If I'd Known It Would Have Been This Easy. . .

. . .I wouldn't have wasted my time trying to get into film school 25 years ago.

The best part, and I wish I had come across this when I was fermenting these dreams of making a major feature film, is this pair of sentences from the Kubrick quote:

The point to stress is that anyone seriously interested in making a film should find as much money as he can as quickly as he can and go out and do it. And this is no longer as difficult as it once was.

Indeed. If I weren't so incompetent with a camera (I'm not joking - I can't take a simple snapshot without getting a finger in front of the lens or moving the camera so slightly that the picture looks like something a wino sees before he passes out or cutting off the top of a subject's head or that someone's knees become the main feature of the shot or any other items from the list of What Constitutes a Bad Photograph, and I'm sure there's a list like that somewhere on the 'net), I'd rent a camera, some sound equipment, a grip kit, corral some dude to help me haul it around, and shoot a short. I've worked with layer-based editing programs, so I've got an idea of how to do post production. Easy, right?

Right?

Back when I was in college, sometime around my junior year, I got this wildass dream to go to film school. Not just any school, mind you, but the mofo mac daddy el grande supreme of flim schools: USC. I don't know why I picked that one out of all the others. I think because George Lucas went there or something. So here I was, attending a small state university in Kentucky with a double major in Radio/TV and English, and I thought I was just going to luck myself into USC's graduate program in Cinema.

According to Kubrick, all I would have needed was a good film camera (and somebody to operate it, of course) some other equipment, find some money (the hardest part) and the guts to just go ahead and make something. Anything.

That dream is more than two decades dead. It's ghost, though, sometimes shows itself and teases me. And I start to think: from my voice-over work and connections with the LMN, I now know a few folks who can shoot and do post-production.

Hmmmm. . .