Get kicked out of college in
1969 and move to New York to study with Lee Strasberg. Come back to Los
Angeles and do five years of underground theater with the Company Theater,
the Odyssey, the Group, and La Mama. Write radio plays for KPFK. Join the
Three Guys from Hollywood and do comedy news for KROQ.
Go to your nephew's Bar Mitzvah.
Stand around while he opens presents. See him marvel at his new Polaroid
camera. Smile as he takes your picture and throws it to you. Sit down.
Look at the picture. Give in to boredom. Take a swig of champaign, pull
your chocolate cake encrusted fork out of your mouth, and smear it across
your face in the photo - Just to see what happens. Watch your eye go traveling
down your cheek towards your mouth. Start having fun. Give yourself a bigger
nose and curly ears.
Lose boredom. Grab your nephew's
camera and take more pictures. Use every implement you can get your hands
on. Turn photos into paintings. Go out the next day and buy an SX-70 Polaroid
camera of your own. Take a picture of a flower...and mutilate it. Take
a picture of a building...and mutilate it. Switch to people, but only strangers
at first because you don't want to alienate your friends.
Write a letter to the L.A.Weekly
and mysteriously get hired as a film critic. Write thousands of reviews
and conduct hundreds of interviews. Go to screenings and parties and openings
and press conferences and junkets. Take your camera and take pictures of
everybody. Discover that you can get into places other photographers can't,
just because you've got a harmless looking Polaroid.
Since you only have fifteen
minutes to work on them, you inevitably end up doing your magic in front
of your victim. They will beg you for their pictures - sometimes to keep
them, sometimes to destroy them. Don't give them up unless the victim lets
you take more pictures.
Refine your technique, switch
from a fork and a plate to an awl and a slab of jade. Improvise. The SX-70
is like an oil painting with the oils still wet. You can fingerpaint in
it. See which colors take longest to set, and work on those last. You may
only want two effects, but the first will only be available at 1 - 2 minutes,
and the other at 7 - 8 minutes. Have patience. Take pictures of women you
want to meet, show them the pictures, give them a pen, and watch them write
down their number on the back of the picture.
Discover more of the wacky wonderful
world of free-lance journalism. Do cover stories for Interview and Movieline,
and reviews for Parenting Magazine, the Santa Monica Bay News, Billboard,
and L.A. Style. Become voted in as a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics
Association. Get regular column in Billboard. Move to Seattle for a year
to work on a Tom Robbins' project. Take lots
of pictures. Spend three years working on a massive show for the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and sciences that's cancelled for the strangest
reason. Suffer frustration because no one can see your work. What the
hell. Post them to the net.
