A Little Bit More About Me...

So I had to write an "autobiographical summary" for an application to a writing fellowhip program at Disney. There was very little direction as to what that meant, but since I have not been updating the ol' blog latley, cause I have been burning DVDs on my computer as well as playing too many video games, I figure I'd post the longer, unedited version for all the people out there who read this blog but don't know me...that being, well, probably nobody. Don't worry, the one I sent to the fellowship people was much shorter, after being edited by my girlfriend, who is much smarter than me.

Enjoy...


My love of stories probably grew out of a desire to escape to a world better than the one I was living in as I grew up an awkward kid and teenager. The nerdy Jewish son of a Lesbian couple living in a redneck town in the Bay Area (the bullies who beat me up for having two moms up didn’t seem to care that we lived a mere half hour drive from progressive meccas of Berkeley and San Francisco,) I felt like I had a lot to escape from. Movies and books provided that escape. I remember sitting in a darkened theatre in 1993, watching Jurassic Park, and walking out changed. I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life- I wanted to dream up worlds that were as astonishing as the one I had just witnessed.

At the age of ten, I attempted to write my first novel, which was, unsurprisingly, a pastiche (or to put it more bluntly, a “rip-off”) of Jurassic Park. The story of hubristic scientists playing god by combining human and reptile DNA to create lizard-men and snake-beasts who (you never would have guessed it) escape and wreck havoc on humanity scared even me as I wrote it. I was sure that I was working on the next best selling hit, and confident that Hollywood was destined to come knocking on my door for the adaptation rights (a precocious kid with an unhealthy interest in the movie and television industry, I was reading the box office charts and Variety articles before my Bar Mitzvah.) Maybe all my dreams would have come true had I gotten past writing Chapter Three before I moved on to my next preoccupation, but somehow I doubt it. I began to make comic books (despite the fact that I could not draw,) write plays for my friends and I to perform, and shoot short movies on my parents’ camcorder. I was hooked on storytelling.

Things did not get much better for me socially in middle school- as they tend not to for most people. I still think that Junior High is one of the most awful times in anybody’s life. If you can survive sixth through eighth grade, you can survive almost anything. In sixth grade, I was beat up for my lunch money (an assault that felt like something out of a bad movie and made me ask my assailants, “are you actually beating me up for my lunch money?” Being sarcastic probably not wise when three guys are pushing you to the ground.) That incident was enough to motivate my over-protective Jewish mothers to enroll me in a private school that I attended from seventh grade through high school. Despite the school’s brochure, which promised a progressive “community,” the students at my new middle school were just as cruel as the students at my former public school.

But I survived middle school, as everyone does. I made it through by keeping my head down, reading tons of books and spending my weekends at movie theatres. By the time I was in high school, things began to change- the kids around me had grown up, and I grew a little more confident, a bit more comfortable in my own skin. I got more ambitious in my “pastiches” than I had been when I was ten. I co-wrote, co-directed, and co-starred in an epic length Indiana Jones movie with my best friend, complete with a car chase, an airplane, and seventeen year old kids running around with plastic guns and fake Nazi uniforms. We were lucky that the police only stopped us one time during our entire production. We premiered the movie in front of the whole school, wearing tuxedos and rolling out a red carpet. It was an indescribable feeling when we got a standing ovation from our whole school as a couple of seventeen year olds who had just spent two years of our lives making a rip off of another person’s hit movies.

I was accepted into the USC School of Cinema and Television in the production department, where I met a group of aspiring writer/ directors who had similar high school experiences to my own. I quickly realized I had gone from a big fish in a small pond and become a little fish in a very large pond. My four years in film school passed faster than I had ever expected. I’ve been out of school for a year and I’m still trying to take into account all that I learned and all that I wish I had learned. I did find out what the word “pastiche” means. The thing I regretted most about film school was that I didn’t get picked to make a “480” film, which was the production department’s highest honor. Almost every student attempts to make one, while ten filmmakers are picked to pitch to the faculty, who then select four students a semester to make a film. It’s a very competitive process, and I regretted missing the opportunity to make a 480 Film myself.

I had been working on a script for a year about a close friend from high school who had died recently in a freak car accident. The script I was writing was my attempt to make some sort of sense out of the tragedy. Just a month after graduating, I decided to stop complaining about not being chosen to make the film- and decided to make it myself. I directed the film last summer, right after I graduated. I’m still working on a final edit a year later. I’m afraid I made something a little too earnest and mopey (and a little bit too much like “Garden State,” a film I loathe for it’s dishonesty and pretentiousness.) Hopefully, I will finish it this summer and be at peace with it- and maybe get it into a few festivals.

A couple months after I finished shooting my film, I got an amazing job at Disney’s Video Game Division, Buena Vista Games. I was hired as a writer in a think tank, where I was paid to dream up ideas all day for new video games, to create worlds and characters for gamers to play with. I was elated- most people don’t get paid writing gigs right out of college. I was lucky enough to get a creative job instead of landing behind a desk, answering phones for an uncaring producer or executive. It was a lot of fun, and I am proud of everything I did during my time there, but it couldn’t last forever. It was an internship with a set timeline, and it just ended recently.

Now I’m back at square one, where I was right after graduation. It’s a frightening place to be, but I’m ready to face unemployment and try my best to keep writing until something sticks, and I’m able to do what I love for a living.