| In high school,
(Ritenour Senior High; Overland, Missouri - Class of 1976) I discovered the term
“total film-maker” in the book of same title (tHE total film-maker; Warner Paperback
Library; 1973) by comedian and movie star/writer/ producer/director/editor and exhibitor,
Jerry Lewis. A passage from Page 16 reads as follows: “Film, baby, powerful tool for love or laughter, fantastic weapon to
create violence or ward it off, is in your hands.
The only possible chance you’ve got on our
round thing is not to bitch about injustice or break windows, but to make a concerted
effort to have a loud voice. The loudest voice known to man is on thousand foot reels.
Campus chants about war are not going to help two
peasants in a rice paddy on Tuesday. However, something might be said on
emulsion that will stop a soldier from firing into nine children somewhere, sometime.
Now, next year, five years from now.
Try emulsion instead of rocks for race relations
and ecology. That, and love and laughter, has to be what it’s all about.
Then you’ll survive. Maybe we’ll all survive.
Maybe.”
...and on the next page it says:
Where do you start? There’s no Monopoly
board. No “Start, Do Not Pass Go.” I think you start out by just being there,
and being curious and having the drive to make films.
More important: make film, shoot film, run film
Do something.
Make film. Shoot anything.
It does not have to be sound.
It does not have to be titled.
It does not have to be color.
There is no have to. Just do.
And show it to somebody. If it is an audience of one, do and
show, then try it again.
That is how.
It sounds simple.
It’s not. Then again, it is.
These words spoke to me. I decided that I had been correct.
I had felt something coming off the wall sized projector screen in the “movie
theatre” I had put together in my basement. I had even been recognized by one
of the most popular girls in school from the Teenage Werewolf film I'd produced and
starred in three years before. My glasses were off because of a sparing accident in
karate and she stopped me and, with a curious smile, asked “Weren’t you in that
movie with Tim and Jimmy?” A similar recognition thing happened to me at a Fox
Photo store in St. Charles two years after my freshman theatre performance in Godspell.
Inspired by Jerry Lewis’ written word and the recognition of
my experiences, I’ve been conceiving, shooting, editing and producing final product
since 1981.
And, finally, I'm very pleased to see filmmakers around the globe
taking advantage of current (2001) digital technologies that now afford we
"micro-budget" filmmakers to produce to the scale of our dreams doing so.
- Joseph Palermo, Executive Producer - Dream Masters Studios,
LLC. |
