I was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1963, but have been raised in California.  My family was lower middle class, and until my high school years we lived in the bay area.  I was not bitten by the creative bug until my sophomore year in high school. My freshman year we had moved to Scottsdale Arizona, and shortly after my parents divorced. We went from being lower middle class to dirt poor. My mother packed us kids up and we moved to Atascadero, California on the Central Coast. It's located half way between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It was the movie Jason and the Argonauts that first got me interested in movie making.  Now that I look back, I think I was more interested in prop making and practical effects, than actual film making. Either way  I was poor, had no mentor, so I just figured it out.  Back then there was no Internet so information was really hard to come by.   My first stint at making a movie was a disaster. I had my grandmother's 8mm movie camera and a roll of film. My younger brother played a super hero, unfortunately I was so poor I didn't have the money to have the film developed. During my sophomore and junior years I kept to myself, but my senior year I met my first love, and our first and only date was to see the movie Popeye. Her and I remained friends, but she had another boyfriend and he owned two Mustangs, and I didn't have a car. Talk about no self esteem. She opened my eyes to the world of girls and I was hooked. I still think of her with affection.

 

After high school I had planned to go to a tech school in Arizona, but my mom talked me out of it, so I had no real direction.  At the age of 18 I moved to San Diego and stayed briefly with my dad. it was then I bought my first car, a 1971 Dodge Charger. I miss that car.

 

I moved around a little, including a small stay in Idaho. I always wanted to go to Cheyenne, but  even to this day I haven't been back there. I eventually made it back to Atascadero, and learned about beer. I still had no real direction, and really didn't care at the time. The two things I did know, and have always known is that I didn't want kids, or a relationship, so I started to party. That was the early 80s and there wasn't much else to do but get drunk and talk about music. It was during this time I met a guy that had a bunch of video stores and we became friends. This was at a time when video was new to consumers, and it inspired me to want to make movies. The first time I ever used a video camera was a funny disaster. My friend was commissioned to video tape the Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo cheerleaders, so he gave me the camera and sent me on my way.  The camera was in two pieces, the recorder strapped to my shoulder and the camera had a cord to the recorder. I had a field pass to a football game and I had a blast. Unfortunately a large percentage of the footage was of the ground. I didn't realize it was an on/off switch. I had a blast shooting footage of the girls, and I even had one had one hit on me, and ask me out on camera. I still have that footage.

 

I eventually moved to Las Vegas for a couple of years, mostly for adventure. I worked where I could, and worked on small films and short films whenever I could find it. I remember the Nevada film commission was in a small office at Mccarren Airport in Las Vegas, and a guy I knew at the time gave a a script from John Carpenter. It was a script that was never produced, and that script inspired me to start writing. After a couple of years in Vegas, I found myself in Huntington Beach, which was just south of Los Angeles. Once I got settled in there, I started working on more small films and short films.  I didn't want to make my own film because it was not only expensive, but a whole lot of work. I didn't want the responsibility.