Most parents pass along the things they love to their children.   Mine were no exception and thus, they were the unwitting source of my desire to get into the movie business.  They loved movies – they enjoyed watching them as a past time and had their favorites and opinions about which ones were worth seeing in the theaters and which ones were rentals, the way most people did.  But for me, it wasn’t like that.  From a very young age, movies stuck with me in a much more profound way.

The reason for my intense connection with film was I yearned for the adventure and excitement created by the stories told in the movies I watched.  I wished the environments were real, the characters existed, and the things that happened to them actually happened.  Not only that, but I wanted to experience all these things for myself.  Sometimes I imagined that I was a new character and would make up my own storyline and relationships to the preexisting characters, other times I pretended to be someone who already existed within the story.  I knew, however, that no matter how much I wanted to be a part of these stories, and how much I wanted them to be real, they weren’t.  There was no way to experience movies the way I wanted to, save for one option – to get into the business and be a witness to their making.  By doing that I could be on the sets, meet the actors and get to see firsthand how the yarns of cinematic story get spun.  When I was young, I thought everyone responded to film this way, and it wasn’t until I was a little older that I realized this wasn’t the case.  I was different.

I grew up far away from the bright lights of Hollywood in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, about fifteen miles northwest of Boston.  My parents raised me and my younger sister, Abby, in an old medium-sized grey colonial house with black shutters and a slate roof.  It stood proudly at the end of a quiet crescent shaped street that was just off a main road, part of a cluster of small meandering lanes enveloped by dense woods.  It was a great place to grow up.

From the inside out, we looked and acted like your average suburban American family.  My mother, Barbara, taught geometry at a local private high school.  On the weekends she tutored kids in SATs.  She also had a knack for sewing and would earn a little extra money by making home furnishings – curtains, slipcovers, quilts, things like that.  She was always working on a project of some kind and was happiest when she was busy.  She didn’t like being idle.   She was pretty but not in a refined way – her beauty was natural and she didn’t believe in enhancing her looks by wearing a lot of make-up.  She had chestnut brown hair that fell just below her shoulders, though it was seldom down.  Her dark blue eyes were small and piercing, she had a sloped pointed nose and a strong jaw line.  She was tall for a woman, over five feet nine inches, which she was very proud of, and kept her slender figure by staying active and going to the gym regularly.  She was a loving mother but also firm in her discipline.

Her cinematic influence on me when I was young was mostly musicals.  Her movie tastes were a lot wider than the musical genre alone, but she had a soft spot in her heart for them.  Perhaps they were a love that was passed on to her from her parents.  Musicals were the perfect way to introduce us kids to films that weren’t specifically targeted to our age group.  They had singing and dancing in them and their content was G or PG rated.  Before Hannah Montana and High School Musical, there was Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Julie Andrews, Audrey Hepburn and Barbra Streisand.  Often Abby and I took it upon ourselves to watch the movies multiple times until we knew the music by heart.

My father’s name was John.  He was a tower of a man, standing well over six feet and solidly built.  He had a ruddy complexion and crystal blue eyes set in a smooth round face.  As a building contractor he spent a lot of time outside, but aside from his complexion the only telling sign was his hands.  They were large and muscular and very rough to the touch.  He was outwardly gruff, sometimes it was easily to misconstrue as rudeness or anger and because of his size he could be quite intimidating.  This was just on the surface, however.  Once you got to know him, he was a kind person and great father.

My father loved movies of the action adventure persuasion.  Abby and I had him to thank for rounding out our cinematic education with movies like the Back to the Future trilogy, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars.  I can still remember him first talking about Raiders of the Lost Ark.  We were sitting around the dinner table and he was describing the scene where Indiana and Marion were trapped in the temple and there were snakes coming out of the walls.  We were sold on the movie from that scene alone and begged him to take us to the video store so we could rent it.  We triumphed quickly.

Despite my hunger for adventure, I was very much an introvert.  I depended on my intense imagination to satisfy my craving and never actively sought it outside the confines of my own house.  Aside from reading and watching movies, my outlet became writing stories of my own.  Without realizing it, I isolated myself and I grew up not having many friends.  Abby and I were always close and for much of my early childhood I didn’t have anyone else.  My parents worried about me not having friends.  They tried numerous ways to get me to engage with kids my own age.  On my ninth birthday they bought me a cheap camcorder.  They thought since my desire to be around filmmaking was so strong and you can’t make a movie by yourself, having it would motivate me to reach out to the neighborhood kids and ask them to be in my movies.  This was a very good strategy but it proved ineffective.  After making a few little films by myself starring my stuffed animals, the novelty of it wore off and it was cast into my closet.  Eventually I forgot about it.

One late summer day about a year later, our doorbell rang.  School was still far enough away that we couldn’t count the days without using more than two hands.  The nights were beginning to cool down enough so you could open the windows, but you needed more than a sheet to keep you warm.  That particular day was warm and dry with a soft breeze which made the lilies that lined our front walk sway gently.  My mother called up the stairs to me to answer the door.  She had been bustling around the kitchen most of the morning, something I didn’t really think twice about until that moment.  I reluctantly left the book I was reading and did as I was told.  I swung open our front door, on the other side of the screen was a tall, elegant woman with smooth red hair that was pinned neatly in a bun at the nape of her neck.  She wore a pale yellow sundress with small blue flowers on it and simple white flats.  She smiled at me through the screen in a motherly sort of way.

“Hello,” she said kindly.  “I’m Celia, I’m a new friend of your mother’s.  And this is my daughter, Caroline.”  She reached over and pulled on something to her right side, beyond where I could see.  When her hand came back into view it was holding the arm of a young girl about my age.  Celia pulled her in front of herself on the stoop until she and I were nose to nose, just the screen door keeping us apart.

I immediately saw the purpose of this visit and my mood soured instantantly.  This was my mother’s newest tactic to try and get me to make friends – she would invite other mothers over to our house for snacks with their children who just happened to be my age.  Thus far, it hadn’t worked out well.  Most often it led someone to tears and that someone was usually me.

“We just moved in, we live on the next street over,” Celia continued.  My mood must have read on my face, because she said this in that tone adults have when they are trying to cajole a child out of an ornery state of mind.

I studied Caroline through the screen.  She had red hair, like her mother’s, which was put up in a half ponytail.  It was long, super fine and stick straight.  It looked like someone, undoubtedly Celia, had run a comb hastily through it, but the ends were still knotted a little.  Her face was round with just a handful of freckles over the apples of her cheeks and she wore a sundress similar to her mother’s, only hers was blue with darker blue flowers.  The dress was creased in odd places like it had never been worn before and because of the breeze I could smell its perfumed scent, like it had just come from a children’s boutique.

My mother came to the door then, quite horrified that our guests were still standing outside.

“Please, come in,” she said hastily.  She gave me a disapproving look as she opened the screen door and Caroline and Celia stepped into the house.

“Caroline moved into the red house on Maple Street.  You two are going to be in the same class next year, isn’t that nice?” my mother said in the same tone Celia had used on me moments earlier.  I didn’t answer.  I felt Caroline’s eyes on me now, and I turned to look at her.  She was studying me curiously.

“How about some lemonade and pizza English muffins?  I have some in the kitchen.  Homemade,” my mother said.

“Sure,” agreed Celia.  We all followed my mother in the kitchen.

My mother did not enjoy cooking.  True, spooning marinara sauce on English muffins then topping them with sliced cheddar cheese and sticking them in the toaster oven hardly constituted as cooking in most people’s minds.  Still the effort was exerted and thus, in my mother’s opinion, she had cooked.  It wasn’t that she was horrible in the kitchen.  She just didn’t care for it.  When she really took the time, she was actually very good.  Her pizza English muffins and lemonade were a testament to that fact.

She served the little pizzas on the good serving platter.  The four of us sat around the kitchen table.  My mother and Celia did not partake in the pizza, but they did sip lemonade, drinking it the way adults do when they are playing tea party with children and don’t really care to drink anything, but do it anyway to humor their host.  This put me in a worse mood because it only made it that much clearer to me why Caroline and her mother were in our house.  Caroline munched on her little pizza and slurped her lemonade.  Our mothers talked about inane things, like the weather and the route of our mailman. Once in a while they would try to engage Caroline and I in the conversation.

“You looking forward to going to a new school, Caroline?” my mother asked.  Caroline shrugged.

“I guess,” she said.

“Her last school wasn’t the right fit for her,” Celia added.  “We’re all looking forward to the change, aren’t we Caroline?”

Caroline looked at her mother over the rim of her glass as she gulped down the last of her lemonade.

“It will be nice having a classmate living so close by,” my mother said in my direction.

Caroline looked at me intently, then did something I was not expecting.  She reached over to me, cupping her hand against my ear.

“Do you want to go play?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.  I had never been asked this question before in this way, usually my mother was the one to shoo me and my forced playmate away from the snacks so we would go play an ill-fated game of Chutes and Ladders or whatever.  This was an unexpected change of pace, and I found myself wanting to say yes.  I nodded to Caroline and crammed the rest of my pizza English muffin into my mouth.

“We’re going to go play,” I said to my mother with my mouth full as I hopped down from my chair.  Both my mother’s and Celia’s faces lit up like Christmas trees.

“Okay, great!” my mother exclaimed.  I led the way out of the kitchen and up to my room, Caroline following close behind me.

Minutes later, Caroline was in my room checking out all my stuff.  I was somewhat particular about the arrangement of my things in my room, and I thought having her touching everything would be upsetting, but Caroline seemed to be sensitive to this and was very careful to put things back the way she found them.  She quickly opened my closet, the only place in my room I didn’t keep neat and wouldn’t care if she went through.  She rifled through all sorts of old games and art projects.  Soon she found my camera and held it up like she had uncovered buried treasure.

“Is this a movie camera?” she asked, examining it.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Cool!” she exclaimed.  “Does it work?”

“Yep,” I said.

“Do you use it?” she asked.

“No, not really,” I said.  She looked at me with her mouth open, then back down at the camera.

“We should do something with it.  Like make a movie.  You want to make a movie?” she asked excitedly.

I stared at her apprehensively, not sure whether or not she was serious.  I had dreamed about being in movies and working on them, but at that time it was in the way I wished that I could fly or turn invisible.  It seemed like such an impossible dream and I didn’t really think it could turn into a reality.  Now this person in front of me, this skinny, made-to-wear-a-dress-by-her-mother waif with bandaids on her knees opened a door that I never even knew existed.  She looked back at me earnestly.

“We can’t make a movie by ourselves,” I said.

“You don’t have friends who would want to be in a movie?” she asked.

I hesitated.  I didn’t want to say that was indeed the case, because it made me sound like a friendless loser.  I opened my mouth to make up some kind of excuse, but when I couldn’t think of one, I closed it again.

Caroline didn’t say anything, but gave herself a little nod as if understanding the answer to her question without me needing to give an answer.  I shifted uncomfortably, not liking feeling so vulnerable but at the same time liking the fact that my new friend could understand something about me without me actually having to say it.

“Your neighborhood has a lot of kids in it,” she said.  “Why don’t we ask them?”

“Oh no,” I said, shaking my head.  “They wouldn’t want to.”

“How do you know?  C’mon.  I bet they’d be in our movie.”  With that, she swung the camcorder onto her shoulder and strode out of my room.  I followed her down the stairs.

“But-” I tried protesting as she swung open our front door.  She looked back at me.

“What?  You want to make a movie, don’t you?” she asked.

“Yes, but we need a story,” I said.  “We can’t just go out and film stuff.”

“Why not?” Caroline asked.

“Because, we need a plan,” I insisted.

I didn’t know it then, but this moment was what would become the very basis of our friendship dynamic.  Caroline studied me for a moment, then took my camcorder off her shoulder and came back into the house.

“Okay, fine,” she said.  “Then let’s make a plan.”  I smiled as she handed the camcorder back to me.  I was to find out later that she didn’t always give in so easily, and this was a big exception to the rule.

“Let’s go back to my room,” I said.  “I’ve got some ideas for movies up there.”

“Really?” she said surprised.

I shrugged.  “Yeah.  I have lots of ideas.  It could be fun.”

“Okay,” she agreed.  She followed me as we climbed back up the stairs to my room.

In the weeks that followed, Caroline and I found a story to make into a movie.  Initially she didn’t really care what the story was and left that up to me.  But as soon as I chose one I liked she started to put in her two cents, and before I knew it, what was once my idea was suddenly ours.  Our movie was going to be about a girl who was able to see ghosts and she helps one of them reach out to her living sister.  Both our mothers were extremely pleased with themselves that we were becoming friends, something I initially detested, but realized the benefit when they offered to help with our project.  My mother made the costumes and Caroline’s mother bought us a brand new tripod for our camera and helped make some of our props.

When it came time to actually shoot, we had everything we needed.  Caroline had recruited our “cast” – neighborhood kids mostly, who Caroline had negotiated to pay with her mother’s cookies.  We had costumes and other equipment and my father had gotten permission for us to shoot in the local cemetery, which was one of our main locations.  We spent two whole weekends filming and when we were done, Caroline’s father helped us put it together.  Though our parents had a huge part in our successful completion of our film, it still felt like our own.  When it was over, we screened it in Caroline’s house, since she had the bigger TV, for everyone who was involved.  Shortly after that we began scheming about our next project.

As we got older, our parents’ involvement became less and less. What they once were responsible for was taken over by us or our ever growing group of friends.  Being involved in our films became somewhat cool, and even though neither Caroline nor I ventured into the so-called “popular” strata of middle or high school life, we had plenty of friends and our social status didn’t matter much to us.  I was happy, really happy, for the first time in my life.  And it wasn’t just because of my circle of friends; it was because Caroline inspired me to visualize a career in the film industry.  My parents may have sparked my desire to be in the movie business, but it was Caroline who showed me it could actually be my reality.

When we started applying to colleges, we hoped to go to film school together.  We applied to the same schools but when Caroline got into the University of Southern California film school and I did not, it seemed like suicide to both of us for her not to go.  I wasn’t about to deny her the opportunity to go just because I hadn’t gotten in.  We agreed that her being in Los Angeles would benefit both of us, so she went to USC and I went to Boston University.  Before we even set foot on our respective college campuses as freshman, our plan always was steadfast – after graduation, I would move out to Los Angeles and we would both find jobs in the film industry, helping each other succeed in any way we could.  Throughout my college years that plan was always in the back of my mind no matter how much I was enjoying myself.  The idea of leaving my family and everything I knew normally would have terrified me, but as the time came to go I became more and more excited.  The adventure I had been waiting my whole life to start was finally happening.  And I was ready for it.