Where did it start? Certainly not when films jumped ship in New York and shifted their operations to the sunny climes of So Cal but that didn't hurt. Did it start somehow when my Abuelita and her clan made their way to LA? How about Ernest, Mister Cop in the Closet case himself? I have to wonder, with that passal of boys already ahead of my pop, what was that old man thinking when he looked down on my father, fresh from the womb..why did he think of Wallace Beery, of all men? But the image struck him as reasonable and I suppose it was good with my Abuelita, too. So my Father was named after a popular movie star all because his faced was scrunched up. I suppose I could have been named after Clark Gable but that would have made my name a bit too plain and redundant.
So, my father goes on to be in the industry as a grip, his brother goes on to marry a horsewoman and the two of them go on to be major stunt people in a world filled with horse-loving stuntfolks. My aunt marries a man whose brother works for the Disney studios, my uncle's son follows in his father's footsteps and gets into stuntwork as well. My father, well, gawd bless his heart, turned me away from his line of work because he felt it was no way for a young married man to support his wife. He knew the way of the studios as far as grip work was concerned. Feast or famine. I remember all too well his stories of the off season, hitting up the back side of businesses with his Chevy Apache pick up, picking up scrap metal for sale. He weathered tough times but then again he was a tough SOB.
I think of the movie business and know that it's in the blood. Sure, we are not Copollas or big film families who have veritable empires in the industry, but we are the flesh and blood, blue collar, end of the credits kind of families who make movies, who hold them in high esteem, who know stars and don't fawn in their presence. As my father always told me, we all put our pants on the same way. "They're real folks, everyday people, just like you and me" he told me once while we were on location, "they just have a different job, that's all". Heck, his tales of hanging out with Nick Nolte on the set of North Dallas Forty are legendary.
Well, I never got into the business the way my kin did but my profession at least allows me to be an exhibitor of a kind. I have set up film series, I use my experience and expertise to help me collect films madly and knowledgeably, follow the latest in cinema in all the national papers, blogs and movie rags like Variety. I am an accumulator, alot like my mother and my grandmother were before me. They were both movie heads as well, both of which helped to shape my misspent youth, who turned me onto late night movies, matinees on school days and triple bills in the old seedy theaters along Broadway in downtown LA. It seems that we have always been movie people, with talk always circling back to what we watched last before we popped on or tuned into another feature on the tv.
My children are wild for film as well, all with their own unique tastes and appetites. Toy Soldier Boy is into war film, Punkin loves her "scary movies" and anything with Audrey Hepburn and my son, the auteur, loves fantasy and animation of any kind. That boy is poised and ready to launch off into the industry. He's doing well in his classes, working with film and eating it alive, editing, sound tracking, acting, the whole shebang.
I like to think of that and gloat, not so much because so much of his family has been in or has been actively pursuing movies all these years but because my boy's mother always tried to make me pinch pennies in the film acquisition department. I squandered money on movies and gear, bought electronics when times were tight, expanded our film collection when it didn't make sense to do, always looking for movies that were good to share, always expanding my kids horizons and tastes, always making sure that those pesky youth of mine sat through the credits and absorbed the final details, the names of the workers, the titles of the jobs that made the movies. As I always told my boy the auteur, pay attention to the credits, that's where movies are made.
He took that lesson to heart, as he always sits and watches movies through to the end, always pays homage to the men and women who made the films he just watched unspool. Someday, with luck, I will be sitting there in the last part of the dark, in the quite of the emptied auditorium, waiting for the lights, waiting for the moment, THE MOMENT, when I first see his name up on the screen in something big, in something nationally released.
Hell, he already has his first credits under his belt. Those student films I just watched unspool in Boise? I saw his name and I weeped.
Wallace Berry and Wallace Senior would be proud. Wallace Jr was, that much is certain.
We are movie people.
Action!
IMDB: Wallace Beery, actor!
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000891/
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