Well it's finally happened. I'm getting to direct a movie. It's called "The Extincts".
It was announced in all the trades, Cartoon Brew, The Hollywood Reporter... you name it.
This is a journey I started when I was 5 years old...when I went to see my first movie at the grand old movie palace, The Strand, in downtown Shreveport, Louisiana. The theater is still there. And so are my movie mad dreams.
Every Saturday The Strand showed a classic kids matinee... like Robin Hood ...
or King Kong...
...or a Ray Harryhausen fantasmagoria...
These movies scorched their vivid images into my young brain and I never recovered. Who could not be haunted forever by scenes like the one from Pinocchio when Lampwick is turned from a boy into a donkey. Who could ever forget him screaming for his mother as he drops on all fours and his voice becomes a bray "Momma! Maaaaammmaaa!!!" He was lost forever but so was I. Lost in the power, the terror, the wonder of the movies.
I'll be making the film in France. My daughter Mary Katherine lived in Paris in the last months of her life. She was as brave as any film heroine. And somehow I take great comfort in continuing my journey in the place where she blazed her own trail.
Mary Katherine was always followed by lady bugs. Even when she lived in Paris. Her room still fills with them several times a year. One of my new producers, a rowdy woman from London, told me she'd been finding lady bugs in her clothes and luggage. I took that as a good omen.
The streets of France seemed open to whimsy and possibilities.
And "Extincts" has many whimsies.
Looking for daydreams to put on the screen..
Dreams that only the movies can make seem real ...
A journey that began in childhood will keep going on and on and on till I'm back where I started. Back home. Where, despite all the hard times and heartbreak the past and possibilities stroll together as easy and happily as a breeze.
Wish me luck.
