PHOTOGRAPHY
I’ve been taking photos since age 7, when my saint of a Grandmother gave me my first camera, an old 35 mm Zenit-E, which I still have, though the shutter mechanism is permanently jammed.
In LA, I built my own black and white darkroom and found Ansel Adams' 3 volume set on his zone system invaluable in my education.
While taking and printing my own shots, I worked from time to time as a B&W dark room tech and as a staff photographer for a small West LA paper.
Although I love to look at most types of photography, as you can probably tell from what I’ve put on this site so far, I love to take street shots. I capture an authentic scene, a moment and its transient inhabitants. Currently my city is LA, so most of my recent photos are of this great jumble of streets, neighborhoods, people.
I try to be as discreet as possible, to capture as much of the authenticity of a moment without intruding and messing it up. I use a small digital camera and finish creating the photo by using the computer to put my take on the captured image.
I use digital exclusively now, and expect I’ll never go back to emulsions and chemicals. Although I enjoyed B&W darkroom work, I consider Photoshop the best thing since gravity. It’s faster, cleaner, less polluting, and even smells better if you put a rose on your desk. With it, I can do anything I did in a physical darkroom, plus much, much more. I in fact no longer have a darkroom. Going back to one would be like going back to an old IBM Selectric typewriter.
MOVIES
I attended USC undergrad, getting a BS from the great business school there, then entered the graduate film school, but left to move to Paris and take photos and write screenplays for awhile.
I’ve written 20 scripts, some of which you can read here. My scripts most definitely lay in the indie film world. Story remains first and foremost. Market and return considerations are further down the list.
An example is “Tuesday.” If you go to that page, you’ll see that I wrote that script with a “no-budget” production in mind. “No-budget” is even less costly than “low budget,” “low low budget,” and “mucho primo 180 proof ultra-low budget.”
Please reach out if you would like to take part in bringing any of these scripts to the screen, big or small.