“Time travel, make it unravel. It never happened, so we don’t need to care, if only we’re able to have our past wishes come true.”
Rob Wold
I have more than 45 years of creative and technical skills in the creative media industry, an artistic background of experience in associations generated working with some of the most respected talents in American film, television and music.
These influences contributed greatly to my success in developing original documentaries, short comedy and dramatic feature films as well as television programs noted for social impact.
A native of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, I initiated my career in the mid-1970s with a cross-country film production to document the subject of the newly emerging solar energy industry. Soon, that effort developed further when I involved 3 time Emmy Award winning director Victor M. Summa from Chicago’s PBS affiliate WTTW in asking him to direct the documentary.
For producer of the documentary, I was able to invite Washington D.C. based writer-producer David Prowitt who was internationally recognized for his 12 part BBC series The Weather Machine, a program that identified the first signs of shifts in global weather. At the time I met Mr. Prowitt, he was producing Cosmos, the PBS series he originated with Carl Sagan, whom Mr. Prowitt introduced me to.
Following five years of filming and then videotaping solar projects, the production attracted the attention of Robert Redford who offered to participate in the project if he approved of it. Jazz artist Chick Corea agreed to create original music. The resulting program was titled Sundance and it aired on PBS in May of 1981.
In 1978, I was asked to perform as Director of Photography on a foreign language feature film titled Dream Shores which was being developed for shooting in Montreal, Canada, written and being funded by a professor of English literature at McGill University. The project was to become my first work in 35mm sound film. I also contributed to the film’s story writing, a tale that traced the first nine months of a newlywed couple’s hardships in marriage and child-bearing after coming to America to start life anew.
Due to extreme problems with the Canadian government’s exclusion of American technical talent in films being produced there, I urged the producers to shoot the film with standard 35mm equipment rented there in Montreal. A Panavision’s Panaflex camera system was used on some portions of the film. This would have allowed us to capture and present parts the finished motion picture in a wider screen format, but Dream Shores was never completed because they ran out of funds during post-production.
Back at home in Chicago, I found work in the following summer on the four month production of The Blues Brothers. I worked with others who were also assigned to what is called non-credited ‘vendor’ work. My job was simply the task of purchasing dozens of used cars to be employed as background props for scenes or in the record-breaking 54 or so car wreck “gags” filmed for the automotive mayhem featured in the comedy.
The purchased cars were turned over to Union Teamsters for painting, driving to locations or parking them in places where they might be damaged in scenes.
As luck would have it, Blues Bros. was followed with an offer for me to do the principal photography of another foreign language film in Kerala, India in very early 1979. I filmed the production Heavanbound with 35mm Arriflex sound camera equipment. This film also explored a romantic adventure in which a twenty-five year old woman let go from her job in a textile factory finds love at sea after meeting a young fisherman.
Back in Chicago, later on I also became involved in casting duties for an award-winning ABC Movie-of-the-Week script In This Fallen City. I worked for producer Bernie Brillstein to find and supervise school-aged children for background scenes.
The film’s highly respected stars Geraldine Page and Bernard Hughes who take into their home a youngster on the run from a street gang. Before national broadcast, it was re-titled by ABC Studios with the more pleasant title, A Night Of Courage.
This casting assignment led to further incidental casting work on the Richard Gere/Kim Basinger film No Mercy. I worked for producer Serena Hausman to cast key, non-speaking bad guy roles for their scenes to be filmed in Chicago and, later, on location in North Carolina. A friend of mine and I picked real martial arts professionals sparring at a Chicago self-defense school and chose a few of them as candidates to cast the mercenary roles. They were not used since the main casting producer flew in and announced that he had already found the men that he wanted in NYC.
In the 1980s, I also produced a variety of short corporate films and video promotional shorts for clients. I contacted officials at Control Data Corporation in Minneapolis to fund a short promotional film on small wind power turbines that CDC had started to manufacture. I produced a short film on passive solar energy architectural design for The University of Illinois Architecture School. I also wrote a short comedy and worked with improve trained actors from Chicago’s Second City.
During that era, a newfound friend I made in Chicago who had trained and then went to work on New York City based films, including Superman, with Christopher Reeves. He asked me to write an original screen treatment, the basic storyline for a film that he believed that he could get funding for at one of the Philippine film studios, one that could be put into wide distribution in the Far East.
I first drafted the initial story for a very low budget action adventure film, with the working title Disappear!, in 1992, as it could be set in the South Pacific. The tale traced the theft of a Japanese submarine filled with gold late in WWII, a treasure that included a solid gold Buddha. The sub’s captain scuttled it in a lagoon without knowing the event was being witnessed by two American U.S. Navy sailors, one of them a young Irish/American.
The captain opens fire on his own crew and then the U.S. sailors. One of the sailors dies and the other one kills the captain and then rescues a native boy who’d wandered into the lagoon. The story continues in present day in Chicago when an adventure takes off to recover the gold.
The first draft of the story worked its way almost if passed along by magic to Chicago-based Director of Photography William Birch, best known for his Director of Photography work on The Blues Brothers and a good number of other Chicago backgrounded hit movies like Code of Silence and Above the Law.
Mr. Birch had often worked with seasoned Unit Production Manager and Producer John G. Wilson of Studio City, California on a number of those Chicago films; he forwarded the screen treatment for Disappear! to Mr. Wilson who agreed the concept offered the basis for an unusually good action movie. Mr. Wilson’s film background included Clint Eastwood’s early San Francisco themed features Magnum Force, The Enforcer and on through to one of the most esteemed westerns ever made.
Wilson appreciated the screen value of my story on his experience in managing or producing a good number of studio financed, action productions that became Hollywood blockbusters. The Outlaw Josey Wales. Wilson had also managed many other film classics, such as Blue Thunder, Ghostbusters along with one that I thought was underappreciated,1941.
I owe it to Mr. Birch for making a very fortunate match between myself and Wilson, so I suggested that the three of us could join forces in an ongoing story, talent and financial development effort.
John appreciated my ability for creative set design and writing and basically took me on as a protégé to learn how to budget a film start to finish using the standard 60 page cost figuring department system, write up daily call sheets for production and do all kinds of required paperwork.
Mr. Birch was impressed with my ability to do D of P work or as I would be just be satisfied with doing any cameraman work.
Rather than initially seeking financial support in Hollywood, initial funding development for Disappear!, I remained engaged in Chicago’s prospective corridor of major funding. Birch, Wilson and Wold formed an independent feature film production company tagged Cinema Equinox Pictures to organize support from local and international sources.
The budget for Disappear! was set at just over six million dollars in the Philippines.
On the basis of the first drafts for the feature, through sheer luck, I was able to find free-agent actor Richard Harris living at a hotel in NYC and sent him the script. He liked it enough to commit to play a key role for the film, with a script re-write boosting his character’s involvement as an older version of the Irish character. Through other channels, I brought in television writer and director Robert Collins [Police Woman] to direct the production.
Through Mr. Wilson’s contacts, planning for the technical arrangements of the production in the Philippine Islands were entrusted to Jun Jubon who had safely overseen the difficult filming of action scenes that required the use of explosives for Apocalypse Now and Missing in Action.
Gino Contemesa, the sound recordist who had won an Academy award for his sound work on ET The Extraterrestrial was secured to do the sound work on the film.
The founding of Cinema Equinox Pictures made news within Chicago’s modest feature length talent pool and other talented aspirants from local circles [and a few other national sources] which submitted scripts and lesser developed productions to myself or Mr. Wilson for funding consideration.
After considering a few dozen primarily Midwestern themed scripts, Cinema Equinox added four other feature film productions, two of them comedies and two dramas, to the planning roster.
As well, a television special that would capture the opening ceremonies of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio was put into planning.
Funding issues were taken to well-placed principal financial consultants at the Arthur Anderson firm in Chicago. The scenarios for profit from the rapidly expanding market for independent films were successfully promoted to private trust fund managers, one of whom found us $3M for production, funding that could be matched or mixed as an IPO in 1995.
Operations continued after Cinema Equinox Pictures opened offices in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles and an active apprenticeship commenced as Mr. Wilson led me through the nuances of experience in film budgeting and motion picture unit production management. The five projects we developed further had production requirements that ranged from 4 million to 7 million dollars.
I developed the specific skills needed to determine the rates of production insurance, pay scales of that era, overtime and benefit costs for each area of the IATSE union guild crafts involved in feature and television production. He also developed similar knowledge with regard to determining Directors Guild of America rates and long-term producer responsibilities. Mr. Wold interacted with Richard Soames, a principal executive at the film production insurance firm Film Finances, Inc. and acquired experience with negotiating insurance issues and related bonding matters. [Today, there are other film insurance companies, too.]
Through my entertainment lawyer in Chicago, Jay Ross, who was the Grammy Award Midwestern president, I gained representation at Warner Brothers Film Division. Warners liked Disappear! with Richard Harris and the production was okayed through two of the three steps required for a green light and funding. It took two years for the production to rise to the point of being finally green lighted. Warners would only fund it if the production were moved from the Philippines to a tropical American setting such as Hawaii or the Virgin Islands due to the unsettled political situation in the Philippines.
At John Wilson’s suggestion, we re-named my film The Golden Buddha.
I further developed contacts at Paramount Pictures, Orion and Touchstone Pictures. After being introduced to film development executives at Showtime, I maintained contact with the producers at the cable network regarding prospects of producing the Native American feature film John McClain, The Deer Hunter which Cinema Equinox had in development as an original motion picture. I traveled to the Okanagan Reservation in Upper Northeastern Washington State and scouted the locations and logistics of hiring IASTSE technicians for the Showtime production division which eventually agreed to fund the production to be filmed on location on the Okanagan reservation for $4M. However, The process for filming by Showtimes standards required a lead time spanning at least two years. I got into negotiations in Los Angeles with the agent for The Last Of The Mohicans actor Wes Studi to direct and act in the film, however his price for performing both tasks was $2.5M, but the $4M budget limit by Showtime would not allow an increase to accommo–date Mr. Studi’s price.
After Katrina hit, I moved to New Orleans to aid redevelopment of many homes there and as a construction supervisor for Habitat For Humanity. When film and television series making began strongly re-emerged in Louisiana, I learned digital cinematography on Sony’s new television cameras and went on to begin learning the basics of recording with the just conceived larger format, digital 35mm camera systems. I also found work in front of the cameras for the first time as a featured player on the sets of a number of New Orleans set films. Those included True Detectives with Mathew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, followed by 12 appearances on HBOs Treme where I befriended John Goodman. I worked on the Netflix feature film The Highwaymen, with Woody Harrelson and Kevin Costner.
In my experiences with sound recording began with the short films I made using Sennheiser shotgun mics with Nagra sound recorders. Later on, in Chicago, I managed the 12 studio recording sessions of songs being created for a debut album by a new group headed by Derek Frigo, rhythm guitar player who had accompanied Enuf’s Enuf. Earlier, Derek had played back up guitar on another 12 cuts recorded by Mick Jagger for his solo album. [A very early agreement Jagger had with the Rolling Stones prevented any of them from releasing any future solo albums] Through those experiences, I learned more about studio sound engineering from Ron Gresham, Aretha Frankin’s favorite sound engineer.
Currently, I’m writing a novel Lightning on the Moon, a suspense thriller based on my actual investigations, including a trip we made to capture television images of a large underwater pyramid located in the Bermuda Triangle. Many other true life testimonies influence the progression of events in the storyline. These include my direct interviews with other participants in the Apollo Project. The early parts of the carefully footnoted tale are woven together from many hidden realities of deception and cover-ups at have taken place NASA and other government agencies and continue today.
The story progresses into an adventure where the main characters end up taking a trip to the Moon. They follow a trail of scientific evidence attempting to resolve the many lunar mysteries and find themselves exploring what are among the more intriguing puzzles now confronting humanity.
Lightning On The Moon 
Leave a comment