I surely had forgotten the dream. My once hope filled chassis now wreaked any semblance of any kind of dreamer.
Like any wanna be “REAL” director, I’d been chasing Spielberg’s Dream. I realized that when I watched “The Fableman’s.” A kid with a big heart who’d been devastated by parts of life and wanted to evoke emotion in not only an audience but their personal one. And the legend himself waited his entire life to tell his story but we all experienced pieces of it through his films. Now it’s woven into who we are. So Spielberg feels like home.
I’d spent my 20’s dreaming in poetry, chasing love with reckless abandon. In my 30s I wanted money but had turned in on myself, like the aging queen in a fairytale. I turned 40. The world shut down. I lost my job. I lost my father.
I was destroyed. All the while I forced myself to just work nonstop. Coffee at midnight. Edit all night. Write write write. This dream, this dream. This fucking dream.
Just throwing media into the void.
I got a loan in the midst of the pandemic. I was going to use it to shoot a horror film. There was just one hiccup, I was 7 months pregnant by the time I’d secured the funds.
The day I started my solo location scout, I felt the world at my swollen feet. I’d found the perfect 70’s dream home. I felt a connection with the homeowner. She reminisced the summer she was pregnant. I took photos and dreamed of dailies.
I was really gonna do it this time!
I drove back through the Mulholland Hills elated. I arrived home brimming with urine. When I turned to flush my heart fell through the tile.
B L O O D
Immediately panicked, my husband hightailed it from Hollywood in minutes and we ripped through the valley to the ER.
That was the time I realized that it wasn’t the time. Highly disappointed in myself, I’d have to shoot the film once the baby was a few months old.
Izzy arrived safely. My world completely changed.
I was a fool to think I’d be able to do anything besides be a mother the first 6 months. Then the next 6 months. I started to panic.
The money drained.
My spirit waned.
I scrambled and spent the rest of the loan to open a studio on Melrose. Renting a location seemed easy enough. But alas again, trying to run a studio with a toddler on your hip was a lot harder than I expected. I fell a few times on set trying to wrangle stingers for renters with her actually attached to my hip. Once I turned to help a client and she fell off the couch. I wasn’t doing much of anything right and the bills were eating my soul. The last thing I was making was a movie.
I closed the studio. Dead was the dreamer.
So my husband checked his unhinged wife into a hotel for a night. We needed a break and surely it was cheaper than a stay in the psych ward. I checked. We didn’t know what to do, so we did the only thing we knew how.
We dreamed.
We took our little daughter to the Universal City Walk and immersed ourselves into the masses. No money for park tickets, we were fine window shopping and dopamine hitting; Bubba Gump Shrimping. Our baby amiss to the entire situation, on a mini vacation. Buying keychains for future selves, saving my mind from the personal hells.
Our tired feet and sweaty brows faced the coral sunset through the neon City Walk lights.
We existed in no where. The place your mind goes when enthralled in a film. The ferocious glimmer as the light refracts and the celluloid burns.
Through the speakers echoing steps ahead
Visions of adventure danced in my head.
Goddamn John Williams film scores bellowing out!!! Fuck!
Your heart swells. The Nostalgia Hits. So clean and so pure.
Silhouetted by the Universal Sign I threw my daughter in the air.
I was home again. Back in the midst of hope and Hollywood. The metropolis of make believe.
All of a sudden you’re thinking about how Spielberg made an office out of a phone closet on that very film lot and you’re full of spark again. Maybe… just maybe…
My stomach felt butterflies knowing the dream existed and I could still be one of those wonderful people out there in the dark…
And for fellow directorial dreamers!! Let’s jump on Spielberg’s kids dream. Destry Allyn Spielberg’s film Please don’t feed the Children just debuted and she had me at thriller. After a viral outbreak wipes out the adult population, a group of orphans band together to seek new life but along the way encounter a deranged woman with a secret.
The director is honest and cool about being a Berg’ yet her road to a finished film wasn’t paved with gold. She talks about her experience making it here for Deadline.
Watch the short film she made with Hopper Penn & Owen King, (Wtf so cool) here. I look forward to seeing what she brings to the next generation of dreamers.
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