Filmmaking

I saw Into Darkness last Friday and immediately wanted to see it again. From the first moment it grabs you and doesn’t let go. It was the 2D version as I detest most things 3D, though I’m tempted by Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, and I don’t think I missed anything watching Star Trek in 2D.

Something funny happened while I watched. Yes, there was the man with a baseball cap and the bladder of a seven-year-old girl who chose to sit in the center of the row and then needed climb over everyone six times to use the restroom. Six times. But that wasn’t funny.

No, the funny thing that happened to me was that I somehow saw the filmmaking in a way I never have before. This isn’t a criticism. I wasn’t looking for it and I don’t think it was obvious. In fact, I try so very hard not to see the filmmaking. I want to enjoy the story as it unfolds and revel in the magic as it takes place in front of me. The magic isn’t in the technical skill required to make me believe. It’s the fact that I do believe. I’ve always believed. I believed a shark was going to get me, even in Denver’s Cook Park community pool. And that was just from the commercials. I didn’t actually see Jaws until 1986. I believed that Luke Skywalker came from a planet that had two suns and that blew up the Death Star. I even kind of almost maybe believed you could build a time machine out of a DeLorean, at least for the two hours I sat in the darkened theater.

That’s how I like it. I want to be reeled in and convinced.

Then along came JJ Abrams. I’m not going to pretend I’ve followed his career. I haven’t. It was more a realization that I’ve enjoyed his career without knowing it was him I was enjoying. The same thing happened with David Fincher not too long ago. Anyway, it was probably Abrams first Star Trek that hooked me. He was treading on sacred ground to so many and he’d never really watched the show. Abrams is a Star Wars guy so he relied on his collaborators to keep the mythology on track. Or turn it upside down as the case maybe. One of them was Alex Kurtzman who likened the original Star Trek to classical music while Star Wars was rock and roll. Star Trek was submarine warfare, cat and mouse. So what could Star Trek learn from Star Wars? Pick up the pace. Wow, did they ever. The first one was huge. Into Darkness takes the spectacle even further yet somehow remains grounded in reality, even if it’s sci-fi reality. The characters are old and new at the same time and I care about them. But while I like Star Trek I have to say I’m more Star Wars myself.

I wasn't allowed to see Star Wars when it first came out. It was rated PG and I had only seen G rated Disney fare. So I pressed and prodded and pushed for the entire summer. Dad had to give the green light. Mom usually made these types of decisions, but not this time. I wonder if they disagreed and she made him tell me no. I don't know what changed his mind, who he might have talked to that made him feel that it would be okay, that I would be okay, if I saw Star Wars. Maybe he talked to Seth's dad while they were both mowing the lawn. Seth had seen it. He had all the dolls. I hadn't yet learned to call them action figures. He even had the record, just the music, the soundtrack. We listened to it over and over lying on Seth’s living room floor while I made up new adventures for the dolls because I didn’t know the proper story. Seth didn’t mind that I strayed from the script.

At any rate, Dad finally conceded. Maybe he just gave up to my constant nagging. Maybe Fr. O’Malley nodded his approval. Maybe he wanted to see it himself. However it came to be, just before I started second grade, Dad took me to the movies. Not dropped me off like with the Raggedy Ann & Andy movie. In the mid-1970s wasn’t considered child endangerment to drop of a seven-year-old at a movie theater alone. This time though we went together.

It was like nothing, nothing I'd ever seen. No one had. Everyone wanted to know how it was done. So they told us. There was a TV special that revealed some of the secrets. School had just started and I was given permission to watch The Making of Star Wars across the street at Seth's house. He had a color TV We climbed onto the fuzzy mustard colored couch in his family room facing the 18” tube with rabbit ears sticking out the top. I’d changed out of my red plaid school uniform into play clothes, but not my socks. I still had on my white knee high socks with Buster Brown shoes. His mom had made supper, they called it supper, and now their brand new dishwasher rumbled and groaned in the kitchen behind us. Seth had recently started wearing glasses and he kept bumping them on his nose as he tried to brush brown curls out of his face. We each had a Dum Dum Pop; mine was root beer, his was pineapple. Down the hall Jordan, Seth’s little brother, was splashing in a bath. We were giggly and chattering until John Williams silenced us. C3P-O came on the TV and showed us how the land speeder zoomed across the sands of some place called Tunisia, not Tatooine, in one endless circle like a horse on a merry-go-round and how the space ship that had filled the screen was really only about three feet long and that some guy named Ben, but not Kenobi, created the sound for light sabers.

I know these revelations ignited imaginations in future filmmakers, Abrams included, for which I am most grateful as a movie watcher. But it burst a bubble in mine. I didn’t want to run out and buy a movie camera. I wanted to believe. Filmmakers are magicians and I love what they do. I don’t necessarily want to know how the trick works. I don’t want to think about blue screens or green screens or stop motion animation or make sticky software or the shutter in 3D glasses or RED cameras. When the lights go down I don’t want to think about these things. I want to believe.

I do though. Know stuff. Not much, but I did help roommates with their 8mm masterpieces before digital. I can pull focus walking backward next to a Radio Flier being wheeled down a never-ending dorm hallway. I’ve lived in a room with strips of film taped to the walls waiting to be spliced together with a clank and projected at twenty-four frames per second. I’ve seen the benefit of letterboxing and signed a petition to get Ted Turner to quit colorizing the classic black and white films, especially the ones shot after color was readily available. I have spent ages tracking down obscure source material for adaptations before Google.

Abrams is a Star Wars guy. He was one of those that made his own 8mm films as a kid. Look at Super 8. So when George Lucas sold to Disney and Abrams signed on Episode VII, I was cautiously thrilled. He seemed to be the perfect answer to take my first true cinematic love and have the reverence and respect for the source material and then make it bigger and better while still getting it right. I don’t know what “right” looks like but I trust that Abrams does. I trust that he can make me feel like I’m seven-years-old in a theater sitting next to Dad watching the most amazing thing either one of us has ever seen and believing with everything that I am that it could really happen in a galaxy far far away.