Cinematographer!

 When I was a kid, I wanted to be a cinematographer!  Say what, you say!  And here's the thing:  What makes it all the more crazy or strange is that I didn't go to the movies back then... that's another story. 

So how did I know anything about film making?  Well several things.  When I was in high school, about once every two months or so, the public would be invited to view a film made by the producer which was shown at the school auditorium.  Almost all of the films were documentaries; shown in 16mm on the school projector onto the big screen.  

The documentaries were mostly (if I remember correctly) about some adventure which the cinematographer filmed; like a historical story-telling theme, hiking, mountain climbing, etc.  Almost all were really interesting and fun to watch.  Most of us could only dream of someday doing the same thing.

While in high school, my extra curricular activity included Audio Visual;  instead of study hall, I was responsible for showing up at a specific room and showing a 16mm film to the class.  Usually, it was at a history class or English.  Some of the WWII films were awesome!

At the same time, The Billy Graham Ministries produced The Restless Ones (1965); it was a Hollywood-style production about juvenile delinquents, teen pregnancy, and other social issues of the day.  It was a full-length feature, controversial in some church circles but it was shown in our community.  Again, I was impressed and it stoked my desire to be involved in making film.

I was really interested in the photography/film/technical aspects of film making and knew I wanted to know more.  So in my quest of I discovery, found the magazine, American Cinematographer and was probably the only person in our town of 13,000 who subscribed.  I think I took the mag for about three or four years before I realized that I wouldn't be moving on in the business.  

But I hadn't forgotten by first love:  I bought a used 16mm Bolex which I used for an advertising class in college to make a commercial for my final grade.  I had a Canon Super 8mm which I used for making movies of canoe trips to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in upper Minnesota, I made a film about a trip in an A-37 Air Force jet in Vietnam; I made a film documenting a trip up into the wilderness of Cambodia where we got lost and ran out of fuel; etc.

I've continued by dabbling in making documentaries (now they are videos) and they all can be viewed here:  

https://vimeo.com/jamesdavidphenicie

Several weeks ago, the Major League Baseball organization decided to pull the All Star Game from Georgia and move it to Colorado.  And there was Coca Cola cheering it on.  So I decided to make a "commercial" about it.  So here is my little take on it: 

https://vimeo.com/552644736

 

Cubs Win!

So there are a lot of people going crazy tonight!  THE CUBS WIN!  The World Series, that is.  Everyone will have a "Cubs" story to share... now that they are winners.

So here is mine:  Back in 1959 - 63, I was a paper carrier for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel newspaper.  I lived in the small town of Huntington, IN (the home of James Danforth "Dan" Quayle, the 44th vice president of the United States) which had its own newspaper, the Huntington Herald Press.  Dan Quayle's father was the editor.  

But I digress... so it being the out-of-town newspaper, I didn't have a lot of customers on my route, maybe 35 customers.  My brothers each had their own routes in the neighborhood slinging the paper.  Each day a car would swing by the little house at 404 Swan St and dump a couple of bundles of the daily papers onto the sidewalk.  We would cut the wire and count out the number of papers for each route.  And then we had to fold them so we could stuff them in the big newspaper bags tied to the handle bars of our Schwinn bicycles.  

During the summer and into the fall, as we folded our papers, we had our transistor radios blaring the Cubs games.  The scratchy play-by-play transmission from WGN, the AM signal surging in and out,  captured our attention so much so that often my mother would yell at us to hurry up and get going on our routes.   She wanted us home by dark!

One funny thought was that my mother was always yelling at us to shut off the radio when a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer or "Lucky Strike" cigarette commercial came over the airwaves.  My older brother remarked that due to those cautions he never took up smoking!

Ron Santos, Ernie Banks, and Lou Boudreau the manager wow... those were the names I remember.  Each year we had a newspaper contest to try to get new subscribers and usually the winner won a free trip to see the CUBS... I never won!  But that didn't soften my love of the Cubs.
  

                                        Ernie Banks

                                     Ron Santos

Next to our house was a park with a baseball diamond.  We often played neighborhood baseball; one of the teams was always called the "Cubs."  And we each took the name of our favorite player... all of us in the neighborhood were white:  none of us gave it a second thought not to take the honored name of Ernie Banks! 

And all those years of losing the big ones, never going all the way, the perennial losers, those Cubs.  Not because they didn't try... it just didn't work out.  Maybe it was the big bucks of the Yanks and Mets buying all those star players; whatever it was, I became a fair-weathered Cub fan.  I moved to Houston then to Washington DC then finally to San Diego -- all towns with pro baseball but I had no interest.  After the baseball strike, I lost my enthusiasm for America's favorite past time.

But tonight I became a big fan!  Not necessarily of baseball per se, but the idea that after 108 years, the CUBS WON!   The perennial losers won respect again.  Happy fans, family and friends all celebrate the way the ball bounced... their way!