Astronaut applications

This is something I wrote for a scholarship application while I was just finishing up film school (we got scholarships for after we matriculated.  I know, it didn't make much sense to me then, either).  Anyway, I found this on my computer, and it's something that helps to remind me that, no matter how difficult the path may be or how discouraging it might get, there is only one thing that I can imagine myself doing for the rest of my life.

Apollo 13 and the Birth of Movies (for Me)

I’ve never traveled into outer space, but ever since seeing Apollo 13, I’ve always wanted to go – it’s just that the astronaut application is kind of long and, well, I’ve got things to do.  To say that Apollo 13 was a life changing experience would be, well, a vast overstatement.  But the truth is, much of what I’ve sought out of life probably began with the ninety minutes I spent captivated by that movie.

Let me take you back to the summer of 1995, a kinder, simpler time when a Democrat was in the White House, Rush Limbaugh was attacking this President for his political agenda, and the United States was involved in nation building in a country without any weapons of mass destruction.  It was, as you know, very different from the world we live in today.  In June of that year, Ron Howard’s film chronicling the flight of Apollo 13, NASA’s “successful failure,” graced the screens, and my father took my brother and me to see it.  It may seem a strange film for a father to take his two young sons to see, but you have to understand that, at the age of nine, I was already quite a nerd.  All my life, I had moved from one obsession to another – trucks at a very young age, then trains, later airplanes, then the solar system, then cars, and back to airplanes – but at this particular moment, my obsession was with space travel.  My father, sensing a chance to create one of those father-son moments that Kodak patented when they invented memories, decided to take the three of us to the movies.  In the theater, I can’t imagine that my father was watching the film as much as he was probably watching my brother and me, our eyes transfixed on what we were seeing onscreen.  Apollo 13 certainly wasn’t the first movie I’d ever seen, but it’s the first that I can remember, and that I remember so vividly.

In fact, my memory of the experience is so vivid that, whenever I return to the theater where I saw Apollo 13, I know exactly which seats were ours that afternoon.  Apollo 13 had the two things that any film needs in order to entertain a nine year old boy: rockets and explosions.  I was entertained.  Fascinated, really.  My first inclination was to enlist in the astronaut training program, but, finding that they didn’t generally accept nine-year olds, my next idea was to figure out a way to make those kinds of movies myself.  

The power of Apollo 13 was twofold.  It was an experience that my father could share with my brother and me.  The three of us were able to bond over something we all enjoyed: my father, having lived through the experience, and my brother and I, having been fascinated with the idea of space travel.  And it was a view into the fantastic possibilities of the cinematic medium that, even as a nine year old boy, I wanted to be a part of.  If a film could take you to the far side of the moon, could drop you into the tiny Apollo capsule – so that when the characters onscreen were in danger, you were in danger too – well, if a film could do that, then it could do anything.  And it was after seeing Apollo 13 that I realized that I wanted to be able to take an audience on that kind of journey.

Needless to say, I find myself, some fourteen years later, a recent graduate from UCLA’s film program.  I’ve made six short films of my own (but, unfortunately, none of them are set in space) and I have a future with countless opportunities ahead.  If I’m lucky, then someday perhaps I’ll have a film of my own like Apollo 13 playing in theaters, a film that a father somewhere will think is the perfect movie to take his son to watch.  And perhaps that son will watch in astonishment, thinking, I want to make something like that, too!  And, just maybe, if my movie is successful, I’ll get a chance to sit down and finish that astronaut application I started.