| One day back in 1996 a phone call to the House residence fulfilled a 10-year-old’s
dream that he would be attending USC Film School. They say. Part of the
problem with biographies and their ilk is that they have the uncanny ability
of thwarting that now grown up kid’s positivist ever onward gaze,
instead offering a filmy lens refracting lots of energy, activity, excitement,
and motion but little else. In other words, what great feats need yet reporting?
Aren’t biographies written more often in later life, like a bedside
Proust or only when truth equals a suitable preface like “A long time
ago in a galaxy far away . . .” ? In fact, the last time he was forced
to do this it was for the previously mentioned gang in college and only
after he was baited with the gloss and promises of a fully funded 16mm short
(some call it 480, a curs'ed word often heard muttered scornfully from studio
mailrooms and production assistants guarding doors). Suffice to say, here
we find ourselves and what to do but focus on fact and some feeling?
Jason read a lot and then learned to write, then learned that to write was
to entertain, to inform (and to avoid the dreaded verbal conversation) .
. . so be it. So he wrote lots of stories and the everyone thought they
were pretty neat. He never really held still much. He started a lot of businesses.
His mom planted the word entrepreneur at a young age. He found a video camera
and that’s when it all got started. Thus bitten by a swarm of movie
bugs that balmy summer, he found a medium that to his mind surpassed all
others—the ultimate synthesis of story, picture, sound. Numerous movies
were made—the neighborhood was transformed into a fully functioning
movie studio; the possibilities were infinite. They wrote a newspaper story
where the fated statement was uttered, along with a promise to attend USC.
That day in ‘96 he was doing what he did most of the time—making
a movie. In fact, had USC not gone and mucked the whole thing up he might
have been perfectly happy studying English up at Berkeley. But he loved
film, what can you say?
Between 10-years-old and now, Jason has done all sorts of crazy stuff. In
High School he put his deck-to-deck editing skills to work with a first
job in the television production department at Magic Mountain, then government
access television, numerous freelance industrial/educational jobs, a punk
rock band, short films, oftentimes overseen by his mentor, producer Peggy
Kenline—then college, rushing pizzas to and fro and more city council
meetings, and whatever else he could do to pay for it all. College helped
cement a lot of what had already started; studying under Nina Foch, Bill
Haugse and Alan Rucker amongst many others, helped evolve a notion of film
that was subversive, self-aware and personal. By the time he graduated he
had a very motley assortment of skills, and had discovered an interesting
personality trait: he didn’t like doing only one thing.
So he went to work for a company making movies for the internet and shot
and edited some, then several shows as an AD, wrote some scripts, made some
documentaries, started a business, and one day stumbled through the door
of Pictures in a Row.
“You see, because it is a film but then again it kind of isn’t,”
owner Peter Lang explained with an enigmatic grin—that was the introduction—before
he was pulled back into a conference call. To Jason, Pictures in a Row seemed
an edifice over Hollywood attracting legions of renaissance men and women
(and the aspiring ones) to its lofty confines—a company that seemed
to appreciate the myriad skills the artist/filmmaker wielded and steered
away from bureaucracy of any kind. Three years in its penumbra saw Jason
produce his long-lost short “The Method in Winter”, edit some
pretty neat commercials, and that’s not to mention contracting the
Photoshop virus, picrow.com, almost blowing up Peter and himself in a Union
76 oil refinery, tagging along for all sorts of commerce/film exploits,
secret underground publishings of the picrow gazette, impromptu guitar jam
sessions in the conference room, digitaldionysus.com, still-life sojourns
to the Queen Mary and beneath Grand avenue, embarrassing mispronunciations
of French composers and their "songs," twilights with Winogrand,
drop shadows; it just goes.
So I guess you could say its all kind of fun through that lens. |
