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| Earl Owensby |
|
And Me |
In 1981, I was pretty much just out of college and was determined to get into movie making. So far I had only been able to get a job as a PA on Friday the 13th. (There were no part numbers at that point!) It was a great time for regional movie making. The Black Stallion had just been made in Texas and was a big hit, George Romero was in Pittsburg, PA; and in North Carolina there was a guy I read about by the name of Earl Owensby. I had written and sent my resume down but never got a response. As chance would have it, I had to go to Florida for a wedding and figured I had nothing to lose by adding a stop over, renting a car and just driving to Shelby to push my way in. Luck was on my side that day. A film had just started a few days before. (It was a rental. You bring a script, director and some of the cast and Earl provides everything else.) The editor was coming from LA on Monday but the person they had hired locally quit when he found out he was to be the assistant editor, not the editor. So there was Earl sitting with unsynced dailes and a editor coming in with no AE. I guess Earl figured I knew the lingo and could at least pretend I had some experience. So I called my parents had them bring extra clothes to FL and instead of going back to NJ, I flew back to Shelby and started working as an Assistant Editor for Earl Owensby on Monday. The first film was Final Exam, directed by Jimmy Huston. I lived in the motel attached to the studio and since the movie was shooting all day we would work at night so Jimmy could sit in on the edit. All told I spent a year working at EO studios and AE'ed on five films. A Rare Breed, directed by David Nelson (somewhere I have his cowboy hat) of Ozzie and Harriet fame, starred George Kennedy. Hey not bad, I was 21 and working with an Academy award-winning actor. I also got credit on Lady Grey (1980) which was directed by Worth Keeter, which is how all this came up in my mind again. Worth had recently directed episodes of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers shows. In working on our Jack Scalia pages, we ran accros Worth as the director of Illicit Behavior (1992), which starred Jack. (I talked to Worth last week and hope to be able to bring you an interview with him in the near future.) To round out my stay at EO studios I worked on Night Screams (1983) - also called Death Screams or House of Death. This terrible little film has never come out on video, but I did glimpse a bit of it one afternoon on A&E of all channels. Too late did I realise what it was and by then, it was over! The last film I worked on is now called Dogs of Hell (1982). The original title was Rottweiler 3-D and was of course shot in 3-D. The big deal here was that it used a new 3-D technology and half of the development team for it was Lenny Lipton. For those of you who were not film students, Lenny wrote Independent Filmmaking. For me it was a big thrill. (Oh yeah, he also wrote the words for Puff the Magic Dragon, that Peter, Paul and Mary had such a big hit with.)
For a while I was one of the few experts on setting up 3-D projectors in the US. All in all I worked on five feature films in one year. It was a lot to cram into a year and for a New Yorker living in NC I was a fish out of water. But I have to say, I was treated well by Earl and the EO Studio. Working there gave me an unbelievable lesson in filmmaking, one that I can assure you would not be available in NY or in LA. Working with David Nelson and especially the editor (John O'Connor) were great experiences. I learned how to make a movie and - more importantly - how to fix a movie. When I got back to NY I could of course not get in the Union, but that's another story. Earl just sent The Picture Palace a few movies on video that he produced and starred in to sell, as well as one documentary on himself and another on a painter he knows. We just finished watching the documentary and it is pretty honest. I was a little surprised that it mentioned some of his failures (hosting The Abyss in an unfinished nuke plant) as well as the good stuff.-- Steve
Last updated August 18, 1998.
