MY MFA AESTHETIC: The First Movie I Ever Made Was Taped Over by Baseball

The first movie that made me want to make movies was not the kind of movie filmmakers usually cite when they are trying to sound impressive.

It was not a John Ford film. It was not Bergman. It was not Pulp Fiction, though I am of the generation where that answer would at least make sense.

It was Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

I know.

But that is the truth, and truth is usually more useful than taste-signaling.

I had seen plenty of movies before that. I understood stories. I knew how to be entertained. I knew how to follow a plot, root for someone, laugh at a joke, get scared, feel the shape of an ending coming.

But Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey did something different to me.

It made me see the seams.

There was a scene in heaven that looked nothing like the world I knew. It was stylized and strange and clearly built by human beings who had made a series of creative decisions. There was an animatronic rabbit. There was heavy makeup. There were sets and effects and jokes and choices so visible that, for the first time, I remember thinking:

Someone made this.

Not in the dismissive way people say that when a movie is bad.

In the holy way.

Someone made this.

Which meant movies were not weather. They did not simply happen. They were not handed down from some unreachable place. They were assembled. Written. Lit. performed. Cut. Scored. Designed. Faked into truth.

And if someone made them, then maybe I could too.

Around that time, I subscribed to Disney Adventures magazine. Every issue had a short story. After seeing Bill & Ted, I took one of those stories and adapted it into what was essentially a Bill & Ted prequel, because originality is a muscle and mine was eight years old.

Then I acquired my aunt’s camcorder.

By “acquired,” I mean I stole it in the way children steal things from relatives: with the assumption that proximity implies permission.

I rounded up the kids in the neighborhood and dragged them through a week-long production. We made a terrible film. I am sure it was incoherent. I am sure it was badly lit. I am sure everyone involved would dispute the fairness of my direction. But it existed.

For a little while.

The tape has since been lost to history. I am pretty sure my dad recorded over it with a St. Louis Cardinals game.

That feels right somehow.

My first film was not destroyed in a vault fire or buried in some archive. It was erased by baseball. A child’s dream overwritten by nine innings of regional loyalty.

Still, something had already happened.

I had become the kid who wanted to be something other than a doctor or a teacher or famous, because when you are nine, “famous” seems like a job. I wanted to make movies. I did not know what that meant. I did not know how long the road would be. I did not know how many times I would leave it and find my way back.

I only knew I had seen the invisible machinery.

That changed everything.

As I got older, the movies I loved changed.

Tragedy arrived in my family, and my taste darkened with it. The silly gave way to the somber. The bright adventure became something heavier. I started using cinema less as escape and more as excavation. A way to get down to feelings I could not reach during the day.

I would go see movies like Jarhead or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and people I was with would leave saying some version of, “Well, that wasn’t fun.”

I would leave feeling comforted.

Not because the films were pleasant.

Because they touched the bruise.

There is a strange relief in art that refuses to cheer you up. A brutal movie can sometimes be kinder than a comforting one because it does not ask you to pretend. It says, “Yes. Life can feel like this too.”

That matters to me.

I still like silly things. I still need absurdity and jokes and movies where people go on impossible adventures with a straight face. Part of me will always belong to the kid who watched two metalhead time travelers wander through heaven and hell and decided that cinema was a door.

But the work that stays with me now tends to be the work that proves life has not taken my ability to feel away.

That is what I want to make.

Movies with seams and bruises.

Movies where you can feel the human hands behind them.

Movies that know grief is not the opposite of wonder.

Sometimes it is the reason wonder matters.