Look and Listen

Biography

I was born in a sleepy colonial town hidden in the Central American mountains, where I spent ten magical childhood years. My second decade flashed by in San Francisco, the second most beautiful city on earth, amid the blur of the passions of youth. I left college in pursuit of some of those passions and thus became a racing driver in Europe, based in England and criss-crossing the continent from circuit to circuit and adventure to adventure. I began writing for motoring Magazines then, to help support my passions. Two years later I returned to California but continued racing and writing. After meeting Paul Newman I wrote my first screenplay, was accepted by a big Hollywood agency and nearly got that script made into a film. After a couple of other 'close calls', the frustration drove me to action. I decided to make my own films. (Innocence is a wonderful thing!) I joined a San Francisco acting academy and soon gathered enough strong acting talent to go forth. Word of our project somehow got around and suddenly we were getting calls from professional filmmakers in New York and L.A. who wanted to join us. Some insisted, even after I showed them my meager budget. I wrote a screenplay to fit our cast, and we shot a good portion of the film. We edited several scenes and took that to Hollywood to seek completion funds. The producers in L.A. were impressed but... business is business. "Get a major actor to take over one of the lead roles or bring us a finished film and we'll give you all the funds you need." they said. Undaunted, we returned to our Bay Area, I wrote another feature length script and we shot the entire film locally. I directed again, this time with a bit more confidence. We are now in a long, slow process of editing, since I am doing it in-house to save money. In the meantime, I wrote a fiction novel and had it published a few weeks ago. I hope to eventually make it into a film. The title is Currents of Destiny, and it is already available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other stores. People can even go to Google Book Search and then type in the title to get to a page where they can read up to 20% of it. Also, Google has provided a satellite photo map of the earth and marked all the locations mentioned in this historical fiction novel (the first of a trilogy covering 150 years), and they can zoom in to see these places, be it Paris or some sleepy village in the mountains of Southern Mexico; one of those places washed by the currents of life.

Inspiration

I was fortunate to be born in a place isolated and remote from the Meccas of the modern world. Instead of television we had raw nature and wonderful storytellers who could terrorize us with 'real' ghost stories and amaze us with Spanish variations of 1001 Arabian Nights. And, although dad brought us the latest toys from some fabled and distant land called 'the United States' where he paid for our future with his sweat, my favorite was a wooden thread spool pushed along by a broom stick. It represented a car and it allowed my imagination to fill in the blanks and take me to wondrous places. I became a dreamer, romantic to a fault, and creative energy became my magic carpet.