A Fuelish Planet

“Last chance to fill up for a 100 million miles!”

Shot over the summer of 1974 after graduating from Lima Senior High in Ohio, it is an amalgam of high spirited youth, good friends, “The Sting”, “Star Trek”, “2001: A Space Odyssey”, my future career in VFX and fun.

In order to appreciate “A Fuelish Planet” you may need to reset your frame of reference to life at age 18. In the summer of 1974, I had just graduated from Lima Senior High and was enrolled in Pre-Med at the University of Cincinnati. I was planning on being a doctor, not a filmmaker. With nothing to lose, I decided to make a ridiculous Super-8, Sci-Fi film with my friends, since I had a shiny new Yashica LD6 Super-8 camera that could do stop motion, fades and lap-dissolves. Working in the film industry wasn’t even on my radar since I had never even MET anyone that had made their own film and I had no formal training in filmmaking. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Star Trek had been off the air for 5 years and I figured it would soon be forgotten, so I stole ideas generously. “The Sting” had come out the previous year and George Roy Hill’s bold, clear, fun-filled directorial style absolutely mesmerized and inspired me. The opening music from the Gayane Ballet Suite appeared in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and I loved the lonely, deep-space feeling it evoked, so yes, I stole that too.

To me, one of the most valuable aspects of this film is that it documents my home town (i.e. Lima, Ohio) and it’s a time capsule of 1974. The Vietnam war had just ended and it was the summer that Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. Star Wars wouldn’t come out for another 3 years. Gasoline prices were starting to noticeably rise. In 1972, when I first started driving, the price of gasoline in Lima was $0.27/gallon and by 1974 it has risen to almost twice that, thus sparking public-service commericials with the tagline “Don’t be Fuelish!”. It’s also wonderful to see downtown Lima as it appeared in 1974 as a backdrop for our crazy antics.

To say my high school friends were “good sports about this” is a gross understatement. I pitched them this crazy space movie idea one night after graduation and before we knew it we were stitching velcro to our pants/skirts and taping aluminum foil to our boots, then traipsing around Lima with a Super-8 camera looking absolutely ridiculous. One of the most meaningful aspects of the film to me was creating roles so I could make a “buddy movie” with my best friend, Pat Dunster. I know he would rather have bamboo shoots under his fingernails rather than have this film be seen by the general public, but I think his 70’s haircut is far less embarassing than the outrageous sideburns I was sporting.

In the end, YES it’s embarassing to share this film. I think we’re all a bit embarassed looking back on our teenage years, but worse for me, after working on feature films at ILM and Dreamworks Animation I cringe at the cornicopia of filmmaking missteps, tilted title cards and laughable visual effects. Thus, in cleaning up and scanning this old film, there are many shots I’ve been tempted to “fix”, but I know that most of the entertainment value is BECAUSE of these mistakes and laughable visual effects, so I’ve left them intact. The only adjustments I’ve made are brightness level and color adjustments from the scanning process to make it a faithful reproduction of the original, Super-8 footage. I have been asked and I am tempted to make an over-the-top “Special Edition” of the film, complete with dramatic spaceship shots, dynamic particle-system beam-down effects and car explosions, but I don’t think it would make it a better film and for now I’d rather move forward with creating new films, and leave this film as a document of a bygone era.

There is something I DO feel works well in “A Fuelish Planet”. In making my own films later in life or trying to determine why a technically brilliant film doesn’t work for me, I’ve come back to the element of FUN. Is the film FUN to watch? Even if it’s a thriller or horror film, does it convey a sense of fun for the viewer? Making this film was pure joy for me. It doesn’t take itself at all seriously. It is what it is. I think the films I’ve loved the most over the years are the ones where the filmmakers are expressing that sort of joy for the process and infusing it into their work. It’s an easy quality to lose as you age and life becomes more intense and serious, yet creating something that expresses the joy of being alive is something we never get tired of experiencing.