Early in my life, the power of story and characters to transport and transform an audience, including me, was a compelling siren.

I couldn't get enough. So I started creating my own. Then someone put a camera in my hands... I was 13. That was it. Did some camera tricks, shot knock-offs and send ups of TV shows. Then a high school English teacher challenged our class to create special projects - poems, short stories, plays... I had another idea. I made a 20 minute film. People liked it... I was hooked.

A story came out in the newspaper about that little film and I started to get calls about work. One of my best friends was working as the lead actor in a Coronet Film series about the pitfalls of teenage marriage. I signed on as PA and got my first pay check for running slates, then audio, then lighting, then camera! Then I interned/gripped/production managed at the local PBS affiliate one summer.

The summer after high school graduation, a group of us were going to Europe for a couple of months, getting college credit for studying comparative lit/govt/religions and essentially seeing what trouble we could get into. The tour group included my friend, the actor, and some other high school thespian types. I packed a suitcase full of film and a rough outline for a movie. We shot in Rome, Paris and London, finishing the shooting in the States and then I spent my first year in college editing. The result was "Die Sieben Kreuze (The Seven Crosses)" a serious-minded 2 1/2 hour chase across Europe which won a couple of festival awards and generated more press.

By now, I was a pre-Med major at University (mostly because I had always loved science and nobody I knew made a living making films) with an identity crisis. A phone call from my old mentor at the PBS affiliate began to change that: he had left the television station and raised the money to shoot a feature. There'd be 1500 mm lenses, helicopters, car chases, all the toys and joys. He'd be directing. Would I be interested in ADing for him and directing second unit... ummmm, YES! So I took a semester off from university. "A Thief In The Night."

I met people who kind of made a living making films. But I was interested in deeper stories, switched majors (Psychology), took an acting class and sniffed around the University's film dept, coincidentally one of the three in the country offering a degree at that time. The University also had the International Writers Workshop. Guest instructors there included Tennessee Williams, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Penn Warren, William Price Fox - but it was all about poetry and prose. I wanted to tell stories visually. William Price Fox saw my dilemma and created a way for me to do "Special Projects" for credit under his guidance - writing/making films.

About this time, Frank Capra and his wife came to spend a week with students in the Film & Broadcasting Dept. at the University, speaking, screening his films. As "the narrative guy" they assigned me to be his student host - for the whole week I sat with him in the back of screening rooms as he whispered recollections, anecdotes and directing tips to me. Amazing!

After some prodding, I entered "Die Sieben Kreuze" in a film festival - my first exposure to that magical soup - and it won "Best Feature." The next year, still a student, they asked me to run the film competition I had just won. It was transformative, watching/judging film entrees from all over the U.S. I was intrigued to build the festival's non-competitive elements in both scope and reach, bringing together experimental/mainstream filmmakers, adding in video and television. As Co-Director, then Executive Director over the next two years, we grew the Refocus International Film, Video & Photography Festival into the largest event of its kind, featuring premieres, workshops and seminars with world class filmmakers during bi-annual five and 10 day gatherings. High profile guests often stayed past their initial commitment, diving deep into the creative conversation they discovered there.

One of the guests at Refocus was producer/director Sydney Pollack. We spent most of that festival together, talking film. He stayed the duration. Sydney asked me what I wanted to do when I graduated...

TO BE CONTINUED...

CONTACT:
Jerry L. Jackson
JLJ@JerryLJackson.com

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