Me and my brother, Harry, come from Cincinnati, Ohio, which in my view is the Iran of the United States. Cincinnati always tried to legislate morality. When I was growing up, X-rated films were not allowed to be shown in Cincinnati, and a few years later the curator of the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Museum was put on trial for exhibiting the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. It's a very conservative town with a lot of racism. But my family grew up in a great neighborhood, North Avondale, which is very integrated and cool.
I'm four years older than Harry. I remember when that little sucker was born. My dad came home from the hospital and gave me a candy bar. It hasn't been all candy since then. My brother and I officially started working together about 20 years ago in a tough fucking business, making documentaries, which budget-wise are on the low end of the totem pole, and degree-of-difficulty-wise (at least the way we make them) are on the high end. Still, despite the daily gamble and stress that is our chosen profession, we still get along.
Harry and I started working together in San Francisco in 1985. I had wound up in Paris when I couldn't get an exhibition in the US to save my life. And at the same time Harry was living in New York City and doing experimental theater. Then we both wanted a change and moved to San Francisco were lots of people were trying to make art, there were lots of parties and everyone was wearing all their sexual energy around. While in San Francisco we kind of developed our approach to filmmaking by just stumbling around, and not knowing what we didn't know. We'd never been to film school. When we later moved to this lovely little town of LA in 1991, we were lucky enough to make Taxicab Confessions, first as a little pilot for Telepictures and then as a series for HBO. And a lot of things changed after that.
Looking back, those years working in San Francisco were pretty pure. We had a tiny office in Sausalito, we lived in Mill Valley, we were making no money, but we were having fun. It was always a fucking uphill battle, but we didn't have LA to compare it to, or even know anyone from LA, to compare it to. We were young and living that fringy, artisty life. And we couldn't decide whether or not to move to L.A.
So we compromised by flying to L.A. once in awhile to pitch shows, and then high tailing it back to San Fran. Until on our third trip we were on a plane to L.A. and mid-flight a co-pilot walked down the aisle and began to pull up a piece of the carpet and look through this little window in the floor. He was looking to see if the landing gear was really not coming down, as his instruments had told him. And yep, the landing gear wasn't coming down on one side of the plane.
So we flew around for forty minutes to use up gas, and then we made an emergency landing, surrounded by fire engines on the runway of LAX. We all went out the emergency exit and slid down the inflated slide. And when we hit the tarmac and realized we were all in one piece, Harry and I looked at each other and said, "fuck this flying back and forth, let's just move down here." And a month later we were living in L.A.
And of course that's when the real uphill battle began...
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