Back in college, one of my intrepid super-8 filmmaking friends, Kirk Mathison and I embarked on filming a western.... in Minnesota. We shot it at the sand and gravel pits on the southern side of Edina, the suburb where we lived. It was arid enough in mid-July, with lots of sand and scrub grass but without horses or an old western town the story was about a good guy and a bad guy hunting each other under the unforgiving sun, sans modes of transportation. The film turned out pretty well, considering, and that was that.
Jump ahead to 1995. I was working at Warner Bros. in Burbank, CA and one day, during my lunch break I fired up my super-8 camera and shot a bunch of footage (complete with horses!) in the studio's old western town located on their back lot. Little shots to add production value and scale to Kirk and my homespun western. One new shot featured the above WANTED poster of Kirk.
The end result is a shining example of irony -- what started as a genre film, shot almost entirely in a Minnepolis suburb, became a visual record of the WB western town... that was ultimately torn down to be replaced by, yes, a faux subruban neighborhood.
To view the film:
Vestiges from my advertising days. One of the more prestigious (which is to say the only prestigious) clients we had at my first agency job was a software company with a contract to do video arcade games based on Disney theme park rides. Rudimentary stuff, very Pac Man-esque, back in the day of APPLE IIs, when Donkey Kong was king of the arcades. As seen above my design for the Matterhorn game was pretty close to the final product sold in stores. The JUNGLE CRUISE game however, that one never saw the light of a cathode ray tube. Old timers may recall the basis for my illustration -- from the original version of the ride... where the jungle boatmaster actually shot the hippo in its gaping maw, much to the horror of the kiddies aboard.
