Bio-Hoedown

"The television business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
                                                                                                   - Hunter S. Thompson

Where to start?  I suppose the beginning.  I was born in Ft. Worth, Texas to an out of wed-lock 16 year old girl and given up for adoption. My parents brought me to San Antonio and divorced about a year later.  I have no recollection of them being together, though there are pictures.  Sounds kind of like the profile of a serial killer, doesn't it?  Like a Cure song.  It gets better.  My mom met and married a businessman she was set up with on a blind date.  They married by the vicinity of  my fourth birthday and soon after, we moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  I spent summers and holidays in San Antonio and Albuquerque with my dad and his family.  Thankfully, I was tall for my age and my parents were able to trick the airlines into letting a 4 year old kid fly alone.  Try doing that today!

Hold tight!  We're about to play a little "moving-van ping pong".  We moved to the San Francisco area by the middle of my fourth grade year.  We spent all of nine months there before moving to Lincoln, Massachusetts just outside of Boston.  We moved to Los Angeles at the end of my sixth grade year.  At the end of my seventh grade year we moved across the pond to Lausanne, Switzerland.  I went to a British private school where there were just over one hundred kids in kindergarten through the 8th grade.  There were eight kids in the entire eighth grade class!  It is said that culture shock stings most when moving back to your own country.  This, I can say with some authority, is quite true.  We moved back to the states during the summer after my eighth grade year and weeks after arriving on familiar shores, I decided that I wanted to live with my dad in San Antonio.  I didn't want to do any more moving.  Thus began my High School experience.  Here's where culture shock comes in to play.  I went to a high school with more than 4,000 students.  There were 1,500 in the freshman class alone juxtaposed to my most recent eighth grade class of eight.  Mentally, I crawled under a desk in a fetal position and rocked back and forth repeating "take me to my happy place".

I survived, as most of us do and decided I wanted to go snow skiing for college.  As it happened, the University of Denver accepted me.  It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.  I majored in film production and minored in art.  I skied.  I partied.  I went to rehab.  You know, the usual college experience.  I graduated after 5 years and moved back to San Antonio to look for work.  I found a part time position with the ABC affiliate running camera, meanwhile, I planned to write a few scripts and shoot a few shorts to craft a nice reel.  Here comes the kink in my scheme.  The television control room.  It looked like the bridge of the Enterprise!  I took one look at the video switcher and it was over...I knew I wanted to direct the news and play with brightly colored and flashing do-dads.

I got screamed at.  I almost got in to a fist fight with the sports anchor.  But, like prison (I hear only!) you have to hold your ground to gain respect in this business.   I bugged directors to teach me how to punch shows.  I learned the studio stuff to the point that I could change a lamp, prompt, floor direct and run camera blindfolded.  Perspiration, frustration, patience and most of all humor finally afforded me the title of director.  I spent every waking moment, much to the chagrin of my then girlfriend now wife, at the station creating new effects to use in the newscasts.  If interested, you can see a collage of my effects I put at the beginning of every resume tape here.  Keep in mind these are from 1998 - but I think they still hold up.

GVG Kalypso

With my resume tape sent to the far corners of the continent, I landed a director job in Minneapolis and so began my second round of "moving-van ping pong" and me eating my words.  I spent two years directing a morning show start-up in the "Minny-Apple" that was fun, but the diva factor was extreme.  Soon after the move, I married the girl of my dreams.  She is the yin to my yang.  Or is it the other way around?  After Minneapolis, we moved to Omaha, Nebraska.  There, a production manager job fell in my lap.  It was a job of many hats really.  I directed the newscasts, created graphics, designed animations, managed & scheduled the crew and got saddled with building sets.  Omaha is the birthplace of my twin sons also.  After interviewing for a job in D.C. for the show Around The Horn and being denied said job because I specifically lacked Kalypso experience, I made it my mission to find a station that had one and to learn it inside out.  After almost 5 years in Nebraska, we moved to Memphis, Tennessee where we presently reside.

Now, six years later, here I am writing a blog for a grad school program in Interactive Media.  I got my Kalypso experience, but I lost the fire.  I decided that TV - more specifically news - is a dying art.  Journalism isn't what it used to be.  Ethics and integrity have been replaced by contests and sensationalism.  My grand plan - be done with TV news and enter an as yet determined field where I can surround myself with like-minded and creative thinkers.  Hunter S. Thompson would be pleased as spiked punch to know his proclamation continues to describe broadcast news with laser point accuracy.  The future, with TV behind me, is indeed bright.