Sixteen-year-old Mark Sanderson was on the verge of his first big break. It was early 1982 and Gerard Ravel, the 35-year-old host of the local public access show "Word of Mouth," had come to the apartment of Sanderson's friend and production partner James Baumgarten in Santa Monica, Calif., to check out their 28-minute martial arts adventure "The Last Silent Swordsman" with an eye towards putting it in a program he was mounting at the Nuart Theatre the following month, grandly titled "The Best Teen Super 8mm Films of '81."

After 15 minutes of fights, car chases and flying ninja throwing stars, Ravel had seen enough.

"He said, 'That's great! I want to put it in our festival,'" recalls Sanderson, who directed the film.

Just like that, Sanderson was in. There was only one small catch: He had to sign an exclusive management contract with Ravel's Word of Mouth Productions.

"My dad had to co-sign it because I was underage," Sanderson recalls. "[Ravel] said, 'Now, you're going to be approached by agents...' I was thinking, 'Who wants a 16-year-old kid to make a movie?'"

The more pertinent question was, "Is anyone interested in seeing a bunch of no-budget movies made by teenagers?"

Mark got the answer as his car approached the Nuart on the night of the event and he saw the line of people waiting to get in the theater circling around the block. And it wasn't just the casts and crews and their friends and family. There was a TV crew and professional still photographers snapping pictures. Inside the auditorium, the audience applauded, cheered and gasped at the appropriate moments. The six-thirty show was a sell-out, and the nine o'clock show was nearly three-quarters full.

"When the guy [in the "Swordsman"] gets his head chopped off, I distinctly remember people saying, 'Whoa!'" recalls Raj Makwana, who played an evil henchman in the movie. "Afterwards, people were coming up to Mark saying, 'How did you do that?'" [Answer: A styrofoam wig head outfitted with a Halloween mask and ninja hood placed atop a dummy torso.]

"It was crazy exciting," Sanderson says. "Gerard sold the hell out of it. He was like P.T. Barnum." Although, "I don't remember any agents walking around saying, 'Here's my card,'" he laughs.

Perhaps they should have been.

It might not be on par with the future progenitors of the French New Wave coming together to publish Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s, but in an age when the movie landscape is dominated 3D renderings of computer-generated comic book characters, the event stands as a significant seminal moment in contemporary film history.

One of the films screened that night was the 45-minute horror-comedy "High Voltage," made by 15-year-old Jeffrey (J.J.) Abrams, today famous as the creator of the TV series "Felicity," "Alias" and "Lost" and the director of "Mission: Impossible III," the big-screen "Star Trek" reboot and the recent Steven Spielberg-produced hit "Super 8," which, in a bit of autographical data mining, revolves around a group of 13-year-old amateur filmmakers in 1979.  Another was the 28-minute Hitchockian thriller "Stiletto" by Matt Reeves, who went on to co-create the series "Felicity" with Abrams and direct the films "Cloverfield" (produced by Abrams) and "Let Me In." The program also included the 15-minute spoof "Toast Encounters of the Burnt Kind" directed by Larry Fong, the cinematographer for "Lost" and "Super 8," which, in an interesting bit of gestalt, has been cited for its visual debt to Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1979).

Others in this community of teen filmmakers went on to be prominent players in such TV shows such as "Heroes," "Parenthood" and "21 Jump Street."

Fong says he doesn't remember much about the event itself, but its key players never left his orbit.

"From time to time, J.J. would have a party and half those people would be there, and I still see them," says Fong, whose credits also include multiple collaborations with director Zack Snyder ("300," "Watchmen" and "Sucker Punch") and a trio MTV VMA Video of the Year Award-winners for R.E.M., Van Halen and the Goo Goo Dolls. "When you're a friend of J.J., it's kind of this weird club where you end up seeing each other over the decades even when none of us are doing anything. He hires you or you're part of his company and you stay there. It's kind of a family thing."

The Pre-Credit Sequence

By the time of the festival, Sanderson's eyes had been on the prize for nearly half a decade. He and classmate Reeves began making films together in 1977, the year of "Star Wars," crafting their own versions of the secret agent and kung fu movies that fascinated them as preteen boys.

"We had tremendous output, at least a movie or two a year," Sanderson recalls. "The films would be 20 minutes, then later they got to 45. We lived a block from each other, so it made it quite easy to work on stuff. His house was sort of the movie studio with all the equipment."

The duo formed their own production company, R&S Studios (for Reeves & Sanderson). Reeves assumed the title of president; Sanderson was vice president and head of security. They enlisted their friends as actors, printed stationary and published a newsletter to publicize their efforts.

"It was vertical integration," Sanderson says. "We not only would shoot the films and edit them, we'd put up posters around the neighborhood then show them for money to whoever would come. We believed in it that much, like, 'Oh, we're moguls.'"

Ravel too had visions of moguldom. An avid surfer since 1962, he had been touring the country showing surfing films. This was in the days before the home video revolution, when niche films had few avenues of distribution and the random access instant gratification of YouTube, et al, was still decades away. He would rent a theater or hall in each city, pass out flyers and put up posters around town, and enthusiasts would turn out in droves to see the wet-suited heroes they'd seen frozen in the pages of Surfer Magazine come to life and shoot the curl in super-slow motion.

By the turn of the '80s, the iconoclastic "movie brats" of the late '60s of early '70s had solidified their status as mainstream moneymaking machines. It wasn't just Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who scored a blockbuster with their nostalgic thrill ride "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in the summer of 1981.  Darker-minded compatriots like Brian De Palma ("Carrie," "Dressed to Kill"), John Carpenter ("Halloween," "Escape from New York") and Paul Schrader ("American Gigolo") were also turning out hits. Betting on the next generation of young filmmaking talent didn't seem like a bad idea.

Ravel launched "Word of Mouth" as a showcase for local amateur filmmakers, taking advantage of government regulations at the time requiring cable systems in communities with 3,500 or more subscribers to set aside TV channels for locals to show their self-produced programming and provide the equipment and the studio time for them to make it.

Reeves was flipping through the channels one day in June of 1981 when he stumbled upon an installment of "Word of Mouth" featuring a collection of Super 8 horror movies followed by an interview with the 14-year-old filmmaker, who had been making movies since the age of 7 when he borrowed his parents camera to make a stop-motion clay animation short.

At the end of the program, there was ad cheekily proclaiming, “Air your shorts." Eager to get on the action, Reeves called the number on screen and soon he too was showing and discussing his films on the show. Ravel told Reeves he should meet the kid whose films caught his eye, Jeffrey Abrams. An introduction was made, and the two became friends. When Gerard asked if they knew of another kid who might have a film for the fest, Reeves referred him to Sanderson.

Fong met Abrams around the same time, when he made the 42-mile trek from his home in Rolling Hills, Calif., with a friend to spend the weekend with the latter's divorced dad, who lived across from the Abrams family in the Pacific Palisades, a few miles north of Santa Monica.

"We were about four years older, but [J.J.] would come over and bug us and vice versa," Fong says. "He invited me to his house and he was just this whirlwind of energy and multiple talents even at that young age. His room was full of musical instruments and magic and monster books and models and stuff like that, and I was interested in all the same things, so we connected and became friends, even though at that age it's funny to be friends with someone that much younger."

Like Abrams, Fong was captivated by the works of Spielberg and horrormeisters Carpenter and David Cronenberg. He had been making Super 8 movies since junior high, both live action and stop-motion and cell animation, and experimenting with makeup effects, and Abrams called on him to help craft the transformation scenes for "High Voltage."

"There's this part where [a character] has these reactions to being electrocuted, and his arm swells up and ripples a la 'Altered States,'" Fong recalls. "I used bladders and stockings and latex and tubes."

Fong's own film "Toast Encounters" was a veritable special effects spectacular, featuring levitating sandwiches manipulated with an off-camera fishing pole, stop-motion-animated dancing foam rubber toast creatures and a spectacular scene in which the protagonist witnesses a toaster spacecraft land on a schoolyard, built in miniature.

Like their fictional counterparts in "Super 8," the real life teen auteurs weren't above incorporating snatches of real life drama into their films for added "production value." Daniel Krishel remembers being in the middle of shooting a robbery scene for his film "Six Inches of Death" in an alley behind his house, using fake guns and a knife, when the Beverly Hills Police rolled up, sirens flashing. He showed them his camera and assured them that they were merely students shooting a movie. As the cops returned to their squad car, Krishel told one of his actors to lay on the ground and play dead, then placed the camera on the ground in front of him and rolled film.

"The last shot of the film you see is the cops surrounding him with their car and their lights and everything," Krishel says. "For a student film, to have the actual Beverly Hills Police in my movie, it looked pretty neat, pretty real. And I remember that caught a lot people [at the festival] by surprise."

The juvenile movie crew in "Super 8" lives in a quaint, isolated Ohio town. Their big dream is getting their film into the Cleveland International Super 8 Film Festival. To their parents, factory workers and cops, making short films is viewed as a frivolous hobby, at best.

Not so for the real life Super 8 auteurs in Abrams circle.

"My parents bought me my first camera," Sanderson points out. "They were artists in their day, but never got to do it. My dad," an aerospace engineer, "was a budding singer. He used to send tapes to Capitol Records and sing in the piano bars, and my mom wanted to be a Rockettes dancer. They were always saying, 'Go after your dreams.'"

Growing up in Santa Monica in the '70s, "it was the back lot, basically," says Sanderson. " 'Charlie's Angels,' 'Starsky & Hutch,' 'Quincy,' all these shows that we watched and followed, would be shooting there every week, and after school we'd go off and hang around the set. The gaffers would take us under their wing and say, 'Hey, sit here.'" Becoming a filmmaker "didn't seem like a crazy dream we were trying to chase," he says, "because it was happening around us.'"

Abrams' father Gerald W. Abrams was a successful TV movie producer ("An Act of Love," "Berlin Tunnel 21"). Writer/director Nicholas Meyer ("Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan") attended J.J.'s bar mitzvah and special effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull(“2001: A Space Odyssey") sent him note of encouragement when he was 11.

For the leads in "High Voltage," Abrams called on friends Adam Rosefsky, whose father was local TV financial guru Robert S. Rosefsky, and Peter DeLuise, the son of comic actor Dom DeLuise ("History of the World, Part I," "The Cannonball Run") and, later, one of the stars of Fox's "21 Jump Street" (1987-1991) alongside Johnny Depp.

"The Palisades was one of the areas where the Hollywood folks lived," says Rosefsky. "So, like anywhere else, you sort of follow in the footsteps of your father."

Sanderson and Reeves attended Santa Monica High School (aka Samohi), where the baseball team's roster included Charlie Sheen (whose father Martin sheen was riding high as the star of "Apocalypse Now"), future "Lois & Clark" star Dean Cain (stepson of director Christopher Cain) and Brat Pack heartthrob-to-be Rob Lowe. In theater class, the pair acted alongside future Oscar-winner Robert Downey Jr., who had already appeared in several films directed by his father, noted underground filmmaker Robert Downey, best known for the cult classic "Putney Swope" (1969).

"He disappeared in 11th grade," Sanderson recalls. "Then one day we're watching 'Weird Science' and I'm like, 'Holy, shit! It's Robert Downey Jr.!'"

Also roaming the halls of Samohi was the youngest son of TV director Leo Penn and actress Eileen Ryan, Chris Penn, who would go on to co-star in such films as "The Wild Life" and "Reservoir Dogs" before succumbing to heart disease in 2006 at the age of 40. His older brother Sean had co-starred opposite Timothy Hutton in the movie "Taps" the previous fall and would shoot to fame that summer as Jeff Spicoli in 1982's "Fast Times and Ridgemont High."

The brass ring was clearly within reach. Big things were happening, and not just to remote, mythical figures in newspapers and magazines. Then, suddenly, Sanderson was one of those people, and his classmates weren't so jaded that they failed to take notice.


Check out The Real Kids of "Super 8," Part 2, in which I take a look at what happened in the wake of the fest, the teenage chutzpah of J.J. Abrams and where some of the lesser-known 40-something "kids" are today.

Historically, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) has embraced changed with all the speed and enthusiasm of the Vatican or the Daughters of the American Revolution. Aside from a few minor tweaks here and there (e.g., the addition of the Best Animated Feature category in 2001), its awards lineup has been relatively static for the past seventy years, especially compared to the TV Academy, which alters and adds Emmy categories with regularity. But when AMPAS took the bold step of doubling the number of Best Picture nominees from five to ten in 2009, it may have been an indication that its capacity for change was, well, changing.

On Tuesday night at AMPAS' "Cinematography in the Digital Age" event at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, Academy executive director Bruce Davis said that the pervasive use of computer technology has inspired the organization to reexamine all its awards categories and ask two vital questions: "Is this going to make sense at all in ten years?" and "Is this going to be a category that even ought to continue to exist?"

"I don't want to scare anybody here tonight," Davis told the crowd, "but it is a time for very serious looks at what we're doing in all kinds of disciplines."

The most obvious issue is the diminishing distinction between animated films, most of which are now made digitally, and "live action" films that make heavy use of computer-generated visual effects, which are animations by any other name, created with the same tools and techniques.

If the line between live action and animation continue to blur, "then there's really not much point in having an Animation category," Davis said, "and we'd like to keep [it]."

According to Oscar rules, to be eligible for the Best Animated Feature award, "a significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture's running time." Director James Cameron estimated that his 2010 Best Picture-winner "Avatar" was 60% CG animation and 40% live action, which is edging close to the limit. But the rules also stipulate that movement and characters' performances be created using a frame-by-frame technique, and "Avatar" used motion capture of live actors to power its animated figures.

Davis said even actors who thought their categories would be spared the impact of the digital revolution "have woken up to fact that we as Academy voters may be asked to evaluate two very different kinds of performances in the next year." One is the traditional performance recorded by a camera; the other is the motion capture performance, "which is really a collaborative effort between himself and a team of technicians who have the ability to... change the nature of that performance," Davis said. "They can slow down a gesture [or] supply a fleeting facial expression that really wouldn't have been there with just the actor there by himself."

If any Oscar categories are altered prior next year's awards, it's unlikely it'll happen on Davis' watch. He's set to retire from the Academy on June 30th, 2011, after 30 years with the organization.

My sister-in-law couldn't believe Lt. Charles "Chick" Hennesey was screaming in her face -- or, more accurately, Jackie Cooper, the man who played the character on "Hennesey" (1959-62), a CBS series she remembered fondly from childhood as a favorite of her parents.

It was sometime in the mid '70s. She had been walking across the USC campus on her way to class when she inadvertently walked into a scene Cooper was directing for a TV series (most likely "The Rockford Files" or "Quincy"). The area was not cordoned off. No production assistants were strategically stationed to stop her. So when Cooper angrily asked her if she knew how much money the blown shot had cost them, she yelled right back, something along the lines of, "Hey, bub, I go to school here! Know how much that costs?!" Cooper told her to get the hell out of there. "Which I did because, you know, I had to get to class," she says.

The incident was the first thing my sister-in-law thought of when she heard Cooper died last week at the age of 88. In a way, it's fitting, given how his behavior was reminiscent of the role cited in most of the obituary headlines -- blustery Daily planet editor Perry White, which he played in a quartet of "Superman" films starring the late Christopher Reeve.

The first thing I thought of when I heard of Cooper's passing was a photo that's been with me for nearly 20 years, jammed in series of desk drawers with old birthday cards, canceled checks and orphaned computer cords, too inconsequential to treat with care, too weird to throw out. It shows him leaning over pioneering film producer Hal Roach. On other side of Roach is Cesar Romero, best known as The Joker from TV's "Batman" (1966-68). Laurel & Hardy imitators lurk in the background.

The date was January 12th, 1992.  The occasion was a 100th birthday party for Roach, who wouldn't actually turn 100 for another two days. Laurel & Hardy (Jeffrey Weissman and Bevis Faversham) were there because Roach produced dozens of films starring the comedy duo. I always figured Cesar Romero was there because, well... back then it seemed like he would show up for the opening of a tuna can. But it turns out that Roach produced his TV series "Passport to Danger" (1954-56).

The event was held in the assembly hall of the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif. Roach didn’t room there with other aged industryites, most if not all of whom were younger than he was. He lived alone in his house in Bel Air. But he did have a personal connection to the facility: it was built and run by the Motion Picture & Television Fund, a charitable organization he established with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Cecil B. DeMille and other Hollywood heavyweights in 1921 to aid industry members in need. By 1992, Roach was the sole survivor of its founders. He had also outlived both of his children and many of the kids in his "Our Gang" comedy shorts (later repackaged for TV under the title "The Little Rascals"), including Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas, Matthew "Stymie" Beard and Darla Hood.

As Roach was about to enter the party, he was greeted by Anita Garvin, a full-time resident of the facility who played Laurel's shrewish wife in a numerous films. He then walked into the room under his own power -- slowly -- and was seated in a chair at the back of the room. Charlton Heston showed up to pay his respects. So did B-movie actress Marie Windsor, whose credits include "Cat-Women of the Moon," produced by my wife's great uncle, the late Al Zimbalist.

As the organizers prepared to serenade Roach with "Happy Birthday," people crowded into the room, craning their necks to see him. On my left was a surprisingly tall Dan Aykroyd, who was playing Roach's silent film-producing rival Mack Sennett in the "Chaplin" biopic starring Robert Downey Jr. that would be released later that year. A foot or two away was Micky Dolenz, who had starred in the TV series "Circus Boy" (1956-57) as a preteen before going on to gain fame as a member of The Monkees.

I looked to my right and noticed a short middle-aged man had materialized in front of me. Dressed in a skin-tight jeans and T-shirt combo, showing off a tight, muscular frame, he was accompanied by an attractive younger woman who could've been his girlfriend, his daughter or his assistant. Looking at him, I couldn't help but think of "buffed monkey," a nickname friends had bestowed upon a similarly short and muscular high school classmate.

After studying the man's face for a moment, I realized it was "Baretta" star Robert Blake, who played Mickey in "Our Gang" comedy from 1939 to 1944. He looked uncomfortable, like he wanted to pace the floor, but the crush of people prevented him. It's unlikely Blake had been running into Roach at parties over the years. Was this the first time in decades he was confronting this living ghost from his ghastly childhood, conjuring up memories of brutal abuse at the hands of his alcoholic father who mercilessly pressured him to support the family? ("Being locked in the closets, and beat up, and burned, and sexual stuff...." Blake once said. "I mean, most people like me end up on death row, or in the graveyards, or in prison.")

There's no evidence suggesting Blake had any reason to resent Roach directly. The same cannot be said of Cooper.

Like Blake, Cooper had done a stint in "Our Gang," beginning in 1929. In 1931, Roach loaned out the 9-year-old Cooper to Paramount to star in the film "Skippy" for $25,000, paying the young actor his contractual rate of $50 a week and pocketing the difference. The film gave Cooper the title for his 1982 autobiography “Please Don’t Shoot My Dog,” a plea he made when, in a ploy to get him to cry for a scene, his grandmother had his dog dragged off-set and shot by a security guard. (Not surprisingly, Cooper was adamant that his own four children stay out of show business until they were adults.) The deadly shot was faked, the dog was unhurt, and the film became a smash critical and commercial success, propelling Cooper to superstardom and earning him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, making him the youngest person ever to be nominated for the award. He eventually lost, but the film’s director Norman Taurog -- a onetime child actor who was Cooper’s uncle -- took home an Oscar for Best Director. Roach subsequently sold Cooper’s contract to MGM, where the towheaded moppet starred in a series of hit films with the gruff and bearish Wallace Beery, including “The Champ” (1931) and “Treasure Island” (1934).

If Cooper harbored any ill-will towards Roach, he didn’t show it at the party. But a person who makes it to 100 tends to inspire a certain amount of awe and curiosity. What's his secret? How'd he last this long? It certainly wasn't because he was a health nut. Roach was a chubby man who was reportedly smoked and drank well into his 90s. At 99, he still went to the racetrack regularly and had a girlfriend. On top of that, his skin was remarkably smooth and taut. That alone would inspire respect and admiration in Hollywood, but, as Noah Cross (John Huston) said in "Chinatown" (1974), even politicians, ugly buildings and whores  all get respectable if they last long enough.

Roach's reputation was less stellar back in 1937, when he partnered with Vittorio Mussolini, the son of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, to form R.A.M. (short for Roach and Mussolini) Pictures. (Click here for a vintage Time Magazine article on the partnership.) Roach received assurances from the dictator that Italy wasn't planning to impose sanctions on Jews, but people in Hollywood didn't buy it. The backlash moved Roach to back out of the deal, but he reportedly displayed an autographed portrait of the dictator in his home up until his death from pneumonia on November 2, 1992, two and a half months shy of his 101st birthday. Fortunately for Roach, that small corner of his history was all but ignored in his obituaries, which instead focused on his legacy as a film pioneer.

Cooper wasn't quite as lucky. Looking at his sixty-year show business career that included an Oscar nomination as a child actor, lead roles in several successful TV series, including "The People's Choice" (1955-58), and an Emmy-winning career as a TV director ("MASH," "The White Shadow"), many news editors zeroed in on his relatively minor supporting role in a series of comic book movies and decided it would make the most compelling lead.

Me? I chose the time he showed up at some old guy's birthday party.

Kirk Douglas was not at all amused.

For the second time, the 91-year-old screen legend had told me he was planning to return to the stage in a one-man show, and for the second time, I told him he should revisit his role as Randle P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which he had played on Broadway back in 1964) -- this time with an all over-80 cast.

It was the fall of 2008, and I had come to Douglas' Beverly Hills home to interview him for an article I was writing for The Hollywood Reporter about the beginnings of runaway production in the 1950s. I had been there a half hour. I had the quotes I needed. Yet there I sat, repeating the same joke.

I could see it in his eyes. Douglas must be thinking, "Who the hell does he think he is?! This punk, this pisher, wasting my time! " It was as if he was hissing the words through clenched teeth, as over the top as Frank Gorshin's famous impression of the actor. He was Spartacus, dammit! He'd dined with presidents and banged Joan Crawford!

The way I remembered it, anyway. But listening to the recording of my visit more than two years later, I discover that my Cuckoo's Nest crack got laughs from the two relatively young female publicists in the room and, regardless of what Douglas might've thought of the joke, he played along like the old pro he was.

"That would be a good show to do, because it's one set," said Douglas of my proposed revival. "I'm going to do it. You gave me a good idea."

If my memories of the day are darker than they deserve to be, it's due to the lingering feeling that, transfixed by the allure of fame, I had overstayed my welcome.

I had a similar feeling about Douglas as I watched him present the Best Supporting Actress Oscar on “The 83rd Academy Awards” telecast last month.  The next morning, publications from around the globe declared that the 94-year-old actor had stolen the show when he went wildly off-script, flirting with actresses a third his age, teasing Hugh Jackman and performing a will-he-or-won’t he routine with the envelope. I too was charmed by Douglas, but after the third unsuccessful attempt to ease him off the stage, I was half-expecting him to break out into "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" from Dreamgirls.

On one level, it was inspiring that a hunched and wrinkled nonagenarian not only had the wherewithal to walk across the expansive stage of the Kodak Theater and perform under blinding lights, but the cojones and the charisma to command the rapt attention of tens of millions of viewers worldwide armed with nothing but a cane and a handful of seemingly-improvised wisecracks. But if a celebrity between the ages of 8 and 80 had been similarly hogging the spotlight during someone else’s big awards moment, pundits would be making unflattering comparisons to Kanye West stealing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009. Of course, Douglas' manner was relaxed and engaging, not aggressive and confrontational like West’s, and, besides, it’s a universal truth that otherwise inappropriate actions are somehow charming if performed by infants or the aged ("Did you see him try to pinch the waitress' butt? How cute is that?").

What was most unsettling to me was the idea that after all the years of fame and acclaim, Douglas still needs it -- and us -- so badly. He still has something to prove, whether the audience is millions of TV viewers or a single reporter, as I found out when I rang the doorbell of the actor's home just south of Sunset Blvd. two and a half years earlier.

Check back for My Pal Kirk Douglas, Pt. 2.