The plan was to be a film critic.  

 

When I was twelve years-old, I came across a large movie guidebook for sale at the local video store (a place I visited frequently). The volume, Rating the Movies: For Home Video, TV, & Cable, became a treasured possession. I devoured it; memorizing the ratings for movies, who directed them, and, most importantly, the rationale for the ratings they received. For example, Jaws 3-D (1983) only received 2 out of 4 stars because the shark attacks “are about as scary as feeding time at the zoo” (Wait! Jaws 3-D is a bad movie?). In later years, Leonard Maltin’s annual Movie & Video Guide became my Bible. My college roommate joked that I was probably the only person on the planet to buy an updated edition each year. 

 

Cinema took a backseat to economics and computer science at college but I did manage to finagle a job as a film critic for The Stanford Daily. Sadly, I was low on the totem pole: while I wanted to review movies like Spider-man 3, I was instead assigned to movies like Rush Hour 3. (Little did I know at the time but these two movies are of comparable quality.) Still, it was a welcome distraction from the drudgery of graduate school. Fun fact: writing a Ph.D. thesis can be about as exciting as watching Andy Warhol’s 1965 film Empire.*  

 

Cut forward ten years…I am an unfulfilled professor of economics, convinced of one thing: if I never try to make a feature-length movie before retirement, I’d regret it and spend my dying days attempting to build a flux capacitor. So I quit my job and completed a degree in filmmaking at Academy of Art University. So far, I have directed four narrative shorts, two of which are currently in post-production. I would rate these films at least 3 out of 4 stars =)  

 

I am currently trying to expand one of them into a feature film. And then perhaps a killer shark movie? I do love killer shark movies.

 

​*Bonus fun fact: Empire consists of a 485 minute static shot of the Empire State Building.