I’m a huge fan of film. When I was a kid, my older brothers and I would literally watch the same movies every single day after school. For the hidden singer in us, we had classics like “Grease” and “Westside Story”; for the action hero side of our imagination, we watched “Excalibur”, and “Total Recall”. We didn’t merely watch these films; we became them. I can recall many serious discussions/light hearted arguments involving which characters we wanted to be in the movies that we saw (we each wanted to be the coolest character, of course). We didn’t just watch Bruce Lee demolish Chuck Norris in the Colosseum; we were Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris duking it out kung-fu style that day. We didn’t just watch the suave Ludlow brothers of “Legends of the Fall”; we were the brothers (and of course, I was the coolest). So much of our childhood developed around the TV that we can, to this day, readily quote lines from films that clinically intertwine with our day to day conversations.

Movies and television became our way of self expression. Our lives unfolded watching “A Different World”, “Yo MTv Raps”, and “The Cosby Show”. Our lives were lived through these larger than life characters, doing larger than life activities. Sure, we created our own characters, and re-enacted our own daring adventures, but the television was the catalyst that thrust us into that imaginative void; that realm where dreams become reality, and thoughts and deeds transcend what’s perceived to be real. We were not couch potatoes, I might add; our heroic deeds spilled into the backyard, where we became mighty sporting heroes and dauntless explorers. In short, movies and TV helped to mold and shape me into the man I am today. My artistic endeavors can all somehow be traced back to those days, huddled in front of the TV, dreaming about the tales and characters that were being projected into my psyche (and of course, I was the coolest one).