Greetings and welcome. Thank you for joining us. This is Embrace your Storm. My name’s Jonathan Nadeau. I’ve got an awesome, exciting episode for you, because I’ve already spent half an hour talking to this guest before we even started this interview. So, everyone, I’d like you to introduce you to Bill. He has submitted a film called Footage to the Tornado Film Festival. Bill, thanks for coming on today.
0:01:27 – Speaker 3
Happy to be here, Jonathan.
0:01:28 – Speaker 2
Thank you, thank you so much. So, bill, before we get into footage of what that’s about and everything, I can’t wait to ask you this question. I’m glad I didn’t ask until we started recording. What got you into this medium of your creative outlet, what brought you down this path, of everything that you’ve done with films?
0:01:50 – Speaker 3
Well, that’s a long story and I’ll try not to make it too long.
So, I started doing creative things when I was eight years old. I started writing little poems and doing songs. I wrote my first short story in early middle school and, like most people, you have an interest in pop culture. But what got me into film was that I was in between jobs and there was a film that was happening about some history my local history where I lived in Appalachia on the border of West Virginia and Kentucky and there was a film being made called Mate One. That was about that history and I found out about it and I, you know, as I said, I was laid off from work and so I wanted to be a part of it, and so I showed up and auditioned to be an extra on the film. That’s cool, and the thing that happens when you’re an extra is that you sit around all day long waiting for the two minutes that they need you.
0:02:53 – Speaker 2
Yeah, you need to hurry up and wait, exactly exactly.
0:02:57 – Speaker 3
And so I sit there watching this film, watching these people make this film, and I thought you know I could do this, I could do this. This is not. It’s hard but it’s not complicated Right, and I thought I could do this. And so, after the film was over, there were several other people that I met on the film that were going out to Arizona to do a documentary about a guy named Carl Barks. Carl Barks is the guy he didn’t invent Donald Duck, but he’s the guy who took Donald Duck and made him one of the more famous Disney characters. Okay, there’s all these people out there that have art by this guy named Carl Barks. He, like, invented Huey, Dewey and Louis and all that kind of stuff.
And so they were going out to make this film, and so we all piled into an RV and we’re driving across country 40 hours. And as we sit there and I began to talk to them, I found out they didn’t have a clue what they were doing. They did not know they’re hunting from a home of ground, and so they had a bunch of books about this guy and I’d never heard of him. So I started studying all this and looking at all the images. And by the time we got to Arizona there was a museum in Prescott, arizona that had a lot of his works and we were going there to interview the people and film the works, the paintings and stuff. And by the time we got there I ran the show.
0:04:30 – Speaker 2
Snow cannon.
0:04:32 – Speaker 3
I just took it over. I wrote the questions down for the interviews. I picked the shots we were going to shoot. I set up the location for the shoot. You know the tool. How we were going to record it and everything, and I just did the whole thing. Suit to nuts.
And I thought I know I can do this now because I just did it Right, totally. And then I came home and there was a guy who was a professor at a small college in West Virginia and I found that he was doing a horror film. And I went to the guy and I said give me a job. He said I don’t have a job. I said, well, give me one anyway. He said, okay, well, it was episode, of course. So there were the five short stories that are wrapped up into a film.
The film was called chillers and he said I tell you what I’ve got these three boys that are like 12 years old. They’re in the first episode and I need somebody to babysit them. And he said I’ll give you a second assistant director title for that. I said, fine, I’ll take it. And so we went to the set and he was using college students to flesh out his crew and his assistant director was a young kid who had never been on a movie set, and so he wilted under the pressure and I stepped up and took over the assistant director role, and what the assistant director does is he basically manages the set.
He tells everybody where they’re supposed to be, when they’re supposed to be there, what they’re supposed to do, and you know you’ve got hundreds of people that you’re basically managing the flow of all that.
0:06:09 – Speaker 2
Yeah.
0:06:10 – Speaker 3
And I stepped up and I took over and the cinematographer looked at the director and said, where did you get this guy? And I, of course, I think I have to overhear that- and so then he made me assistant director, and I was the assistant director on that film and two subsequent films that he did, and so I’ve been making movies ever since.
0:06:28 – Speaker 2
Man, the one thing that jumps out at me and I love about the story that I just told is you just kind of take action. You’re just like oh, I heard they’re making this movie. I went down and I wanted to be an extra. Then you know you’re sitting around and you’re kind of taking everything in, you know, observing everything that’s going on, and then you go to do the that kind of Donald Duck film and again you just kind of took action. You’re just like all right, hey, let’s do this. I’m going to write down the questions, let’s shoot this shot here.
And like that’s what I think a lot of people like, because I believe everyone has a creative inkling in them and I think a lot of people don’t know how to get out of their own way and like, just kind of, do it. I mean, nike kind of said it best, just do it. You know, and, and once you get in there, you kind of, you know, figure your way through stuff. You know like, okay, that’s not going to work. Okay, yeah, this does work. And you know, look, you’re at the right place at the right time. You becoming the assistant director, the guy you know, this professor’s like, hey, babysit these three 12 year olds Like all right, fine, I’ll do that, and you’re on the set and then you’re just right there to kind of be able to make that move. I love that about your personality bill. That’s awesome.
0:07:35 – Speaker 3
One of the things I tell young people. I say, first of all, you can’t get a hit unless you get into batter’s box.
0:07:40 – Speaker 2
Right.
0:07:41 – Speaker 3
Okay, and don’t be, don’t be unwilling to take crumbs. You, if I was 20 years old right now, I would go to somebody like Christopher Nolan or Steven Spielberg and I would say I want to be your assistant, you don’t have to pay me, I’ll just do whatever you tell me to do, whatever you tell me to do. And what happens is you meet all these people. That guy gets faith in you, he gives you more responsibility and there’s been a couple of people that have done that have ended up becoming producers on, you know, major films. A guy people won’t remember now, but one of Steven Spielberg’s early protege days was a guy named Christopher Columbus and he wrote a couple of the screenplays and then he went on and was the it director there for about, you know, five or six years. So take any opportunity you get, because opportunities don’t come along very often.
0:08:39 – Speaker 2
And when you pass one up.
0:08:41 – Speaker 3
you don’t know that it’ll ever come back again. There was, I have, you know, one of those mistakes that I made in my life that you know I still kick myself over, do you mind?
0:08:50 – Speaker 2
do you mind?
0:08:51 – Speaker 3
telling it or no, oh, I don’t mind telling it. So the the the film that I was talking about, the first film that I did that was was called mate one the director. He came back to the town where the film was set and was was part of the marketing for the film and I had I was the only person actually from.
They didn’t shoot it in the town where it happened, they shot it two and a half hours away, so I was the only person on the shoot that was actually from where the film happened or from where the story happened, and so I, you know, I gave him the, the, the name of the town is mate one, and so I had gotten a ball cap from the local sports team and and given it to him and and just thanked him for bringing that story to life. And we were at one of those functions. He said what are you doing next? What’s what’s your goal, what’s your plan? And I was working on these small independent films and primed the ladder in those to where I’d gotten up to basically being a production manager and and associate producer.
And I said well, you know, I’m doing these things. He said, okay, that’s, that’s fine. And he walked away and I realized that what he was doing was saying you want to come work for me? And you know, I was too young and immature to realize it. And one of the things that young people don’t realize is that people that you think, oh, I’m young, I don’t have a lot of experience, but there are established people. When they see somebody that has the goods right, they’re looking for a protege, they’re looking for somebody to give a break to that, that basically work for them cheap and do really good stuff, and they can also feel like they gave this person.
You know that step that they needed Right and I didn’t realize that that’s what he was doing, and it would have changed my life if I’d have done that, you know well yeah, you know.
0:10:55 – Speaker 2
But so before we get the footage which is why we’re even doing this interview but we talked about this other story and I got to get you talking about this too, how the Hatfield McCoy show that you you pitched the history channel that they picked up for a season. You got to tell the audience about that because there’s a lot of stuff that you did with that. That’s just kind of inspiring also, I think so.
0:11:17 – Speaker 3
Well, so I am. I grew up in the place where the hat Femalcoy feud happened. It happened on the border between West Virginia and Kentucky, and that area is the I call it deepest, darkest Appalachia it’s. It’s one of the poorest places in America, and so I become an expert on that story and had been interviewed in some documentaries on the history channel and some different things. And so there was an author who was doing a book at the time and he was. He knew some people in the film industry and he really wanted to pitch the some sort of a reality show unscripted show about that for some, of course and so I basically came up with this concept. And so the concept is this that the two families are working together, the feuding families that hate each other’s guts are working together to create a new moonshine man and they’re going to market that moonshine. And so they got to get over their differences and their hate to actually make some money and 150 years of feuding, exactly 150 years of hate and all this stuff.
But the thing that really made this show different was that we were actually going to make a moonshine as a part of the show. That’s awesome and and the show was basically going to become a commercial. You know a 13 episode commercial for this moonshine that was then going to go on the market and be sold all over the world. Man, and you know it was like. You know it was like an MC Escher drawing. You know it was curling back in on itself. It was a show about making moonshine. It was actually a commercial for a product, right, you know it’s like the ultimate product placement.
Exactly yeah, our show is a product placement.
0:13:09 – Speaker 2
Exactly.
0:13:10 – Speaker 3
Exactly, you build a mystique into it of the families and all that stuff, and then, as there’s as in successive seasons, as the product takes off, you’ve got a whole new set of. You’ve got a whole new set of problems. Okay, now you’re making money and you’re going to fight over that. Exactly, exactly, and these families, invariably, are going to shoot themselves in the foot because that’s what they did. One of the reasons that this the show would have been, it would have been a landmark, but due to some scheduling issues and some different things, it only got one season.
If it had gotten a second season and the product had actually gone out there, it would have created, it would have been a storm of publicity. And it would have been, and it would have been something that was started, a trend, you know you would have seen more shows built around that and that sounds, you know, a little mercenary. That, okay, the show is about selling a product. It wasn’t just about selling a product, it was about an interesting story that happened to have that element to it Exactly, and it was a genius concept.
0:14:18 – Speaker 2
But I really was.
0:14:20 – Speaker 3
The. What happens is is that sometimes things go wrong. Yeah, and filmmaking is a very collaborative medium. There’s so many moving parts. The show was premiered up against the first pro football game NFL game that is happening in four months.
0:14:40 – Speaker 2
Like honestly, like that’s just the worst decision right there. Like I wish I was in that boardroom and they’re like, yeah, so Thursday night at eight, that’s a good time right.
0:14:52 – Speaker 3
Yeah, there’s only going to be 40 million people watching Thursday night football, the first game in you know, four months Exactly, and it was like the two teams that played in the Super Bowl.
0:15:00 – Speaker 2
Exactly Super Bowl Exactly, exactly, exactly.
0:15:06 – Speaker 3
And then and then, because it got such bad ratings during that slot, which had nothing to do with the show, they moved the time slot to an hour later and moved it again later on, and so it just killed any chance that the show had to do, and the history channel had huge confidence in it.
0:15:22 – Speaker 2
Normally I believe it.
0:15:24 – Speaker 3
They only, you know, they only order eight episodes. They ordered 13 episodes, which is the largest number of first season episodes that history channel had ever done, and and so you know, all the things were right. And then somebody in the scheduling department, you know, laid an egg. Yeah and yeah nothing.
0:15:43 – Speaker 2
you knew about it. Man, that’s crazy. But yeah, that that again. I just love how you kind of took action in that whole thing and it’s so cool I did the that moonshine ever start to get made Like. That was kind of oh that’s the story gets even better.
0:16:03 – Speaker 3
You know, sometimes the story about the movie is better than the movie Totally. So one of the things that happened was so we’re starting the show and they’re getting the copyright for the product so that nobody can compete. Well, they were. They were slow in getting the copyright and there was these members of the family who, in the first iteration, there was one set of production company and this, this, these members of the family were going to be central to the story, and then a different production company came in. They were actually the production company that did the Kevin Costner mini series, and so they had a lot of cloud. They came in and take, took over, they pushed out these two family members. The two family members were able to copyright their moonshine before the show did.
And and so what you want to have is have film a coin moonshine. Well, they copyright that name, and so the show had to come up with this.
0:17:06 – Speaker 2
Like a different, like an off brand name or whatever.
0:17:09 – Speaker 3
Yeah, exactly, it was like the half film McCoy family brand or something like that. It was this long gobbledygook name that just just was horrible, yeah, and so that was another instance. And so the families fought through the whole, the whole show and instead of the hat fields fighting the McCoys, the hat fields were fighting the Hatfields.
0:17:32 – Speaker 2
Oh man.
0:17:33 – Speaker 3
And so the entire show became this kind of a train wreck because of all the infighting between people that were on the show, and so it was just it’s it’s. The behind the scenes of that show was so awesome that that you know. Just I wish I had been filming with my cell phone just to be able to capture all that.
0:17:58 – Speaker 2
How long ago was that Like? When was that? It was 20, see 2015, 2016. Okay, not too, not that long ago.
0:18:06 – Speaker 3
Yeah, not longer at all, and there’s a new iteration of that show that’s on the streaming channel for Fox the non-compete things that all the cast and science have expired, and so another production company saw, well, that really is a great idea and they’ve gone back in and basically done the same setup with, with a slight variation in the cast.
0:18:28 – Speaker 2
Man, that’s too bad. You didn’t, you didn’t have kind of the whatever numbers on the books to be like, oh shoot that that NDA is over. I should, I should approach those families again, or whatever.
0:18:40 – Speaker 3
Well, you know, those things take a whole lot of money.
0:18:43 – Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I believe it, I believe it Well, so I guess now we’re going to get to why. The reason why are here is footage. Now, yet again, this is some interesting stuff they are doing, so I don’t want to say too much about footage, but tell the audience what footage is and what you’re utilizing to, you know to, to, to make this film. I think this idea is also really cool. What are you doing?
0:19:07 – Speaker 3
Well, over the years I’ve become an expert in footage that’s in the public domain and that that things that are basically creative commons zero, where you have the ability to do anything you want with that footage. And basically anything that was made before 1923 is, by definition, public domain, and then other other footage as well. There’s other films that are public domain as well for a bunch of arcane reasons, for example Georgia Miros film Neither Living Dead. That film is in the public domain because they did put a copyright symbol at the end of the film and it just became one of those mistakes that created, you know, all kinds of problems for the film company. But so I’ve become an expert on on these things and.
I ran across this footage for a German film that was done in 1926. It was a silent film and the the name of the film is Ways to Strengthen Beauty, and the Germans were fascinated with perfection, perfection of the human body and the human mind at that period of time, which unfortunately became Aryan thought I was just going to say that sounds like kind of like what Hitler kind of you know like dove off of that whole kind of concept.
0:20:29 – Speaker 2
Right, that was the whole thing.
0:20:30 – Speaker 3
Between blonde hair, blue eyes, you know, the perfect person right, Exactly, and one of the things is is that one of the people who is an extra in this film is Lenny Reichenstall, who’s the person that did all those hitter propaganda movies. No kidding, you know those amazing hitter propaganda movies, and so that whole thing was this thread that was going on about human perfection, and so you know that’s 100 years ago. Don’t let that tank the way that you feel about the film.
Yeah, I really hadn’t put those, those, those pieces together until just recently. That that’s where that the idea that film was leading to. But after I’d made the film, but but Germany was doing before World War One and in between the wars they were doing a lot of really interesting stuff. All the German expressionist films came out Nosferatu, cabinet doctor Caligari.
0:21:28 – Speaker 2
I didn’t realize that was a journey.
0:21:31 – Speaker 3
Yeah, all those are German films, they’re fw more no, and Fritz Lang, they were all Germans, and Just some of it, just some of the amazing imagery that still stands up today, I mean metropolis, you know, that film stands up today and they’re all silent for the most part. And so the that idea was going on, this real creative Seething that was going on in the 1920s all over the world. I mean, this is when Picasso starts becoming Picasso, and you know so there’s this rich Bubbling up of all these creative activities, and one of them was they took this idea of Expressionist dance, where the human body was as a, was a communication device, and there was this one theorist that had this idea that so when that every movement had an associated sound with it. So, for instance, you know, if you raise your hands, the, the idea was, ah yeah, that sound went with that, just like you know, if you’ve got the letter B, that that character also has a sound associated with a buff. And so they were.
They were trying to make links between these different things, and so, regardless of whether or not that goes anywhere, it’s a very Creative way of looking at things and and searching for truth in a different way, and so this film basically comes out of all that, and it’s a silent film, it was released in 1926 and there’s all this footage of People doing very physical things, and some of it is gymnastics and boxing and these different things, but there’s a bunch of it that is dance and and what with what people still call modern dance, and it was just really, really awesome stuff. And so what I did was is that I’d found In I’d done another, another film called downsizing that I was getting out into film festivals and I kept running across these film festivals that were all about dance. That was their theme, and that seemed odd to me that, you know, dancers that seemed to be should be at something alive, but there were film festivals built around dance.
0:23:52 – Speaker 2
Yeah, I’ve seen that too.
0:23:54 – Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah, and that’s just seemed weird to me, but that went in the back of my memory and when I ran across this I said, oh well, let me put something together. I think people will be in a lot of those dance film festivals in Germany and so I thought, well, people that are into dance will be interested in this as a history document, totally, because so much of the movements that you see are still used today in modern dance, and so I cut this thing together. It was all black and white and then I had a bunch of really interesting color and I said it all to modern music.
That’s interesting, you know yeah, and so, like you know, there’s there’s people doing these really really interesting dance movement and it’s it’s to house, you know, dance movie yeah it’s like they’re dancing to music a hundred years later that they weren’t even actually dancing to that, so cool exactly and, and so it’s, and, and each film you know each, each one of the segments it’s got.
I think there’s eight segments that I put together in that film. It has a different kind of music and the music is nothing like like. One of them is a sort of it’s. It’s like jazz has saxophone, but it’s more I don’t know expressionistic.
0:25:18 – Speaker 2
It’s, it’s just it’s not.
0:25:20 – Speaker 3
It’s not real, it’s not gonna tune. You know, it’s just got this kind of there’s a little bit of a tune background on it, but it just does this really sort of staccato sort of a thing.
Yeah and and then. Then there’s another segment that this guy is doing an interpretive dance where he’s in shackles, and I took this real epic music that that I built that around and it, it, it. One of the things that’s so interesting about that is that it took. Once you would cut it together, it was one thing, but once you added the music, it became a completely different thing. I believe it, um and and, something that, as film does, when you put all those different elements together, that rose above what it was before.
0:26:10 – Speaker 2
I hear you, I I have, I think I don’t. I think there’s like a Like not a film festival, but like a festival maybe, like kind of around, not Romania, but kind of in that area, where they every year they have this like site, they have all these silent films, but they get Not necessarily a huge giant orchestra but quartets to write Specific scores to go along with these films. So you watch the silent film but you have this live music while they’re playing.
Like that is so cool, like that is such an interesting way of of like now I don’t know if you want to say repurposing content, but like you, like you said, it’s another way to elevate it to this other level that that wasn’t thought of, obviously, when it was made. I thought that’s so cool of a way to yeah.
0:26:57 – Speaker 3
There’s, there’s a film festival in Austin and another one in Nashville that does. They do live Performances in with the film, and so, and the film maker submits his film and then your local, you know production troop, a dance troop or Performance troops, they come up with a live performance to go with that film. That may or may not have anything to do with Whatever the film’s about. Oh, it’s yeah, and so, you know, it’s amazing to see. That’s the great thing about creativity is that you know a person can bring something in that completely changes the complexion of something.
And it elevates it or just takes it a different, you know, a completely different place, because you know some of the some of this dance is Would have been done to this very flowing Orchestra music, you know right so. I’ve got it going.
0:27:54 – Speaker 2
Exactly, yeah, we’re just off time beats that weren’t even probably thought of at that time, you know right.
0:27:59 – Speaker 3
Yeah, and you know that sounds like that’s gonna be terrible, but it’s not, it really, really works. And then I Colorized some of the footage and then I also added sort of a Psychedelic sort of element to the the colorization and some of the episodes, and so it’s. It’s one of those things that it’s called footage, if OOT AGE, because it’s a bunch of old footage. But what is it associated with?
with dance exactly, and then it’s a good player words there right, and yeah, just cause it’s a hundred years old and so you know it’s not the greatest title in the world, it’s.
0:28:41 – Speaker 2
I like it, but.
0:28:43 – Speaker 3
But but still, you know, that’s that’s where the poster for it is, this art nouveau sort of a thing, and so it’s. It’s just, it’s a fun film. It’s like 11 1⁄2 minutes long, but it just goes by like a snap.
0:28:58 – Speaker 2
If someone wanted, if someone to like check out public domain stuff, can you how would they go about doing that? Where? Where are some kind of quick resources they should like check out? If they wanted to look in doing something like this.
0:29:08 – Speaker 3
Well, you know, one of the great repositories for public domain, anything books, posters, photographs, cartoons. I’ve even done this thing where I repurposed 1940s political cartoons and put different captions on them and put about today that’s funny. Yeah, and it was one of those things. They were funny when they first came out, but now you look back and you know, three or four years later, and they’re not funny anymore, because they were of their moment.
0:29:38 – Speaker 1
Which is the?
0:29:38 – Speaker 3
nature of cartoons, right, but but anyway, that’s the. The US Library of Congress has a huge repository of those things and some of that stuff is online. A little bit of film was online. Another place is a place called archive Dot org. Oh yeah, that’s a great website. Yeah, it’s, it’s a great website. It’s got. It’s got music, it’s got podcast that people have put out there so that you know, people could get to it another way. Not everything on that side is public domain. Most of the footage that you can get off that is really low quality. It’s less than 720p for the most, for the most part, and so, uh, you know, that’s one of places. The other thing is just a Google. I mean, there used to be companies that sold this footage Relatively inexpensively on on the internet, but those companies have kind of gone the way of the dodo, but also the, the, the, the archives up and US Department of Sorry, I’m, I’m branding out here.
Anyway these things are. There are companies that have that, that they form this footage out to that you can get high quality. There’s also a place called pond 5, which is an online Footage place. We can buy footage that has a bunch of clips, but you know you have to pay for it because you know they’re a for-profit company and they, yeah, exactly, you know footage and digitized it and, and so you know They’ve got a cost into it and they have some free stuff.
But then other stuff you know that you have to pay for and you know, in these days there’s a lot of content out there and you can, you can create, you know, take that content and do different things with it, like what I did with footage. Exactly that. You know, I completely repurposed that stuff, made it something that the original filmmakers which you couldn’t conceive of and updated in a way that’s it’s pretty and interesting and and just just an enjoyable, you know, 11 and a half minutes.
0:31:53 – Speaker 2
Yeah, really, you took a hundred, hundred year old film and breathe new life into it. Where you know, now a whole new group of people are able to see this that you know haven’t people haven’t seen over a hundred years. It’s really cool.
0:32:06 – Speaker 3
Right. And the thing is that those original filmmakers you know that stuff would have been dead and now people a hundred years later can appreciate how amazing that original film was and go back and hunt it up and watch it.
0:32:23 – Speaker 2
That is very cool. Bill, do you have a few more minutes? Because there’s one more thing that we didn’t talk about before the interview and I purposely didn’t because I knew we would talk forever about it. But I think you mentioned in passing, like an email, that you had cancer at some point and you like obviously won that battle and stuff. But what caught me about that is I think you said you were like creating movies through that kind of time in your life and you use that creative outlet to kind of usher your along. I don’t want to put words into your mouth or whatever, but that’s, that’s the way it seemed. Like it came across an email, is that about right?
0:33:00 – Speaker 3
Yeah, you know, one of the things I was reading, I was reading about your festival and one of your goals is to you know, you went through a traumatic event and you’re a very creative person and you’ve used, you know, those creative outlets to breathe Absolutely Hope and purpose in your life. I mean, you’re a musician, all these different things that you do, and so one of the things that happened I’ve been a creative person my whole life and it’s for me it’s like eating. I hear you, if I go a little while without creating, I get antsy, I get uncomfortable, I can’t sleep, and so this past year I’ve had this the worst year of my life. I was diagnosed with cancer. They took an eight pound tomb or, excuse me, a four pound tumor out of me.
Oh, my goodness, five days after I got home, the incision ruptured and all this fluid started pouring out of my body, oh my goodness. They took me to the emergency room and the wound was in my leg. It basically goes from my groin to my knee. And so this thing rips open and the doctor looks at me and says sorry, nothing I can do for you. And there’s an 11, 11 inch long gas. It’s four inches deep, oh my goodness. And it’s blood and fluid are pouring out of this thing. And the guy says can’t really do anything for you, I’m going to send you to the hospital and they’ll have a surgeon. The surgeon walks in and looks at it. He stands at the foot of my bed. He doesn’t get near me. He says sorry, nothing I can do for you. You need to go back to the guy who operated on you originally.
Oh, my goodness, you got to be kidding me. I’m saying, man, and the stuff is just. I mean this is no joke. When it first ruptured my wife, it shot out in a stream and my wife she didn’t faint, but she went crazy for a couple of minutes. She started walking around in a circle and I’m trying to get you know, my neighbor had come over and I was trying to get them to get the car turned around so that we could go to the emergency room and she it just fried her brain because I mean it was, it was literally like something in a horror movie, I believe it.
0:35:14 – Speaker 2
It was probably. It was so real, it probably seemed fake or whatever.
0:35:18 – Speaker 3
Like I’m sitting there looking at him and I’m saying how can this happen? Am I going to die standing here? It was just bizarre man. And then the doctors the doctors I got an infection in the hospital. And the doctor this long, gobbledy good name and I got three infections. One of them was Merca Okay and Merca. The people at the hospital would not say the name of it.
0:35:48 – Speaker 2
It was like we will not we will not speak the name of it Exactly People will not be named. I got.
0:35:55 – Speaker 3
Voldemort in my body. So they wouldn’t speak the name, even though it’s on the chart, they wouldn’t say the name. And then they had the goal to say to me well says well, look, I mean Merca is everywhere these days. You can get it in the shower, you can get it wherever you want to. Well, if you read Merca, it says hospital infection is the first line of the definition when you go on the internet, which means it’s something you get in the hospital. Also, the incubation period is five days. I’ve been in the hospital for 11 days. There’s nowhere else I could have got Exactly, but they would not say the word because they were afraid of being sued.
0:36:30 – Speaker 2
Yeah, no practice.
0:36:34 – Speaker 3
And then I got two other infections with names so long that I could pronounce them, man. They were also hospital infections. The only way you could get them was in the hospital, and so they nearly killed me. The hospital, my stay in the hospital. I was in the hospital for a hundred days, wow, and during that period I got four infections that were almost incurable, all from the hospital.
0:36:58 – Speaker 2
Dude. I mean you said in the email you’re like oh, I went through some stuff, but nothing like you. I’m telling you what man. You were in the hospital far longer than I was. You had to fight some serious stuff, man. I mean I did too, but what you’re describing here is no joke.
0:37:14 – Speaker 3
No joke.
No joke Like man and then simultaneously so. In your body there’s a great big blood vessel that goes from your heart down and then it branches at your navel and these other two big blood vessels go down into your legs. That place where it branches is called the vena cava, and this, the large there at the vena cava, is the largest blood vessel in your body. The aorta, or the vena cava, went for the vein and mine plugged up. Oh, my goodness, you got a blood clot in it. Now you can’t live when that happens, right, because all the blood goes through there and the doctors did this experimental procedure. Now this sounds like fiction. Okay, this does not. Nobody will believe this, but I have video of it. They took a blood clot out of my body that was a half a gallon.
0:38:17 – Speaker 2
Oh my goodness, think about that, that I just did in my head. I’m picturing a half like a gallon of, like a milk jug, and picture in half of it full. Half of it full.
0:38:30 – Speaker 3
Man, man and see blood clots are usually they’re like a teaspoon, right, this was a half gallon and that was only the first surgery. They couldn’t get it all. Man and the doctor had to come up with an experimental procedure where you put these 10 inch long, two inch round stents in my body. Now if you have a stent put in your heart, it’s about a half an inch long and it’s about the size of a pencil.
Yeah, it’s about the size of a half an inch long, and so he had to put two 10 inch stents in me together in the same, because you’re it’s such a big blood vessel, and take out another half a gallon of this, these blood clots. And so, dude, I I mean I come close to dying several times during all this. Yeah, seriously. And then in the middle of it, the most important person in my life passed away. My mother was diagnosed with cancer. Geez, with lung cancer, had two weeks to live. I found it on my birthday. Wow. I went to see her in the middle of all this and spent a couple of weeks with her and I had to come back home because of I was having a procedure and she died a little bit after that and I was so sick I couldn’t go to her funeral. Man, she lived 14 hours away, and so just the most brutal year possible. But in that year I wrote 30 short stories and made five films.
0:40:13 – Speaker 2
That is incredible. Like, did what? I don’t want to put the words into your mouth or whatever, but did you use the negative things that were happened to you? Like you know, these infections is half gone like was that fuel for your fire? We’re like, oh no, I ain’t going out like that. Like you know, did that make you like, right, you know, pump out 30 short stories? That is that what made you pump out five. You know films during that time that you did. Part of it was you kind of dig in?
0:40:43 – Speaker 3
Part of it was to get distracted, but let me give you one specific example. All right, so I’m in the hospital. I’ve had cancer surgery. They put a thing in me, they did a thing called brachytherapy, which is what they do is they put these plastic tubes while your wound is open. They put these plastic tubes inside the wound and then sew you closed, and then they come in afterwards and they put in these seeds of radiation that go down those tubes, so that they can target the specific areas they want to kill. The thing that happens, though, is that you cannot move.
0:41:20 – Speaker 2
Oh, my goodness.
0:41:22 – Speaker 3
So and they anticipated they were going to be in there five days. Well, the swelling was so bad from the surgery they had to be in there 10 days. So I had to lay flat on my back for 10 days, couldn’t go to the bathroom, couldn’t do anything, wow.
And if I moved it could kill me, because the radiation wouldn’t go to the places that I needed and it would throw all that stuff off, and and so I ended up having to lay in bed for five days for the swelling to go down enough before they could do the first procedure. So it was intended to be five days, it ended up being 10. But anyway, the first procedure I went to have. On the way back from the procedure, the elevator got stuck.
Oh my you got to be kidding me. So I’m in the bed on a gurney and the elevator freezes and I’m in with these two young guys who were the, the transportation guys for the, for the hospital, and so these things are going through my head. They start calling try to get the, the local maintenance guys. The maintenance guys can’t get it open, they call the fire department, all that stuff. You know that the things begin to happen, and so what’s going through my head is, if they have to get me out of this bed, to get me out of here, it’s going to kill me, because all that training and stuff inside me is going to get moved where it isn’t supposed to be Right. And so I’m laying there thinking I could very well die as a result of this.
Besides how terrifying it is to be trapped in an elevator right on top of it, right, right, and so what happened was is that they put me back in my room and a few days later I wrote a short story about the the event. But the short story was not about what really happened. The short story was basically about guy gets trapped in an elevator. He starts hearing all this pounding and stuff in the gears and all that stuff, and then he hears these other sounds outside the elevator that sound like giant monsters.
0:43:21 – Speaker 2
That’s interesting and I won’t tell you the rest of the thing. I won’t tell you the rest of the thing.
0:43:24 – Speaker 3
But the point of it was, is that what my imagination did was took this situation that I had no control over and exerted control over it and turned it into something fictional and completely different. Wow, and what I think is is that what my mind was doing was trying to take the helplessness that I felt, yeah and, and say, ok, but I’m going to exert control over that.
0:43:48 – Speaker 2
I’m going to give you a sense of power.
0:43:51 – Speaker 3
Exactly yeah. That had been taken away from, yeah, and so that’s that. And so it was therapeutic in that way that my mind was trying to to re exert some, because the thing that everybody’s afraid of is is uncertainty and randomness. Right, you know, the things that you can’t control, like your accident, those things happen, totally, you know, by whatever, and so that’s what people are most afraid of. And so my mind was trying to take that, that randomness, and re exert control over it.
0:44:20 – Speaker 2
And you know, that’s that’s a wonderful example of what your creative impulse can do for you to try to heal you Absolutely Like, like that, because I, you know, tornado is also a non profit organization and our goal is to show people, like you know I don’t want to say you know creativity can, you know, heal you in a sense that like I’m not a doctor or play one on TV, so I want to be careful of saying stuff like that but I do feel like having a creative outlet can, in the way you’re describing it, give you back that power, give you back that whatever you might need when you’re going through that traumatic event. I really believe that creativity can do those things for people and, like I said, we I believe we all have a creativity inkling in us and so we have kind of what we need already built inside of us to to help us through these hard times in life.
0:45:12 – Speaker 3
I think it’s, I think it is a, I think of it as a healing aspect of, of of what’s inside you, absolutely that that whenever I create something, first of all it distracts you and gives you something positive to look forward to, but it also it just creeps up on you that that that feeling of the things are not so bad. You know that that that there there is.
you know there are. There are some people that say that that instead of creative creativity coming from within us, that it’s outside us and we tap into it and we bring that into us, and who knows if that’s true or not. But one of the things is that whenever I’m creating something and it’s rocking and rolling, it feels like it’s an out of body experience. It feels like that I’m connected to something beyond me. I hear you Like you know I’ll be writing a story and you get into one of those passages and your fingers can’t type fast enough to keep up with it. It just flows out of you. Yeah, there was a, there was a book. Right now I’m trying to get a. Just send it off to a, a literary agent. I wrote a novel, 80,000 word novel in 10 days Wow.
0:46:32 – Speaker 2
I don’t think I’ve written 8000 words in my life.
0:46:35 – Speaker 3
You know it was, it was just one of those things where it felt that creative impulse felt like it was not just it felt like it was in me, but it also felt like that there was this other thing and it was like a power source in me and a power source out there, and I don’t mean this in a religious way, but it just felt like that it was flowing back and forth. I hear you?
0:46:57 – Speaker 2
I get that.
0:46:59 – Speaker 3
Yeah, and so it was. It was. That’s the perfect thing whenever you’re doing something creative and the thing I love. The thing about film is great that it’s collaborative. The thing about writing this great is that it’s all you that and.
You’re just there with a blank piece of paper and whatever comes out of you you can put on that piece of paper, and that’s one of the things I love about prose. So but when you get into that Groove whether it’s on a film or whether it’s writing something, and it just flows out of you like water, man that is it’s one of the best feelings in my life.
0:47:36 – Speaker 2
You know what? That’s a great spot, and I’ve been. I stole a lot of your time today, bill, and I appreciate it so much. I’m glad we were able to cross each other’s paths for sure.
0:47:48 – Speaker 3
Absolutely your stories. That is inspiring to me, the things that you’ve been able to do and accomplish, and when I when I read that and and had a chance to be on your podcast, I was just really excited about it.
0:48:01 – Speaker 2
Yeah, no, thank you so much. Thank you for submitting footage to the tornado film festival. Do you have any any kind of, I guess, last words for someone out there, like an inspiring, creative person that you know Anything you want to tell them? Like what do they should do and get off there. They’re re-rend and just get out there and do it.
0:48:19 – Speaker 3
Let me tell you the difference between some Novelist and somebody who just wants to write a novel? Is you finished it? The difference between a filmmaker and a person aspires to be a filmmaker, as you?
0:48:31 – Speaker 2
finished it.
0:48:32 – Speaker 3
Most people don’t finish. Yeah, I hear you no matter how? No matter how you start.
But it exactly. It becomes easy to just theorize it in your head. The thing is is that you have got to put yourself on the line. The first 90% of everything you know you can do. The last 90%, the last 10% is brutally hard. You have to push through it, you have to finish and even if what you come up with at the end stinks, you’ve still written a novel or you’ve still made a film, and that makes you in the 1% Right there.
So finish and let me just leave you with one other thing. People that are interested in, in following up with me, my way oh yeah, bill Richardson comm and it’s bill with 1l, and also I’ve got a bunch of books out on Amazon.
0:49:23 – Speaker 2
Mostly, I’ll put links in the, I’ll put links in the show notes to your stuff, bill.
0:49:27 – Speaker 3
Yeah, and so I write a lot of different kinds of things and do a lot of different kind of things. But that and it is a let me say one thing for filmmakers out there if you’re a young filmmaker, this is the greatest time to be a filmmaker in human history. Absolutely you can. You can make a great film on your cell phone.
0:49:44 – Speaker 2
Seriously done?
0:49:46 – Speaker 3
Yeah, absolutely. The set my cell phone that I’m holding in my hands, speaking into right now, is better. Its camera is better than Cameras that I rented for one that I bought for twenty thousand dollars twenty years ago. That’s hilarious. So, it’s, it’s, it is beyond hilarious. And so the tools out there are. They’re out there, they’re available, they’re cheap. There is no more excuses for not getting out there and at least trying absolutely, absolutely.
0:50:18 – Speaker 2
So again, everyone, thank you for listening, thank you for downloading and don’t forget to embrace your storm.
0:50:23 – Speaker 1
See our NATO with Jonathan Nadoe. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe now. See your first to hear new episodes With more stories of inspiration about the highs and lows of life and how embracing the storm Is so much more fulfilling of a life than being crushed by the weight of the world. And until then, we hope you’re inspired to do something, whether it’s creating, participating or learning, whatever leads you to your personal passion.