Summer 2004.  A bored six-year-old boy stood on his back porch.  The grey thunderheads, dense greenery, and sultry Carolina heat stifled his imagination.  The most exciting thing in recent memory was his parents’ divorce, save some brief encounters with his college-bound brother and sister, who seemed always in a frenzy of motion and excitement-- dinner date here, party there, study calculus, fly to Italy-- and what?  The boy would wait for the first rumble of thunder from those thickening clouds to feel the hairs prickle on the back of his neck.  Fake a conversation with the stuffed animals he’d finally accepted weren’t real.  Bang out some notes on the piano.  Drift to sleep and hope for a good dream, not a nightmare.  To find true excitement, all he had to do was flick on a movie and escape the monotony.  Each time he pondered the image on a DVD case, cracked it open, and exhumed the new silver disc, he opened a world of adventure on his screen, a place where possibility was infinite and action, not rumination, was the norm.  The movies were a blast and reality was a bore.  I was that kid once, and I was wrong about reality; I just had to grow up. 

Sixteen, clad in a navy tux, orange vest, slicked hair, aviator mirror shades and a silver Invicta Diver’s Watch, I sped my Infiniti G35 through Glenwood Avenue traffic on the way to seize a quintessential junior prom night.  At a red light I cranked up the volume on Flo Rida’s GDFR, Big Sean’s I Don’t F**k With You, and a few of my own EDM tunes, and blasted them out the windows toward the golden afternoon sky.  It turned green and I revved the thing to 6000 rpms, the engine roaring against the basslines.  At 45 miles an hour I took my foot off the gas and rounded the bend, face to face with the skyline of my city, rising above the canopy which once stifled my spirits. 

Our prom group—5 guys in slick tuxedos and girls in radiant dresses--took pictures in Moore Square, the green centerpiece of downtown Raleigh, and savored gourmet meals from every corner of the globe.  As the sun sank our excitement rose to replace it.  We strode down Fayetteville Street at dusk and I took in one “movie moment” after another.  I put my arm around my girl the first time as a chilly wind whistled past, then took her hand and pointed skyward: 28 stories up the Wells Fargo Tower, a barely perceptible chandelier, the only visible trace of prom, flickered to life above us.  We laughed as we realized the it was twice the height of Venus, rising in the twilight.  We rode an elevator into the sky and danced until midnight above sprawling lights.  Amid the pounding music and pervasive heat, I pondered the surrounding cinematic spectacle, then marveled that I had nothing to capture it with but my five senses.  Moments like these were why I wanted to make movies; tonight my task was to make memories. 

Early childhood boredom and frustration was a gift in disguise.  It had pulled me back long enough to slingshot me forward into a pursuit of storytelling.  Songwriting came first, then short stories, and novels, countless scribbled storyboards, and exhausted packs of crayola markers.  Words and colors on a page weren’t enough.  For every stationary image I penned on paper, I saw a moving picture behind my eyes.  By middle school my contemporaries’ dreams of being doctors, lawyers, and firefighters had faded and we were confronted with the daunting prospect of deciding our future.  I didn’t have to think hard--I wanted to be a filmmaker.  What did it mean?  Work hard.  A quick “world’s best film schools” search drew me to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles--one of the most competitive institutions in the country.  For a thirteen-year-old North Carolina boy who put more energy into ranting about school than into doing his homework, this dream, tainted by a 6% acceptance rate, was a call to shut up, get off my ass, and work myself across the continent by the end of high school. 

Five hours after prom my eyes fluttered open and the roar of plane engines flooded my ears.  My flight accelerated west, burst through the clouds, and left Raleigh in the dust.  A late connection instigated an action-adventure style chase through three terminals of the Atlanta airport.  I leapt onto the “plane train” then held the door so my Mom could board.  As the dark inter-terminal tunnel enveloped us, I calculated our chances of making the flight.  It was 9:45 now.  Original departure for the LAX flight was 9:20.  Atlanta weather had grounded our Raleigh flight, but there was a chance it had commensurately delayed our LAX flight, leaving a window of mere minutes to rush between five terminals of the world’s busiest airport.  I’d been awake 27 hours, but damn it, I was getting to L.A. 

Five minutes and terminals later the doors slid open at concourse A.  I told my Mom I’d have the gate agent hold the plane for her.  She nodded.  “Go.”  Now I was James Bond chasing his adversary down the concourse.  I threw my suitcase over my shoulder and broke into a run.  Rounded a corner to face an escalator which shrank upwards to a tiny dot at its opening.  No biggie.  Leapt every 3 stairs and put the climb behind me in 30 seconds.  Heart pounding, eyes strained, head throbbing (should’ve grabbed that coffee at RDU!), I made it to gate A19 to find another LA-bound couple--pounding on the gate door to try and get on the flight.  Pounding to no avail.  By the time my Mom showed up, I could only report the plane took off for Los Angeles and left us in the dust.  Thankfully, an hour’s negotiations with gate attendants got us onto another flight bound for the west coast.  It’d be easy to get frustrated, but every good story needs an obstacle; as the plane departed I left mine in the dust. 

I drifted in and out of sleep against the plane seat.  With each inhale and exhale, clouds beyond the window alternated flickers of sunlight and darkness, illuminating a procession of old memories which let me ponder the progression from boredom to enthusiasm.  Seeing the skyline of New York for the first time, weathering a mountaintop thunderstorm as a Boy Scout shivering in a waterlogged tent, chasing my first crush down a beach with a flower at sunset, winning a 50-yard freestyle race then leaping out of the water with my suit around my ankles; I recalled how each fragment of time became so immortalized through imagery and sound that as I crashed each night and my head hit the pillow, those memories projected from the back of my mind and flickered against the inside of my eyelids in a fashion I could only describe as cinematic.  I gradually discovered that real people could live real stories worth telling.  With a grand goal on the horizon the stakes would only get higher, and the stories, better.  

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve begun our descent into LAX.”   My eyes filled with desert and clouds and sky.  The agonizingly slow approach through a blanket of rain clouds afforded mere glimpses of the city.  Finally, between bands of Pacific fog, I saw some palm trees, a freeway, and the runway.  The wheels hit the ground.  I zipped up my backpack filled with schoolwork and pulled out a folded piece of paper; tattered from the transcontinental trek, but still legible.  The reverse thrust roar faded and the plane rolled to a stop.  Printed on the front of the paper were interview questions I’d concocted weeks in advance.  Now I had 4 hours at a college I’d worked toward for 4 years; I’d be damned if I wasted them.  I strode through the terminal doors into Los Angeles. 

I’ll call the moment I dared to crack open a non-fiction book my definitive transition from boyhood to manhood.  Suddenly my eyes were riveted to the page by real events: the battles of Thermopylae or Tours or Gettysburg, the speeches of Lincoln and Churchill, and the spectacular escapades of Theodore Roosevelt.  While holed up in a hospital bed in February 2015 I vicariously lived each muscular “movie moment” that man seized in his 60 years on earth--60 years so rich with adventure they made any 2-hour runtime pale in comparison.  But it brought to mind a bigger question: how many magnificent, inspiring events could a life create?  In my pursuit of a storytelling career, how many stories worth telling lay ahead, undiscovered? 

I plunged into the hotel pool hoping to wash off the last 40 hours without sleep. The night would be an ongoing struggle to stay awake through a long drive through Wilshire Boulevard traffic to Brentwood to reunite with my sister, her husband, and his parents; then to a posh Persian restaurant doubling as a concert venue, an awesome conversation with my USC-bound cousin Bobby over rice, kebabs, and blasting music, a failed attempt to stop myself from falling asleep or throwing up, and finally, a long-deserved rest which doubled as a biological reset.  As dawn broke in Los Angeles I brushed off the remaining jetlag with a two-mile run through Westwood.

I now see the world as a wide open playing field where the forces of nature and good and evil and manpower and chance clash to forge epic stories every second.  Our minds empower us two-fold: we can create narratives through actions and perceive them through senses.  Lives are stories, and the greatest motivation I’ve ever found came from my resolve to live a story worth telling.  Much older, I cracked into biographies of the lives of great men and was as enthralled by them as by the greatest tales of fiction.  Art celebrates the spectacle of circumstance, the fragments of time which cling to the recesses of memory.  These memories weave an emotional framework and their conglomerate shapes our character on the inside, while on the outside, it gets things done.  It’s how history’s made. 

I passed multi-million dollar homes of movie stars.  Heck, I jumped over the water jets of their front-lawn sprinklers.  Every road led back to Wilshire, where I gazed in awe up the glass facades of the sleekest condos in the city.  I pictured the penthouse view, resting on the laurels of success while my City of Angels sprawled below.  The aesthetic marvel of a place twenty stories above LA only scratched the surface of its significance; the drive to make it out here in this cutthroat industry catapulted me on.  I blinked out of my vision of the top and kept running past the ground floor.  Before I summited the city I’d have to author the climb.

My tour guide let me pause at the hilltop.  The UCLA campus spread skyward up the expansive Bel Air slopes.  The guide finished her sentence about me doing a film major here.  There was little potential for financial aid and I wouldn’t start film classes until my junior year, but it was one of the best institutions in the country.  From up here it sure looked like one.  I was impressed but not enthralled.   A quick jaunt back to the hotel and my Mom and I caught another car.  Our driver dropped us off and I strode out of the car toward a red-tiled gate and a palatial set of buildings beyond it - the USC cinematic arts complex.  The sun beat down tempered by a gentle dry breeze, and with it, I heard the gentle clicking and turning of--bikes?  A herd of students on bikes, longboards and scooters swept past me through the gates, leaving a current in the warm air which I couldn’t resist - it drew me through the campus gates, around a sleek stucco corner, and into the gleaming courtyard of the greatest film school in the world.  It was a suitably cinematic welcome to USC’s School of Cinema. 

Through my boyhood eyes, that gleaming skyline or earth-shaking thunderstorm or first love represented unfathomable optimism.  My world stretched beyond all horizons, rich with possibility.  Many grow older and find that knowledge breeds cynicism.  Reality is a bore.  That wondrous spirit and impressionistic awe from childhood is sheer “movie magic.”  I say otherwise.  Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder and extraordinary spectacle exists on our plane of reality.  Filmmakers wield the 21st century’s cultural sword of inspiration and, like Homer in Greece and Shakespeare in London, we have the responsibility to celebrate the experience of our era, one story at a time.  We must make it spectacular because life leaves us in awe, and spread it across the silver screen on a scale as grand as our times.  The lure of storytelling in its modern guise is irresistible.

That lure had brought me across three years of high school, 2200 miles of North America, and to the gates of USC, where it manifested itself in a crowd of future storytellers on bikes drawing me in.  On my tour I met several like-minded applicants, other kids pulled by the magnetic lure of the movies to SCA.  A PowerPoint presentation by the admissions officer sealed my certainty: she described the school as an academy of storytelling, where cinema is the medium of choice.  I’m confident if I hadn’t found the school of my dreams from a Google search in 8th grade, it would’ve found me by now. 

The presentation ended with application information.  Each year, 1300 people apply to the Film and TV Production BFA.  Sixty-four get in.  Of those sixty-four, five get full ride scholarships.  Without one, the school’s prohibitively expensive.  I whipped out my iPhone calculator.  Zero point four percent of applicants get what I need.  My heart rate accelerated and a smile crossed my face; my objective and odds had never been so clear.  I had 4 months until applications and not a second to waste.  I had a one in three-hundred twenty-five shot and I was determined to make it. 

In most of my favorite films, the main character hits a point near the climax where the odds seem impossible, but his objective is close.  Faced with steep odds and high stakes but determined to press on, he finds a way and attains his goal.  As I exited the USC gates and gazed at the magnificent Los Angeles skyline in the shadow of a mile-high mountain range, it already felt like home.  As I boarded the plane and took off from LAX, I knew I’d devote every day to getting back out there.  As a massive blanket of city lights shrank into the darkness behind my red-eye flight, I drifted to sleep, hurtling east at 500 miles an hour to intercept the coming dawn.