The 70s
I dropped out of college and headed to Europe. I moved into a tiny Paris apartment above an art gallery. The photo shows me next to an anti-Nixon banner during a side trip to Switzerland with fellow Cal-Western dropout Rich Gillen, which made the front page of a Zurich newspaper. My next stop was Amsterdam, where I found out I was classified 1A. It was time to come home and face the draft.
After Europe
I enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts and was there for Year #1. Allen Ginsberg gave the welcoming address, swinging a thurible from a chain.
Cal Arts Teachers: Buckminster Fuller, Nam June Paik (Fluxus), Carlos Castenada (The Teachings of Don Juan – A Yaqui Way of Knowledge), Gene Youngblood (Expanded Cinema).
“We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.”
– Buckminster Fuller
After Cal Arts
- I studied holography with the pioneering Shotwell Group in San Francisco.
- I held a solo photography exhibit on Durant St. in Berkeley, California.
- Later, I moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, to attend more film school at Simon Fraser University.
Santiago de Atilan
I traveled through Mexico and Central America with my girlfriend, Chris. We stopped along the way, sometimes for months, on a beach in Yelapa, across the lake from Panajachel in Santiago (photo), and at a cashew finca in El Salvador, before finally reaching the end of the road in San José, Costa Rica.
Return to the U.S. (Almost)
While sitting on a bench in the Parque Central, we struck up a conversation with Mercury and Charlie Vincent from Detroit, who was looking to start a business.
El Patio Restaurant San Jose, Costa Rica
A few weeks later, we opened El Patio Restaurant. The entrance was through one of San José’s most exclusive art galleries. Mornings were spent shopping in the beautiful outdoor markets, and some nights we hosted cocktail parties with an eclectic mix of characters, including a few Somozas and the families of fugitive financier Robert Vesco and Don Nixon. One night, while walking downtown, we saw Nixon resign on TV. That got us thinking about coming home.
Back in California
I helped my dad come out of retirement. After a few years of working on films like Son of the Crimson Pirate and others, we had offices and a green light from Paramount Studios to begin production on The Last Public Enemy. John Frankenheimer was set to direct, Jack Nicholson was in talks to star, and the screenplay was written by Michael Mann. This would have been Mann’s first screen credit—before Heat, Thief, or even The Jericho Mile. But with a change in studio leadership, the project was shelved, and so was I. It was time for a change.
