Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(6)

My mom’s sister, Aunt Nori, married Bill Smith, an army guy. Bill was stationed in Japan, and when I was about five years old, Bill brought back a little army uniform for me to wear. My eyes widened when I saw it, and I put it on immediately. I loved it. I wore that uniform as much as Mom allowed. To the store. To kindergarten. On Halloween. I even slept in it. Whenever, wherever—I wore that army uniform.

When I was just a little kid, I visited Dad in his office where he cut films on the old Moviola editing machines. Dad was working on the World War II documentary series Victory at Sea for NBC, and had also been hired by a director named Herschell Gordon Lewis, who shot very low-budget horror films, “splatter films” my dad called them. I couldn’t read yet, so Dad told me the titles: Color Me Blood Red, Two Thousand Maniacs!, Blood Feast. Dad showed me a clip of a Lewis movie where a monster came out of a swamp and chased two hunters down the road, and he later pointed out his name on some movie posters. Dad told me once that the film was so low budget they would just run down to the local meat market for some cheap special effects to use for the blood and guts. So I imagined a director yelling at the people around him, ordering them what to do: “We need some more gory stuff—go down to the store and get some hamburger and lots of ketchup! Get tons of ketchup! This movie is called Blood Feast for cripes’ sake.” I looked on as Dad ran the inky film through a machine about the size of a breadbox and pressed a button, and I watched the film on the machine’s little screen. He would stop the film often, tamp down on either side of the film, cut it with a blade, and put a piece of tape over it.

“There,” Dad said. “That’s how you edit film, Gary.” I took note and grinned.

Years later, Mom and Dad moved out to California where Dad opened a West Coast office of his new editing firm, then called The Reel Thing. Mom came up with the name. Among the many TV series he worked on were Miami Vice, Hart to Hart, Dawson’s Creek, Baywatch, and Michael Mann’s Crime Story, which happened to be the first time I directed episodic television. In 1992, my dad edited Of Mice and Men for me.

I think it’s very cool that he was so deeply involved in an industry so new in Chicago. When Dad started out, television had only been around for about twenty years—and already the industry was exploding. What’s more astounding to me, though, is when I think how Dad got his start in the business by developing film for the navy, which means in some ways my roots in film go all the way back to the United States military.



When I grew up in Chicago, the North Side / South Side rivalry was as old as the city itself. Depending on who you talked to, the rivalry might be serious or only a chance for some good-natured ribbing. Even then, few people agreed completely on what the rivalry was about. The White Sox came from the South Side, Comiskey Park. The Cubs played on the North Side, Wrigley Field. The South Side of Chicago, where I was born, made its mark in industry. Railroading. The blue-collar working stiffs. The North Side, or northern suburbs, had more money. More white-collar business types. This part of Chicago was right on the lake, so folks from the North Side liked to go to the beach in the summer. The South Side suburb of Harvey, where I first lived, was actually so far south it was south of the South Side. But it was still gritty as could be. The address of the two-bedroom, one-bath, one-thousand-square-foot house my parents owned in Harvey was 14419 Sangamon Street, and my folks beat that address into my brain so I didn’t forget. As a kid I was free to roam the neighborhood, and they didn’t want me lost.

My grandpa Dan was a South Side man—a big-framed, tough Italian guy who’d been through the war and worked for the railroad. Not a cuddly grandpa at all. He was never mean. He was just tough. And a little scary. As a kid, I was a little afraid of Grandpa Dan whenever my parents took us for a visit. But years later, when I started acting in high school plays, Grandpa Dan and Grandma Betty came to see me in the restoration comedy Tartuffe by Moliére. I was playing the title character and had all kinds of makeup on, a funny nose, and a crazy wig, and from the stage I could clearly hear one voice in the audience. Grandpa Dan wasn’t the kind of guy who laughed a lot. But I heard this bold belly laugh from the crowd, and I knew it was Grandpa Dan—strong, rich, and vibrant. Hearing his laugh was so affirming. I thought, Well, if I can get Grandpa Dan laughing like this, then maybe I’m not half bad as an actor. Maybe I’ll keep going.

For first through third grades I walked to school by myself. Every morning, I passed a big mound of sticks, dirt, weeds, and thorns that beckoned to me. I liked to climb that mound and stand on top like a king. One morning I was messing around on top of the mountain and tumbled off. A thorny bush broke my fall, driving a huge thorn into my leg. Bloody, I got to school where they patched me up. My leg healed, and I forgot about it. Two years later, I looked down at my leg one day and saw something sticking out. The tip of a sliver of wood. I reached down and yanked it out. My eyebrows arched in disbelief. I had pulled out a two-inch-long piece of thorn that had lived in my leg unseen for two years. The scar is still there, a little indentation in my left calf muscle, to remind me. Perhaps it was some sort of life metaphor. Something dirty and thorny can live unnoticed in a person for a long time. Little by little, you hope, it works its way out, never to return.

This was the height of the Cold War. The nightly news didn’t mean much to me as a kid, but I frequently heard about the tensions between Russia and the United States. In elementary school we had atomic bomb drills where we were all ordered to “duck and cover” underneath our desks. On the news, I heard about the Cuban Missile Crisis, a serious standoff between Khrushchev and Kennedy, and everybody prepared for nuclear weapons to land. I didn’t understand all of this, and I wasn’t fearful—but all the adults around me sure looked concerned. Even paranoid. What’s the big deal? I thought. If an atomic bomb explodes over your city, you just duck and cover under your desk.