would persuade anyone who isn't willing to get extremely dirty and
extremely tired and extremely frustrated and extremely beat-up for art,
to just walk away."
Professional Profile: Patrick Read Johnson, Writer, Director, Producer
About halfway through watching the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey,
Patrick Read Johnson decided he wanted to be a filmmaker. He was only
six at the time. "My father had been waiting forever for this movie to come
out. He had read a few tidbits in Time magazine and was absolutely
riveted." The family dressed up and drove to downtown Wadsworth,
Illinois, population 750, to view the Kubrick epic at the local movie theater.
"Within the first few frames, I was just riveted." Although he fell
asleep before the movie ended, he recalls, "I did know halfway through
that I needed to know how they did what I was seeing. I was fascinated
by the visual nature, the manipulation of images to make me see things
I thought were impossible." As he was carried out of the theater nearly
asleep, he turned to his parents and said, "I'm gonna direct movies when
I grow up."
From that time on, Johnson was fascinated with movies, particularly
with discovering how various effects were created. He read everything he
could find about the process, including a book on the making of 2001. By
the age of nine, while his father was at work, he was stealing his Super-8
camera and making movies. "I'd run outside and set fire to my model air-
planes and blow up armies of GI Joes, trying to imitate my favorite effects."
In his teen years, he once tried to create weightlessness on film by sus-
pending his little brother from the garage ceiling with piano wire. In the
midst of shooting, he received a phone call from a friend. Forgetting his
brother was still suspended in mid-air, he dashed out to meet the friend.
"He hung there for another four hours and fell asleep."
In high school Johnson studied theater, but his heart was set on film-
making. Constantly searching for reading material about film, he discov-
ered American Cinematographer magazine. Each month he poured over the
pages, reading how the effects for his favorite films were created and
dreaming of going to Hollywood to meet some of his visual effects
heroes. One day he came home from school to discover his mother
holding one of his American Cinematographer magazines while carrying
on an animated telephone conversation. Finding a phone number on the
masthead, she had telephoned the magazine's editor, Herb Lightman,
and convinced him to not only introduce her son to his hero, Douglas
Trumbull, but to allow the 15-year-old to tag along with him for a week
while he interviewed filmmakers.
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