Steve Wax
When I was ten or eleven, growing up In Sausalito, California, I had a rudimentary darkroom in a dirt-floored basement space. I printed up shots of my waterfront community and pasted them into scrapbooks.
Later at Reed College I was the editor of the Griffin, the school’s photo annual, and I spent every waking hour under a dim red darkroom bulb printing and laying out candid shots of my fellow 60’s truth seekers. I was creating a narrative of a moment in time at the hippiest of liberal arts colleges.
Inspired by a late night screening of Shoot the Piano Player, I transferred to the UCLA film School where my fellow students included Jim Morrison and The Doors. I made films about characters much like Charlie from Piano Player: dark, lonely, sensitive types.
In the midst of editing one of the first short films for AFI, a draft notice arrived ordering me to Vietnam, I fought for and won Conscience Objector status. Working at a school for disturbed kids in San Francisco, I got a writing/directing job with Francis Coppola during the first incarnation of American Zoetrope.
But American Zoetrope imploded (temporarily) and I hooked up with some friends to create a now-famous San Francisco film collective, Cine Manifest. It was a challenging but terrific experience. One of our first films, Northern Lights, won the Camera D’or at Cannes in 1979. Another, Over-Under, Sideways-Down, is still a compelling working class tale.
After seven years, Cine Manifest came to an end and I continued my narrative sojourn developing and producing my own independent features, including The Little Sister.
Finally I decided to go earn a real living, got married and founded Chelsea Pictures, working with many of my feature director friends to create intimate :30 second stories for brands. I also produced a number of feature films and shorts including Unmade Beds and the Academy Award nominated Killing Joe.
My fascination with storytelling and technology led me to the Blair Witch Project filmmakers via Sundance in 1999, and ever since, I’ve been working closely with two of them, Mike Monello and Gregg Hale, on “branded entertainment” projects. Through the boom and bust of the dot com era we have built Campfire into a unique company that draws on interactive narratology.
As Hawthorne said, all stories are “twice-told” – that is each new story is inevitably rearranged, deformed, and made into a new version that is passed on, only to be changed once again.
