Delavan native Tim Beringer and filmmaker Patrick Read Johnson have spent twenty years trying to bring the movie 5-25-77 to the screen. It’s a movie leading up to the day the original Star Wars movie opened. The story is based on Patrick’s real life experience and Tim plays Pat’s brother.
Libby Collins talked with Tim Beringer and Patrick Read Johnson on today’s WTMJ Conversations
Listen in the player above.
A portion of the conversation was transcribed below, courtesy of eCourt Reporters, Inc.
PATRICK READ JOHNSON: I was 6 years old when I was taken to see, opening night, 2001 Space Odyssey. My father really wanted to see it, my mom couldn’t have cared less, but we went. And I watched the whole thing, my DNA was altered. And, you know, at the end when they were carrying me out, I kind of whispered sleepily into my mom’s shoulder, “I’m going to direct movies someday.” And she said, “Well, finish kindergarten, and we’ll, you know, figure –” I just became utterly fascinated, but I was not fascinated with directing, but I wanted to know how they did all the spaceships. So, that became my thing. I just built spaceships out of everything I could find, and it just became an obsession.
And then when my dad was at work, I would borrow his Super 8 movie camera, and of course these days, you could borrow a video camera, an iPhone, or whatever, and no one would know the difference, even if you were 6, because you could download the stuff and the evidence would be gone. I had to also borrow his packages of Super 8 film, and he’d go to, like, film a birthday event and there would be no film left in his cabinet, and my mom had like secretly processed all the movies and given them to me and I would watch them in my room.
So, anyway, to make a long story a little longer, as I got older, it just became such an obsession that I sort of took over my house. My mom had three other children behind me to raise, but I was set because I had the basement where I was blowing up train sets and army tanks on little dioramas, and I had the swimming pool where I was filming shark attack scenes, and I had the garage, which I kicked all the cars out of when I was hanging my brother by wires in front of planets and stars and all that kind of thing, and I had become a little movie studio by the time I was in high school. I was also a complete geek, dork, lunatic, but people seemed to kind of like to observe me doing this. Even my friends, were like, we have no interest being in the movies, but we’ll be in your movies because we feel sorry for you.