Adventures In Videotaping

We wanted to videotape a plane cutting through the dense evening fog.

We called ourselves the Vidiots. We were not paparazzi since we had little interest in videotaping celebrities. Nor were we nightcrawlers, those gothic ambulance chasers who tape police shootings to sell to the evening news. We viewed ourselves as documentarians wanting to capture the essence of our beloved Los Angeles.

We relished taping locations from classic movies. We recorded inside the Bradbury Building featured in Bladerunner. We shot at the Alto Nido Apartments where William Holden’s character lived in Sunset Boulevard. We taped in dark alleys, on rooftops, inside abandoned buildings, on the sides of freeways. Once, while driving through downtown, we pulled alongside a police car transferring Richard Ramirez, the infamous Night Stalker, to county jail. We captured four chilling seconds of Ramirez staring directly into our camera lens.

One of the cops yelled out the window, “Get out of here, you idiots.”

“Vidiots,” we corrected him. “We’re Vidiots.”

Luke and I met in Atlanta in the summer of 1981 while working on a horror film. Luke was the lead actor while I was a production assistant on my first movie. We bonded over our love of cinema. Luke wanted to direct while I wanted to write screenplays.

After returning to Los Angeles, Luke got married and I finished college. A few years later, we…