A Boomer Who’s Still 17 at Heart
Who framed Roger Rabbit?
Tim Eaton did.
Eaton also inflicted multiple stab wounds on Goldie Hawn.
He caused several tornadoes, too.
Oh, and he sank the Titanic.
“It’s a living,” he sighs.
Eaton framed Roger Rabbit in a visual, not criminal, sense. Same goes with the Goldie Hawn stabbing, the tornadoes and the sinking of the Titanic.
He is one of those people whose name scrolls up the big screen after most people have left the theatre — the special effects technicians who imbue Hollywood blockbusters with extra whiz-bang.
He summoned the tornadoes for Twister, punctured Goldie Hawn for Death Becomes Her, and sank the Titanic for, well, take a wild guess.
He’s currently supervising the high-tech tinkering that will transform Jim Carrey into a digital Ebenezer Scrooge for a computer-animated, 3-D version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, directed by Robert Zemeckis.
It’s a far cry from the first film Eaton worked on — a grainy vignette shot on a Super 8 camera about his hometown, Kitchener.
That was back in his high school days at Forest Heights Collegiate, long before he had any inkling that he might someday move to La La Land and make movie magic.
That very first film — which, he now recalls, won some sort of student contest and was screened at Ontario Place — did get him thinking about filmmaking as a career.
That led to a brief stint studying film at Wilfrid Laurier University, followed by a longer stint at York University (because York had a better film program, and Toronto had a lot more opportunities for work).
One such opportunity, Eaton’s first professional job in the industry, was on a sci-fi flick called Legion of the Winged Serpent (or Alien Encounters or Starship Invasions, depending on which re-release you’re talking about).
It was dreadful.
Mind you, some reviews placed it in the so-bad-it’s-good category, but Eaton doesn’t see it that way.
“Yeah, I made a lot of crap at first.”
But, as in gardening, crap often helps better things flourish, which was the case with Eaton’s burgeoning career.
In 1979, when vacationing in San Francisco, he was introduced to a friend-of-a-friend who worked in Hollywood and, just like that, Eaton landed a month-long internship at Industrial Light and Magic — the Shangri-La of special effects.
One job led to another, and another and another, and before long Eaton had more film credits to his name than most Hollywood megastars: Willow, The Mummy, Back to the Future 2 and 3, Field of Dreams, Forrest Gump and Beowulf, to name a few.
Yet there’s one elusive credit that Eaton has spent the past 20 years struggling to earn: screenwriter.
Eaton and co-writer Marc J. Seifer have penned the script for what they believe is a guaranteed hit — an epic biographical film about the life and career of Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest (and strangest) inventors who ever lived.
Eaton became fascinated with Tesla decades ago, after reading an article about the somewhat-mad scientist in New Age Magazine.
Ever since, Eaton has envisioned Tesla’s life story as a big screen biopic — “a cross between The Aviator and A Beautiful Mind,” as he puts it.
Eaton believes it’s a “no-brainer” that a movie about Tesla would be gripping; Tesla has been called “the man who invented the twentieth century,” since it was he who patented alternating current (AC) electrical systems, which created a revolution in technology.
What’s more, Tesla was notoriously troubled and peculiar; he was repulsed by the sight of earrings, he couldn’t stand touching human hair, he fell in love with a pigeon, and he only stayed in hotel rooms with numbers divisible by three.
In other words, Tesla would make for a great character in a movie.
But Hollywood seems reluctant to make a film about Tesla. Eaton’s script is one of many Tesla stories floating around Tinseltown, and there are no takers.
“We’ve shopped it to hundreds of different actors and producers and directors,” Eaton says.
“My theory is that there’s still a rock that we haven’t turned over.”
After two decades of dead-ends and frustration, Eaton remains determined to get his Tesla movie made.
It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy digitally adding explosions and laser blasts and flying DeLoreans to movies — he does — but they’re not his movies.
The creative spark that led him to make a Super 8 film about Kitchener as a teenager is still there, he says.
“I’m still 17 at heart.”
Category: Baby Boomers
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I’ve written two screenplays, so I know about the desire to have your movie made. I wrote one about farmland along the Columbia River being turned into developments (which later actually happened) and an action movie about weight loss.
I wrote the action movie because it was one of the 10 ideas on my list. A producer I met at the Willamette Writers said my land use movie wasn’t high concept enough. I wrote the action movie with him in mind. The next year he said the action movie I wrote wasn’t one he’d be interested in making at the end of the day.
It must be great to live and work in Hollywood and be able to pitch your movie to hundreds of different actors and producers.
Like a lot of people, I love movies.
Rita Blogging at The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide
Glad I found your site. I’m obsessed with anything ufo.