1959 West L.A., California
David Shaw
Born 1951
West L.A. California
Interviewed on January 28th, 2017
By Rebecca Shaw
From the time I was very young—maybe three or four—I remember my mother bringing me to the movie theater to see Disney cartoons like Fantasia or Bambi. They weren’t usually new releases, but rather screenings of movies that had usually been made in the 1940’s. I remember parts of Fantastia really scared me. The last segment is called “Night on Bald Mountain” and involves all of these evil creatures gathering together to dance as the music crescendoed. It was all very dark and creepy, with bright flashes of color that were pretty startling, and I’m pretty sure I covered my eyes through a lot of it.
The first movie I have a strong memory of, that I attended not with my mother but with my best friend Michael, was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Our mothers dropped us off at the Pickwood Theater, on Pico and Westwood boulevards in West L.A. You needed to be driven anywhere in Los Angeles, but by the time we were about seven or eight we were allowed to go into the theater by ourselves and see a double feature. That was the experience at the time; you’d see two pictures and take a refreshment break in between them to get popcorn. In the kid’s movies, I remember they would sometimes show a cartoon in between the films. There were ushers at the beginning of each aisle, and they would point you towards available seats.
So when Michael and I were eight years old, we were dropped off at the theater and got to see 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which had been released a few years earlier. We were completely entranced. My friends and I were all very nerdy, and we were captivated by anything to do with science or technology. In terms of the films we loved, that extended out to monster movies, anything to do with the space race, and all of those sorts of things. I’m sure some of it had to do with our families—my father was a physicist who worked in aerospace and Michael’s father was an engineer who worked on aircrafts. I remember Michael’s father would sometimes bring home pieces of technology he was working with, and we’d love playing with them.
One thing about the portrayal of technology in movies at that point was that it all was sort of the same. The characters all wore great suits: underwater suits, diving suits and space suits were all roughly the same. A big fishbowl around your head, and you had to breathe through a tube. They were all very cool to us. A submarine was the same shape as a rocket ship: you were in cased in metal, and scientific things went on. That’s what it was all about for us at the time, me and my nerdy friends. Whether it was monsters in space or under the sea, that idea of science and discovery was what was exciting for us.
And I remember the effects in the movie being like nothing I had seen before. At one point the ship is attacked by a giant squid. Looking back on it, the effects were incredibly primitive, but at the time it was a real eye-opener and I couldn’t believe I was seeing something like that on film.
I also loved the actors, especially the ones playing the characters I looked up to. I don’t remember having a strong impression either way of Kirk Douglas, the sort of masculine harpoon guy, but But James Mason who played Captain Nemo was just spectacular. I just loved him. He was just this strange exotic guy. And Peter Laurie was even more so. They were just strange great actors, and I loved them followed their careers across my life.
I work today as a computational biochemist, and I can trace my fascination with science and technology back to these early experiences in the movies, sitting there with my friend, watching scientists on the screen.
