Dale R Botten

Executive Producer

My Journey Into The Film Industry

 I was born at a very young age, with I suppose, all the normal functioning genes that one of my gender should possess. Well, save I guess for one: the natural athletic ability that many enjoy seemed to be insignificant in my physical makeup. My arms and legs and brain were all wired separately, with no connecting wire between them, so that the first dribble of a basketball was fine and the second usually ended up somewhere in the bleachers. As a baseball pitcher, my fastball travelled at about the speed of a pregnant bumble bee. And when I was at bat, the opposing team not only pulled the outfield in, they pulled the infield in. My football pass didn’t spiral, it tumbled. Alas, back-slaps, accolades and swooning girls all seemed to be out of my league…basketball, baseball or football.

 

Ahhh! But then, fate took a hand (or possibly a foot). On a cold and rainy early Spring day, when I was in the 5th or 6th grade (details get fuzzy, after one turns 30), our teacher assigned us to author a poem. Now, when one doesn’t have basketball, baseball or football practices to attend, along with all their associated co-ed social gatherings, books (and later, television) provide a measure of solace. A series of young-peoples’ history books, encyclopedias and even a dictionary became regular bathroom reading material for me. A poem? Hell, child’s play. I got this. 

 

And indeed, I did. The poem was much like one would expect from a budding bard of about eleven (give or take). It was something about a tree, a mother bunny her lost little boy. The teacher read that one in class. After the last line, there was dead silence. The day ended and as we were all getting ready to leave, several girls said how much they liked my poem. YES! AT LAST! Something in can do well…maybe even better than the jocks! (That poem later won third prize at the regional fair.) On that cold, rainy day in the classroom of a country school house in bum-intercourse Wisconsin, was born…a writer.


The warm color of this literary success was tinted (tainted?) by my young mind’s obsession with television; principally, old movies that were shown late at night. Many a night my dear sainted mother would try to coax me to bed on a school-night, while I crowded the TV set, in an effort to keep the sound down lower. There, I leaned an appreciation for the marvelous techniques of the old masters: the lighting, the cinematography and mostly, the rata-tat-tat dialogue that shot like a machine gun from the mono-speakers of our black-and-white boob tube. 


Paraphrasing…somebody, you can take the man out of writing, but you can’t take writing out of the man (or, woman). Through 22 years of active military service (Marine Corps and Army), the need to write and (as I was to learn) perform on stage and on a movie set only festered and grew within me. Somewhere in that nether region of the brain that is impossible to completely control, formed words, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, characters and plots…all running hither and yon in futile effort to find a home on paper, stage or celluloid. Occasionally, either by happenstance or the necessity of whatever my current day-job required, a few of them would slip out and find their home. But for the most part, they simply multiplied in their cells, dangerously overloading the system.  


After my separation from the Marine Corps, I decided I wanted to become ed-ju-ma-cated. So, I returned to college, where I became a disc-jockey and dabbled in television/film.   BUT, I was soon lured by the roar of the grease paint and smell of the crowd, finding myself in several productions on the wicked, wicked stage, where I learned the stage wasn’t as wicked as it is portrayed. Like the Marine Corps, the Army and any other profession, it’s made up of people with a talent, who are just trying to put out the best product they can. Now I was burdened with two curses; writing and acting. Could be a lethal combination. Lesson: If you have a talent you didn’t know you had and people tell you that you have it…LISTEN TO THEM. End of lesson. Over time, theater morphed into film and I was lost in the abyss forever and ever.  

Near graduation and by pure happenstance again, I applied to the University of Southern California Graduate School in their MFA program of Professional Writing (Screen Emphasis), never dreaming of acceptance. What? Accepted?  Me?  What the hell do I do now? GI bill money exhausted. No time for financial assistance application. SO, I borrowed a few bucks from my dear sainted sister, jumped into my version of a depression-era Okie car (VW Beetle, loaded to the gills) and motored west, to find fortune and fame. What I found was a hill too steep for my little underpowered engine to climb, so I was forced into a tactical retreat, ostensibly to re-group, repower and retry.  


“The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley.” So said my new best friend, Bobby Burns, in 1785.  A beautiful night, a beautiful woman, another bride, another groom, another… Well, you get the idea. Finding myself with a beautiful wife, four growing boys and no adequate job, another stint on active duty looked mighty inviting.  Nineteen years later, both decisions were among the best I ever made. Even during that hectic, sometimes turbulent time, the need to create was strong and oozed out through various cracks in my wall of normalcy.  

Ironically, my first incursion into professional film came while still on active duty, when I was cast as a still photographer in Disney’s IRON WILL (1994). I took 22 days of leave. As it was with theater, I tasted the forbidden fruit of film acting and was captured by it.  Now completely corrupted, I stand prisoner of the printed word and bound in celluloid chains. 


 And so dear reader, I present to you some evidence of my wayward life. As for mitigating circumstances, I have none.  I am a writer and an actor. This is my hour upon the stage.  
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