Ron and I benefited in another way from our Howards Hurricanes exploits besides enjoying the competition and the teamwork: we established ourselves in the community as citizens rather than as child-actor curiosities. We never heard “Dopey Opie!” or “Where’s your bear?” on the court during Hurricanes games or in the three-on-three pickup games we played at the rec center. Our teammates and opponents knew that we had this odd other life, but it didn’t matter to them. For Ron and me, this was meaningful. It furthered the idea that we had identities independent of who we were on soundstages and the backlots.
THE CORRELATION BETWEEN coaching and directing turned literal when Ron asked me to recruit some of my buddies to join me in the cast of Ron’s earliest attempts at directing. The first short we did was called The Ball Game. It was simply a dramatization of a Wiffle Ball game. The film begins with me waking up in the morning in my underwear, getting dressed, and calling up my friends on the telephone to invite them over to our place.
The Clybourn Avenue house had a great setup for Wiffle Ball. Its previous residents were a Chinese American family whose kids were a singing group, a sort of Chinese-language Osmonds who performed at fairs and festivals. The parents had torn up part of the backyard and replaced the grass with paved concrete, creating an outdoor rehearsal space. For Ron and me, this became our sports arena. Dad put up two basketball backboards, and we also configured the space for Wiffle Ball, putting down bases and defining outfield boundaries that were vaguely modeled on Boston’s Fenway Park.
RON
The Ball Game ended up running about twenty minutes. It was hideously boring: no sound, and I included every pitch of every inning. But it was a great exercise in experimentation, way more creative than the rudimentary home movies that I’d shot using the Bell & Howell 8 mm camera that the Andy Griffith guys had given me years earlier. My most artful effort on that camera was a short in which I had Dad playing a hobo trying to break into the house. He peered through the window for one shot and climbed on the roof for another. It was shot in order so that I wouldn’t have to edit it.
By the mid-1960s, Standard 8 mm was replaced by a new format called Super 8. Dad bought a Kodak Brownie Super 8 camera for his own use. I borrowed it to make The Ball Game. I planned my shots, tried different angles, and pointed out to Clint’s buddies where their marks were. Then I edited the picture myself. With my own money, I purchased a primitive Super 8 home-editing system that consisted of two cranks, a view screen, and a splicer. To edit a scene, I had to hand-crank the film back and forth, manually cut it on the splicer （sometimes nicking a finger in the process）， and then bind together my edited scenes with adhesive tape lined with sprocket holes, more or less in the same way that you would apply a Band-Aid to a cut.
Editing this way was incredibly time-consuming, but it became my favorite part of the filmmaking process. The intensive labor soothed me in a Zen way; I never cared much for erector sets or model airplanes, but I could edit for hours on end. That said, for The Ball Game, I clearly didn’t edit aggressively enough. Still, I was pleased: I considered it my debut as a filmmaker. Twenty years later, my memories of that film inspired the Little League scenes in my movie Parenthood.
My next film was the product of my resistance to doing household chores. Dad asked me to mow the lawn one Saturday. Rather than flat-out refuse, I pitched him an idea: “Dad, I have this idea for a short film. It’s about a military veteran, a man about your age. Not an air force guy like you, a guy who was in the army.” This detail came to me because we owned a combat helmet that Dad had bought for us at an army surplus store. I used it when I played World War II with the Cordova Street boys.
“This vet, he doesn’t just mow the lawn,” I said. “He puts on his helmet, he salutes, and he attacks the grass with his manual mower like it’s the enemy. It’ll be a satirical film, Dad. I’ll use lots of ground-level shots of the mower coming right at the camera, with grass flying all over the place!”
Dad smiled. “That sounds like a strong low-angle shot. Could be pretty good,” he said.
And so we set to work on my next film. Dad was no easy mark—he knew damned well that I was finagling my way out of a chore. But he admired my initiative in wanting to make movies, and he enjoyed hamming it up in the army helmet, taking direction from his son. I kept coming up with different camera angles until the lawn was completely mowed.