Gary Walkow

Gary Walkow is a filmmaker, photographer, writer and visual artist.

Gary's earliest dream, from age four, was that he was lying on an operating table with his head split open. Tangled strands of 8mm film were pouring out of his head. A doctor picked up a strand of film and held it to the light, it was a scene of little Gary running across the front yard.

Walkow's first film was a film version of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" which he made at Bellaire High School. Walkow went to Wesleyan University, where he studied film with Jeanine Basinger. He did honors thesis research on the films of F.W. Murnau, with George Pratt at the George Eastman House, and in the archives of William K. Everson.

Walkow began his professional career as a film editor, working on industrial films in Houston, Texas. After a memorable but unsatisfying semester in the MFA Program at USC Film School, Walkow eked by as an editor in the low budget realms of Hollywood. Working for George Gale (who had edited Jean Renoir's The River), Walkow compiled nature footage bought at bargain basement prices into feature-length films for TV syndication at the rate of one feature a week. The company specialized in what Gale called "outdoor psychic mysteries." They were set outdoors because you could shoot without lighting.

Walkow spent an entire year working for Family Films, a company devoted to making Lutheran religious films. The twelve part "Life of Jesus" needed cleaner dialogue, so all of the dialogue was rerecorded, and Walkow had to cut in the new dialogue. This process was called looping, as sound loops were made of each line of dialogue and the actor then matched his performance to the loops. Walkow came to call this "looping for the lord."

His short film, Auto-Mates was about a husband and wife who discover they cannot get out of their automobile, adapt to living inside the car. It is Exterminating Angel in an Oldsmobile Starfire. The film shot entirely inside an automobile. Tom Frei, who shot Gary's Wesleyan films, designed and built a tracking system that allowed for tracking shots inside a moving automobile. This innovative technique was the subject of an article in the August 1979 issue of "American Cinematographer."

The Trouble With Dick was Walkow's first film as a writer-director. It tells the story of a struggling science fiction writer, Richard Kendred, who moves in with three women and has a nervous breakdown. The story of Richard's fictional character, an escapee on a prison planet, is intercut with the narrative in the house. The Trouble with Dick won the Grand Prize at the Sundance Film festival. The film was acquired for distribution by FilmDallas Pictures, but the company went bankrupt before it released the film. This began a pattern of jinxed distribution that has haunted Walkow.

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