PIGGY BANK LOANS from my 9-yr-old daughter saved my film career(!) This story is from SHOWBOAT 1988 days (1976). https://vimeo.com/ondemand/showboat1988

Excerpt from my book,TWELVE DEAD FROGS and Other Stories––A Filmmaker's Memoir: https://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Frogs-Stories-Filmmakers-Memoir/dp/1389845451

PIGGY BANK (1976)

As new Palmer Lab bills arrived in the mail at my apartment, including invoices from the Claremont shoot, I just placed them in a drawer with all the rest of my unpaid bills – not something I currently recommend. Without funds, it seemed counter- productive to terrorize myself with the financial facts that I was bucking on a daily basis. So I did my best to forget about my overhead, tune out reality (all too frightening!) except for what was projected on the screen. On the home front my kindly landlord let me go three, four, five months without paying rent, while the corner grocery store let me pay off my bills at the end of each month. I was fortunately very high on the editing of Showboat 1988, which kept my spirits up during this difficult time.

Bluesman J.C. Burris performs at SHOWBOAT 1988-THE REMAKE audition to a packed house, JULY 24, 1976, CALIFORNIA HALL, SAN FRANCISCO, CA. https://arhoolie.org/blues-professor-dancing-dolls/ (see TRAILER: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/showboat1988

Sometime around March my mother offered to start sending me a check for $20 each week as a type of birthday present (I had just turned 32), just to help out with groceries and insure that I could feed my little kids on weekends. And of course I quickly got behind. Since I was scrounging the smallest amounts of cash, a dollar here, a dollar there, just to keep editing (it took a $1 bridge toll to get from Oakland to Palmer’s Lab in San Francisco), the $20 didn’t stretch very far. I finally resorted to asking my nine-year old daughter, Heather, if she would agree to loan me money from her piggy bank each Monday morning, to help me stay afloat through the week. I explained that I would return all her money on Fridays, when we arrived back at my apartment, and even add an extra fifty cents interest each time. Heather was initially doubtful that she should risk her nest egg. But after I repeatedly answered her doubts (yes, I would return exactly what she had saved – the silver dollars, paper money, exact breakdown of change), and reiterated her profit of fifty cents per transaction (a new half-dollar coin for her collection!), she finally broke into a large grin and agreed to my proposal.

I know this sounds like very small strokes after the thousands I rustled up for filming, lab costs, and the rest, but sooner or later it all comes down to pennies, even with feature filmmaking.

Each Friday I would take my mother’s check for $20, which, God bless her, showed up regularly in the mailbox, and cash it at the Bank of America in downtown Oakland. And I’d ask the teller for the same breakdown of seven silver dollars, three half- dollars (plus one for interest), ten quarters, a certain number of dollar bills, etc., packing it all neatly back in Heather’s special box/bank at my apartment, once again preparing it for her careful inspection.

By the time each weekend rolled around and I settled back into my babysitting duties, I was thankful for the required break from filmmaking, worn out from the trials of editing and my tight money routine. I can’t remember how many extra half-dollars Heather earned, but it was enough money for her to figure out that she had a real cash-cow on her hands.

Finally, after hitting the same bank teller a few weeks in a row, cashing my twenty dollar check for Heather’s combination of coins and bills, the young but dour-faced woman behind the counter asked me why I always requested such an odd assortment of currency. When I told her a shortened version of the basic story, about how I borrowed from my daughter’s piggy bank, she looked at me with total disgust.

Postscript

Within a short period of weeks after of being scowled at by a bank teller I received word that I had just won a $7500 grant for completion of SHOWBOAT 1988, from The National Endowment For the Arts (NEA). And daughter Heather didn’t do so badly herself. If she kept the silver 1/2 dollars from 1976 I paid her as interest, it looks like they go for $830 (or more) each!