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KENT’S CLASSICS: STEVE CARVER

Kent's feast of an experience with the man who not only directed Chuck Norris, but who learnt story-boarding from Hitchcock, as well as making pasta with the lord of the spaghetti westerns, Sergio Leone.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Steve Carver received his first camera when he was eight years old. At 13 he began his formal education in photography, attending the High School of Music & Arts in Manhattan where he received training in art and music. Fascinated by techniques of creating imagery, he experimented with situations to maximize his learning experience--testing and exploring the creative limitations of the mediums.Attending the University of Buffalo in New York on a Regents Scholarship, Carver developed an interest in photography while studying commercial art and illustration. Determined to learn the entire photographic process, he served an apprenticeship under several professional photographers and gained invaluable technical knowledge. It was his willingness to explore ideas and adapt his skills to new situations that resulted in an impressive portfolio of work.Following the completion of his undergraduate studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, Carver accepted a fellowship to study classical arts at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Inspired by insightful portrait photography, he attempted to broaden the scope of his study by serious practice. Establishing himself as a freelance portraitist, he began his career with limited success and encouragement. Determined to work as a photographer, Carver undertook a photojournalist assignment on a documentary film. By learning the flexibility and immediacy that the work required, he gained valuable experience that contributed to his artistic vision of observed life. The experience also sowed the seed for Carver's interest in storytelling. He spent increasing amounts of time studying the creative process of filmmaking. In his final year at graduate school, Carver was a mature artist who had a passion for the visual arts and whose goals were vividly conceived. He rejected a conventional presentation of his thesis in favor of creating a film as a deliberate aesthetic choice to enhance the collective nature of his artwork with visual excitement and inventiveness. Working feverishly, Carver prepared a scenario that incorporated an assemblage of images derived from his photographs, paintings, drawings and etchings. While he labored with the arduous and complicated process, the single-minded intensity and pure ambition that he brought to the task ultimately motivated the completion of his first film. The achievement earned Carver a Master of Fine Arts degree and reinforced a new objectivity. During the next two years, Carver devoted himself to studying filmmaking while concentrating primarily on photography and art.Resuming his freelance career, he worked as a conceptual artist, contract photographer, lecturer, film consultant and sometimes journalist. He accepted an invitation to attend a special postgraduate program in photojournalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Under a core group of staff photographers from "Life" magazine, Carver began studying the techniques of pictorial journalism. By drawing upon his unique vision and the imagery of culture, he built a portfolio of photographs that explored the interstices connecting culture, art and the artist. Returning to St. Louis, he exhibited his work at a fine-arts gallery and enjoyed both critical and commercial success. That success earned Carver a teaching position at Florissant Valley College and offers of employment.Dividing his time between working as a photography instructor and freelance photojournalist, he contributed to the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch", ABC-TV's Wide World of Sports (1981), "Architectural Digest", "National Geographic" and "Time-Life". He later became a staff photographer for United Press International, where he developed a documentary portrait style producing a significant body of work. While photojournalism inspired his creativity, Carver maintained his fascination with filmmaking. On weekends he enjoyed the challenge of experimenting and exploring its technical process by shooting and editing thousands of feet of 16mm film. For inspiration he turned to the work of documentary filmmakers and the intellectual stimulation provided by friends. Mainly self-taught, he began taking on assignments as a cameraman and film editor. While teaching photography and filmmaking at the Metropolitan Education Council in the Arts in St. Louis, he began producing educational films that documented urban life and attitudes under the auspices of the St. Louis Mayor's Council on the Arts. Subsequently, the photo-documentaries created collections of images, dramatically increasing his productivity as well as his profitability. Despite his best efforts, however, the work exhausted Carver's interests in art and photography of all kinds. At the invitation of the American Film Institute in Beverly Hills, California, he shifted the focus of his efforts and relocated to Los Angeles to pursue a formal education in filmmaking.Over the next 20 years he gradually gave up professional photography and rarely used a still camera. While attending the fellowship program at the Center for Advanced Film Studies, Carver studied screenwriting, film directing and editing, exclusively as a student. His principal mentors were great directors, producers and actors. Their counsel contributed enormously to his education in film and provided an outstanding professional atmosphere. Through the apprenticeship program at the Directors Guild of America (DGA), Carver gained employment as an assistant director and developed a technical aptitude for the craft. As a result, he got a foothold in the movie industry and received his first directorial assignment, establishing himself as a feature film director. Directing feature films and TV-movies throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, he made good use of the creative vision he developed through photography. While working on location in Moscow he receiving a still camera as a gift, and he renewed his interest in photography by undertaking a series of photographic expeditions throughout Russia. After his return to Los Angeles he was offered a partnership in a business, but decided to take a break from directing and turned his attention to a different kind of creative enterprise--establishing a photography business he named The Darkroom, located in Venice Beach. Its opening, however, coincided with the demise of the partnership, and Carver ran the business himself for five years--he was not only the owner but the operator, technician, educator and photographer, even doing the rentals and services that helped to support the facility. Largely self-taught, he quickly came to terms with the arduous business process. Since his technical skills relied heavily on the precepts and techniques that he learned over the previous 20 years, he began to focus his efforts on encompassing new photographic technology to stimulate diversity in his work. To maximize production, he practiced, concentrating more and more on photography, adapting his idiosyncratic working methods. Working independently, he explored the boundaries of his classical photographic vision in black-and-white, and by using applications of early chemical processes as a means of documenting the evolving ideas and facets of his work, he liberally incorporated the technology from his explorations into his photography as a means of expression. Gradually, it allowed him to produce photographs of exceptional depth and quality. As a result, The Darkroom gained popularity and increasingly attracted a core group of photographic artists and serious students.While his techniques and methods became the subject and inspiration of a diverse body of photographs, as a portraitist Carver began creating sensuous and moody figure studies that he considered being among his highest artistic achievements. As expressive formalism incorporating a traditional classic sensibility, his portraiture provided a stylish and diverse cultural document, serving to chronicle life and culture while conveying the emotional, psychological, and spiritual as opposed to merely rendering a likeness. He also produced photo-transformations of people in motion, isolating successive stages of rapid movement by using long exposures to permit the intrusion of motion into the image, as both a means of expression and transformation. These images typically included insightful psychological compositions, involving precise staging, elaborate props, and direction. Psychologically probing and surreal, the images often involved the use of light abstractions, color-frequency alteration, long-exposure techniques, split-filter printing, solarization, and archival chemical toning. Carver became affiliated with conservators and scientists in an effort to interact with private collectors, archivists, and curators, to further the development of his work in archival preservation of historical prints and negatives. He appropriated images from archives and private collections in order to raise issues of cultural heritage. Primarily produced and used as source material for scholars and as telling documentation to ensure the preservation of cultural heritages, he created replicas and duplicates of photographs that characteristically challenged perception of its originality. While the closing of the lab allowed Carver to resume his career as a director, his ambition now is to create exceptional collections of formal portraiture for wide publication. It is his hope that these informative photographic studies will offer new interpretations and contribute to the necessary preservation of cultural heritages.
- IMDb Mini Biography 

KENT’S CLASSICS: WALTER OLKEWICZ

Kent finally met with Marco from WIZARDS & WARRIORS, otherwise known to the world as the late, great Walter Olkewicz. Walter was born on May 14, 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey, USA. He was an actor, known for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), The Client (1994) and 1941 (1979). He died on April 6, 2021 in California, USA.
(bio courtesy of IMDB)

Mr. Stanley, I Presume...

Kent whisks his way up for a fourth-time catch-up with the irrepressible filmmaker from the high mountains, Richard Stanley. Listen in as Richard talks about past, present and future - the wonders and perils of life in The Zone - plus his NEW BOOK and visions of awesomeness in store for all true believers. It's always enthralling when Mr. Stanley's on the line...
CHECK IT OUT:
https://theofficialrichardstanley.com/
https://www.amazon.com.au/Conquest-Planet-Tapes-Straight-Video-ebook/dp/B01EQ4NT62

KENT’S CLASSICS: HUGH KEAYS-BYRNE

Kent sits down to lunch with the Australian acting legend for a final (as it turned out) interview. Hugh Keays-Byrne was born in 1947 in Kashmir, India. In 1973, he moved to Australia, where he began an acting career. He is a well respected theater, film and TV actor in Australia. Hugh became noticed after roles in Stone (1974), Mad Dog Morgan (1976) and The Trespassers (1976). He landed his first leading role in TV film The Death Train (1978), and year later he became internationally well-known for his role of Toe-cutter in highly praised apocalyptic SF film Mad Max (1979).Hugh has continued to work on TV, usually in smaller parts, and he is known for his performance as Mr. Stubb in the mini-TV series Moby Dick (1998) and TV series "Farscape".
(bio courtesy of IMDB)

KENT’S CLASSICS: PETER KENT

Kent on Kent with Kent. First and last time its ever happened, as Arnold Schwarzenegger's stunt man holds court. Born June 23, 1957, in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Peter Kent was predestined to be a thrill-seeker and adrenaline addict. As a young child, raised along the banks of the often treacherous Seymour River, he was shooting rapids and climbing the highest trees available, then letting himself fall through the branches to the ground, or pedaling his bicycle across planks placed 12 feet atop the family's laurel hedge to get the desired adrenaline rush, usually resulting in lacerations and stitches.On another occasion he tried to extract his own loose teeth with a hammer in the family garage. At six years of age his parents divorced and he moved to New Jersey with his mother, a move responsible for the dual Canadian-US citizenship which would come in so useful later in life.Returning again to Canada at age 11, he and his mother ran a local bed-and-breakfast style boarding house while he attended Nanaimo Senior Secondary school on Vancouver Island, and worked in the usual variety of West Coast jobs: Sawmill, salmon fishing, pulp mill, paving crew, bouncer and electronics salesperson in both the towns of Nanaimo and Victoria. He also worked on the road as a sound engineer for various Canadian bands, for five bohemian years.Nearly killed in a terrible motor vehicle accident in the early 1980s, he survived only through willpower. Multiple skull fractures, broken cheekbones, a crushed nose and a fractured jaw transformed his look, some say, to closely resemble actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was to prove fateful indeed. In 1984, having done Shakespeare in various local theater groups, he decided to move to Los Angeles to pursue a film career, although he had no previous film experience or acquaintances in Los Angeles. After living in the notorious YMCA off Hollywood's infamous Sunset Strip for a tenuous and outrageous six months, he was taken under the wing of James Cameron to double Schwarzenegger in The Terminator (1984).His minimal stunt experience did not stop him from quickly learning the ropes and becoming one of the most celebrated and highly paid stuntmen in the business. His association with Schwarzenegger lasted 14 films and 13 years, both as friend, workout partner, ski buddy, confidant, chef and dialogue coach. His apprenticeship on 14 of Schwarzenegger's films (from "Terminator" to Jingle All the Way (1996)) has put Kent in a position to understand that genre better than most, and having access to a variety of the best screenplays in Hollywood, was to again prove useful in later years.While making Eraser (1996), Kent was almost killed when he was struck by a three-ton shipping container 100 feet in the air. It was then he decided to pursue a different, less life-threatening line of work, seeing as how he had been injured in some way during nearly all of Schwarzenegger's pictures.He has studied with several different Los Angeles-based drama groups, but his longtime coach has been Zina Provendie, former head of MGM's drama department for 26 years, and coach to James Dean in Giant (1956), as well as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963). After a 14 year absence, Kent returned home to Vancouver,BC, where he met the love of his life, a nurse, Marcia Kent. The two were engaged in Venice,Italy in December of 2005 and married in Victoria, BC in August of 2007. Currently, they are expecting twin boys in the fall of 2009.Kent has been interviewed in numerous publications, including "Entertainment Tonight","Extra", "People Magazine", Germany's "Der Stern", as well as London's "Daily Mirror", "The New York Times", "Dallas Star", "Los Angeles Times" and hundreds of TV and radio stations worldwide. In June 2009, Kent was inducted into the "Hollywood Stunt-man's Hall of Fame."
(bio courtesy of IMDB)

KENT’S CLASSICS: MARCO KYRIS

Kent gets as close as he may get to Nicolas Cage, by wearing out the ear of his former stand-in. Marco Kyris was born Evrimahos Kyriakakis in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on Oct 14th, 1961. His parents were both Greek immigrants who met through an arranged marriage in 1958. His father owned and managed a Greek variety store while his mother was a homemaker. Marco Kyris, along with his two siblings, were raised in a non-english speaking home.At an early age, Marco recognized his disparate social and cultural status through American pop television and culture. Failing in school, he adopted an entertainer's persona and began thinking of a life as an actor.After his sojourn in Paris during his early 20's, he moved to LA and began studying acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. He landed a few bit parts, but worked primarily in the restaurant industry. He returned to Toronto in the early 90's.He was waitering and receiving work through an extras agency when he was asked to stand in for actor Nicolas Cage on the film "Trapped in Paradise". Unbeknownst to him, this would land him a long time working relationship with Mr. Cage and help springboard him into the A-lister culture of Hollywood.Marco worked as Mr. Cage's stand in for 10 years and then began working full-time investing and renovating properties in Toronto. He is now producing a podcast called "Babble, Bullshit, and Beyond", along with other projects.
(bio courtesy of IMDB)

I’ll be JUGGERED!

Kent stumbles on the unearthing of one his all-time favorite, post-apocalyptic action/adventures like never before. Aaron McCann and Kristan Angel share a passion for the 1988, Oscar-winning David Webb Peoples directed The Salute of the Jugger (aka The Blood of Heroes). So much so, they've progressively excavated a veritable feast for fans of this movie...with words from an incredible meeting and friendship with the film's writer/director...to never-before-seen behind the scenes material. THE JUGGERS ARE COMING is a documentary that needs to exist! You can jump in and be an honest Jugger by lending your support to his phenomenal film in the making...
 
CHECK IT OUT:
https://documentaryaustralia.com.au/project/the-juggers-are-coming/
https://youtu.be/rOqApEuKsOo

The ESSENCE of Persistence

Kent calls up his screenwriting and film-making buddy, Jeff Kacmarynski for a pow-wow about what's going on with the movies, alongside what's going on with his long-suffering, Lovecraft-inspired passion project....ESSENCE. Jeff spills the beans, together with his hopes, dreams and aspirations for his upcoming debut feature...
 
CHECK IT OUT:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/284592825998549/
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5715846/