In the yore days of 1990, I was making my way back to this newspaper after a 10-year writing hiatus, and it felt suddenly good again. I was writing some short art features and music reviews when arts editor Bob Blaisdell asked if I wanted to review movies for kids. Indeed I did.
My son Zachary was four years old and we already went to everything anyway. Now we could get in free. Besides, I found my son’s company routinely inspiring: his creative renaming of things like the Oscar Meyer wiener as “hog dog” kept me braced for constant revelations. More time with him? Check.
Meanwhile, I had just read a Spy Magazine column called “How to Be a Grown Up,” in which the writer (also Weiner, Ellis that is) turned his toddler’s utterances like “more milk” into astute proclamations on such topics as Reverend Jesse Jackson’s poverty solutions. Suddenly parenting seemed more like a job opportunity than a way of life.
So I proposed joint authorship reviews to Blaisdell. He hesitated first and then gushed approval once he read a story we wrote about Kevin Costner’s deliriously bad Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and the fit Zac pitched after watching it.
Spoiler alert: Our collab turned out very well. Magnificent, I think, and some of that, no doubt, was due to the sudden flourishing of kiddie cinema from Hollywood. There were culty films like Mom and Dad Save the World, Monkey Trouble, and Honey I Shrunk the Kids and honest bell-ringers like Lion King and Nightmare Before Christmas.
Our only memorable argument in seven years occurred when editor Michael Smith assigned us to The Little Princess. Zac vehemently kicked against the goad, refusing to get caught attending a junior chick flick. Arguing with him about duty and consciousness-widening helped break his reluctance and, as you may know, the film by Alfonso Cuarón was both gorgeous and explosively surprising at every turn.
“Well?” I queried as we shuffled from the Fiesta Theatre.
“Okay,” he muttered, shaking his wee head in shock. “It was great.”
Be that as it may, I really had no idea how this might all work out. Anxiously querying him after our first film, Shipwrecked — Disney’s recycling of a Norwegian tale starring Gabriel Byrne — I was proud when he alluded to a classic critical tenet, complaining that they showed a sword in an early scene but then failed to use it later. Still, I wondered, what did he think overall?
“At first it was too long,” said my preschool genius, “and then it was too short.”
Stellar birth observed.
Zac is 40 now. His accomplishments include managing a small Philadelphia theater, directing TV animation from PBS to Adult Swim, and guiding young people through after school Dungeon and Dragon campaigns.
We still talk about movies constantly, and his opinions hold great influence over me. He lives a hundred miles away, and the time apart sometimes seems way too long but our time together is always too short.
As the Santa Barbara Independent celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2026, our staff is sharing their “Indy Origin” stories and other memories. See more of them at independent.com/40.
