Meet George B. Kelly | Motion Picture Producer, Director, and Instructor

We had the good fortune of connecting with George B. Kelly and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi George, why did you pursue a creative career?
That’s a surprisingly hard question to answer… My grandfather was a pioneer in film processing of home movies and consumer film cameras in the 1920s to 40s. My father worked as an engineer in the motion picture industry before pursuing a career in science. My mother was a scientist before becoming a fine artist. So I guess I was brought up to be a brainy and imaginative kid, with a foot in movies already, although I didn’t really understand the family history back then. A mix of technology and art, which formed me into a general craftsman. Of course, like a lot of filmmakers my age, I borrowed my Dad’s Super8 camera and started making movies when I was in 1st or 2nd grade. It was a lark at the time, and my friends and I would goof it up in front of the camera – natural hams.
When my parents wanted me to start having extracurricular activities, I found that there was a local children’s theatre group, and I joined at 7 years old. It turns out that this small-town kids’ activity was the pilot program for the youth theatre project at the most prestigious theatrical company in San Francisco. And so I accidentally got professional acting, voice, and dance lessons before I had lived a decade.
This was followed by my High School Drama Department, the Dramatic Art major at Berkeley, and a UCLA Bachelor’s in Theater and various community theatres (which I still dabble in this day). Before I graduated college, I was working as a professional lighting designer at a stage company under a prize-winning playwright and director.
I gave up the ghost of my aspiration to engineering at UC Berkeley and started taking film classes at UCLA, inspired by the burgeoning new special effects of the 1980s. I started getting work in Hollywood as lighting crew on features and early music videos.
I got into the Graduate Film Production MFA program at NYU, but started working as a Gaffer (Chief Set Lighting Technician) on features in New York, left grad school and worked in film, theatre, fashion, commercials and television over the next three and a half decades. Now, after all that time, and considering retirement, I’ve gone back to school. I’m hoping, after almost 20 years as a professional motion picture director, to finally get my MFA in Motion Picture Directing. Then I’ll quit directing and continue teaching and mentoring, which I hope to do until the day I die.
I’ve always thought that there are four basic types of people in show business: A matrix of those who pursued show biz and those who stumbled into it, crossed with talent or no talent. When you cross those you get Ambitious Talent, Talented Stumblers, the Ambitious Untalented, and the Untalented Stumblers. Those four categories align with Talented Divas, Accomplished Workers, Hacks, and Wash Outs. I count myself as a Talented Stumbler, which makes me an Accomplished Worker, but not a celebrity (nor would I want to be).
So I didn’t decide to join the arts and the creative movie community out of starry-eyed ambition or a sense of talent so much as fate and family history. That’s what makes this question hard to answer…

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
There are a few accomplished motion-picture directors who, while often considered ‘auteurs,’ actually don’t consider themselves to have a personal “style.” Rather, they tailor the approach of their art and craft to the original material, whether co-written by them for the screen, original, or adapted.

I never really thought about it until recently, but as a director, I’m no auteur. My daughter has said to me, “I can tell that this is your movie.” How? “It’s got your ’style.’” Style? “Um, yeah. It’s got lots of close-ups.” So? I like close-ups. I’d say most of my movies are deeply weird and twisty, although they’re all traditional narratives. But I try to stay true to the original material rather than put some sort of stamp on it.

I think even my commercials and music videos tend to have a storytelling feel. And my casting tends to be more generically human than by character type. It’s like close-ups. I just happen to like good actors, regardless of type or temperament. If their basic humanity shines through, then that works for me. So the performances in my work tend to have an “everyman” feel to them. That includes “everywoman” and “everychild” too, of course!

Great stories should touch the common humanity in all of us. I might have my own personal stories to tell, but I prefer to be touched by other people’s stories and bring those to life.

The secret to surviving an artistic career is to stay proud of the work you’ve done, and excited about the work you’re going to do. Even if that work is riddled with compromises, which is inevitable in a complex artform like motion pictures.
Now that I’m transitioning into teaching, the pinnacle of my pride is the work of my students and apprentices. When I see them pull off creatively something they weren’t sure they had the capability to do, but with some precise encouragement from me, they succeeded.

And on that note, what I’m most excited about is teaching. I think I feel more accomplished giving power to a new generation, and a new representation of human voices that will leave a larger mark on the world than any of my actual work as an artist and craftsman.

Professionally, probably my favorite accomplishment was producing and technical directing (arguably) the biggest event at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival. It was essentially a performance art piece and star-studded rave party to promote a feature I’d produced. The film didn’t sell, despite a lot of important interest, due to internal squabbling, but hey, that’s Hollywood for you.

Contrary to popular opinion, making movies is rarely glamorous, or even interesting. Most of the time it’s just incredibly hard and often tedious work, with impossible problems to solve and extraordinarily long hours. Two things get you through it: A passion for making movies and rhinoceros skin. Sounds like a magical potion, doesn’t it?

It’s mainly about perserverence, but not just of mind and body. Most importantly your heart. Keep your wonder childlike, but your emotional life mature and introspective. The passion every artist shares alongside the resilience of a soldier.

I sold out my rising Hollywood career to be closer to my aging parents in San Francisco. I got out of music videos, theatre, and features to make commercials for big Silicon Valley companies. I learned a lot from seeing the inner workings of Facebook, Google, NASA, and others, but in the end, it was unfulfilling, and I do kind of regret it. But I survived, and I’m back in Hollywood after 20 years. (Ironically, the first thing I did after moving to Silicon Valley was to go back to Hollywood to produce a mockumentary about the assassination of Bill Gates…)

Not all the lessons I learned were about show business. The biggest lessons are always pretty universal.
• Learn to be poor. Even commercial art isn’t always a big money-maker if you’re going to stick it out.
• Be nice to people as you climb the ladder; Those are the people you’re going to meet on the way back down.
• Always be professional, courteous, and compassionate. The Golden Rule.
• Learn from the people who know things you don’t. Help people who don’t know the things that you do. We’re all in this together.
• If you’re a student, look at the people sitting beside you in class; that’s going to be your professional network.
• If you’re a worker, look at the people with you on set, from the Line Producer yelling at the UPM on the phone about needing a duplicate picture car, to the Lock-up PA being yelled at by strangers on the street. You’re all making the same movie. You are ALL storytellers.

The backbone of the film industry doesn’t live in Beverly Hills. It’s the hard-working but incredibly dedicated and creative people who come to work every day with love for humanity in their hearts, even if all they ever accomplish is making pretty pictures that entertain people who are stuck indoors, with nothing but their screens during a rainstorm or a pandemic.

Maybe you’re making a big-money star-studded feature film, maybe it’s a TV show for kids, maybe you’re making “high art” with a message on a budget, maybe you’re just selling a service, highlighting a new feature of social media, or attracting investments, but if you’re reaching people, touching them, making them think or feel new things, it’s the real deal.

I feel so incredibly lucky to count myself amongst those anonymous people who really make the magic happen.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way… Skip the Walk of Fame, unless you have some other reason to go to Heart-of-Hollywood. Look, I’m not very star-struck, but for instance, I’m a fan of Jodie Foster. I’ve seen all her movies, so I’ve seen her name in giant letters on a bright screen in every town I’ve lived in, big or small. Why would I want to hunt down her name in 2-inch letters in dirty concrete on a sidewalk? For the life of me I don’t understand why tourists flock there.

The HOLLYWOOD sign? Sure. But it’s the most fun to hike up to it and see the view of Hollywood from behind it. It makes for a great picture!

Nearby is the Griffith Observatory, which you can also hike to. It’s got a free astronomy museum, you can look through the real telescope after dark, and (as only Hollywood can…) well-produced and inexpensive shows in a state-of-the-art planetarium. Even if you’re not into all that stuff, it’s got the classic view of Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) that you’ve seen in a thousand movies.

If you have to do a movie studio, skip Universal Studios. My daughter loves it, but I always tell her that it’s fake movie sets at a fake movie studio on a fake studio lot next to a fake studio backlot, all next to a real movie studio that you don’t get to see. Paramount is the place to tour a real, working movie studio. It’s still at the original studio in Hollywood, unlike Universal or Warner Bros. You might even get locked-up on your tour, needing to be quiet and stand still for a take on an actual production shooting on the lot.

But if you really want to understand Los Angeles, the soul of it is the La Brea Tar Pits. Giant pits of deadly goo welling up out of the ground. Black gold! The gravesite of thousands of prehistoric animals, their bones on display. And one human. Yes, L.A.’s first murder victim. Long before European colonization, a young Native American woman was bashed in the back of the head, and her body was thrown into the tar pits with the long-dead mastodons and saber-toothed cats.

“Rancho La Brea” is Spanish for “The Asphalt Ranch,” the West-Coast version of the concrete jungle. And that’s just what L.A. is: Thousands of acres of asphalt spread out on a flat plain, where lots of useful beings can live and graze.

So where are the best places to graze on the Asphalt Ranch?

Skip the Polo Lounge and the other high-end hotel restaurants. Far and away the best restaurant is Petit Trois in the Heart-of-Hollywood. It’s a very small neighborhood-style place, but the Chef is un Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la République française (A knight of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic). The food is rumored to be transcendental. Speaking from personal experience, it is.

If you’re looking for something more low-key, it’s Barney’s Beanery. The original is in West Hollywood, but now there are ones in Burbank, Santa Monica, Westwood, and Pasadena with the same vibe. Great food, fun atmosphere. And they serve the famous Producers’ Lunch: A hot dog and a bottle of Dom Pérignon ($300.00).

Speaking of hot dogs, don’t leave town without trying an L.A. Street Dog. You can get them from street vendors all over town. I get mine on Hollywood Boulevard or in the festive outlying districts of DTLA.

A few other great things are the actual space shuttle in the basement of the Exposition Park Science Museum and the Original Farmer’s Market, also founded in the 1930s, on Fairfax Avenue. And don’t miss the ritziest hangout in Hollywood, the Roosevelt Hotel, kitty-corner from the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Marilyn Monroe, Errol Flynn, and Montgomery Clift haunt the Hollywood Roosevelt. You can find Marilyn’s ghost in Suite 1200.

But my all-time favorite hangout is the Formosa Café. It’s a Hollywood classic, and it’s been there for 85 years now. I’ve been in and out of Hollywood for almost half that time, and I’ve watched it go from trendy hangout to embarrassingly empty ghost and back again several times. It’s right next to the original Warner Bros. studio lot, and they’ve been trying to condemn it for years, but it always comes back by popular demand. It has one of the original Red Cars as part of its dining room (yes, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is based on a true story).

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
My father and grandfather were the influencing undercurrent of my whole career, although I clearly get my artistic bent from my maternal lineage. Both sides had technicians, scientists, and artists.

Two college professors, George Ulnic at Berkeley, who taught Lighting Design at UC Berkeley, and Frantisek “Frank” Valert, who taught Cinematography at UCLA were a huge influence on me. The courses I teach today are all modeled after theirs. My courses include Advanced Lighting for Cinematography, and I’m currently writing a short book on the subject.

I credit Mike LaViolette (now the regular Gaffer for an important director) as my movie-lighting mentor. He helped me learn how to translate theatre lighting to movie lighting, extending into the real world what I learned from Professors Ulnic and Valert.

The actors directors, designers, and cinematographers with whom I’ve worked that inspired and influenced me is far too long to list without missing someone important. I will shout out to a few of my late colleagues who influenced me significantly: Cinematographer Sergio Coro, directors Robert Downey, Sr., and Neil Kinsella; last but not least my little spirit sister, actress Derya Arbas Berti.

Several books had a great influence on me. I was brought up as a Unitarian, but felt a spiritual absence in my life in my mid-20s. I’d always had a more than passing interest in physics and discovered a whole trend of books comparing modern particle and quantum physics to ancient Eastern religions (“The Dao of Physics,” etc.).

This got me to start researching comparative religions as a hobby, and stumbling upon “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which compares Eastern and Western modalities of thought, and I dove deep into Zen Buddhist metaphysics. It’s stuck with me, and besides getting nicknamed “The Zenmaster” on film sets, I credit my Zen study with surviving a serious hospitalization in 2021.

I guess I’m obligated to list my “Great Artist” influences. This list is long too, but the pantheon would include William Shakespeare, Isaac Asimov, Salvador Dalí, Rembrandt van Rijn, Gustav Klimt, Auguste Rodin, Michelangelo, Johann Sebastian Bach, Wendy Carlos, Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Stanley Kubrick, and Greta Gerwig. Dalí inspired my animation tour-de-force; Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” has influenced my entire life, and still does. I consider Gerwig the greatest living director of our time.

Website: http://www.cinespecialproductions.com

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/george-b-kelly/16/715/806/

Youtube: https://vimeo.com/georgebkelly

Other: http://www.imdb.me/georgebkelly
http://pro-labs.imdb.com/name/nm1231074

Image Credits
John Alcott Lucky Atkare Sergio Coro Kristel E. Gomez George B. Kelly Richard Krause Michael LaViolette