When You Quit Your Hollywood Dream, You Don’t Get to Find Out What’s Next by SCYTHE Movie’s Jim Rothman
(Read the full Q&A with Jim Rothman here via FilmCourage.com)
When You Quit Your Hollywood Dream, You Don’t Get to Find Out What’s Next by SCYTHE Movie’s Jim Rothman
Film Courage: Where did you grow up?
Jim Rothman: I grew in Burien, WA which was a suburb of Seattle. We lived twenty miles south of the city. I had a prototypical family: mother, daughter, father, son. My parents divorced when I was seven, and in the middle of a heated argument I was sent to live with my father when I was thirteen. It was kinda interesting in a way. I had both my parents under the same roof for the first seven years, just my mother and sister for the next six, and just my father for the final six, before I moved to Hollywood when I was nineteen. We grew up lower middle class. My parents made certain my sister and I got a great private school education, but there was little money left over for anything else. It was a bold sacrifice for my parents. My mom was a stay at home mom, until the divorce, then of course she was a single mom, working. My father owned and operated his own stamp business. When I went to live with him, he ran the store, owner/sole-operator style, leaving me to my devices nearly exclusively. In a way I’ve been on my own since I was thirteen, so learning self reliance was necessary early on. I was provided for of course, just left alone a lot.
Film Courage: What were your plans after high school? How supportive was your family of those plans?
Jim: For the many years growing up I longed to become a police officer. Studied, learned, trained, ate, slept, nearly everything having to do with being a cop. COPS was one of my favorite TV shows, along with the 80/90’s classics, Alf, Dukes of Hazzard, Quantum Leap. It wasn’t till I got closer to high school graduation that I realized, I didn’t want to be a cop: I wanted to PLAY being a cop. My high school didn’t have an acting program. The security guard of the school had a BA from his college in Texas, so for fun he put together a mixed match group of high school kids and asked us to put together a piece of material just to assess our ability and see if we could put on a play worth watching. Being a young writer, I wrote my own piece for the audition. When we performed out pieces, when he came to me, all he said was: I got a script for you. For the next several years I came to him during my high school breaks and learned acting from him. And he got me ready for my audition for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena, CA and I was accepted. My mother, being my mother, did not want me to go. Instead, she wanted me to go get a four year degree of some kind and do acting on the side. My father said as long as I could support myself I could do whatever I wanted.
Film Courage: Did you go to film school?
Jim: I never attended film school, no. Watching films was my film school.
Film Courage: When did you arrive in Los Angeles? Which cliches seem true about LA?
Jim: I got to Pasadena first in 1999. It wasn’t until 2000 after college that I moved out to LA. But LA was LA. It’s been built up quite a bit more now than then, but the attitude of the city still seems to be the same. Very quick, very congested, the people all there to be rich and famous, the glamour of it all in West Hollywood, Beverly Hills. For a small town guy like myself, it was a much different experience.
Film Courage: What do you miss about Seattle? Will you ever go back?
Jim: I miss my Seattle Seahawks, my fish and chips, and downtown Seattle. It’s a much friendlier city. But probably the place I miss the most is on Lopez Island. A place I’ve not been to since I was 15. Still remember it though.
It was actually used in Free Willy 2. It’s a rock reef where the ocean water crashes up against it. There’s a nice spot to sit near the edge where you can sit and see on for miles. The gentle wind blowing, the breeze, the calm of it all was something beautiful. There is actually a plot of practically neon bright green grass on that rock formation near the bottom by the water edge. I was thought perhaps that might be a nice place to buried, to be close to the rock. I plan to have a vacation house there one day for the fall football seasons and to get away when I need to, if I am ever able to be so fortunate to have dual homes. LA is my home now. But I’ll always be Seattle.
(Read the full Q&A with Jim Rothman here via FilmCourage.com)
