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question about it -- a storm was gonna happen, it was just a matter of when.
    Act III began, and tiny drops of rain began to descend. Ed, giving the best performance of his life, was totally oblivious. Even the two burly police officers, assigned to monitor his every move, seemed to enjoy the show. Thankfully, the weather held until the final curtain and Ed got quite an ovation. I'm sure Charlie clapped harder than anyone.
    Once off stage, Ed quietly changed back into civilian clothes and was escorted to the waiting patrol car. As the sedan pulled away, the heavens opened up and drenched all the well-wishers.
    We toasted Ed at the cast party that night.
    "To Ed! An Actor's actor!" someone shouted.
    As I raised my glass of punch, I looked around the room. I had never before seen people so passionate, particularly about an amateur play, and I realized that this was the life for me.
    I'm sure Charlie wasn't surprised when I announced that I wanted to be an actor. He also had dreams of becoming a painter, but my grandfather talked him out of it. Eager to see me free from a similar trap, Charlie encouraged me to get involved as deeply as I dared.
    With this endorsement in hand, I set off to find out what this "actor" thing was all about.

3
    THE ASSEMBLY OF LIKE-MINDED INDIVIDUALS
    FORMATION OF THE "DETROIT MAFIA"
    Michigan is surrounded by the largest supply of fresh water in the world -- hence the nickname of "the Great Lakes state." But there must have been something more to the water of southeastern Michigan, something that caused half a dozen young men to throw caution to the wind and pursue the film business.

    Meet "The Boys":
    Mike Ditz and I date back to pre-kindergarten. Our mothers drove neighborhood kids to various events and we shared company at a birthday party or two. Mike's dad documented many of these events with a hand-cranked, Kodak Brownie double 8mm camera.
    We found this "adult toy" much more interesting than your average G.I. Joe. You had a choice of three lenses, mounted on a revolving turret. The film inside was actually 16mm, mounted on a twenty-five-foot roll. After exposing one side, you flipped it over and exposed the other side. The processing laboratory would split the film down the middle and voila -- you had 8mm home movies.
    There were a few gizmos on this camera that just begged to be exploited, such as single-frame exposure. This allowed us to do magical things with the touch of a button. We could disappear, "animate" ourselves skidding across the ground, or change into Richard Nixon (my favorite mask at the time).
    Mike's interest was primarily behind the camera, since he knew how to operate the damn thing. This was fine with me because it allowed me to jump in front of the lenses -- all three of them. In the early experiments we did, the concept of telling a story hadn't captured our imaginations yet -- that's where Scott Spiegel came in.

    Junior high school hooks you up with kids from strange new lands. Scott was one of them. He lived near Walnut Lake, where my family had summer swimming privileges. Scott and I bumped elbows unknowingly at Gene's, the local candy store, buying Spree or banana-flavored Turkish Taffy.
    In eighth-grade study hall, when Mike Ditz wasn't borrowing Mad magazines from him, Scott and I talked about movies and TV almost all the time. We both agreed that the new film, The Poseidon Adventure, was about the coolest disaster movie ever and that The Ghoul, a local TV show, was very funny. The gag of this cheesy show was to air a really bad horror film and the host, Ron Swede, would dub in his own disgusting sound effects and put on skits during commercial breaks. One of his favorite pranks was to blow things up with M-80s, and Scott was impressed that a prop I had sent in got blown to smithereens.
    As it turned out, Scott also made 8mm films, but by the time I met him in 1972 he was a veteran. His first film, Inspector Klutz Saves the Day, was cranked out in 1969.
    "It was