By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO—Laura Simon, an artist and writer, admits that she used to shrink back whenever she would see teenagers approaching.  Teenagers made her nervous, but that was when she was much younger—perhaps as far back as when she was 97.  Now that she is 100, she counts some teenagers as among her best friends.  They are students in a remarkable film program at Point Loma High School.

In particular, Simon will brighten whenever you mention the names of Tyler Knell and Eric Louie, who collaborated on Laura Simon: Making Her Mark, a short film completed in time to be shown Nov. 26, 2005, at a celebration of Simon's first century. Nearly from the moment she recalls on film that she was born in Chicago in 1905, when Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States, Simon's 'can-do' philosophy shines through. After the film by Knell and Louie was screened during the Film School Confidential Festival at San Diego's Museum of Photographic Arts, the audience gave her a standing ovation as well as a bouquet of roses.

As a matter of coincidence, the film brought together in collaboration three remarkable members of San Diego's Jewish community: Simon, Knell, and Pt. Loma film program teacher Larry Zeiger.

  
Laura Simon                                    Tyler Knell                                        Larry Zeiger
The students spent long hours with Simon recording her stories, photographing her paintings, and drinking in a philosophy that acknowledges that life will bring its vicissitudes, but that you have to be strong and never give up the quest to learn.  Born to working class parents, Simon had to drop out of school to go to work and help pay for her younger siblings' education. Among other jobs, she worked as a secretary to the branch manager of the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation in Chicago, one of the early movie makers.  The film students ate that up.  Simon was married for 52 years and one of her children, playwright Mayo Simon, suggests in the film that among other reasons for his mother's appeal is that her life story offers hope.

Perhaps because circumstances denied her a formal education, Simon became a life-long student. She regularly attends classes at UCSD's Institute for Continued Learning.  She also is a familiar face at lectures and classes held at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center and at the senior center operated by Jewish Family Service in the University City neighborhood of San Diego.

Although her eyesight is so poor that she is classified as legally blind, Simon up to recently painted and made collages, some of which won awards in local competitions.  She also dictates into the tape recorder stories from her life, which friends like UCSD Literature Prof. Charles Chamberlain and other volunteers, transcribe. I had the privilege of publishing two of her stories in the now defunct San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage, and she won local journalism awards for both of them.

Constrained by the time limits of  "short film" competitions, the students recorded  many hours of interviews with Simon that may, in the future, provide scholars with an oral history about a remarkable life.  On the other hand, notes Knell, Simon is in the process of completing her autobiography, I'm Still Here, and plans to finance its publication herself if she can't find a commercial publisher.  One way or another, more stories from Simon's hundred years will come out.

Knell always has enjoyed acting (San Diego Junior Theatre), singing (San Diego Lyric Opera)  and video photography,  but says it was not until he began taking Zeiger's classes that he started to give a career in film serious consideration. Zeiger helped him and other students understand that there is more to film than the action on screen. Today a Pt. Loma High School senior with an A-plus average waiting to hear which universities have accepted him, Knell's first experience as a film maker was a clay-animation public service announcement to warn against j-walking.  "It was kind of dark," Knell recalls. "Our main character j-walks... and gets run over by a bus.  When he gets to the gates of heaven, it's brought to his attention he didn't look both ways."

The next project, suggested by Jesse Brunt, was a story about a boy whose letter to Santa Claus was "intercepted and his struggle to get it back."  The film took eight months to complete, and it won a first prize at the Innovative Video in Education Awards sponsored by the San Diego County Board of Education.

The following year, Brunt and Knell made a film for which they won the grand prize award—a story of a can left on the sidewalk that dreamed of all the wonderful things it could be, if only it were recycled. 

"Then Mr. Zeiger came to the class and said he had been to Laura Simon's 99th birthday, and he kept going on about Laura and suggested that we make a film about Laura and finish it in time for her 100th birthday," Knell recalled. Brunt had graduated so Knell teamed up with Josh Lizarraga and Jacob Yufa for the early stages of the documentary, and then when they graduated, he brought it to completion with Eric Louie.

If Simon had some learning to do about teenagers, near-centenarians also were a mystery to the students.  "I had never gotten to know someone on the verge of 100 years old," Knell said. "I didn't know what to expect."  He recalled that at their first meeting, they introduced themselves to each other, and "I saw this spark in her; I thought this is what I want to be—I want to have that spark when I am 100.  When we came back, she remembered everything about us, the projects that we working on, and that capped it off for me."

Fascinating to Knell was the fact that "the stories she was telling were a mirror image of what the country was facing as her life progressed, what you would read about in the encyclopedia, Spanish flu and the wars... She is so outspoken, so outgoing and she can connect with so many people.  These are rare qualities that you don't find in too many people."

Currently, Knell is working on two films. One is a story about a boy who finds a magical pot in his yard.  Whatever he puts into it he can duplicate. The film examines "how he deals with that power."  Another, much shorter, "is a dark comedy with a serious undertone. It deals with trust, guidance and religion, in a sense." Knell said he didn't want to say anything else about the plot.  To rent the equipment to make these films, he said, he has been digging into the money he received from his bar mitzvah five years ago at Congregation Dor Hadash, San Diego's only Reconstructionist synagogue.  He said he spent $1,500 on the magical pot film, and $400 on the other.

Zeiger said that like Simon, his mother was a student at the UCSD's Institute for Continued Learning.  The two women—one a transplanted Chicagoan, the other a transplanted Clevelander—became good friends. 

A teacher for 32 years, Zeiger says it was Cleveland's bad weather that turned him into such a film buff.  "We went to movies all the time," he recalled. "I saw more movies between the ages of 5 and 18 than at any point in my life. I used to go to the store, and buy the books that the movies were made after.  When I went to the University of Miami (Florida), the teachers encouraged me to get involved in the film community."  He did a master's at San Diego State University, and flirted with enrolling in a doctoral program elsewhere, but meanwhile started teaching in the mid 1970s.

"It was a time that public education was at its most creative and innovative," Zeiger said.  "The English curriculum for juniors and seniors was made up of a variety of electives.  They could take a semester of Shakespeare, or modern media, or gothic novels, or women in literature, or the athlete in literature.  I developed a film program, and subsequently wrote up another curriculum for music and the theatre."

Zeiger's film program at Point Loma High School  became a "pilot program" of the San Diego Unified School District, and by the late 1980s it was winning awards.  Like many devoted teachers, Zeiger financed some of the program himself. For film lovers around the world, Zeiger's investment paid off royally.

Today, he said, "literally hundred of my former students are at work in television and theatre, and it is tremendously rewarding to meet with them."  

Such as?  

"Chris Brinker, a producer, who did a cult movie seven years ago, Boondock Saints, which is a favorite movie among college kids... Steve Horowitz has a company called Corporate Logos...Halle Stanford, director of children's programming with Jim Henson's Muppets.... Michael Ford, a top animator and digital effects person at Sony; I use his text book on animation.... Randall Rosa, director of Stan Winston's studio and a winner of an Academy Award for digital effects....Jason Scheff, lead singer for Chicago....Aaron Zigman, who wrote the musical score for The Notebook and who also did John Q... Erik Fleming, who is working in TV reality shows, and also directed the TV movie, My Brother the Pig... David Krintzman, an entertainment lawyer who produces big budget movies like The Butterfly Effect..."

Zeiger is just as enthusiastic about his current students.  "I have one kid, Blake Ritterman, who started his own film society.  He shows a film, a landmark film, or an independent film, and with 20-25 kids, they have a discussion afterwards.  The other week they saw Cachet, an abstract French film at a local theatre, and they discussed the film afterwards for about 20 minutes.  Other members of the audience stayed to hear them.  The kid is an entrepreneur. Maybe some day he will run film festivals."

The teacher is very high on Knell, whom he believes has a tremendous career ahead of him.  He explained that he has seen a lot of student films in his years, not only those of his students, but also those of famous directors like Steven Spielberg , George Lucas, Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola. Some of the films were not very good, but in each one could see a glimmer of what these famous directors would become.  "I tell Tyler and Eric that their films are vastly superior," he declares flatly.

He said that Laura Simon: Making Her Mark probably will make the round of student film festivals, and perhaps Jewish film festivals as well.  It was completed too late to be shown at this year's San Diego Jewish Film Festival, but Zeiger hopes it can be shown to Jewish audiences in the future.  It also will be kept in Pt. Loma High School's collection of student films.

There is a scene in the film, said Zeiger, that never fails to stir audiences.  A cake with 100 candles is placed in front of Simon.  She keeps trying and trying until they all are blown out.  You can't help but cheer.