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Excerpted from LatinoLink:
'Red Light August' Director Gets the Green Light
By RICARDO
VAZQUEZ
© 2000 LatinoLink
Continued from page
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But Gomez countered that the film was made
for an adult audience and was never intended as a documentary, but rather as
a work of art. "My interest in making the film was partially to show people
who have OCD," said Gomez. "Certainly, there's an artistic component in this
whole thing -- that you can take this unfortunate mental difficulty and turn
it into a piece of artwork."
Precisely what Independent View producer Scott Dwyer thinks of the movie. Its "great visual style, interesting story and strong soundtrack...all add to a unique half-hour drama," he said.
Also unique was the fact that Dwyer found the film on a web site. The entire half-hour work is posted on LAlive.com. Surely it was a great way to publicize the movie. Then again, one wouldn't expect less from the internet savvy Gomez.
"Red Light August" is not Gomez's first foray into story telling. Long before that film, he had already made a name for himself as creator of Turok, an immensely popular video for Nintendo 64, Gameboy and PC. The even more elaborate plot of the sequel, Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, has shipped more than 1.5 million copies and has spun off comic books and a line of toys.
For the seeds of this interactive story telling, as for many other aspects of Gomez's work, one has to go back to his childhood. "When I was a teenager...I began to use something called 'adventure games' like Dungeons and Dragons," said Gomez. "That way, a group of people could still sit around a table and listen to me tell stories, but they would also participate. That was early interactive storytelling. I then understood what video games were all about because it's essentially the same thing, except it's the computer telling the story."
Not that game developing companies began knocking on Gomez's door overnight. Before he became a successful creator, he had to overcome quite a few obstacles. "I've learned a lot about success, and about how Latinos are held back, or at least how they were until Ricky Martin came along," said Gomez half seriously, half jokingly.
As a young man with a talent for telling stories, Gomez remembers how a lawyer once advised him to change his last name to Holmes so he would have an easier time being published.
"As an experiment I submitted an article to a newspaper under the byline Jeffrey Holmes. It was published immediately," said Gomez, who found the experience "both frightening and enlightening at the same time."
But the bitter taste left behind by the experience of seeing a different name attached to his work prompted Gomez to say "never again." And to this date, his Latino surname appears on all his projects.