It's where other service members left with
traumatic brain injuries practice the art of video editing, where Marines with
limited use of their arms lug shoulder-mounted cameras into the field.
Life moves quickly at "the School,"
as the Wounded Marine Careers Foundation in San Diego has been dubbed by its 19
students and instructors. Teachers in the filmmaking academy include Academy
Award and Emmy winners and acclaimed movie-industry technicians.
It's an invitation-only program for seriously
wounded casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Classes meet every day and don't end until
after dark. Getting into the 50-day program requires an interview with
instructors and directors as well as the usual applications.
The students are expected to keep up despite
agony in their limbs from bullets and shrapnel injuries or medication to
control combat-related stress.Sometimes they slip outside to grab an espresso
to fight the effects of the powerful pain medications -- including morphine
pills and Vicodin -- that most take daily.
Two make it around in wheelchairs, limbs
missing from war.
First Graduates
Course work includes everything from
interviewing Medal of Honor recipients to videotaping a concert at Camp
Pendleton to capturing Marines training at a nearby mockup Iraqi village before
returning to combat.
The payoff: a coveted membership in the
International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the union that represents
workers in motion pictures, television and theater.
Membership is essential to landing the best
paying gigs as camera operators, sound mixers, editors, lighting directors and
writers. Graduates from the School won't have to pay initial union membership
fees, which can reach $2,500, and the union will help them find work.
National union President Thomas Short calls the
San Diego program a head start for current and former servicemen bound for new
careers.
"We know they will make a substantial
contribution to our industry," Short said.
The School's first class graduated Thursday at
Stu Segall Productions in San Diego, where the television series "Silk
Stalkings" and "Veronica Mars" were taped.
The School formerly served as a prop storage
house. Habitat for Humanity volunteers and active-duty Marines spent three
months converting it into a classroom, building partitions for individual
learning centers, laying electrical cable and installing wheelchair ramps for
students with limited mobility.
The graduates included Marine Gunnery Sgt. Nick
Popaditch, 40, and Lance Cpl. Michael Passmore, 23, both Twentynine Palms
residents before they earned Purple Hearts for combat wounds in Iraq.
Better Listener
Popaditch was a 17-year Marine when his Abrams
tank blew up after a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into its turret in
Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004, an attack caught in dramatic fashion by a CNN
cameraman, who continued taping as the bloody Popaditch crawled out of the
tank.
The attack left him deaf in his right ear,
blind in his right eye and with just 8 percent vision in his left. He's
learning to become a sound technician, a job that requires him to set up
overhead microphones and other audio equipment while working a mixing board to
record the right sounds while eliminating background noise. He can't drive anymore
and he uses a monocle to get around the job site.
But he's good to go.
He has a glass eye in place of the one he lost
in Iraq. It bears the eagle, globe and anchor emblem that symbolizes the Marine
Corps.
"The time for feeling sorry for myself is
long gone," Popaditch said.
"I'm 40 years old and I am looking at all
sorts of possibilities I didn't have a year ago. It's all good. It's kind of
like getting a second childhood."
Honoring Bruce Lee
Passmore, who suffered blurred vision from a
roadside bomb in Al-Anbar province, said he hopes to take the lessons learned
at the School and put them to work on a documentary film.
His subject: martial arts legend Bruce Lee.
Passmore said he wants to build the future film around Lee's former student,
Jerry Poteet, himself a master of the style Lee created more than 35 years ago.
Passmore sees cash as well as creativity in the
filmmaking program.
"It helps me make money," he said.
That attitude suits founders Kev Lombard, and
his wife, Judith Paixao just fine.
The pair, both documentary filmmakers, dreamed
up the idea of the School after the Marines approached them and asked them to
make a film about Leathernecks hurt in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Marines didn't
want their wounded to be forgotten. Lombard and Paixao wanted to do more -- to
turn the former trigger-pullers into storytellers.
They worked to raise the $3.5 million to run
the school, garnering corporate sponsorships from Apple, Adobe, Canon and
AbelCine Tech and support from the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, the
National Association of Broadcasters and the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund.
Corporate and individual sponsors pick up the
tab for the program, which runs between $75,000 and $80,000 per student.
"Being a storyteller is an art," said
Lombard, a four-time Emmy winner who moved from Connecticut to San Diego to
launch the School. "It heals the person who is telling the story and the
person who is listening."
Lombard, 57, said he's amazed at the never-quit
attitude exhibited by the Marines-turned-moviemakers.
"I don't complain about aches and pains
any more," he said.
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