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"I figured if my parents were investing all that money in my education, I better do something practical," he says. "Back then, special effects just weren't something somebody did. But my dad and mom said, 'If we're paying all that money, you'd better do what you want.' " So O'Neill transferred to the School of Communications. "One of the really nice things about being in the communications school was that not many students were in the film production classes," he says. "If you were really into it, you could be there every day, Monday through Sunday. Everything was there for you, including the instructors, and Skip Landen became one of the guiding forces for me. I wanted to do as much photography as I could, and he recognized that and kept me focused on what I wanted to do." In the days before computers played such a key role in combining animation with live action, O'Neill spent his IC years learning his trade with a 16-mm camera, models, stop-motion filming, and a vivid imagination. He made what he calls "a lot of loonies," including a short film of a student being chased by a doorknob. "It was a film production project," he says. "The assignment was to kill somebody with a doorknob. So I made a clay and wire model of a doorknob, animated it, and ended up with a movie about a doorknob popping off the door, trapping a guy in the room, and chasing him around. The doorknob didn't kill him, though. It killed somebody outside because the guy ended up picking up the doorknob and tossing it out the window." After graduating with a degree in film production in 1983, O'Neill was hired by a director who was shooting a feature film in New York City. O'Neill's job: assistant to the accountant. "I'd done an internship in Los Angeles my senior year, cutting trailers for a vendor of Universal Studios Hollywood. But my first real job wasn't geared to visual effects at all. My experience in the business school paid off in a really odd way." Things continued to pay off as the filming continued. "It was a pretty low-budget film, and people were leaving to work on bigger, better productions," says O'Neill. "So every time somebody would quit in the production office, I'd just say, 'Hey, I can do that job --- just give me an extra 50 dollars a week.' It was good for the producer because I was working cheaper than the person who had quit, and it was good for me because I was becoming more involved in every aspect of making a movie on a professional level. By the time it was over, I was the associate producer." The show, unfortunately, had a hard time finding a buyer. It was also a time when film production in New York City hit a serious downturn. "That was the end of my film career, at least for the time being," O'Neill says. "So I went into the plastics business. Remember the line from The Graduate? It was like the man said, 'Get into plastics.' " As it turned out, the world of business once again opened a door for
him. "I represented a company that imported and exported plastics,
and the work took me around the world. I did that for about a year and was
able to move to California, where I knew I needed to be because that's where
the film industry is. I slowly started to pick up odd jobs at different
production houses in my spare time, and eventually I landed a job with Peter
Kuran and his effects company. I cut my teeth on a lot of music videos and
feature films like Robocop and Beetlejuice." |
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When O'Neill arrived at Ithaca in the late 1970s, though, he decided
to enroll in the business school and study filmmaking on the side.