Catching Up With . . . Paul Davids

Hooray for (Edgy) Hollywood ... and More

by Brooke C. Stoddard '69

Paul is one of only a few Classmates who made a career in Hollywood. He moved to Los Angeles soon after graduation, and set out to make television shows and movies. These are edgy, but on the edge is where Paul always wanted to be.

Paul grew up in Kensington and Bethesda, Maryland. His father was a noted scholar and professor of American diplomatic history at Georgetown (who taught Jacqueline Kennedy and, via that acquaintance, shaped the original stories for Profiles in Courage) and his mother a teacher. Paul’s sister leaned to swimming competitively, but Paul took to making 8mm movies. He had a fascination with animation, soon fueled by the Sinbad stop-motion animation movies of Ray Harryhausen. An 8mm movie that Paul made at age 14 won a national magazine award, so he was getting encouragement.

Growing up only a few miles from the grave of F. Scott Fitzgerald likely had an influence on Paul’s selection of Princeton for higher education. He majored in psychology and was pre-med but worked on his writing. He won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award in our junior year, as well as a poetry prize and Tiger Magazine’s prize for humorous writing. All this led to his decisions to forego a medical career and try his talents in Hollywood, a path, of course, also trekked by Fitzgerald.

Paul was chosen for a very select group to study at the new American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies, a course that opened doors and introduced him to film heavyweights such as William Wyler, Charles Bronson, and John Huston. He also met his wife Hollace Goodman while in Cambridge, Mass., to work on a Warner Bros. movie set and married her in 1972. Paul and Hollace now have two grown children and, looking back, Paul says "the marriage provided a stability in my life during a career with huge amounts of rejection, and I am very grateful for that.”

After the AFI education, Paul worked for Hollywood agent Paul Kohner before helping produce episodes of F. Lee Bailey’s Lie Detector and then 80 episodes of the original Transformer cartoons, keeping alive his love of animation. A bit later, Paul and a literary agent pitched the idea of writing Star Wars books, the premise being that a rising generation in the 1990s should not be allowed to lose interest in the time between the completion of the third movie and that of the fourth many years later. Hollace was Paul’s co-writer of six Star Wars efforts during this period; the illustrated books were translated into many languages and sold millions of copies.

It was not until Paul was 45 that he produced a major cable TV movie. This was Roswell: The UFO Coverup, which originally aired on Showtime in 1994 and has become something of a cult classic on TV. It starred Kyle MacLachlan and Martin Sheen and proposed that the 1947 Roswell debris was really an alien space craft crash, an interpretation to which Paul still subscribes. The movie was nominated for a Golden Globe Best TV Motion Picture Award. A few years later, Paul directed his first feature, a biography of Timothy Leary, with whom Paul worked on the film during the last year of the LSD-advocate’s life; it’s called Timothy Leary’s Dead.

Interest in the Leary film energized Paul’s next effort, which was writing and directing Starry Night, a fantasy about Vincent van Gogh – the artist comes back to life in a Pasadena Rose Bowl Parade, discovers that his paintings (which he could never sell during his lifetime) now fetch small fortunes and sets about stealing them. Universal Pictures picked it up for its Home Entertainment division, then licensed it to TV around the world, and Universal has helped Paul with several subsequent films. Paul notes with great pleasure that the DVD of Starry Night is sold at the gift store of the Museum of Modern Art which owns Vincent’s original painting of that name. The artist subject nicely dovetails with the fact that through the years Paul has become an extremely prolific artist in his own right, with books showcasing his paintings now available (through Blurb online) and even a major exhibition in 2014 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, CA.

Since the early 1990s Paul has made almost a dozen independent films, about one every two years. His most successful commercially, and available on Netflix among other places (most of Paul’s movies are available on DVD), is The Sci-Fi Boys, a documentary about sci-fi, horror, and fantasy special effects told by movie persons who, like Paul, became fascinated with special effects at an early age. Peter Jackson, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg appear as well as less well-known but Paul Davids’ personal heroes Ray Harryhausen, George Pal, and Forrest J. Ackerman.

A more recent feature documentary that aired extensively on the Sundance Channel and on TV around the world was Jesus in India. The premise is that Jesus traveled to India at some time between his childhood and the beginning of his ministry (the Gospels being silent on this period), thereby picking up some Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. It also raises as a possibility that Jesus may have survived the crucifixion and returned to India, living a long life there and being buried in Kashmir, which purportedly has Hebraic and Jewish roots. Princeton Religion Professor Elaine Pagels appears in the film to say that the basic premise of Jesus possibly having traveled to India during the so-called "Missing Years” cannot be ruled out.

Another was Before We Say Goodbye with an all-Latino cast focusing on the incident of the Lady of Guadalupe and other purported miracles. More recent is The Life After Death Project, picked up by the Syfy Channel last year and scientifically investigating a particularly fascinating case of communication with the dead . . . a case that involved Paul directly and one of Paul’s film mentors: the late Forrest J. Ackerman. This drew a great deal of interest and has been followed by The Life After Death Project 2: Personal Encounters.

Says Paul: "I chose controversial subjects and dealt with them in a controversial way. It was always my intention to create fire storms with the things that I did. Jesus in India stirred the religion editor of the Wall Street Journal to say it was a ‘cavalcade of crackpots’ (What? Pagels? Libel!) I liked that, though, because so many of my movies have been about persons considered crackpots in their time but who made tremendous contributions, even becoming accepted as mainstream – witness van Gogh and Leary, or Forrest Ackerman who was ridiculed in the 1930s for saying man would one day fly to the moon.”

A future film project involves Marilyn Monroe; another takes up Paul’s father’s contribution to Profiles in Courage.

Paul believes he may have attended more movie premieres in a non-working capacity than just about anyone in Hollywood – a case for the Guinness Book of World Records, he says -- a reason being that Hollace has been in charge of premieres at Universal for almost two decades… and before that at Tristar and Columbia Pictures, back to the pre-Ghostbuster days. "These have been wonderful fun,” he says, "but thank goodness I don’t drink,” the attendant parties always flowing abundantly with liquor.

Paul’s principal hobby is magic, which he has practiced from a young age, and he has been a member of Hollywood’s Magic Castle (and the Academy of Magical Arts) for decades. But he puts most of his spare time into painting as discussed above– in different media and different styles. These have enjoyed exhibitions throughout California as well as in Mexico and Utah. Many are posted at Paul’s art website pauldavids-artist.com and eight to ten coffee table books of his art are planned (three now being available in hardback or digitally at Blurb.com)

Paul has also written three books of poetry, all available online. His poetry spans the humorous (think Shel Silverstein), beginning with Poems to Read While Driving on Freeways, to the serious, and to personalities such as Edgar Allen Poe. "Like my paintings, I hope my poetry is discovered by The Establishment,” says Paul. "Hopefully while I’m still above ground! We’ll see.” Some of Paul’s poetry finds audience on YouTube clips. Paul has created a character called Professor Hack Harddrive, whom Paul impersonates rapping some of his poems on various topics to a background of visuals.

Like many hard-working Hollywood professionals, Paul occasionally gets out of town. He vacations in Sedona, Santa Fe, and Big Bear Lake, California. Both son and daughter are grown and have successful careers in the film industry, the one in digital effects, the other in advertising art design. He points out that his son, Scott, can be either praised or blamed (as an editor) for much of Sacha Baron Cohen’s "Borat” and also "Bruno.” Hollace maintains her position of SVP of Special Projects at Universal Pictures.

To learn more about Paul and his works, try the website noted above (www.pauldavids-artist.com), as well as pauldavids.com, and there are separate websites for many of his movies. He welcomes correspondence at roswellufo@aol.com or starrynightmovie@aol.com.