Drawing Directors: SCA legend Randal Kleiser reveals another talent
by Desa Philadelphia
Randal Kleiser is a bona fide member of the Film School Generation, the maverick graduates of USC, NYU and other programs that came to prominence in the sixties and seventies with groundbreaking films that legitimized getting an education in film scholarship and production. Kleiser credits include The Blue Lagoon, White Fang, Big Top Pee Wee, and Grease, one of the most celebrated musicals of all time. He graduated from the School of Cinematic Arts with an undergraduate degree in 1968, a member of the class that included George Lucas, John Milius, Basil Poledouris, Caleb Deschanel, Walter Murch, Willard Huyck, and others. “They called us ‘the Dirty Dozen,’” recounts Kleiser. “It was the beginning of the USC Mafia.” Kleiser also earned a master’s degree at the School in 1974.
Kleiser has been blind contour drawing—where the artist draws the contour of a live subject without looking at the paper—since his grandfather sent him to art school when he was a child.
“I was able to do it in church when I was a kid, when I was bored,” he laughs. He kept up the practice, and started doing it at Q&As after film screenings. “It as a way to pass the time while I listened to what they were saying.” This summer he published “Drawing Directors, Volume I” a collection of the drawings he has done over the years, along with anecdotes about the directors portrayed.
With a foreword by Roger Corman, the book includes portraits of 110 directors including Billy Wilder, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Lucas, Milius, and cover subject Steven Spielberg. “He caught me drawing him and said, ‘hey that looks like me,’ and I said, ‘can I put you on the cover then?’”
The book spans generations of directors, from Buster Keaton, the comedic actor-director who dominated 1920s box office, to USC grad Jay Roach (Austin Powers), to the Daniels (Everything Everywhere All at Once). When he was a USC student, Kleiser snuck onto the set of Beach Blanket Bingo, in which Keaton had a cameo. “He was sitting off in the corner by himself, I couldn’t believe it,” says Kleiser. “So I went over to talk to him, and I sketched him when he wasn’t watching.”
Kleiser keeps a sketch pad and pen with him at all times, at least in the car. At events, he says, “I sit in the front row, and keep my eye on the subject, and they don’t even know I’m drawing them.” He has accumulated hundreds of drawings of directors and is currently preparing a Volume II book, featuring more Hollywood visionaries.
Drawing Directors: Volume I
For many decades, film director Randal Kleiser (Grease, The Blue Lagoon, White Fang) has been drawing sketches of other fellow directors using a technique called blind contour drawing, where you trace the lines of the subject with your eye and simultaneously draw with a pen on the paper without looking down. The difficulty was that the subjects moved or changed positions in mid-sketch and many of the attempts were thrown away. This is a collection of the ones that worked.