At eighteen, Bob Charlton headed west from Cincinnati to become a physicist. Instead, he became an eloquent storyteller — a writer, photographer, producer, and award-winning film director with the ability to turn even corporate marketing stories into engaging works of art. He describes himself as a “media architect,” because between film and video projects he applies his skills to the Web. During the course of our interview, I decided “polymath” is a more appropriate description.

Charlton is conversant in poetry, fine arts, classical music, physics, and mathematics — the product of an education at Reed College preceded by a type of public schooling now rare. He was four when his father, an inventor and photographic researcher, gave him his first camera; Charlton grew up learning how to manipulate lenses, filters, and light. He studied drawing and painting at the Cincinnati Art Academy, the same place that introduced him to classic short films from around the world that “weren’t known as classics at the time.”

The story of his own filmmaking career begins with a fish story (literally) called Sockeye Odyssey, created for the U.S. Department of the Interior. During college, he spent summers working in Alaska, tagging salmon for a Fish & Wildlife Service research project. He recalls, “While upriver, I was struck by the beauty of the sunlight sparkling on the water. I knew they had a movie camera in [the town of] King Salmon — a 16mm Bell & Howell 70DR, which was a windup camera with no reflex viewing. I suggested I could get some nice footage of the nets in the river. I ended up making a movie of the entire operation over a two-year period.”

How fitting for a man who says he “was pushed over the edge into filmmaking after seeing Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran, the ultimate water film.”

Charlton appreciates the richness of nature and remote geographic outposts. He finds beauty in primitive places. Since his Alaskan days, he has made documentaries such as Caracol, The Lost Maya City and Songs of a Distant Jungle. For the latter, he and his crew followed an American musician from Juilliard through the rainforests of Papua New Guinea. Reflecting on his work, Charlton once wrote: “I have walked with Buddhist monks in the foothills of the Himalayas, heard the morning birds at Tikal, lived in small villages and imperial cities — and from time to time I’ve had the resources and freedom to translate my involvement into film.”

These translations of his involvement have resulted in two regional Emmy awards, five CINE Golden Eagles, seven CINDYs, and about twenty international gold medals. His credits include documentaries at home and abroad for Lucasfilm, Ltd., BBC-TV, Bechtel Corporation, Connecticut Public Television, the National Park Service, the National Science Foundation, and NHK Television. Add to those: corporate marketing and technical pieces for 3DO, Bank of America, Cathay-Pacific Airlines, Chevron, Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed/NASA, Port of Oakland, Panasonic, Saatchi & Saatchi, and... you get the picture.

Charlton hates being pigeonholed. He loves the challenge of communicating complicated information if he has the freedom to bring it alive, and he cares very much about the emotional dimension of his work. If asked what he is most proud of, he would probably say Survival Run, a docudrama he directed that received, among other awards, a CINDY Best-of-Show and the Rosalind Russell “Best Director” award at L.A.’s FILMEX. On the surface, it’s about two men, one blind, the other his guide, running the Dipsea Race over Mt. Tamalpais. At a more profound level, consider this quote from a review in The Economic Times of Bombay:

“I shall not be overshooting my mark if I say that Survival Run has the deepest symbolic undertones. It is about humanity, about man’s linking up with his fellow being, and it is about all those qualities which are noble and human.”

Humanitarian qualities aside, the film made me want to hike the Dipsea Trail the weekend after I saw it, despite my aversion to steep hillsides. But maybe I'm a pushover. After reading, “Truffaut par Truffaut,” a book review Charlton wrote about Francois Truffaut: Correspondence, 1945-1984 for the San Francisco Review of Books, I ordered a copy for my husband.

Survival Run also brought Charlton to the attention of Hollywood studios, got him signed with an agent, led to work with companies in L.A. and, he says, laughing, “15 years of development hell.” Away from L.A., he looks at that hell with a different perspective: “Several years ago, I saw an exhibit of a series of da Vinci drawings at the Legion of Honor. By the end of the exhibit, it hit me that most of the drawings were actually proposals for projects that never got made.”

Despite “frittering away years in L.A.,” Charlton says he gained a lot from the experience. He learned how to write dramatic screenplays. He learned about the workings of the industry and how to pitch a story. He developed projects with the writers of Patriot Games, Bladerunner, and Internal Affairs, with the producers of Poltergeist II, Tales From the Crypt, and Home Alone, and with the director of Rocky and The Karate Kid. During this period he also directed the European segments of The Making of the Return of the Jedi for Lucasfilm and a cable feature for HBO and Showtime that led to more development hell. L.A. production companies still hire him as a creative consultant and script doctor, and he has about a half-dozen projects in various stages of development "still kicking around the town.”

Charlton approaches his work from a content organization point of view, incorporating several “through-lines” (story, music, sound, and composition) all at once. He partly attributes the success of his Web site search engine optimizing services, which he provides between film and video projects, to a similar, multi-level approach. He started this sideline business, his “Web division,” in the mid-90s, when advertising agency clients asked what he knew about the Web. One thing he knew was that Laura Lemay’s first Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week book didn’t cover meta tags, which at the time were important for getting search engines to notice a Web site.

Charlton has devoted many hours during the past five years to learning the principles behind the search engines. He consistently gets client sites listed within the top ten of every search engine result. “Meta tags aren’t enough anymore,” he says. “I cringe when I hear prospective clients say they want someone to do keywords and submit for them. Today, search optimizing a Web site involves much more than putting a wish list in the meta keyword tag. It involves the whole site structure. It involves researching and prioritizing search targets, site theming, page design, site design, coding, writing optimized content, targeting directory submissions, and getting optimized external links. The targeting process is in many ways similar to what I do in preparing a marketing film or video: identify the audience and what the client wants to communicate. It’s complicated enough to keep me interested.”

Though Charlton takes a cautionary approach towards embracing technology for its own sake, the blending of art and technology has been a theme throughout his career.

He has thought about the challenges of interactive movies since he saw the first version of Dragon’s Lair in a U.C. Berkeley arcade. Now that technology enables games to be more movie-like, he’s in discussions with gaming companies about applying his writing and directing skills to their projects from start-to-finish, so that characters and story are more than an afterthought. In his view, whether it is for information or entertainment, “interactivity needn’t drive out coherence, structure, beauty, emotion, and pacing in an audio-visual presentation, but you have to work very hard to keep them in.”

There's a lot of buzz about how, with DV video, you can now make a feature film for $100,000, so I asked Charlton if this format would liberate feature filmmakers from development hell. He replied, “What’s not discussed is that it will take a year to make the film, and another year to get it distributed, if you’re lucky. You want the script to be good enough to justify that much of your life. But it generally takes six to nine months to write a good screenplay. Somehow, the economics of speculating that long on a script for a $100,000 project just don’t work out. The format might end up being more appropriate for intimate documentaries than for dramas.” He added, “It doesn’t matter what the technology is. What's most important is the thought and imagination and caring you put into it, and that takes time and effort.”

Charlton has cared enough to learn to wear many hats, often of necessity when budgets are limited. He likens the various roles he plays to biodiversity in nature: you've got to have it to survive. He has not yet made the film of his dreams, but when he does, I’ll be in line to see it.
You can reach Bob by email at robert.charlton@gmail.com