Me: And then Sam Neill steps in…
Rappe: Ye, it’s like; “Sam Neill doesn’t like kids. Whatever.”
So that’s the scene I really remember. The movie’s kind of a blur and I think, you mentioned the veloci-raptor scene, there was a part of me thinking, “are they going to fake it out?” like for the whole movie? Are we going to really see dinosaurs? If you remember, the first trailer we saw the T-Rex’s foot and I remember when you only see bits of the raptor, I just thought they were going to fake this out like Jaws, we’re never going to see a whole dinosaur. Not that they’re going to look really real and I was really worried that I had been ripped off. I was obviously a very hyper aware child because right now I can’t believe all this stuff was going on in my head.
Me: Ye. I think an 11-year-old worrying about being ripped off seems strange to me right now.
Rappe: Well. Somewhere in there, and I may even be wrong on the timing, but like Super Mario Bros. and The Never Ending Story II so I had already been disappointed in movies and movies that I had gotten excited for and imagined a certain way and you go in and you’re, “ohh, I don’t like this. This isn’t what I thought it was going to be.”
I just kind of remember thinking it couldn’t meet up to my expectations. I was a very mature 11-year-old. I was just thinking that there was so much hype and I just thought for a moment that it wasn’t going to be very good.
It was even in my “Ranger Rick” magazine and they were like, “this is a very scary movie,” and I remember when that opening thing happens and I’m going, “I’m not scared. How could you be scared of a dinosaur without seeing the dinosaur?”
That was my first memory of it and I remember at that point it was like, “ye this movie is going to be awesome.” That first shot was, “this is the best movie ever, this is the summer right here.”
Well. It was the first movie, and I had gotten excited about a lot of movies and unfortunately a lot of them were old and they had passed me by. I was a little too young for Star Wars, I was a 2-year-old when Return of the Jedi came out but I was too young to really see it and enjoy it. I had toys and books but I didn’t know where they were from. I was also too young for all but the last Indiana Jones. I remember seeing Last Crusade and that was a big deal, but that’s another one that I don’t remember a lot of build up. Kids at school were talking about, “there’s a new Indiana Jones movie,” and I was like, “that’s cool, I want to go see it,” and then my parents just took me and it was just that.
There had been very few movies; I loved being sucked into the fantasy of a movie. I knew Harrison Ford was an actor but he was also very much Indiana Jones and Han Solo so I never had this desire to know how they did Last Crusade or Star Wars and I remember Jurassic Park being the very first movie that I really wanted to know how they did it and about the actors filming it. I really sought out any magazine that had Jurassic Park on the cover. I bought or just sat and read in like a Barnes & Noble because I was really curious what it was like to film it and how they did it. Were the dinosaurs’ animatronics? Was it on a computer? And that’s a weird break for me because now there’s now only some movies I’ll do that with again, and other movies I don’t want to know how that was done because I like to imagine it’s just really there and obviously in my line of work you don’t have a lot of choice sometimes.
That was a really big deal, and I remember being really jealous of all the actors who were in the movie. That wasn’t something that had really occurred to me before; to be jealous of Harrison Ford or jealous of the people in Star Wars, but I was really jealous of the kids in Jurassic Park. It was sort of a dual fantasy because not only did I want to be in the movie but I wanted to also be the character of the movie and playing with dinosaurs and hanging out with Sam Neill or whatever. I think in a lot of ways I can almost pin point it to almost a “growing up” thing because it was like the knowledge that that was a fake thing, you wanted to pretend it, you wanted to be at least paid to play that game that you were hanging around with dinosaurs and then wishing it was real and you were really that character. It’s actual a really interesting dichotomy and it was the first time I can remember having that experience and thinking, “God I wish I was an actor because even if dinosaurs don’t exist you got to pretend they exist.” It’s kind of sad too when you think about it, I never thought that with Indiana Jones. I never thought, “I wish I could be an actor so I could be Indiana Jones,” Indiana Jones was just Indiana Jones. I never thought of him going to the set everyday and putting on the costume while with Jurassic Park I was thinking, “Ye I’d love to go and be covered in mud and have makeup put on me and climb an electric fence. That’d be so cool. I hate that kid.”
Me: “Why wasn’t it me? Why?!!?”
Rappe: Ye! You’re getting into pre-teen and you’re getting kind of aware of things like that anyway, like jealously and why some kids are luckier than you. Then you start getting a little more green-eyed than I probably was as a kid watching The Goonies or something, I don’t remember watching The Goonies but “rrrr”. Till I got older and it was, “ohh I wish I was a kid actor.” But by then Corey Feldman had already gone off the rails so maybe it was better that I wasn’t in The Goonies.
That’s what I really remember of that. Just so much piling on and kind of, and it’s really stupid but I also remember even though I wanted to be an actor I had already given up like, “I’m 13 it’s too late.” 11 I should say. It was just an obsession that started that obviously didn’t carry on. I remember after that realizing that since I couldn’t be an actor since I was too old it’s not too late to be a writer and I actually started, and I had the tape for a really long time and if I still had it I would actually produce this as evidence, and I did a fake interview with the actors of Jurassic Park with my friends playing the actors. That’s just so sad.