In my senior year at CSULB, I entered the annual Molson Golden poster competition, a national contest held across colleges throughout the country. First-place finalists from each university surrendered their original art in exchange for $500, with those works traveling in a nationwide exhibit. The grand prize of $2,000, along with the distinction of having your illustration used in promotional posters distributed to colleges across the country, went to a single winner chosen from that group. My entry didn't take the grand prize, but it caught the eye of a New York book publisher whose brother-in-law was producing a film he had written and needed an illustrator willing to work on a tight budget.
That single connection led to a call from the production department at MGM Studios and my first meeting with Charles Grodin, who had written, produced, and starred in the film alongside longtime collaborators from his Hollywood circle. The project called for ten dinosaur illustrations to serve as title cards in the opening credits. I was given almost complete creative freedom — no real art direction to speak of, just a subject and a deadline. Looking back, I wish I had spent more time researching dinosaur anatomy. But I was a month out of school, hungry for the work, and grateful for their trust.
I had hoped this was the moment everything would take off. It wasn't. The film disappeared almost as quietly as it arrived, and the decade that followed was a long, humbling education in persistence before I finally found my footing as an illustrator.
FYI – I had to surrender the original artwork to the studio, as I was told this was a non-negotiable requirement. The samples on the left are screenshots taken from a low-resolution video of the film.
