“Hi, I’m with the United States Marine Corps, are you Christopher Rice?” My heart pounds out of my chest and my thoughts storm behind the back of my wide eyes. “Could I be in this much trouble?”

Apparently I had actually enlisted myself, on accident of course, via electronic submission into the Marine Corps. This mistake was due to the power of the film that inspired me to make movies. If I weren’t thirteen years old at the time I certainly would have been thrown in jail for tampering with the enlisting process or thrown on to the front line of a battlefield, which, come to think of it, I have been! Welcome to Hollywood!

Hi, my name is Christopher Rice and I’m a Hollywood Runner. I currently work at a large production company located on Sunset Blvd. Here’s how I got here and how you can too…

In seventh grade, a friend of mine gave me a videocassette of an upcoming war film nominated for best picture. I was captivated and watched the film every day before and after school. The film was ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and for me … inspiration.

Inspiration can be tricky and it may falsely lead you to places you don’t want to go … like the Marine Corps. After the Marine tried to recruit me AND my cousin, I figured that I was actually into movies – not the military. So I produced a bunch of experimental scenes and shorts and fell in love with the feeling of presenting it to an audience.

After many more shorts, I talked to a friend’s roommate, who was currently directing a short film called ‘Spoonaur’. We were invited to help out on set as PA’s and see, first hand, how movies were made. I worked up to 23-hours a day as a PA, grip and still photographer at CLU were I learned the basic “grip language” and set activity. I learned about C-stands, 12 x 12 silks, duckbills, the martini-shot – the list goes on!

The summer post of graduation led me onto the set of, “The Caper”, a Bank Robbery feature film shot in High-Def. Although it was a quick shoot, Ill never forget shooting in the porn-studio (quick pointer … don’t touch anything!), setting up the camera in the back of the truck while on the way to the location (true guerilla filmmaking), and shooting at the gay bar during a busy night (There’s no locks on the bathroom doors!). Oh, and not to mention how I drove the truck down a one-way street, hit someone’s fence and fled the scene making it my first and only “Hit and run” … again, another story.