Published Friday, October 15, 1999
The picture of Jason Lyon you see on this page - a recent one, his publicist swears - makes him look like the Doogie Howser of film producers. It belies a guy who has had more careers at 30 (yes, 30) than some of us do in a lifetime.
"When people ask what I do, I usually tell them, `I work in commercial production and produce documentaries,'" says the one-time Charlottean. "I don't have a singular talent. Things land on me, I think they're interesting, and I do them for a while until they're not interesting or profitable. Then I find something else."
You'll be reading about Lyon No.2, the guy who produced and recorded sound for "Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me." That ambitious documentary, written and directed by Tessa Blake, comes to the Manor Theatre tonight for a weeklong run; Blake and Lyon will hold question-and-answer sessions after screenings tonight and Saturday night.
This lad knew he wanted to be in show business at 10, when he danced in the first act of "Gypsy" at Western Kentucky University. He moved to Charlotte with mother Brenda when he was 12; she married Cubby Culbertson, and her son entered McClintock Junior High and East Mecklenburg High School, where he became "this weird little ball of energy."
"I'd be in a show at school and one at Children's Theatre, run to a SADD meeting (he helped found a Students Against Drunk Driving chapter), be on the Ivey's Teen Board, where you went around the state modeling and doing personal appearances. I don't have anywhere near that energy now."
Lyon met his destiny at UNC Chapel Hill, where he directed "General College;" that show ended up on the cable network National College Television. It was a weekly half-hour soap opera that "took on issues you get in college: date rape, homosexuality, anything scandalous in the '80s. I came in as head writer and associate producer, then took over as producer."
He saw Blake, who was a year behind him, in a play and thought her lovely: "She auditioned for `General College' and played a big campus gossip, and she was genius! We dated for about 20 minutes, but we stayed friends. I moved to New York and lost touch. One day, I was walking around a street corner to get some cold medication and bumped into a woman - and it was Tessa Blake. It felt like one of those moments when your whole life changes." So it had. She'd come into money from a trust fund and wanted to shoot a documentary about her much-married, uncommunicative father, a Texas millionaire.
"I had thought I'd be snapped up to write soap operas in New York," says Lyon. "That didn't happen, so I waited tables for a few years - and that money is so good it was difficult to get out."
He did direct an unfinished video in Charlotte called "Trade Winds," an experimental film about eight black lesbians. When that ran out of money in 1993, he ran back to New York and ran into Blake. She started to tell him stories about her family and talked him into producing "Five Wives." The film took four years to finish and sell to distributor Castle Hill, including time for Lyon to pop off to a Maine workshop to learn how to do sound work. He and Blake formed Asset Pictures, which sponsored a workshop of a musical at Lincoln Center and a play in Los Angeles before the trust-fund money ran out.
Lyon went to California last year with "not much of a program in mind, did a little freelance production work in commercials and took a staff gig at Stiefel and Co., where I design work for ad agencies. It's a nice gig after being a starving artist, though I'm sad to say that I had to have insurance benefits explained to me at 30!
"I'm still doing a little writing, though I'm undisciplined; I get kind of paralyzed around a blank page. And I'm starting a company called Joe Messiah that will develop brand identity and market entertainment projects, mostly films. I have a real bent for spin."
One thing Lyon doesn't plan to do is come back East. This ball of energy has bounced comfortably into hip Southern California.
"It has more in common with Charlotte than New York did," he claims. "There's a car culture: I commute from Hollywood to Santa Monica. It's sunny, and it's a little suburban. I belong here."