David Emerson Jackson

"How to Ramble"

    Fade in:
    David Jackson lived his formative years climbing broadleaf maples, riding bikes on gravel streets, chasing polliwogs and building forts in the company of his dog, among dandelion patches and evergreen rain-forests of the Pacific Northwest.
    Central to his tiny logging town’s identity—and increasingly his own—was that it had been the set of a major film wherein a firestorm razed its mill.  On frequent walks between home and school he indulged in naïve adventure fantasies of what had transpired in that charred wreckage of concrete and tin, pondering how the making of a movie could have transformed the landscape and lives of so many.
    Fifteen summers thrilling at campfire stories and playing in the rustic, natural environs of Scout camps shaped him into an ecology-minded young man defined by ethical discipline, moral fortitude, and showmanship.
    He served as a youth ambassador in Australia upon leaving high school, an Honor Society member decorated for Citizenship.
    College refined a facility in the creative arts.  By graduation his theatrical designs had taken him to the Kennedy Center; he had sung opera on stage and toured with a modern dance ensemble; his acting talent formally recognized, he performed professionally with Dallas McKennon.
    Squandering his degree he found a job as Assistant Manager in a drive-in theater where he spliced and projected show reels—while completing his first guided screenwriting effort—before picking up what would become a recurring side career in commercial art as illustrator-designer. 
    He met a girl he would marry and shortly thereafter landed a lead in a filmed feature, in renewed pursuit of his acting ambition.
    Three years later he would leave everything behind to reside with his bride in her native Mexico, where he learned Spanish.
    When he returned to Portland the Rose City was blossoming into the dynamic center of independent filmmaking it now is.  A flurry of screen roles followed.  Shifting frequently between performance and visual art, he began to find his voice writing scripts and illustrated stories.
    In 2005 he was admitted to the Screen Actors Guild.  Soon a former costuming colleague recruited him to dress fashion mannequins at Macy’s—an assignment that would take him out of the vital cinema city, to which he quickly grew desperate to return.  Passing on an opportunity to manage a store in Hawai‘i, he would go back to Portland with neither work nor agent.
    There he won appointment as Wardrobe Supervisor on From Kilimanjaro with Love, a feature that premiered in Downtown Disney in 2008.  That experience compelled him to finish penning his ambitious “mob action spy romance comedy.”
    Always creating, he presently climbs trees and rides bikes outside San Jose in barely-northern California...where his odyssey continues.

Where I grew up

45.859181,-123.171700

Places I've lived

45.859181,-123.171700; 44.064854,-121.275656; 19.021105,-98.186343; 41.468817, -73.248797; 44.851035, -123.233761; 44.851313,-123.231502; 44.843805,-123.235509; 44.854340, -123.240423; 45.511554, -122.622555; 45.486508, -122.722199; 45.527098, -123.044492; 45.565667, -122.641059; 45.527346, -122.800585; 44.847671, -123.228471; 44.073674, -123.093127; 45.531944, -122.959891; 45.313046,-123.963547; Valsetz, OR; 45.516113,-122.523734

Other names

GetJackson