Story on Jeanne Taysom from Arizona Republic Newspaper (November 2004)

PHOENIX – To some of the hundreds of Tempe grade-schoolers who heard an expert talk, learning that what happens in the movies isn’t real came as a shock.Bill Zahn delivered the bad news: The rocks are painted foam, the blood is syrup, and the ice cream is really just mashed potatoes.

Despite his expertise garnered while working on the movies Pirates of the Caribbean, Godzilla, Child’s Play 2 and 3, and Star Wars episodes 2 and 3, there was still disbelief.

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Arms out-stretched over their heads, they asked him question after question. “Does Chucky really say the cuss words?” “Are you sure Mrs. Incredible isn’t real?”

The students at Nevitt Elementary, a Tempe Elementary District school in Phoenix, got a peek into how moviemakers turn reality into fantasy, when one of their own, 34-year-old Zahn, came back Wednesday. The animator and visual effects artist now works in San Francisco for Pixar Animation Studios, but his dream of making movies started in the Valley.

It was 1977 when Zahn’s second-grade teacher at Nevitt took the class to see Star Wars as a reward. Each student had read 100 books with their parents at home. Jeanne Taysom (who “Billy Zahn” only knew as “Mrs. Taysom“) got permission from the principal for a field trip to the movie theatre.

“When I saw it, I knew the children would love it. It was just like an old Western.” Taysom said. Now retired, she was among those who came to see Zahn speak to the children in the school library.

“It all started out with that Star Wars movie,” Zahn said. “After that, making movies was a complete obsession. I started drawing tons of spaceships, monsters and aliens.”

Drawing led to making the figures out of clay. Clay figurines led to dressing up the neighborhood kids to make movies of his own with an 8-millimeter no-sound camera.

His mother, Sue Zahn, who works in the school’s publishing center, told the kids she always knew her son would become an artist.

He eventually made it to Los Angeles soon after he graduated from Dobson High School. He made rubber creatures to use in full-feature films, TV shows and commercials such as the Budweiser Frogs series.

For a year now he has been doing computer animation, most recently in San Francisco where he lives with his wife and two children.

The Nevitt students took all this information in stride Wednesday, but remained perplexed about his announcements about the grisly gore of Hollywood movies being make believe.

“That’s what’s so cool about learning here in school,” he told the kids. “If you pay attention to your teachers you might get to do a job like mine where you get to play.”