City Finds Kids’ Film Speaks to Local Roots 25 Years Later

It started as a project for a group of elementary students: Make a movie about how to care for oak trees.

Before its run had finished, “Michael and the Mighty Oak” had moved from local classrooms to KCET-TV public television. Filmed in Thousand Oaks with local children and a talking tree, the 40-minute movie won a loyal following and a slew of awards.

Now, 25 years later, the tree still stands. Michael, the childhood star, is a city employee. And the City Council and a local cable station have agreed to air the movie again for today’s children.

“It really is one of the first films on preserving oak trees,” said Mayor Judy Lazar, who was instrumental in the film’s revival.

Lazar, a member of the garden club that helped finance the film, decided to find a copy and dust it off for a future showing on the city’s government station, TOTV Channel 10.

City staff found a pristine copy of the film at Ventura resident Annette Myck’s house. Myck was president of the Conejo Valley Garden Club when Acacia Elementary teacher Florence Russell approached the club with the idea of allowing a group of gifted students to make a movie.

It was to be a magical tale about an oak tree that offers its

perspective of the last 400 years to a boy just getting over pneumonia. The club agreed to help fund it, along with the school district, the teacher and donations, Myck said. She said the film would have cost about $4,200 if not for donated time and equipment.

“It’s a very good educational film, an environmental film, if you want to call it that--but not radically environmental,” Myck said. “It doesn’t say you can save every oak tree.”

What it does say, or rather what the oak tree says, is how to take care of an oak and how development is threatening the tree, while offering up a history lesson to boot.

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Once they found the film, Lazar and city staff members gathered at City Hall recently to watch it. They watched as a little red-haired boy named Michael Newman talked to the tree.

Suddenly, a light went on for Carl Jarecky, the city’s cable services coordinator, and he picked up the phone.

“He called me and asked me if I went to Acacia,” Newman, 35, said Thursday. “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ ”

Newman, a supervisor in the city’s print shop, marched over from the other side of the Civic Arts Plaza to catch a glimpse of his film debut. “I walked in real embarrassed,” Newman said.

Rightfully so, it seems. The film version of Michael dons an orange T-shirt, striped pants and dark, horned-rimmed glasses. By his own admission, Newman said that at 11 he was “nerdy.”

“It brings back a lot of memories,” he added.

Not one to pass good fortune by, Lazar has asked Newman to film an epilogue to the 25-year-old movie. The script calls for Newman to stand in front the “Mighty Oak” and proclaim Thousand Oaks a leader in the protection and conservation of oak trees.

Lazar has also asked that the city pay to transfer the filmed footage onto videotape. Her fellow council members agreed earlier this week to pick up the $1,000 expense.

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John Hagelston, one of the film’s supporting actors, was unaware of the film’s revival until contacted by a reporter Thursday. “I’ve changed a lot since then,” he noted.

Now 36, Hagelston still lives in Thousand Oaks and is a publicity director for a recording label in Santa Monica. He hasn’t seen “Michael” since 1974.

“It was made back in the old conservationist days of the ‘70s, and that is a timeless theme,” he said.

Indeed, the Mighty Oak’s laments about development could just as easily be uttered by today’s slow-growthers in town. At one point the oak says, “All the oak trees around these parts are pretty sad. We see our old ways and lives slipping away, some of them before their time.”

Then the tree takes young Michael on a flying tour of Thousand Oaks, pointing out trees that are suffering because of development. Then there’s that song.

Then came man to disturb nature’s balance, and the land he did subdivide.

Thousand Oaks, you’re a city of oak trees, round and stately and dignified.

“Save the oaks,” is the cry of the people, so our name will be justified.