Kurt Kuenne, Class of 1991: Filmmaker

It started with a letter. After drafting a crude 10-page script of E.T., nine-year-old Kurt Kuenne mailed his childhood masterpiece to several literary agencies in Hollywood. To his surprise, one of them responded.

“My colleagues and I were very impressed with your spirit of sending this to us,” former Hollywood literary agent David Strom wrote. “I don’t think this will become a movie, but you should know that this isn’t the way scripts are written.”

For the next five years, Kuenne would send Strom an original script, and Strom would write back with comments and send a few pages of E.T.’s real script for Kuenne to compare. Kuenne soon picked up a camera, and the film hasn’t stopped rolling since.

Kuenne and his late childhood friend Andrew Bagby gained much inspiration for their homemade movies from watching sci-fi and adventure movies at Century theaters next to the Winchester Mystery House. With Kuenne behind the camera, Bagby starred as the captain of a spaceship or a fearless adventurer.

Besides his personal projects, Kuenne also brought his talent to school, making shorts in David Pugh’s Government and Politics class for group projects. Pugh loved them so much that he passed the VHS tape around to show other students and teachers.  

“It was a breakthrough moment for me,” Kuenne said. “I would walk around campus during my senior year and people would say, ‘Dude, your movie was really good!’ That was the first time learning that people liked what I was doing.”

Kuenne’s filmmaking skills eventually made its way to the class adviser Barbara Wiseman, who tasked Kuenne with creating the senior video for his Class of 1991. After collecting hours of footage, Kuenne finished the video in time to premiere at Lynbrook Grad Night, where they played it in the cafeteria.

“People would come in there, sit on the beanbags, get sentimental, cry and watch my movie over and over again,” Kuenne said. “I remember going into that room, sitting in the back and watching everybody watch my movie. It was an early experience for me of what it was going to be like to watch my movies from the back of the theater with an audience.”

After graduating from Lynbrook, Kuenne attended De Anza College for two years before transferring to the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, where he juggled between attending film classes and a film scoring program taught by Buddy Baker, renowned composer of several Disney soundtracks. After his graduation, Kuenne created his most popular documentaries, “Scrapbook” and “Drive-In Movie Memories,” a documentary that premiered at the 2001 Telluride Film Festival.

In 2001, Bagby was murdered after he broke up with Shirley Jane Turner. Shortly after being arrested as a suspect in Canada, Turner announced that she was pregnant with Bagby’s child, a boy she named Zachary. Kuenne decided to create “Dear Zachary: A letter to a son about his father” that would help Zachary get to know the father he’d never met.

“I’d shot all these movies with him as a kid, and I still have all the raw footage,” Kuenne said. “I had him being himself, and I had the most extensive document on film of his life.”  

The documentary also criticized Canadian bail laws after Turner was released on bail after murdering Bagby and committed a second murder. Eventually, “Dear Zachary” led to reform in Canadian bail laws.