Leonard Schneider, filming “Captain Dinosaur and the War Game” for Phoenix Productions, 1973.

When I was a kid growing up, my father Leonard Schneider was an educational filmmaker. He worked for a local company called Centron Educational Films in Lawrence, Kansas. It was an enchanted life from my youthful perspective, because I got to appear in many of his films. After he left Centron a couple of years later, he launched his own company, Phoenix Productions, which still utilized Centron for its film distribution. His first project as an independent writer/director was “A Rain Day Story,” all about the creative-writing process and how people can take the things around them that they see on a daily basis and imagine new stories, new ideas, and create new adventures from the events, people, and places in their lives.

This is the same approach I used when writing “Silver Shoes,” and it’s the same approach used by L. Frank Baum as well when he wrote “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” according to his great-grandson Robert.

Recently I found an “ancient” VHS copy of this short film, which runs a mere 13 minutes. “A Rainy Day Story,” stars a nine-year-old me as “Paul” (it was a stretch playing myself). We made it back in 1972. The quality isn’t good. Not only is it digitized from a low-grade VHS “master,” it was achieved back in the late ’70s by projecting a 16mm print in a screening room and then filming that with a (state-of-the-art for the late 1970s) video camera while it ran. Ugh. A copy of a copy of a copy.

Still I want to share it with you. It was a huge part of my journey as a writer of adventure stories. It’s how Donald Gardner, an average kid from the Midwest, was born. How he discovered a silver shoe on the side of a road in Kansas one day. How his adventure into the “real” world of Oz began.

It started with the two magic words, “What if …” and went from there.

Enjoy!