 David Strong was born into a circus family as a fourth generation performer. He traveled The United States, Canada and Mexico with his family, destined to carry on the circus tradition into the next generation. However, on Sept. 8, 1982, he got a call that changed all that.
David was hired on his first feature motion picture. "A cute young accountant taught me how to spell Per Diem," David says, "I hadn't done a bit of work and she handed me cash, the keys to my condo on the beach, and the rest of the day off. I knew right then my future was in films."
David was hired as a rigging assistant on the motion-picture version of Stephen King's Firestarter. This was the first of many major films produced and shot at the North Carolina Film Corporation, later known as D.E.G. Studios. The facility was built in Wilmington, NC, in the spring of 1983 by Dino DeLaurentis and saw many years of movie making success.
David worked his first two films, as mentioned earlier, in the rigging department, but jumped into lighting when they needed someone to rig lights on cranes on the film Silver Bullet.
"Working with the Italians, the Spanish, the English, . . . Australians, not to mention the numerous New York and L.A. crews, all with their different ways and different styles, gave me a chance to absorb." David says, "Some things worked, some didn't, but to learn from the mistakes of others is always the least painful.
After leaving NC in 1989, David worked at Universal Studios - Florida, doing episodic television on three seasons of The Adventures of Superboy. At this point, he began a new direction: writing motion picture scripts. He found writing fulfilling beyond his expectations. This new love brought the fresh possibility of creating and directing his own visions. "I'm not discouraged that everyone and their mother wants to direct. What really gets me going is the thrill of taking a story, translating it into a screenplay, getting it all on camera, then after all that work, seeing it on the screen. The excitement of creation and completion overshadows any fears I might have had." says David.
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