From his beginnings in a small town in Virginia to the present day in Rochester, New York, Jay Turner has fought adversity
and apathy to reach the status he now holds, as a cult-film legend.
Few knew then just what was coming forth from the nurturing womb of Nancy Turner on the afternoon of February 19, 1975. There was no more fanfare
than usual when the doctor slapped the child on its ass and declared it a boy. Legend has it within the Turner household that Jay Turner was
predicted to be a girl, but the prediction was proven wrong. To this day, a crosstitch declaration of Turner's birth hangs in his mother's family room,
and the crosstitched picture is that of a young and rather feminine looking baby.
This was the first of a number of conflicts Turner had in his early life. Proclaiming that he is unable to remember much of his childhood, Turner
is often willing and quite able to participate in storytelling about his past, stories of riding bikes, hiding out in forts, playing with his toys and being
beaten-up by his next-door neighbor (and best friend). As a young child he was quite the bookworm, preferring to sit inside and study up on dinosaurs and
astronomy rather than join his older brother, Allen, and his friends in sports in the neighborhood. His reclusiveness as a child came off to the other children
as shyness, and it distanced him somewhat from the children he so desperately wanted to be around.
Turner's first role as a performer was as a saxophonist in his 6th grade band. He proved to excel at this, as he did with many of his projects, and went on to become
only the second person his age to win a spot on the Regional Band for southeastern Virginia. He went on the following summer to be accepted to Virginia Governor's Magnet
School for Music, an honor which no other child in the area had recieved.
At some point after that, around his 9th grade year, Turner began to blossom from his introverted shell. The miracle which broke Turner's shell was the miracle of
laughter. He realized that he had the rare power to create genuine laughter in the people around him, whether there seemed to be a common bond or not. He never was quite
the class clown, because of self-confidence issues which to this day haunt him, but he had the gift to make people smile and laugh and generally have a good time around him.
And though this made him an easy person to be around, it also assisted him in keeping his true self deep inside. Only a few today from his graduating high school class can say they
truly knew him.
11th grade was perhaps the most influential year of Turner's high school career, as it was the year in which he was convinced that he had a gift for writing. His English teacher
took him aside to explain to him just what he did in writing that made his work enjoyable to read, and coached him gently to improve upon what she called "some of the best work to
ever come from this school." To this day, Turner will credit that very English teacher for bringing about the pivotal point in his life, where he decided to throw aside his half-hearted plans
to follow in his father's engineering footsteps and forge a new territory in the arts. That same year, he gathered a small group of three friends together and began a short-lived
audiocassette improvisational comedy program called "Sunday Afternoon, Taped," which began as a parody of "Saturday Night Live," but continued on to become a bit of a ritual among the small group of
friends. Turner retains a number of the original recordings, which display his quick sense of humor and his ability to carry a project through. His relationships continued to
grow, and by the end of his senior year he had a circle of male friends and a circle of (somewhat closer) female friends, with whom he let his comic exterior drop from time to time.
He established a best-friendship with one of these women and continues to keep in touch with them from time to time.
He left home for college at Rochester Institute of Technology to study Film and Video. During his years there he endured many periods of soul-searching, and many changes-of-mind
as to career goals. It was at RIT that he met up with his most famous partner, Tony Paglia, with whom he would continue to work in the years to come. Turner produced, as a freshman,
six short films, including the live-action/animation series "Li'l Blobs O' Doh" and "Li'l Blobs O' Doh pt. 2." Turner and Paglia worked together in the spring of their sophomore
year to produce the cult-film "Carrot-Bird" and one other film, known as "Bowling Fun." In keeping with his sense of humor and off-the-wall modes of self-expression, Turner turned
quickly to animation and produced three short animated films, "No Sound," "The Old Man and the Biscuit," and perhaps his best film to date, "Plunger Emergency." Paglia entered the picture
again as the pair began to collaborate on their senior projects, and proffered an ill-fated stop-motion film called "Capt. Courageous," about a superhero on his day off. Paglia and
Turner went their seperate artistic ways after that. And Turner's life took a dramatic turn for the worse. The project he as working on for his senior thesis, "Quentin, Quentin, Quentin," which was an
animation in which a man suspects his wife of having an affair with a talking procupine, came to a screeching halt as Turner found himself suddenly with an ex-fiancee, past-due bills and
an undiagnosed clinical depression. All this led to a journey deep within Turner's soul, a journey which produced the Jay Turner we all know today: temperamental, quiet-yet-expressive,
opinionated, introspective, cynical and full of a wacky (some have said "twisted") sense of humor which somehow makes everything else okay. He currently lives in Rochester, New York, and is preparing
to begin work on a feature-length script with which he hopes to graduate from RIT with a BFA in Film and Video.
And after that, the world.