Roger Lay, Jr. was the cinematographer for the documentary 95 Miles To Go about a comedy tour comedian/actor Ray Romano did. He has also edited and directed several movies, including the upcoming documentary Toy Masters.

First of all, thank you for taking the time out for this interview. You were picked to film the road trip of Ray Romano and Tom Caltabiano. What was it like to join these two men? I understood you were still in film school.
I was about to finish up film school as the opportunity came along to join Ray and Tom on the road. I’d like to be able to tell you some inspiring story about Ray coming to the USC Film School and plucking me out to join him on the road, but that’s not really what happened. In fact I had already known both Ray and Tom for a year prior to the tour — if that hadn’t been the case Ray wouldn’t have felt comfortable with the idea of having me tag along and follow him around with a camera during his time on the road.

I’d actually met Tom at the USC film school a year earlier — he was there taking a summer class in TV directing since he wanted to make the jump from writing to directing on Everybody Loves Raymond and so he felt it would be good to take a multi-camera directing class before attempting that. We weren’t in the same class together but we wound up meeting up through one of our professors and we hit it off right away. We have a similar sense of humor and we both loved jazz so we started to hang out and soon after he introduced me to Ray when the show went back into production. A year later when I was looking to do an internship he helped me out by introducing me to the production people on the show and at the same type he got the idea to try and document his road tour with Ray so everything sort of fell into place. It was a case of being at the right place at the right time and having the skills they needed to pull this thing off. Continue reading →