I’m going to flash back for a moment here and do what I like to call “Part 1” of the high school series. Because I have a lot of stories from high school that show how I got to where I am now. And by where I am now I don’t just mean poor and alone.
High School ended up being a decent time for me. However my Mom always had the joke that I was ready leave for college years before I actually did. Part of the reason was because my high school didn’t really have what I was looking for. I wanted some multimedia classes and clubs and what I ended up doing instead was starting up the Writing Club.
Yes, I was a nerd.
My only real film education at this point was an easy A of a film class in high school where the teacher though Spielberg directed Poltergiest. For the record, it was Tobe Hooper (although supposedly Sir Steven directed some sequences, but you can look up the filming of that movie online for more detail). I said this in class and was told I was wrong, and that was when my brain gave up on film class.
My brain was stuck on film and writing, though, and therefore at this school I was not given much in the way of extra-curricular things to do. I had no interest in sports since the only one I played was bowling…which wasn’t a sport, but a club. And half of those club meetings ended up with us hanging out inside the bowling alley arcade anyway. Looking back makes me think how much more productive I could have been before I remember that my thought process was “fuck it, let’s shoot terrorists.”
At my parents prodding and my own self interest, I tried other things outside of film, writing, or bowling. I was in different band classes for four years as a Percussionist which satisfied my hunger to hit something with a stick but never really stuck with me otherwise. I was also in both Moot Court and Mock Trial in an attempt to become interested in Law.
Moot Court was what made me decide never to be a lawyer, to my mother’s continuing dismay. The experience was basically four months of research followed by ten whole minutes of presentation. Afterwards I asked our teacher when we would do it again, at which point I got laughed at. I was told that was it. I dislike real research to begin with, and after four months the payoff was me being told “sorry but your group lost the case.” I was done with law after that.
Admittedly, the money that lawyers make is still horribly tempting to my near poverty self, but I digress.
Then I joined something called Theater Sports.
Theater Sports was a school club term for “Improv Comedy.”
Improv Comedy saved me from High School.
The Theater Sports crew met after school twice a week in order to make comedy. They weren’t too serious about it, and a lot of the time the club meeting would break down into conversations about which Simpsons episode was the best or what food we hated most at the snack bar. The club was mainly made up of a bunch of friends that had been thrown together by their lack of interest in anything that would make them remotely popular. It was made up of a few drama nerds, some comic fans, a whole bunch of Role Playing Game people; in general, the all star cast of misfits we all remember from high school. My first day in the club they forced me to perform in front of them, which was apparently their version of hazing. I ended up going overboard and “killing” somebody during the sketch, forcing a halt to the game. They congratulated me on being the first person ever to kill someone in a skit comedy game and told me to come back whenever I wanted.
I liked them immediately.
As the years past in high school, however, it became apparent that drama and improv comedy was not filling that empty void in our souls. I quickly found out that I could not act to save my life. If I made a callback at the school plays, I was happy as all hell for a week. To say I never actually made it into a play is a given. Looking back on it, I couldn’t memorize dialogue at all so it was probably a good thing that they never put me in something written by Shakespeare. My brain would have melted. So I turned to writing.
Writing was not working either. I had attempting to write my first screenplay and somehow had created my own format in the process (I didn’t even know what Final Draft was in High School). At the time I was proud to have written over a hundred pages in my lifetime. The script was about teen angst and…well…mainly teen angst. My father read the whole thing in a day and promptly told me that he rather hit his hand with a hammer than read my script again. Bluntness is apparently encouraged in my family.
His point was that it was depressing. This did not encourage me. I set aside writing scripts and tried to find another creative outlet that did not involve rejection. I was ignorant at the time. I later learned that everything involves rejection.
At some point, someone in the Theater Sports group got the idea to make a movie. We didn’t really know what it was going to be about, or how we were going to make it, but God dammit we were going to make a movie. The world could go to hell; this was to be our accomplishment.
It took about a day to get a stupid low budget idea and most of the jokes ironed out. The movie did not have a script, nor would it need one. Our school was old, and had a large collection of ancient wood Podiums the teachers used to mainly lean on. Our idea, therefore, was to be a satire of the school about alien Podiums coming to invade the high school by posing as students and eventually killing us all.
We thought this was genius. No one was around at the time to tell us how truly idiotic it all sounded. We did get a few jokes out of it, though, including one where a podium simply falls over to kill somebody. The trick was to be done by fishing wire and trick camera angles. We had it all planned out in extreme detail by the time the day was over.
We just needed a camera.
A guy in our group told us not to worry, he had it covered. His name was Mike. He was easily over 6 feet tall and had a gigantic curly white guy afro. He talked in a deep voice, was mainly known for his funny one liners, and drove a giant red Van we called “The Flying Toaster.” He was not known for any technological prowess or for having any money to spend. He was simply the guy who thought Podiums killing people was funny. No one has any idea how he was getting a hold of a camera, but if he could get it to us for free no one would complain.
The next day Mike showed up to school with the biggest camcorder we had ever seen. This thing was not digital. It was not even Hi-8 tape. It was a gigantic camera that easily weighed about 20 pounds that used whole VHS tapes as film. VHS tapes are quite large. To accommodate them, the back end of the camera was especially massive. We all stared at it, trying to comprehend how it actually worked. I finally was the one to voice our concern.
“Mike,” I said, “what is this?”
“This is the camera.” Said Mike, oblivious to our stares.
“…Are you sure?” Was all I could respond with.
The camera, we found out, belong to Mike’s parents. It was probably about ten years old. It had a lot of switches and knobs on it that only Mike knew how to use, so Mike quickly was deemed the camera guy. The quality of this camera could not be better than “poor” and the thing was so big it reminded us of a news crew camera, only a lot worse. After all, it did go over Mike’s shoulder. Mike also had a very limited amount of tapes for it, but at least VHS could record for about two hours per tape.
Mike proved the camera did work so we decided to roll with it. We would start filming after school. And that’s exactly what we did.
The first shot was to be a special effects shot. We would film a place where nothing was, then move two podiums into the area and film again. BOOM! Transporting Podiums! We patted ourselves on the back for our ingenuity. I chose to ignore the fact that I had met a kid who could do this when he was eleven.
After that shot came the shot of the kid dying via Podium falling on him. It was not chronologically next, but it was the easiest to do at the time. This begged the question “how are we editing this?”
I asked Mike. Mike looked back at me confused, as if he had never thought about this problem before. Then he thought about it for a second and said “By VCR, I guess.”
“Can you do that?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never tried it.”
I then had another question. “How do you edit on the VCR?”
At this point Mike shrugged and someone else in the group told me not to worry about it because it would all be figured out. Somehow I doubted it.
Filming continued on the scene and it became apparent that tying string to a podium so it will fall in the correct manner on a person who is not there was a hard thing to do. The shot could not seem to match up with what was in our heads. We did a few angles of the podium falling and had a comic-gold shot of a friend of ours screaming horror movie style (we hoped he was screaming; we were unsure the camera was actually recording sound). At this point we gave up, called the shot good, and went home because it was getting dark.
The next day Mike showed up, the camera showed up, and we showed up. Filming lasted all of five minutes before we became distracted by conversation. Eventually we went home swearing things would get done tomorrow.
The next day Mike brought the camera but everyone had something to do after school. We’d wait until the next day.
The next day was more of the same.
And the next.
And the next.
A week later I mentioned the movie, and expressed interest in finishing it. So did Mike. Everyone else sort of shrugged and said variations on “yeah, sure” and then proceeded to do nothing.
A few days later I mentioned it again. This time even Mike shrugged. No one cared.
A month later we had an inside joke about Podiums killing people and that was it. We never saw the footage we shot and we never talked about the movie again. It didn’t take long for me to figure out why this had happened.
Filming things was work. How do you get an unpaid high school student to become disinterested in something in record time? Tell them that something is work. It’s that simple. My group did Improv Comedy because it was fun. The movie was work we weren’t even getting free meals to do. One day of one scene being done over and over again was not a fun way to spend an afternoon. It felt like work, and therefore no one wanted to do it.
Life returned to normal. My friends and I would go see movies in theaters, talk about how to make them, do Improv Comedy, stake out the comic store and never talked about making a film again. This was too bad. I had decided I liked that sort of work. I wanted to do it again.
A year later it was the beginning of Junior year and I decided that I needed to know if I could still enjoy film work, even if I wasn’t being paid. I wanted to see if this sort of thing was as interesting as it seemed. I started sniffing around the school for anything resembling a film job. It didn’t take long for a somewhat legit one to actually fall into my lap. But that’s a story for another time.
