kartooner

When I was in high school, my friends and I over the course of an entire sum­mer would shoot 35MM films. We filmed orig­i­nal movies only. With titles like Boris the Spi­der, Degen­er­ate Don­keys and Kyle the Bar­bar­ian we uti­lized what­ever space we could to flesh out the fea­ture includ­ing aban­doned park­ing lots, run down apart­ment com­plexes and for one scene in par­tic­u­lar a tilted shack.

We’d write scripts, hand them out and study them over night and over the sum­mer we’d com­plete a film in about 3–5 months time. I can remem­ber one film­ing date when every­one in the crew decided that I’d wear a makeshift neck­lace of fire­crack­ers under my cloth­ing. The idea was that when the direc­tor yelled “Action!”, some­one would light the fire­cracker and in effect it would cre­ate the illu­sion that I was being shot. Long story short, they wanted to set me on fire. Sur­pris­ingly I turned down the offer and we used a makeshift dummy instead. We filled con­doms with ketchup and attached it to the dummy along with fire­crack­ers and ulti­mately the dummy caught fire.

One par­tic­u­lar scene in Boris the Spi­der called for a blub­ber­ing, truck dri­ving idiot, a guy who would prop his tar-covered shoes on a couch and rub his greasy hands across the fab­ric. This slob of a human being would most likely live behind a dump­ster and col­lect any­thing he assumed was valu­able. How­ever, in our film this char­ac­ter lived in a spot­less apart­ment with a smudge-free tele­vi­sion set and a glass cof­fee table.

For this scene I was cho­sen as the blub­ber­ing idiot who lived in this spec­ta­cle of an apart­ment and I was also sched­uled to die. To dis­guise myself as this char­ac­ter I used shoe pol­ish on my eye­brows to cre­ate black eye­brows (since I’m blonde by nature) and pressed a fake Mario-style mous­tache above my lips. Boris the Spi­der (played by a friend of mine named Greg) was to enter my apart­ment — unex­pect­edly of course — and then pro­ceed to kill me by crack­ing my neck. As noted pre­vi­ously when my school bud­dies wanted to attach fire­crack­ers to my body, there was no way in the depths of hell they were going to crack my neck.

To achieve this effect we set up a per­spec­tive shot wherein the cam­era pointed at a wig asphyx­i­ated to a bas­ket­ball. The cam­era pointed just above Greg’s shoul­ders so he could shake the bas­ket­ball and the wig pre­tend­ing that it was my head and then with a swift twist (and thanks to our off cam­era Foley artist) the effect of a cracked neck was achieved.

After all of the ini­tial footage was shot, Greg and the edit­ing team would spend the next sev­eral weeks edit­ing the film to their lik­ing, which meant most of the time that a good por­tion of my scenes were short­ened in length or cut out entirely. When every­one was pleased with the edit­ing as a whole we’d then do the post-production work which included dub­bing lines if the actor’s deliv­ery was weak or muf­fled and choos­ing the sound­track. In most of our films we used songs from Devo, Meat­loaf and Talk­ing Heads and finally we’d screen the film to our friends, fam­ily, co-workers, neigh­bors and just about any­one will­ing to stom­ach the material.

It was ama­ture movie mak­ing at its best and some­thing I’ll trea­sure in my mem­o­ries for years to come.