|
|
1993-1994
the history of
1981 - Garrett Dana Gilchrist - that's me - was born in Torrington, CT, on April 20th. The same birthdate as Harold Lloyd, Marge Simpson and Adolf Hitler, and national pot-smoking day. I couldn't help but want to be a comedian. My father was a cartoonist (at that time doing the Muppets comic strip) and my mother was a colorist and airbrush artist in his studio.
1989 - I turn eight years old. A bratty youngster, I love making animated flipbooks, and attempt, with my friend Ben Sipprell's mother's camcorder, to make a cartoon where a chicken hatches from an egg, entitled "Crackin' Up." My idea is too ambitious and I don't get it done. This will prove to be a pattern in my adult life. I also attempt to write books about young detectives, "The Slick Sleuths," and superheroes living in treehouses with names like "Paperman" and "Hogman." I am a silly kid. Somewhere along the line I also try to make a comic book called "Hyper Hotshots," starring my alter-ego, Rob Rabbit. 1990-1992 - I like programming video games on an old Apple IIe computer. My one attempt at making something movie-related, a middle school class project called "Square II" (which had Niket Doshi and David Gordon in it) doesn't get finished and no longer exists. I start wearing a Nickelodeon pin that is orange and in the shape of a cow. When I want my friend David Ashe to do something, I tell him "The Orange Cow commands you!" I write a book of philosophical poems from the point of view of a cow, named Orange Cow. The book is called "The Tao of Cow" and is actually pretty good. 
1993 - I turn 12 years old. I see "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas" and become obsessed with it. On Christmas day, my parents decide they
want to get a divorce. On the same day, my father gives me a Christmas gift - a Minolta Master video8 camcorder. Bought from a seedy grey-market store in New York, the camera is constantly breaking, and has a very bad picture quality. However, it is great for doing animation. The exact same day, I make a short animation starring some Nightmare Before Christmas figures. It is out of focus.
1994-1995 - I make more little animations, using toys from Disney's Fantasia, The Coneheads movie, and Dick Tracy. But I keep going back and making  Nightmare Before Christmas animations, attempting to remake the whole movie on my tabletop. It is very silly and my voice still hasn't changed. I make a video for school about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, with an animation in it. I label one of my videos "Garrettvision."
Finally, I create two clay characters, Izzy and Bud, and shoot a ten-minute animation called "Izzy and Bud: Down the Drain." The show is labelled "Orange Cow Productions." On thursday, December 14th, 1995, "Izzy and Bud: Down the Drain" airs on Charter Cable Access Channel 21. I am overjoyed.
1996 - I turn 15. Start work on a second Izzy and Bud, "The Izzy 500." I never finish this, as my camera breaks - again - and I start wanting to do a live action movie. I draw up storyboards for something called "The Evil Bob From Outer Space," about a kid who wants to make a movie about alligator aliens - basically a teen version of "Ed Wood." This idea is abandoned. 
David Ashe and I have the same English class together and amuse ourselves by making jokes about the classic English literature we are reading. We do a silly radio skit called "Literature Tonight." And I am inspired to do a Monty Python-style sketch comedy film, using all the jokes we are making in class. From a list of titles including "Sugarhigh" and "Dr. Fred's Cavalcade of Lies," I decide to call it "Dr. Fred's Amazing Exploding Cow Show." I start writing a script, and make a webpage that simply has an orange background and a picture of Harold Lloyd on it (which has nothing to do with Dr. Fred, but which was one of the only pictures I had on my hard drive and I just wanted to put SOME picture on the page). That was the first website I ever did, and it became the website you're reading now. It hasn't changed much. I am Harold Lloyd. David Ashe gives me ideas for jokes and sketches - just random inside jokes between him and his friends that make no sense - and I write sketches based on them. Camera still isn't fixed, and the script is rewritten as a radio show just in case I never get a new camera. My voice finally changes. At the very end of the year, we rent a new camera, and shoot a few short scenes.
1997 - I turn 16. Try to get people to show up to shoot more Dr. Fred sketches. I am too embarrassed to call people and become convinced I have no friends. Every once in a while, I call somebody, they say yes, and they show up and we shoot a sketch or two. I involve my sister, because she's around. Eventually I ask David Ashe to call people for me. Two people show up, so we have four people to shoot with. I am overjoyed. I show people a 20 minute tape with some of the scenes we've shot on it. Then another, better tape with the sketches we've shot on it.  Become convinced the movie will never be done. Start editing it at the end of the year, though it's horribly unfinished. Assume the final show will be 30-40 minutes long. I also try some drawn animations with my old character Rob Rabbit. Decide I am better at animation than I am at live action, and rework the unused "Evil Bob From Outer Space" idea into an actual animated comedy science fiction script with a "Day the Earth Stood Still" feel. It is very Douglas Adams like and entitled "The Terra Log." I never even start this film, but I did some animation and storyboards. Characters from "The Terra Log" named Floyd and Teal will resurface two years later in a script called "Easier Than Thinking."
1998 - After two years, finally edit "Dr. Fred's Amazing Exploding Cow Show." Due to the large amount of unshot material, I get bored while editing it and decide to fill in all the gaps with puppets, animations, and me sitting in front of the camera in goofy costumes. I am literally making this movie up as I go along. The editing style becomes very Monty Python, allowing one sketch to morph into the next.  At times, I just turn the camera on and say whatever the heck I feel like ... improvising directly into the final cut of the film! In May 1998, I finish the movie, and check to see how long it is. I was expecting a 30-40 minute TV show, remember? Well, due to my improv, the movie turned out to be a feature-length 85 minutes. I am unable to breathe for a few minutes - completely shocked. I run around the house in the middle of the night screaming that I'm a feature movie director now. My mom, who was sleeping, doesn't care and tells me to go to bed. I am far too excited to sleep.
The movie plays in the art room at the Masuk High School Art Expo. People seem to really like it, and the art teacher writes me a $20 check on the spot to fuel my future filmmaking efforts. Actually, considering how little I spent on that movie, that probably would have covered it. David Ashe especially enjoys the movie, and wants to be involved in a sequel. I had to do the whole first movie myself, but now people were offering me help. Sadly I was so burnt out by the first Dr. Fred that I had no interest in doing a sequel. If anything, I wanted to make a live action 
version of my science fiction script, "The Terra Log." David Ashe insists he'll help me make a Fred sequel, though, and convinces me by turning in his own script for a sequel, "Dr. Fred Strikes Back." We start shooting immediately, actually having a cast this time. Lots of people show up, I am having lots of fun. We make things up and shoot random footage of us chasing geese. Then the camera breaks again.Around this time I spend about a year trying to get our high school theater department to do an adaptation of the classic BBC comedy series "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," which I am so obsessed with that my voice constantly slips into a fake British accent, uncontrollably. I write an adaptation, and get the official rights to do the play from Douglas Adams, with proceeds to go to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. Eventually, drama teacher Penny odell will decide to take a break from directing the spring play, and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" would never be made. Somewhere in here, my art teacher decides to hold a special showing of my artwork in the library. The final episode of one of my favorite kids' cartoons, "Animaniacs," airs. Why is this important? I had written about 3/4ths of a long Animaniacs novel when I was about 14 and still young enough to write silly stuff like that ... it turned all the Animaniacs characters into Star Wars characters, and was entitled "Star Warners." It was published on the web and people read it, seemingly including people who worked on the actual TV show. Well, when the final episode of the show aired, it was called ... you guessed it ... "Star Warners." And bore some similarities to my story. One scene was almost exactly the same. I was amused and wrote Warner Brothers to ask about this. They had no reply, but sent me a nice embroidered Marvin the Martian shirt as a gift. I like to consider it my payment for the idea. Not saying that they necessarily got the idea from me, but I bet they don't know where it came from either. Ideas come out of the ether ... Around this time Ashe and I both appear in the spring play, which is NOT "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," but which is "You Can't Take it With You." I play the role with a British accent anyway. This would be my one time performing in a play onstage. I sprain my ankle onstage opening night, and play the second night with a limp, which helps my performance. I was never too steady on my feet anyway, and wind up limping in many of my future performances, particularly Larry in "The Animal Game." In early 1999 I am hit by a car while crossing the street on my way to school, and will be hit by another car in late 2000, so I eventually wind up limping, for real, permanently. 1999 - Probably the busiest year in Orange Cow history, with four features being shot in the first half of the year alone. My mom buys me a new camera, finally. It's a Sony Hi-8 and the picture is beautiful. Decide to shoot all future movies on Sony cameras. Shoot more sketches and links for "Dr. Fred Strikes Back."Am assigned in History class to shoot a short video about a year in the middle ages. Ben Sipprell and I pick 1381, because we were both born in 1981. Nothing happened in 1381. Over a long winter weekend, Ben, Susan Milne and I make up a movie on the spot, with Ben and I adlibbing almost everything. Ben and I have much fun. The working title is "1381: A Look Back in Terror." The 49-minute epic class project is released as simply "1381." Half of it plays in History class. The whole thing plays in Penny Odell's Drama Class for some reason. I have been taking my camera to school and shooting random documentary footage, presumably for "Dr. Fred Strikes Back." Ms. Odell is interested enough in my movies that she gives me a few minutes at the end of every Drama class to shoot my own movie, entitled "Dr. Fred's Macbeth." I am glad to actually be shooting a movie with girls in it. However, I miss working with the Dr. Fred cast, who were genuinely funny. The short is rushed and comes out fairly horribly. Around this time, Dave Ashe is playing Captain Hook in our school's summer production of "Peter Pan." The script has been rewritten to have a darker, more intelligent feel, and it's a good show. I capture it on video. In a creative writing class, I write the first two acts of a musical dark comedy/satirical play entitled "Easier Than Thinking." I am assisted in the writing by John Hunsucker, but write most of it myself. Set in a twisted alternate future where everyone is killed at the age of 50, the play is comedic but much darker than my usual stuff, and clearly very personal, dealing with issues of wanting to differentiate one's self from one's parents, and needing to leave the house and see the world. It is performed for a younger class in a reading starring Michelle Caruso as Teal. I will finish the third act the next year. I am still proud of the play, and hope it gets performed as a play or film someday. It also introduces the characters of Lucky Xenon and Deirdre, who will reappear two years later in "Stripped Away." By this point we have shot so much random stuff for "Dr. Fred Strikes Back" that the movie has become a sprawling, insane mess. I have no time to edit it together. However, I edit one hour of it together and premiere it the same way the the first Dr. Fred premiered - in the Art room at Art Expo at the end of the year. "1381" is also shown. "Dr. Fred Strikes Back" is never properly finished and is only ever seen in incomplete form without an ending. The same night, I get my senior high school yearbook (the cover of which I designed) and realize I'm not anywhere in it ... except in passing in a possibly mocking fashion. Don't see my initials in anyone's list of friends. Assume I have no friends. Go home feeling pathetic and crying. My college application is accepted to both NYU in New York and USC in Los Angeles. My mother, who spent her youth in California, tells me to go to California. Getting far away from my pathetic boring life starts to seem like a good idea. Continue to shoot things for "Dr. Fred Strikes Back" even after the film has already supposedly premiered. Hang out with David Ashe, Ben Sipprell, Justin Bielawa and others and realize I DO have friends. We watch "The Seven Samurai" together and realize we want to make movies. The summer play is "Sweet Charity." I try out for it, and am horribly turned down. Which is good, since I wanted to make a movie instead. Dave winds up in it, and the play turns out horribly. Dave and I see "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace" and immediately realize we HAVE to parody this movie. We were BORN to parody this movie. With Justin, we see the movie several times and write down the stupid things we say while watching it. Write, with Dave, a very bizarre screenplay entitled "Dr. Fred's Episode IV: The Phantom Movie." It is full of in-jokes and requires intimate knowledge of both Star Wars and Dr. Fred, and us. It makes no sense. But it makes us laugh. We spend all summer shooting the movie as "Dr. Fred's Episode III: The Phantom Movie." (Originally, there was supposed to be another Dr. Fred III - "Revenge of the Fredi." This would contain all the outtakes and unused sketches from both original Dr. Fred movies. I never had time to edit this together, though.) I am shocked to be shooting a movie with a plot and good characters, a real feature film. We start deviating from the script and the film becomes very funny indeed, although most scenes are shot the way an idiot would shoot them - in a single wide shot. I was an idiot. David Ashe is particularly proud of the movie and it's still one of his favorites. He decides he wants to be a filmmaker. I decide I want him to be an actor. I suddenly wish I wasn't moving to Los Angeles at the end of the summer, as I am having fun. I edit together a rough cut of The Phantom Movie, which runs two hours two minutes, on my bed on Niket Doshi's camera in about four days without sleeping much. We show it over at Dave Ashe's house, everyone watches it, everyone likes it. I am leaving for California in less than three weeks. Suddenly, because we're all idiots, we decide we need to make another movie. I have begun a dramatic script entitled "The Animal Game," about an insane young filmmaker who believes he is going to die mysteriously very soon. This was inspired by some nightmares I had actually been having around that time. The script isn't coming out particularly well, and I decide it might actually work if we took the basic concept, abandoned the script, and shot it documentary-style as an improv movie. I am highly interested in seeing if my cast can pull off a drama. But there is no time to shoot the movie - so it all has to be shot in one night. In the two weeks I am supposed to be packing for my move to California, instead I meet off and on with Ben Sipprell and David Ashe (who are coproducing and starring in the movie) talking to them about their characters, trying to develop their characters as much as possible so that they'll have a lot to say when the camera starts rolling. I have them write a monologue in character that they could deliver at any point in the film. (Ben's, a rant about how we screw up the environment, is delivered in the film.) Steve Nagy, Tal Pearson, Jerome White, and David Brown are picked to fill out the cast. When it comes time to shoot, Jerome can't make it, and we can't use David Brown's character, so the cast becomes six. We shoot five hours of footage. Everyone is miserable and horribly tired the whole time. We are convinced the movie is completely horrible, that our experiment has completely failed. Halfway through the shoot, we accidentally run into Jerome White, who is with his girlfriend. We nap halfway through, while Niket's camera battery is charging. Ben, Dave and I improvise a new ending to the film. When the sun comes up we shoot the very last scene, and then go to bed. Everyone involved considers the movie a failure. Later, I would look at the footage and realize it was genuinely good, moody and well-acted with a great ending. From the five hours of footage we shot, I showed some people a 3.5 hour edited version, which got good enough reviews to put out a 2.5 hour edited version. The movie has aged well and I would like to edit it to normal feature length one of these days. Anyway, just a day or so after shooting "The Animal Game," I hop on a plane and head to Los Angeles, California, never to spend a long amount of time in Connecticut (or with my old cast and friends) ever again. After the excitement of working on four feature-length movies in the first half of a year, California seems like a huge downer. I hate the weather and the people. I really wish I was making movies. I get depressed. I write some scripts, including "Stan and Deadman's Movie Thing" and eventually the rest of "Easier Than Thinking." I start working on a decent edit of Dr. Fred's The Phantom Movie. I get a professional S-VHS deck, which helps greatly in this. I am still editing analog, onto hi-8 tape. I also, just for fun, reedit George Lucas' The Phantom Menace ... the real one ... down to 1 hour 18 minutes. I've never really shown people my cut of The Phantom Menace, but I'm proud of it. I also, at the end of the year, start editing some of the old Dr. Fred footage into 26-minute episodes, that could potentially be played on cable access. 2000 - I turn 19, with five feature films to my credit. Dr. Fred plays on cable access, but not in Connecticut. I edit five episodes together, and get to edit together some of the sketches from Dr. Fred Strikes Back that never got used ... even "Dr. Fred's Macbeth!" I also shoot some new material, including a scene as Hamlet. Still very bored in L.A. Write my first feature screenplay, which I am a little embarrassed to admit is a fan-sequel to the Evil Dead movies, entitled "Supermarket of Horror." Later release a non-Evil Dead version entitled "Supermarket of the Damned." Start writing a screenplay called "Midnight Blue," which is very much a drama. I lose myself in it, and write it whenever I am in the mood. It takes a long time. I feel like I haven't made a movie in forever. When summer arrives, I finally have time to finish editing "The Phantom Movie" and "The Animal Game." Dave Ashe realizes he's bored too, and he buys me a plane ticket back to Connecticut for three weeks. I am surprised. I have just seen Ridley Scott's lovely-but-flawed "Legend" and decide I want to make a fantasy film. A scene suddenly pops into my head about a Lord of Mirrors, and I write it down. I call one of the characters in the scene "Spanky" because I can't think of anything else, saying I'll change the name later. I never do. I am unable to think of a name for this fantasy film, and try different stupid puns and plays on words. Finally, the stupidest title I've ever heard even suddenly pops into my head. "Excaliburger, or the Spatula in the Stone." I laugh for about an hour and decide that the title is so stupid I couldn't possibly use it. That it's just too horrible. So of course I use it. An entire plotline then pops into my head based on that title, and in about six days I had written an entire screenplay about Spanky and the spatula in the stone. This is the fastest time I've ever written a screenplay in, and definitely a sharp contrast to the slow, thought-out writing of Midnight Blue and my other dramas. The writing style was very Douglas Adams/Monty Python and really I just had to throw characters together and write whatever I thought was funny. I flew out to Connecticut for three weeks, staying in a spare bedroom at Dave Ashe's parents' house, and we shot it. Dave wanted the lead role (Spanky) because he's normally the Orange Cow star, but I had written the role for myself, since I knew I probably wouldn't be able to finish the entire movie in three weeks (it had taken us nearly three months to shoot Phantom Movie). I already knew the script and could learn lines fast, so this would speed up production. All my dramas had had strong female lead characters, and even though this was a comedy I wrote Arthur in in the same way, as a strong female character. I wanted Liz Dimenno to play this role, as she was Orange Cow's big female star in The Phantom Movie. She decides it's too much work and turns me down. I get what should have been my first choice, the brilliant Michelle Caruso, instead. David Ashe is appearing in a small role in the summer production of "A Chorus Line." I had never seen the play and immediately think it's completely brilliant. I fall in love with the script, and get the play on video, again. Dave and I wind up casting most of "Excaliburger" from people who were in that play, particularly the female cast. I show Dave "The Animal Game" and he as surprised as anyone when he likes it. He thinks it's funny and great. We start devising plans to make a superior sequel, entitled "The Animal Effect," and spend most of the Excaliburger shoot discussing our characters for this film. Liz Dimenno was cast in a lead role for this film, even though she wouldn't have time to play the lead in Excaliburger. We shoot Michelle Caruso's scenes early on, as she will be unavailable after a week or so. I am frantic trying to get the movie done in time. I shoot a lot of footage and develop a bad temper. Regardless, I am having fun, and so is Dave. We watch "Fight Club" and "Conan the Barbarian" and endlessly blare either the Conan soundtrack or the Chorus Line soundtrack while driving around in Ashe's red van, dubbed "The Battle-Van." We are warriors. As with most of the musicals our cast had previously appeared in, Chorus Line jokes wound up finding their way into the movie as adlibs. Steve Nagy also kept finding his way into the movie, playing many tiny roles and stealing the movie away. David Marshall, Michelle Caruso's boyfriend, does the camerawork for Michelle's scenes, and also plays the Minstrel. On one hot horrible day at Great Hollow Lake, shooting the Lady of the Lake scene, Michelle finally just walks offset. To walk away when her boyfriend is shooting her, things must be bad ... We shoot for a day in confusion, then Michelle returns and all is well. Dave Ashe and Niket Doshi start choreographing a swordfight, which becomes a highlight of the movie. We finally finish what we need for Excaliburger, and collapse in exhaustion. Unfortunately, I have to go back to California in two days, which means we have to shoot The Animal Effect! Working on no sleep, Dave and I both get horrible ugly haircuts, which are supposed to fit our characters but just look nasty. Dave doesn't want to shoot The Animal Effect, since he hasn't slept and needs sleep. We try to shoot anyway. We shoot a couple of scenes with Tal Pearson, Liz DiMenno, and Justin Bielawa. It's coming out kind of badly. We go and pick up Ben Sipprell, then Dave, fighting in character with Ben, knocks Ben down and cracks Ben's ribs on-camera! I try and keep shooting, but Ben is shaking. We finally just take him home, scared as hell. We keep shooting, and try and pick up Steve Nagy. Tal Pearson already has to go, so we drop him off. Dave is trying to drive, and act, but is FAR too tired to do either. When we're back at his house, he gives up on shooting and tries to go into his room and sleep. I try to stop him, and he snaps, freaks out and hits me in the face. We continue shooting without our main character. Niket Doshi and Greg Nicolett were also scheduled to appear in The Animal Effect, but they don't wind up in the actual movie because we didn't have time to drive and pick them up! Dave eventually wakes up, and I realize that this movie is really about our failure as filmmakers. Dave, in real life, has a bad habit of falling in love with his actresses, and in the movie, his character suddenly admitted that he had only asked Liz's character to be in the movie because he liked her. The movie became strangely beautiful to me at this point, though we were all completely miserable shooting it. We gave up shooting after taping 5 hours footage (same as the first film), and went to sleep, at last, without even taping an ending. The next morning, I tried to convince everyone to shoot an ending to the film. No one was interested, least of all Dave, and I lost my temper completely, something that still shocks and embarrasses me to this day. We gave up on the film, and I flew back to California. Despite all this, those three weeks really did remind me that I had friends in Connecticut, and great ones, who did care about me. The fun I had kept me going for some time after that. I was lonely in L.A. For about a year at this point I had been visiting a website called Rewindvideo.com, and realized I wasn't alone ... there were other filmmakers out there making crappy movies for no money, just like me. I never felt accepted by the people who ran the site, but some of the people who visited the site were making movies I genuinely liked. I became addicted to the Internet horribly, liking my internet life better than my real life. It began to affect my health, and still does to this day! Around this time, The Phantom Movie was nominated for Best Screenplay [Garrett Gilchrist & David Ashe] and Best Star Cameo [Jar Jar Binks] at the 2000 B-Movie Awards. We, like everyone else, lost to a Billy Zane movie, but it was funny that my hand puppet was nominated in the same category as Christina Ricci. I shot some pick-up shots for Excaliburger in L.A., returned to USC and got hit by a car. My right leg swelled up and turned every color in the rainbow, and I still have the scar today. The driver got off scot-free. I decided to videotape a brief scene showing off my swollen leg, pretending I had gotten eaten by a zombie. If nothing else, the effect would be believable. I really did want to write a zombie movie, a musical entitled "Musical of the Living Dead." I began work on the script. I also kept working on "Midnight Blue." This was also when I almost shot a feature for a friend, called "Four Stars." It was a mess and shut down after one day. Around this time, Gear Magazine very unexpectedly published an article entitled "The Nation's Ten Best Cable Access Shows." And we were in it. I have no idea how Gear saw our show ... I heard about it from somebody at the website who saw the article. I didn't believe them until I bought a copy for myself. It was very shocking. We were #7, illustrated with a picture from "The Phantom Movie" and a quote saying "This show is like Kids in the Hall meets South Park," and talking about our Star Wars parodies. For a month after that, we were hot. I got random emails from USA Networks, Dateline NBC, Extra ... all wanting to see this show. So, I sent a tape of our best stuff to USA Networks, and to Extra. For Extra, I even shot, as they requested, an interview with myself talking about the movies. The attention was shocking. The problem was that the stuff I had to show them really wasn't well made or very good. I suddenly had little bits of industry attention on me, and they would realize very quickly that my show was a lot of crap shot in my basement. I didn't even have Excaliburger out yet ... sending them nine minutes, the opening of the movie, which was all I had edited. I got a polite rejection letter from USA Networks. Extra, I stayed in contact with for some time, but eventually they stopped writing. I'm assuming that happened when they actually watched the tape I'd sent them. When I think about this now, I can't help but wonder what would have happened if, when Hollywood, for 3.5 seconds, came to look at what I was doing, I had actually been doing something really cool. If I'd been able to send in a really professional, quality, good-looking reel. Could I have made someone out there care? Probably not, I would probably just have gotten ripped off. But I could have made my 15 minutes of fame last longer than 15 seconds. 20 seconds, maybe. 2001 -- Best remembered as the year Orange Cow finally started to grow up. When I first moved to California, I hated it. But after a year and a half there, I grew to think of it as home. My attitude toward filmmaking was maturing a little bit too, and I could see, as I edited Excaliburger, how incredibly badly it was shot. The times, they were a-changin'. As the year began, I FINALLY started making movies of my own on the West Coast. It's amazing to think that it actually took two years in L.A. before I made anything there. My brain had been stuck on the east coast. But I was now enrolled in a class at USC, CTPR 290, that required you to shoot and edit five short films in a semester. It was time to rock. The first film was a silent piece of junk that had to be edited in camera ... whatever you shoot, is what you show. I am proud that I was able to make something watchable. "The Hope Dress" is a terrible little film, but without editing I managed to tell a real story, and the class was somewhat impressed. Besides, it was my first Los Angeles movie. That had to count for something. Besides, I realized that my friend Cori Haisler was a good actress, and decided to use her in more things. I wound up shooting most of my movies out of my friend Harry Pottash's apartment, because people were always there. I could go there when I needed to shoot and find people to appear in something. For the first "real" movie, another silent film but with editing and music, everyone seemed to want to do an action movie, so I let them ... I made an action movie. "Legend of the Lazy Fighters" was loved by the people who starred in it. The class thought it was crap. But I made it for the people who starred in it, and I made it for myself. Next, I wanted to experiment with special effects, and have one actress play two roles, using splitscreen. I thought I could impress the class with that. I wanted Cori to do it, but she was unavailable. Jamie "Reoke" Odum wound up playing the part brilliantly. "Music for the Mind Ballet" turned out to be a total turning point. I had always used the dialogue in my movies as a crutch. I had no idea how to tell a story without dialogue. When I stripped away the dialogue, I wound up looking silly ... the storytelling in Hope Dress and Lazy Fighters is pretty hack-y ... it's pure student film silent acting, telling the story without character. But in Mind Ballet, I could clearly see a full character developing, even without dialogue. The two parts Jamie played were very clearly different people, yet facets of the same personality. It also had a love story in it, which I am and always will be a sucker for. The final product came out long at 16 minutes (the films in the class were supposed to be 10 minutes) but I could see that I'd captured something there, told a story, gotten a real character onscreen. Without dialogue. So of course for the next project, they let me use dialogue, so I went back to my crutch again. Still, I think I learned something from making those silent films. A lot of people who knew my movies were completely shocked when they saw my next short, "Stripped Away." Basically everyone agreed that it was the best thing I'd made to date. I was actually embarrassed to show it to anyone when I first was working on it. The script touched upon a lot of personal issues ... it's about a comic strip artist who thinks of himself as a failure as he's dying ... and my father always wanted me to be a comic strip artist, and at the time I WAS a comic strip artist, doing a strip called "The Sugarhigh Crusade" for the Daily Trojan, USC's newspaper. And I really went into movies because I could see how a comic strip artist could get stuck doing the same thing for years and no one caring ... I had heard so many stories of cartoonists ending up like that, depressed and alone ... I mean, I really identified with the character a lot more than I should have, not being a 60-year-old cartoonist. So making this movie and showing it to people was really like standing out in front of a crowd naked. It was completely sentimental, personal, and soul-baring, and at the time I'd only ever done silly comedies. I had written dramas, sure, but I'd never made one. Animal Game doesn't count because it's so ironic and funny, even with the drama going on. Stripped Away was very different. I had tried to write it as a comedy, tried to use my crutch to add some irony to it, some wit, some American Beauty-style sarcasm. It didn't fit. The only way I could write the script was to write how I felt, what I would say if I was that character, sitting on the ground and dying. We shot it fast, in six days. The actor, Richard Havens, had never acted before and had trouble learning his lines, but I looked at him and listened to him and I felt like he was believable in that part. He looked and acted like the guy I envisioned, so I just had to get it onscreen. The movie was hard to edit together, because I always wanted to use the best take of every line and really make it work somehow, even when the shooting had been rough. The final cut came out a little choppy because of this, and when I showed the first half of the movie to my writer friend Jonathan Block, who had served as producer and crew for Stripped Away and Music for the Mind Ballet (appearing in both), his opinion of the film, which was still unfinished, was that it just wasn't working. The ending wasn't edited yet, and it ended with Richard hugging air as his son disappears from him. Jonathan shook his head and said, you know, it's a shame. I really thought you had something with this one. It could have been so much more. And I knew he was right, that it wasn't working. Way behind schedule with just a few hours before the film had to premiere, I worked my ass off getting the ending edited, working backwards, so that just in case I didn't finish, the film would have no middle rather than no ending. As it happens, I didn't finish, missing one minor dialogue-less scene, which I should have cut out anyway. The film is better off without it. I got the film done, and was 20 minutes late to class. I showed it, apologizing for all the problems and screwups. And the class loved it. I don't know what happened, but there's something about that ending that genuinely moves me, and it moves people who see it too. I laid my heart out bare onscreen and captured something far more beautiful and searching than I'd captured onscreen before. I had been embarrassed early on by Stripped Away's honesty, but honesty is the only way to genuinely say something about people. I took a chance on being oversentimental, and wound up with a film I was more proud of than anything I'd done to date. But even that didn't seem important right now, because I was rapidly forgetting about my movies and falling in love. I was in a relationship at last. But I'm getting ahead of myself, let me tell the story properly. On Valentine's Day, February 14th, 2001, I finished my screenplay, Midnight Blue. Lengthy and hopelessly sentimental, I had spent over a year on the script and was more proud of it than anything I'd written to date. As usual it had a love story in it. I had unrequited love, pathos, sadness, and an ending where everyone dies but they still managed to live happily ever after. It was written in almost poetic language and should really be made someday. But writing a script with a love story where the two lovers never quite get together even at the end, and finishing it on Valentine's Day, only reminded me how lonely I was. With Midnight Blue free from my mind, the main thing I had to think about was my desperate need for a woman. I was nearly 20 years old and still a virgin. I was surrounded by gorgeous, seemingly unapproachable California girls. All these years and I'd never been in a real relationship. I wasn't the type to just go up and hit on girls, and I wasn't the type to ever BE hit on by girls. Unless girls were very subtly hitting on me and I was just too stupid to see it, which is entirely possible. So it was an odd sensation when I went to a party at my friend Rob Keith's place, and a drunk, geeky freshman started hitting on me. As I said, it's very probable that girls had hit on me before. However, this was the first time a girl had hit on me in a way that I actually noticed. Maybe I'm thick and need someone to bash me over the head with things. But I noticed that this girl was hitting on me. Probably because she'd had a little bit of alcohol. It was a good sensation to be hit on. The only real problem was that I had no sexual interest in this girl whatsoever. She seemed nice enough, and she was clearly interested in me. So I avoided her for a little while. Otherwise she would have talked to me all night. I wandered around the party, having no one to really talk to. And it eventually dawned on me that I was a lonely man. And that I was lonely enough that it couldn't hurt to go back to the drunk freshman. I walked back outside, where she had been all night, smoking in the corner. She wasn't there, but came back eventually. She started talking to me again. She was a short, dark-haired, half-Mexican, half-Irish girl majoring in film criticism (but she really wanted to be in music criticism.) I sighed and gave in. She was cold. I offered her my coat. I was wearing a Hitchhiker's Guide t-shirt that read "Don't Panic!" on it - I am a horrible geek - and she told me later that that calmed her. We kissed, and kept kissing. We made out for about an hour. Every other person at the party left, and left us to our own devices. I recall some of my friends laughing and giving me a thumbs up as they left ... the bastards. The apartment was now empty. It was suddenly very awkward. It was cold, so we sat on the couch and stayed close to each other to keep warm. We made out some more, and I fondled her. Eventually, she got a little nervous and said we should leave, it wasn't our apartment. I was too stupid to even get her phone number. I wandered a few days alone, and then Jonny Block and his friends saw her, and got her number FOR me, calling me an idiot. So I called her. And we started seeing each other. She was a drunk freshman at a party, her name was Mariana, and I stayed with her for almost two years. And I wouldn't have left her if she hadn't left me, because I am one loyal sonofabitch. Being in a relationship, even one like Mariana and I had where we were constantly fighting and hurting each other, did wonders for me, I think ... it changed my outlook on things. It felt good, y'know. Really good and worthwhile, and right. Being in love is, I think, one of the most worthwhile things a person can be in ... being in love is far, far more worthwhile than, say, being in construction. Or pudding. Being in pudding isn't very worthwhile. And to those of you out there who are lonely, I feel your pain because I'm lonely as I write this. Hm. Anyway, blah blah Mariana and I lost our virginity blah blah let's get back to the movies. As if my mind's still on movies after writing about love. Sigh. Um, for my fifth project I had to go back to making a silent film. The whole class was supposed to be silent films, but I got away with making one dialogue film and that was Stripped Away. How the heck was I going to make a movie better than or even as good as Stripped Away without dialogue? Silent films suck! Inspired by my insane sound teacher, David Bondelevitch, who is always ranting about how sound and sound people are ignored in moviemaking, I write something called "Of Sound Mind," about a sound technician on a Hollywood film who encounters so many problems with poor recording and sound screwups that he goes a little bit insane. I was going to use the fact that I couldn't have properly-synced dialogue to my ADVANTAGE, and base the whole thing around a very strange sound design. The script I wrote was horrible, and if I'd actually made the movie it would have been horrible. Thankfully the lead actor didn't bother to show up when I wanted to shoot, so I hastily had to come up with a replacement. At the time, everyone in Harry Pottash's apartment was reading the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett, an immensely popular British humorous fantasy book series. I was curious enough to read one of them, "Mort." And of course, because I'm a stupid filmmaker, I immediately thought, "This would make a great feature film! Somebody should make this!" Having no script of my own worth making, I suddenly, on a whim, decided to make Mort myself. In about a night I slapped an adaptation of the book together, cutting it down to a story that could run about 45 minutes if animated. I knew I had to make it animated, so that I would be allowed to use dialogue -- there is no such thing as sync dialogue in animation, because the "actors" are cutouts who can't really talk! But how could I slap together an entire animated film in a weekend? (All the 290s had to be shot in just a weekend.) Working in extreme haste, I recorded all the voices in one night, once again using people from Harry's apartment. I let the smaller roles go first so that they could leave. The last voice to be recorded was my own, as Death, and that was recorded at 7AM - we'd stayed up all night recording - so I really felt and sounded like Death when I recorded it. The problem was always that I was supposed to have already shot the entire movie, so I was supposed to give the camera back to the guy who was using it for his movie next. I turned the camera in without having shot anything. I then tried to figure out what the movie would look like - I'd bought some cheap clay which hardened immediately, and realized I couldn't animate with that. So I went with cutouts, using clay bodies and real locations to save time. I borrowed cameras from people, begging, cheating and stealing to get any portion of the movie shot. I was able to shoot just enough footage to cut together about 5 minutes of the movie. It looked great and the class loved it, so I was able to keep stealing cameras and keep going. I never finished a full 45 minute version of the film - instead I made extreme cuts and the final cut runs 25 minutes. But that's quite long enough in my book as it still tells the whole story from the book, and people get bored watching cutouts after about 10 minutes anyway. I'm proud of Mort, and once again was able to say that under extreme odds, I'd managed once again to create a movie that was unlike anything I'd made before. I like that about my movies, that I keep trying new and possibly impossible things ... making difficult projects I shouldn't really be able to do with my lack of time and money, and come up with something new and different. I would like people to not quite be sure what to expect when they go into an Orange Cow movie ... that it should always be different from movies I'd made before. This is important to note because at this point I was writing a screenplay for "Musical of the Living Dead," and it was turning out very similar to screenplays I'd written before. It was coming out a lot like Excaliburger, only set in modern times and with songs in it. I really wanted to make a classy musical, well shot and interesting to watch, with good characters. But what I was writing was turning out to be a shallow retread. Summer came around, and I was finally able to get some time to myself and finish editing Excaliburger. After editing all the short films digitally, I could now see all the horrible flaws in having to go back and edit Excaliburger analog, from camcorder to camcorder. I was tired and angry while editing Excaliburger. I desperately wanted to edit the film properly, digitally, and I think it shows in the edit. Excaliburger is fairly badly edited. I was proud of it when I finished it, and was hoping everyone would love it as much as I did. But it turned out, David Ashe and Justin Bielawa hated it. They had both thought it was funny at the time, but when they actually watched it, they thought it was garbage. I was shocked and horrified, and angry. I liked the movie, but I had always said I was making movies to make David Ashe laugh. He wasn't laughing. What the hell? At this point it was very easy to look at Stripped Away and Mort and see that they were superior films. Dave certainly thought so. And Dave hated the script for Musical of the Living Dead. I really wanted to shoot the film and had even tried to do some casting for it over the Internet. The plan was to, like Excaliburger, have David Ashe fly me back for a month and a half or so, and we'd shoot this movie. Well, Dave suddenly backed out. The movie would not be made. And I was heartbroken and furious. I felt betrayed by one of my oldest and dearest friends. It wouldn't be until 2002 that Dave Ashe and I would reteam for Gods of Los Angeles. The "Musical of the Living Dead" project would resurface, but seemed ill-fated, as shooting would never quite start ... TO BE CONTINUED ... |
