Summer Project '95
February 1995
The VCR Returns - Finally after what seemed like an eternity, my VCR was back from the repair shop. The reason it had taken so long was not really the reason I had taken to get it repaired in the first place. Only a few months after I had gotten the VCR there was a problem where if I outputted to the TV using the coaxial cable the picture was snowy, but it didn't really matter because I just went ahead and used the RCA outputs instead. The delay was a result of the repair shop having to wait for a replacement part to fix that problem. Oh well, so much the better.
I had also manged to splice the master tape of Hate Story and Show 1 together. Luckily it had been destroyed only at the point where I had started The Original Show 2. Even now I'm extra careful to avoid playing the tape at that point. Whenever I'm fast forwarding it or rewinding it I can hear where the bad tape is. Hopefully the day when I can transfer all of that to a digital medium won't come after the tape finally gives out.
March 1995
The Whataburger Discussions/Duties of the Duo - With our tools in order again, Chris and I got back to the topic of our show. Every Sunday night, before I headed back to Denton for the week, and after Chris had gotten off work for the night, we planned to meet at Whataburger. While Chris ate taquitos and I had the jr. hamburger meal, we would plot the course of our efforts, discussing scripts and story ideas and that sort of thing.
Again we tried to figure out where we had been going wrong, why nothing was still done. And we came to the conclusion that a big problem of ours was not finishing what we started. On top of that we had a problem getting started whenever we did get together. I called it the "B.S. Factor," which was that lovely little thing where when we got together we would always take up time talking about other stuff instead of getting down to work. To alleviate this problem we were going to have to be aware of it at all times. And we would force ourselves to finishing a project once we got started on it. We couldn't start anything else until we had that done.
Eventhough we had a whole slew of sketches that needed to be completed, like the ill-fated Original Show 2, we decided that the first order of business was to start the summer like we had the last, by doing a long project that we could possibly enter into the Sony Contest. Once we were done with that. according to the schedule Chris drew up, called The Duties of the Duo, we would start working on all the incomplete stuff
April 1995
Writing the Script - Over the duration of all this, I would sit at my computer and come up with story ideas. One of them was a purely stream of consciousness kind of thing. Using my and Chris characters as the basis I just made up the outline as I went along. There was no real point to the story, but we needed an excuse to make a movie for the summer and this was it.
I showed Chris my outlines at Whataburger to get his input on it. And he made some suggestions for changes. First of all I had intended for the part of the guy who gives a ride to always be Brian and that's how I imagined it. I'm not saying that Chris had that changed, but for the purposes of discussing the changes to the outline I will refer to that character as Brian.
Actually I hadn't really decided how I wanted to end the thing in the original outline. I had listed several options. What I had planned for was while he was giving us a ride Brian would start ranting about how he just lost his job because of affirmative action. And he would refer to minorities, mainly Hispanics, with just about every racial slur he could think of.
My original thought was that it would only be merely an uncomfortable exchange. You weren't sure what this guy would do and then he probably wouldn't do anything, just drop off us and that would have been it. Kind of my trying to do that self important socially conscious Spike Lee/John Singleton thing except only with a Hispanic slant. I'm kind of glad it didn't work out that way.
There were some other options I had written at the end of the outline and it was one of those that Chris had liked the best. At the end Brian does indeed turn out to be more than just talk and he ends up killing us.
Once I had the outline ready, I started out writing the dialogue. Sometimes the dialogue itself would dictate how the rest of the story would go. For example I wanted my character to be talking to Chris' character over the phone. So I had to come up with some chit-chat and so what better way to do it than to put my own words in my mouth. In this case that would be my theological views. It was because of that we decided that maybe that would be the half ass central focus of the story: How Chris tries to prove that his beliefs in the higher powers and the afterlife are indeed correct.
I think the preparation for this project was the most determined I have ever felt and that was because we had a very real deadline. If it didn't get done by the 15th of June then we wouldn't have an entry for Sony. I wrote the script in about a week and a half and had Chris look over it. I had hoped that he would be offer suggestions for things to change, but instead he added more to it, like the exchange that goes on when Chris comes to pick me up for the road trip and the details of what all is wrong with his car.
Once the script was written I set about doing the storyboards. Here I cut loose. I designed it so that there would be camera movement all over the place in the hopes that we would always be able to round up a camera operator. Sometimes we would have one. Sometimes we wouldn't.
Phone Discussion Scene Night 1 - The third week of April, I met Chris down in Fort Worth on a Monday night. This was an oddity for me to go all the way down there on a school night but I was convinced that if anything was to get done I would have to make these sacrifices. Before we got to work we went out with my mom. This was an acceptable diversion since we hadn't planned to shoot anything until the sun had set anyway. Mom took us out to a hardware store and she bought me a workman's halogen light so we could use it for the shoot.
Mom went to bed and Chris and I shot my end of the introductory phone conversation and just about everything that involved me in my mom's house at night. So far so good. I hadn't looked at the footage at this point anyway since I wouldn't be able to cut it together until I had Chris' part shot.
Phone Discussion Night 2 - The following Monday, we got together at Chris apartment to shoot his part of the conversation. We also had a part for Melynie in there too as the nagging wife who tries to get Chris off the phone so he can come to bed. This little exchange was based on an incident during the summer of '93, when Chris actually had his phone hooked up.
He was talking to me late one night and Melynie's mother was staying over there. One thing led to another and they started bitching him out together. I could hear her mother tell him, "you are such an asshole." Melynie then tried to get Chris off the phone because it was poor form for them to be having a crisis and Chris to be on the phone talking to his friends. Melynie at one point yelled so I could hear it, "if Miguel was any kind of friend, he would hang up the phone." Nevermind the fact that it was Chris who had called me and who was also refusing to hang up anyway. After we hung up four hours later, Melynie called me back up and asked, "why didn't you hang up the phone?" Like it was my fault that I was keeping Chris from getting his full bitching out. Chris didn't want to hang up. I asked, "what kind of a question is that?" After a brief silence, I hung up.
So anyway what I had planned to do in the scene was never to show Melynie's face. There were two shots, one where you see her back in the foreground in front of Chris and another where you see a close-up of Chris with Melynie way out of focus in the background. There were a couple more scenes involving the character of Melynie where you never see her. I guess it was kind of my commentary of sorts about how women have no place in the world of the boys when they're at play.
Melynie was kind of reluctant to do anything on camera. She didn't want to have to memorize her lines and she didn't seem to give the proper emotional response like anger. But Chris kept yelling at her because of her complaining. It eventually worked so that she really did get mad and delivered her lines fairly convincingly. As soon as the last take was over, Chris lightened up and kissed her. Apparently he had been trying to manipulate her the entire time into giving the right performance. Too bad we had to cut it out.
May 1995
Journey into Artistic Hell - So with practically the whole beginning of the movie shot up to the point where Chris calls me from a payphone with his car broken down, I did a rough cut of the whole thing. It turned out terribly. We seemed to be half asleep during the phone conversation. We had absolutely no enthusiasm. The scene didn't flow like it should have according to my mind's eyes and ears. It was a big disaster. I had shown Chris the assemblage when he came for a surprise visit early one Monday morning at about 5 a.m. This was the first time I had met his current girlfriend Jewel who was pregnant at the time by her future- soon-to-be-ex-husband. Usually Chris would calm my worries by saying, "it's actually not that bad." But not this time.
It felt as though my entire future, any hope that I would ever have at being a success as a filmmaker was dying. This was just plain bad. Maybe I was a talentless loser after all. We had spent two weeks on this thing that was utterly worthless. There was no way we could continue on the project now even after all that time we had spent trying to get it ready. There was no way we could get something going in time to have it ready by the middle of June.
Reworking the Beginning - Fortunately Chris had kept his head. While I had been wallowing in my despair Chris had worked out a way we could still work on that project and still salvage some of what we had shot already. His idea was that since we were heading to the afterlife maybe we could do the main part of the story as a flashback of how we got to where we were going. Of course we don't know where we're going at the point, but we start to remember more and more the closer we come to the end of the tunnel. That way we can almost narrate over the initial phone conversation pick up with the main points and then talk through the rest. It was brilliant. It would save us and when I cut it like he suggested. Unfortunately we had to lose Melynie's big scene and we have never told her that we had to cut it. Of course she probably wouldn't even remember having done it anyway nor would she remember what it was supposed to have gone with anyway.
Brian's Part - We had been telling Brian about his involvement in the project for a while I had explained to him somewhat about his character. I had planned for him to be a redneck type of person. So we got together on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the middle of May(by this time school was over for the summer)and he had changed his hairstyle. Whereas before it had been functional and natural, now he had a mohawk that he died a wierd color of yellow. He definitely looked nothing like the redneck I had envisioned. But what choice did we have? We didn't have time for his hair to grow out to a natural form so we had to just deal with it. All we got on that day was the conversation in the car which I might add we had changed from being one by a digruntled redneck to a redneck that wants us to bury a body for him and how he beats around the bush when asking us.
June 1995
Vacation to Exotic Centralia, Illinois - Production came to a halt because of the trip that my mom and I had been planning for a few months already. It wasn't a big problem because Chris and I knew it was coming up so we scheduled so that we could get the summer project done without having to shoot that week. It's a damn shame we didn't have that week.
The plan was that we were going to fly to St. Louis and my grandfather was going to drive up from Centralia, Illinois to meet us for what was supposed to be a fun filled week of taking in all the sites and scenery that St. Louis had to offer, like the arches and the riverboat casinos. But we had planned well. Around that time there had been another big flood in the midwest, the second in a year which was odd because they usually only happen once every century, but that was how my luck was running that summer. We wouldn't be able to do a damn thing because everything was covered in water.
So instead we spent the entire week bumming around my grandfather's house in just another podunk town in middle America. You had to drive 20 minutes to get to the nearest movie theater. And the theater was a two-screener showing such really good movies like Casper and Johnny Mnemonic. I didn't catch any flicks that week. This is how bad it was. It usually takes me about two weeks to a month to get through a novel. I managed to read Planet of the Apes and had finished Carrie while we were waiting at the airport at the end of the week.
Recasting Brian's Part - The Saturday after I had come back we resumed the shooting of the porject. The first thing on our agenda was to get all of Brian's stuff out of the way. We stopped by his apartment around 11 a.m. When we got there he was ready to leave with Kendra to go to K-Mart and then they were going to her parent's house. We begged and pleaded for him to be able to do the show, because we needed to do it badly. Kendra agreed to let Brian off of his leash for the day but they absolutely had to go to K-Mart together. He would be back by noon. So instead we went to eat at McDonald's.
When we returned at noon, Brian and Kendra still hadn't returned. I made several pages to him to call me on my car phone, but he didn't call back. We waited for an hour and a half on the front doorstep to his apartment. This was bad. We didn't have much time before the project needed to be finished and one of our principals was conveniently gone.
Lucky for us, Chris had his brother-in-law Brandon tagging along with us. We also had Modester because he was going to do double duty as the camera operator and as the dead body in the trunk. Our best option would be to recast Brian's part altogether, so Chris and I tried to convince Brandon to do it. He was reluctant, but we assured him that we wouldn't make it too difficult on him. It worked out for the best anyway because Brandon looked more the type anyway. I still couldn't get past Brian's hair and Brandon already kind of looked like he could be a deranged white trash killer.
We went out to the little piece of land in Lake Worth where we had found all of the junked tv's to shoot the scene where Brandon pulls over to have us bury the body. We shot everything where Modester is laying in the trunk and the beginning of the fight scene where Brandon puts the gun to my head and where we tackle him. We tried to get all of the stuff not involving any dialogue out of the way first because Brandon was a little nervous about having to memorize lines. We wanted him to get used to the idea of being on camera.
So while we're shooting all this, the owner of the property pulls up alongside the road to kick us off. We had thought the land was public since it was right off the road and it was just a small little clearing that has absolutely no use whatsoever. We thought him to be a crazy kook because there was no way he could own this land. We figured he just wanted to give us hell, but he seemed adamant so we left. We found a cop and asked him if he knew what the deal with that land was and apparently there had been a call made about some kids on somebody's property so we didn't go back there ever again.
A Change of Location - The next day we got back together. We were going to have to find another place in the middle of nowhere where we could continue shooting. We found a place around Arlington. This time we made sure we got permission so we asked a security guard and he assured us that there would be no problem and thankfully there wasn't.
We continued to shoot the rest of the fight scene, but we hadn't reshot any of what we had done at the other location. So you'll notice that this fight scene seems to take place in two different places. We also did the dialogue stuff. By this time I was starting to feel progressively worse. I was definitely coming down with something. Chris kept trying to keep me up and tried to convince me that it was in my head, but by the end of our time there I could hardly stand up anymore. Chris let me sit and he directed Brandon through all of his close ups where he's telling us how to go about disposing of the body. I paid little attention to what was going on as I was in a fever induced daze.
Sick Days - We lost several more days that we could have been using to finish the project which by that time we had titled The Less You Expect the Better It Will Be. The title has a double meaning. My character is being led by Chris to some mystery that Chris is planning to unvail, so I shouldn't expect too much from the excursion. It's true meaning however is that when you watch the final result don't expect too much because you won't get much. Anyway I felt awful, the worst I had ever felt in a long time. My fever ran so high that my sleep was not too comfortable because it was punctuated with delirium. The way things were going with the project and with how bad I felt, thoughts of how much of a loser I was continually ran through my head. Apparently somewhere I had picked up a nasty rash on my arm and this is what was making me sick.
"And that sir is a gun!"or In Trouble With the Law - I finally got to feeling better by the time the weekend had rolled around. We spent one day, back out on our second location finishing up what we hadn't finished with Brandon. The next day we went up the road from my mom's house where the cow patties become more prevalent to 1.)shoot the conversation that takes place in the car and 2.)to shoot the part where Brandon picks us up from the side of the road.
It was the second part that was the problem. We decided to do it around a newly developed residential area. There was an older married couple out for their walk. They passed by us and asked what we were doing. We explained that we were making a movie and everything. They explained that they were part of some neighborhood watch and that they had been having problems with people breaking into houses. As we were leaving Chris complained that all the cops whenever they break your balls for being somewhere you don't belong always give the excuse that the area has been especially hit by burgluries.
Anyway since Brandon had been driving my car the entire time I didn't feel like switching out for the short trip home. We stopped at a Stop N' Go so that Chris could get something to drink and we conitinued on the main road that is part of the route to my house. About a minute later, we were being pulled over by the cops. Now I had no idea what was going on, but I was especially worried because my car only had liability insurance and didn't cover other drivers. I knew that we were going to be in deep shit over that.
I didn't bother to look behind me to see what the cop was doing as she was walking out of her car. Brandon who was looking through the mirror knew that something very serious was going on. He announced that she was approaching very cautiously with her hand on her holster. Without coming up to the window, she ordered Brandon to put his hands out the window where she could see them and get out of the car. He went around to the back of the car and she frisked him. I was about to wet my pants at this point because I knew that for the last couple of days, he had been carrying this pocket knife and I didn't know if it was legal or not.
The cop then ordered me and Chris to put our hands up on the seat. She told Chris and me to get out of the car and put our hands behind our heads. She had us get on our knees with our hands still behind our heads and she frisked us. Chris was demanding to know why we had been pulled over. She didn't answer. "We have given you identification, now you have to tell us why you are pulling us over!"
By then her backup had come and he had his gun drawn pointed to the ground. I was scared shitless. He barked out, "Where is the gun?"
"Gun what gun?" I said. It was more like whimper because I was worried that this cop was going to shoot all of us dead until he found out. "We don't have a gun," Chris said. "I want to know where it is!" the cop demanded. Almost at the same time we realized that he must have been talking about the plastic toy gun that we had been using as a prop. But in my fear I couldn't remember exactly where it was. It was just a toy. We weren't keeping track of it.
Finally one of us, I think Chris remembered that it was in the hatchback. I confirmed it, hoping that the cop would find it and let us go. "I'm not going to open the trunk..." Oh great we're going to be here a while. "...Until you get back away from the car!" What a relief. I was worried that the cop was going to prefer to interrogate and torture us thoroughly or worse we were going to have to wait for some special division to come out to look for the gun. In unison we all backed away from the car. The cop popped open the hatchback found the toy gun and the expression on his face changed.
"See it's not a gun," Chris said. "I don't care! You don't need to be carrying this around with you." A few more minutes went by and they were still looking through the car. We were still on our knees with our hands behind our head. Not only that, but there was all this traffic passing by and you could tell what they were thinking because I know that if I passed by a similar scene I would think it too. "Hmmm, must be a drug bust or something." After five minutes or so, Chris asked, "you've seen that we're not a threat can we please get out of this position." They considered it for another minute or so. Then they finally let us go sit on the curb.
Apparently what had happened was that while we were at Stop N' Go somebody had passed by and saw the gun through the window of the hatchback. Worried that we were going to rob the place, this person called the police. As Chris later pointed out. It should have been obvious that we weren't going to rob the place since we left without having done so. Why did they still pull us over. Our adrenaline was pumped up way high. Chris even shot some of our ranting about the incident when we finally got back to my place.
June 14th, 1995 - This will be a day that will forever live in infamy. This was the day before we had to have our tape postmarked for the Sony competition. We still hadn't quite finished shooting yet. There was still the matter of the last scene that needed to be taken care of where we go into the afterlife and meet the guy(Modester)whose body we had just finished burying. We rounded up Modester went out to Inspiration Point and got it all out of the way.
I had planned to stay up all night editing the project because at that point it wasn't even half way done. So I got started around seven in the evening. I was at Kim's apartment and I set up my stuff in her livingroom. Well then Kim had decided to vacuum. I usually leave the stuff on the floor, but I set the camera on top of the VCR which was sitting on top of an unused stereo speaker. It was a precarious place for all of that to be in the first place. Well in the course of her vacuuming Kim happened to ram the cleaner right into the speaker and the camera fell off of it. When I tried to turn it on again it wouldn't power up.
There was no time to take it to a repairman and have it fixed in time, so I tried to see if I could see what it was myself. With Kim's assistance I opened up the camera. There were these paper thin wires attaching the front plate to the rest of the camera. They got torn in an attempt to get the plate off. Since they were so paper thin I thought nothing of it. We couldn't tell what it was. I was hopelessly screwed, but I tried everything I could to get up and running in order to make that deadline.
I went out to Hypermart which was open 24 hours to look for another Panasonic camcorder with a synchro edit jack. I planned to use it for the night and then return it the next day with some excuse that it didn't have some feature or another(this would turn out to be incredibly prophetic). I went out and they did have exactly what I was looking for on display. The only difference was that it was regular sized VHS so I also picked up an adapter. I charged the whole thing to my mom's credit card. I knew that this would have been a big no-no since the previous summer my mom had laid it into me for charging a $50 dinner, but I figured it wouldn't matter since I was going to return it the next day.
They went to go look for the camera and they came back with the news that the model on display was the previous year's model, but they did have this year's model. Would it be okay. Sure why not? What big difference could there possibly be?...like that years model didn't come with a synchro edit jack, that's what. And the next day I found that a lot of camcorders were beginning to skimp on features. They weren't improving they were getting worse. Not only were the newer models not coming with synchro edit, but they were also coming with auto focus only which is the worst thing they could have ever put on a camera because a lot of priceless moments have been ruined by the auto focus trying to find the new focal point and then overcompensating by going completely out of focus.
The way it was going and has become is that if you're a serious or even semi-serious videographer you have to almost lay out some serious cash for high end professional products just so you can have the features that the consumer models had only last year. They are in effect dumbing down the products because they figure that the average consumer doesn't use them anyway. And for the most part they are right.
Well back to Summer Project '95 it died a quick death right then and there as far as our entering it into the Sony contest was concerned. All hopes for moving beyond that to getting Sniffles work done died along with it. I had put it into the same shop where I had the VCR fixed and they estimated the costs at $300 money which I didn't have. What was making it cost so much was those damn little wires that had gotten torn. If it weren't for that it might have only cost a third of that. What pissed me off even more was the fact that they kept the $64 deposit for their "labor." I should have taken it to Incredible Universe where they didn't make you leave a deposit and didn't charge you for an estimate. Better yet I should have seen if I could have cancelled payment on the check if it hadn't already been too late. Oh by the way, I will never deal with White Glove Electronics in Grand Prairie ever again.