America's not ready for these films - Placebo Effect

I'd like to start the column this week by saying that I hope everyone had a very happy Halloween. I myself was at the News-Letter office all night, ensuring that the campus would have its weekly dose of quality journalism, and frankly, the experience of putting the paper together is scary enough for Halloween every single week.

To get slightly closer to my subject, however: A few weeks ago, I mentioned Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup on Sunday and Thursday nights. I've been watching it more (I'm even starting to catch on to what Cowboy Bebop's about oh, and a correction on that front - a few weeks ago, I reported that the ending theme for the show was "The Regular Folk Blues," when it is in fact "The Real Folk Blues" - sorry for any confusion this may have caused), and I'd like today to say a few words on the show Home Movies, which stars a third grader who likes to make movies. This erstwhile filmmaker goes by the name of Brendon Small, a name so similar to my own that I'm considering suing the show's creators for taking advantage of the great literary and cinematic weight that the Short name carries with it. Never mind that it's the name of the show's creator. He probably changed his name in a futile attempt to imitate me in order to appropriate aforementioned literary and cinematic weight. Gravitas, if you will. What is this great cinematic legacy, you ask? Well, you see, I too was once something of a cinaste.

Shortly after my parents finally got a camcorder, I made my first attempt at cinematic art, but as I recall, it consisted mostly of my pointing the camera at a wall while a friend, bearing a water gun and wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses, dispatched imaginary bugs and mimicked Arnold as "The Exterminator." I remember my dad telling me that we needed more to happen than that. I guess that most screenwriters never had a dad like that.

Sometime later, I tried my hand at a documentary. The opportunity presented itself when Hurricane Bob swept through Cape Cod one summer while we were renting a cottage there, tearing down the locust trees that gave the street we were staying on its name (which was Locust Lane for those of you who can't quite put two and two together). My dad filmed the actual hurricane, but I went out to look at the aftermath. I don't like to talk too much about the results, but let's just say that I learned that if you turn the camera slowly, there will be somewhat less seasickness among your viewers. My dad taught me that one too. I guess that the makers of The Blair Witch Projectnever had a dad like that.

A few years later came the great period of my cinematic life, at least in terms of productivity. Doing business as Reality?NOT! Pictures (not the world's best name, I know, but we were young. junior high, if I remember correctly), we produced a number of sci-fi spoofs along the lines of the Ed Wood Classic Plan 9 From Outer Space, only with better sets. I guess you could call them E-movies, since they were hardly up to B-movie standards. That notwithstanding, you really haven't lived until you've seen Attack of the Clones From Another Planet, or Oh Clown, Oh Happy Clown (our foray into the French art film genre).

There followed a hiatus in my filmmaking career, interrupted only by a brief project inspired by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that laid groundwork for the partnership that was going to produce what I consider still to be the best film ever made in Manchester, N.H, and, to my knowledge, the only film ever made entirely in Franglais.

I speak of course, of Caf des Pendus. I'd love to bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that the movie (made by myself and another close friend for our French class our senior year of high school and taking almost an entire year's worth of work on weekends and afternoons) brought together an all-star cast of people we knew who could more or less speak high-school French and showcased a dazzling array of Manchester locations. The plot brought together Qubecois separatist ambitions, forbidden love, and exciting (if hypothetical and probably inaccurate) parliamentary politics. It also had an impressive number of in-jokes, including the title, which combined a medieval French poem with the name of a series of videos we had watched in French class the year before. For those of you who know French, that makes the tile a bit jarring, but to us it was pretty funny.

It's been some time since I put the camera down, and so far no project has really kept my attention long enough to make it past the planning stage, but maybe someday I'll dig out my director's beret and give the world of film a whirl again. But is Hollywood ready?

Probably not.