December 26-29, 1997. I made another movie. (#157)

March 19, 2023March 19, 2023 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

Author’s note: I’m back.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to post weekly, like I’ve always tried to. I don’t want this project to become stressful. But I’ll do the best I can, and hopefully my small handful of loyal readers will stick with me even I take a week off here and there.

A month ago, when I went home to Santa Lucia County for Thanksgiving, I showed my family the Dog Crap and Vince movie that I had made with the kids from the youth group at church. I first created the characters from Dog Crap and Vince when I was still in high school, with a lot of input from my brother Mark, and I have always credited Mark as a co-creator of Dog Crap and Vince. They all enjoyed the movie. Mark said that when I came home for Christmas, we should get together with his friends Cody and Boz and make another movie.

We did not own a video camera. I had always wanted one growing up. I had tons of silly ideas for TV shows and movies, sometimes Mark and I and some combination of his other friends would even act them out and even record the audio, but we never had the capability to record video. Video cameras cost a lot of money back then, and it was never a priority for my parents to have one. But Mark said that Boz had one we could probably borrow.

It was now the Friday after Christmas. I was planning on driving back to Jeromeville either Monday night or Tuesday morning. I was getting bored at home. Three and a half years after graduation, I had lost touch with all of my high school friends. There was not much to do at home except hang out at home. The closest thing I had to friends at home were Mark, Cody, and Boz. I was going to graduate from the University of Jeromeville in six months, and they were sixteen, still in high school. This was less of an age difference compared to when I was seventeen and they were twelve, but they still did not feel like a primary social group for me.

Despite how bored I was, I had made no progress on this movie that Mark and I were supposedly going to make. I had not done much of anything the whole time I was home. We had our family Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa and the Lusks, who were in the area for the holidays. Jane Lusk was my aunt, my mother’s younger sister; she visited every Christmas with her husband Darrell and their children, nineteen-year-old Rick and seventeen-year-old Miranda. Uncle Darrell’s family was also in Santa Lucia County, so they spent a week going back and forth visiting both sets of their relatives.

Mark had a new game for Nintendo 64, GoldenEye. The game follows the story of the James Bond movie of the same name, which I had seen once. The most well-known feature of this game was a multiplayer free-for-all mode, in which two to four players battle each other. Rick and Miranda and Mark and I spent many hours of that winter break playing GoldenEye, as well as Mario Kart. In both games, Mark almost always won, and Miranda almost always came in last place.

In those days, Mark would often record what he was watching on television on a VHS tape, so he could watch it again. He watched Saturday Night Live regularly, because in the 1990s it was actually funny much of the time. Whenever the show would run a sketch that was not worth rewatching, he would back up the tape during the next commercial and record over it immediately. Whenever I would go home, Mark would share with me his Saturday Night Live highlights.

Saturday Night Live had been in the news recently because Chris Farley, a cast member on the show a few years earlier who was also in a few movies after that, had died of a drug overdose a couple of weeks earlier. Two months before his death, Farley had returned to SNL as the weekly guest host, and Mark saved that entire episode. Earlier that week, I had watched Farley reprise many of his past recurring characters. He also portrayed an exaggeratedly intoxicated Hank Williams Jr. and the weather phenomenon El Niño, acting like a professional wrestler. Throughout the whole time Mark and I watched the episode, Mom kept interrupting, commenting on Farley’s visibly poor health.

The next day, Mark and I watched other things he had recorded since then. We watched what was then considered the final episode of Beavis and Butthead, although unbeknownst to anyone at the time, the show would be revived in the 2010s and 2020s. After this, we watched another SNL in which a Bill Gates character announced that Microsoft had bought Christmas, and that Mac users were now Jewish. Bill Gates then proceeded to spy on Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who was dancing to the song “Tubthumping.” Oddly random, but hilarious.

Mark got home from basketball practice while I was eating dinner Friday night. Mark got all of the athletic talent in our family. He also had a great deal more artistic talent than me, and he and some of his teammates had begun a new tradition of drawing temporary tattoos on each other with permanent marker. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the tattoo that someone had drawn on Mark today.

“A polar bear,” Mark explained. “John McCall drew it.” The polar bear on Mark’s arm was floating on a piece of sea ice, with the letters POLAR BEAR underneath in a style imitating the Old English blackletter font.

“And why do you have a tattoo of a polar bear?” I asked.

Mom and Dad were in the room with us. “That’s the nickname the others on the team have come up with for Mark,” Mom said.

“And why is Mark’s nickname ‘Polar Bear?’”

Dad answered this time. “Because he’s big and white!”

I laughed. “That does make sense.”

Later that night, Mark and I were playing Mario Kart, and Mark said something that reminded me of something from Dog Crap and Vince. As my brain started thinking of related things, I said out loud, “We never made that movie we were going to make while I was home. Do you still want to?”

“I don’t know,” Mark replied. “Do we have time? How long are you gonna be home?”

“I’m leaving probably late Monday night or early Tuesday morning. So we’d have about 72 hours.” As I continued steering Luigi around the course, throwing banana peels behind me, I got an idea. “I think this sounds like a challenge. We have 72 hours to make a movie. And we’ll call our production company ‘72 Hour Films.’”

“Sounds good. I’ll ask Boz in the morning if we can go get his camera. Boz was probably going to come over this weekend anyway.”

“Great! And if Rick and Miranda are around, we can get them in our movie too! So what’s it going to be about?”

“I don’t know. This was your idea.”

“Well, you’ve been saying this whole time that you want to make a movie.”

“I do, but I don’t know what it’s about!”

I saw the GoldenEye cartridge sitting next to the Nintendo console. “What about a spy movie? Like GoldenEye?”

“Maybe, but it seems like that might be too hard if we only have 72 hours.”

I thought about other things I had done at home during previous school breaks, and suddenly it came to me. “Moport,” I said. “Let’s make a sports movie about Moport. Like, maybe, there’s a Moport team that’s terrible, they finish last in the league, so they get the number one draft pick, but the player they draft ends up just making things worse.”

“That could work.”

“Ooo. Better idea. They accidentally draft the wrong player. Like, the general manager gets the name wrong at the draft, and the player they pick is this weird crazy goofball.”

“But all the goofy stuff he does is so crazy, they still end up winning!” Mark said.

“Yes! Perfect!”

“As long as we get Boz to play the goofy guy. He’d be great in that role.”

“Definitely.”

Moport was a game my brother and I invented, based on a game I played in PE class in high school. The game I learned combined elements of football and soccer; Mark and I added hockey sticks to the mix, and Moport was born. For the last few years, we had held a two-on-two Moport tournament in the front yard with Cody, Boz, John McCall, and some of Mark’s other friends.

By the time Mark and I went to bed that night, we had a workable script, and we had decided to title the movie #1 Draft Pick. I suggested that the team in the movie have a geographically appropriate, yet ridiculous-sounding name, like many actual low-level sports teams. The Gabilan Valley in Santa Lucia County is known for growing vegetables, so we named our team the Gabilan Fighting Salads. The movie would open with the Salads losing badly, finishing in last place again, giving them the number one draft pick for the following year. After drafting the wrong player, as we had previously decided, we would show scenes of this player, whom we had named Evan, practicing and playing and still somehow finding ways to score. We added implied references to Evan being on drugs. I suggested that Evan played college Moport for North Coast State, because that was a well-known hippie stoner school, and it was also where Rick went, although Rick was not at all a hippie or stoner.

After the Salads’ first win, the team practiced the next day, and Evan accidentally kicked a ball that left the field and hit a supervillain-like bystander in the face. The villain vowed to get revenge on the Salads and sabotage their season. He sent a henchman to break into the locker room and plant drugs on Evan. When Evan’s name was cleared, the villain hired another henchman to shoot Evan. Mark and I both agreed that Rick should play this other henchman, since Rick’s side of the family were gun enthusiasts. “But we should use the Nintendo Zapper as the prop gun,” Mark suggested.

“That would be hilarious,” I replied.

We continued brainstorming the ending of the movie. Evan survived the shooting, so the villain drove his car onto the field and ran over Cody’s character, whom we named Bob. Cody did not look at all like someone who would be named Bob, so we thought that was funny. Bob needed to play injured since the Salads were out of replacement players, and they managed to score a goal on a ridiculously improbable shot.

“Then we should end by showing Fidel Castro dancing,” Mark said, laughing, referencing Saturday Night Live.

“Let’s name your character ‘Castro,’” I suggested. “And at the end, you’re not there, and Evan and Bob talk about how you went to visit your Uncle Fidel in Cuba.”

“Yes!”

My least favorite part of doing a creative project with other people involved is getting everyone together at the same time. Fortunately, the Lusks were already planning on coming over today, as was Boz. Mark called Cody, and he was free to come over as well. Ronnie and D.J. Lusk, Rick and Miranda’s other cousins on their dad’s side, lived about an hour drive away, and they were also in town for the day. That gave us two more people to use as extras in the movie; Ronnie and D.J. played one of the opposing teams.

“Dad?” I asked as we started filming Saturday morning, shortly after Boz showed up with the camera. “Can you be in our movie for one scene?”

“Ahh,” Dad grunted as he got up from the couch, faking being annoyed although I knew he was going to enjoy helping out. “What do I have to do?”

“You’re the general manager of the Salads, but you get the player’s name wrong at the draft,” I explained. I placed the script on the table where he would be sitting in the shot, so that he could glance down at his lines if he needed to.

I sat next to Dad, in character as Coach McAfee. Mark and Boz faced us, with Boz holding the camera. “Where’d you get the camera?” Dad asked.

“We’re borrowing it from the Bosworths,” I explained.

Dad turned to Boz and asked, “That’s your camera?”

“Yeah,” Boz replied.

Dad played his part perfectly, speaking in an absent-minded manner that would make it believable that he would select the wrong player. As an added bonus, he called his own team the Lettuce instead of the Salads. To this day, I do not know if that was intentional, adding to the mood, or if that was just Dad being Dad and actually getting the name wrong. After Dad called Evan’s name, Boz ran into the scene, in character as Evan, doing a silly dance and hugging Dad’s character. Evan wore a sleeveless top with his arms covered in tattoos, drawn by Mark with a permanent marker.

Next, we went outside and set up the Moport field in the front yard, with the same scoreboard and goals that we used for the actual Moport tournament. When we got to the part with the supervillain getting kicked in the face, we filmed Boz and Cody, in character as Evan and Bob, kicking the ball around in practice. Evan then kicked the ball so hard it flew off camera. My plan was to have the villain, played by me in a different costume from Coach McAfee, looking out of a second-story window with the ball coming in from off screen to hit me in the face. But I had to change clothes for this.

“What are you gonna wear?” Mark asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let me go look.” I went inside to the closet in my old bedroom and dug around, not really sure what I was looking for, but hoping I would know when I found it.

In eleventh grade, five years earlier, I had to do a group project for history class, a presentation on one decade in American history. My group got the 1950s. We talked about President Eisenhower, the war in Korea, McCarthyism, and the Cold War. We also included some references to the culture of the 1950s, which my classmates decided would include getting me to dress up as Elvis Presley and lip-synch and dance. Mom got in on this, decorating an old thrift store shirt with fringe and sequins for my Elvis costume. When my classmates recorded me for the class project, I could not keep a straight face for more than ten seconds, but we decided that would be enough, because the stuffy 1950s father would turn off the television after ten seconds and refuse to let his children watch that garbage.

I found the Elvis shirt in my closet, along with a trucker cap printed in a cow pattern, which Dad had gotten from a local auto parts store, and a pair of oversized sunglasses. I walked to the window where my villain character would get hit in the face and opened it. “I’m ready,” I said to Mark, Cody, and Boz, still outside below.

“What the hell are you wearing?” Mark shouted.

“It’s my villain costume,” I replied.

“How is that a villain costume? You look ridiculous!”

“Hey, we’re not exactly trying to win an Academy Award for costume design. I was going for something that would look different from my coach character.”

After we finished, I went downstairs, taking off my villain costume as I walked outside. “Is that the Elvis shirt?” Dad asked as I walked past.

“Yeah. You’ll just have to see the final movie when we finish.”

We had just as much ridiculous fun for the rest of that Saturday and Sunday as we finished filming. For the scene where Rick’s henchman character shoots Evan, Rick wore a black cowboy hat and boots, with an actual holster on his belt. We all had a hard time keeping a straight face as Rick, trying to be serious, pulled the Nintendo Zapper, the gun from the old Duck Hunt game, out of his holster, complete with cord dangling from the bottom.

Although we kept the plot basically the same, we added two scenes that were not in the original script. In one, Boz, in character as Evan, wakes up in the middle of the night and has a vision of two-time Moport champion Mark Dennison giving him encouragement. Mark Dennison was, of course, just Mark playing himself, wearing his Ice Monkeys uniform from the Moport tournaments. Since this was an extremely low-budget film, many of us were playing multiple roles, and the audience would just have to accept the fact that Mark Dennison looked exactly like Evan’s teammate Ben Castro. Although Mark Dennison had some encouraging words for Evan, he acted kind of obnoxious, eating Evan’s food and sitting right on top of him on the bed. Pee-Wee the cat was in the room at the time, and Mark picked her up and started petting her.

The other scene that we added happened after the villain’s plan to plant drugs on Evan failed. Boz played a double role as the henchman who planted the drugs, and only Boz and I were in the room when we filmed this scene. The camera did not need to move, so I just placed it on a table. On Monday morning, when I had finally finished editing, I watched the final cut of #1 Draft Pick with my family and the Lusks, and I had not yet realized that none of them had seen this scene, not even Mark.

“The plan didn’t work!” Boz’s hunchbacked henchman character shouted on screen. “Evan was proven innocent, and he’ll be playing in tomorrow’s game!”

On the screen, in character as the villain with the Elvis shirt, I looked directly toward the camera and said, “Then it’s time for Plan B.” The henchman walked off screen, tapping his fingers together. A few seconds later, the villain reached over and pressed Play on a portable CD player. Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” began playing as the villain began doing some kind of dorky, ridiculous dance.

As my family watched this scene, hysterically laughing, Mark looked at me, confused. “That’s Plan B?” he shouted. “What is going on here?”

“I don’t know,” I said, laughing so hard I began crying. “I was just doing something weird.”

“But… really? That’s your Plan B?”

Mom and Dad laughed particularly hard at later scenes in the movie, like when Rick’s character shot Evan with the Duck Hunt gun, and when the villain drove his car onto the field. “So that’s why you drove on the lawn the other day,” Dad said. As the final scene played, with Mark and I in character as Ben Castro and Uncle Fidel, dancing to Tubthumping, then transitioning to the credits, I looked around the room to see everyone’s reaction. “That was very good,” Mom said.

I made a copy of #1 Draft Pick to leave with Mark and packed the other one that night to bring back to Jeromeville with me. Mark showed the movie to Cody and Boz the next time he saw them, and they both enjoyed it. I showed it to a couple of my school friends over the years, but not nearly as many people saw this one compared to my earlier Dog Crap and Vince movie. But, considering how quickly we had to put everything together, it turned out fairly good. This was definitely the highlight of my winter break that year.

And of course, to this day, my family still laughs whenever we hear the phrase “Plan B.”

Rest in peace, Uncle Darrell. He lost his battle with cancer in 2023 as I was outlining this episode.

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November 14, 1997. Kind of brilliant, but really weird. (#153)

December 4, 2022December 4, 2022 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 6 Comments

“I’ll see you tonight at JCF?” Sarah Winters asked as we left our math class in Younger Hall and crossed the street toward the Quad.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Have a great day!” I watched Sarah walk toward the Memorial Union as I walked diagonally in the other direction, crossing the Quad from northeast to southwest. It was a sunny but cool November Friday morning, and many of the trees on campus were in the process of shedding their leaves. Beyond the Quad, walking past the library and across Davis Drive, I noticed piles of leaves accumulating along the edges of walkways. I continued south beyond Evans Hall, where I would go later tonight for Jeromeville Christian Fellowship; apparently Sarah would be there too. I walked past the law school building to the University of Jeromeville Arboretum, a park-like public garden of trees and plants from around the world planted along a mile and a half of dry creek bed that had been converted into a long, skinny lake. I walked past some succulents, their fleshy spiked leaves radiating from the ground, to a bridge a few feet wide connecting the north and south banks. I stayed on the north side of the waterway and continued walking west on the path to the next bench, about fifty feet past the bridge, and sat, overlooking the waterway and a tall oak tree of the type that grew naturally here in the western United States.

Last year, I attended a convention in Urbana, Illinois, hosted by the parent organization of Jeromeville Christian Fellowship. The convention was for university students and young adults to learn about missions and opportunities to serve Jesus around the world. I was a newly practicing Christian at the time, many of my friends were doing these kinds of projects during the summer, and I wanted to learn more about what was out there. Every attendee received a Bible that included in the back a plan to read through the Bible in a year, with a few chapters to read each day from three different parts in the Bible. Next to each day’s readings were a checkmark. Yesterday I had checked off August 8; I knew that I was a few months behind, and I had stopped trying to finish in a year. I would just get through the entire Bible in as long as it took.

I read the verses for August 9 and prayed about what I read as I looked up at the oak tree. Coming to this bench to read the Bible between classes had become my routine on school days for several months. I had often heard talks and sermons about the importance of spending time with God first thing in the morning, but this routine seemed to work better for me.

On Fridays, I only had my two math classes. I worked part time as a tutor that quarter, and I had one group that met on Fridays, in the afternoon after my other class. After I finished reading, I headed back toward the Quad and the Memorial Union. I planned to look for a table in the MU where I could sit and do homework until my other class started. I had math to do, and it was the kind of assignment that did not require my full concentration, so I could work on it and not get distracted inside a busy student union. Maybe I would even find friends to sit with, I thought.

As I looked around the tables, I did in fact find friends to sit with. I saw Todd Chevallier, Autumn Davies, Leah Eckert, and John Harvey from JCF talking to Cheryl Munn, one of the paid staff for JCF. They had pushed two tables together, and there appeared to be room for me to join them. As I approached, Autumn smiled and waved. Cheryl, who was sitting with her back to me, turned to her left, waving her arm toward me, holding her palm out at arm’s length, and said, “Out.”

What did I do? I thought. Did I accidentally say something inappropriate that had made me a pariah within JCF? Was this another one of the cliques that had formed within JCF, doing some kind of exclusive Bible study that was only open by invitation? Maybe no one was mad at me or trying to exclude me; maybe someone was just sharing something sensitive and did not want to share with people beyond a close circle of friends. “Sorry,” I said, starting to back away. Maybe I would not be sitting with friends this morning after all.

“Greg,” Cheryl said, motioning toward the table. “Come sit!”

“You just told me not to,” I said, confused.

“Huh? I was just telling Leah that she was on that side of the table, with her back to the wall, and she could see out.” Cheryl made the same sweep of her arm, gesturing in my direction toward the rest of the room where others sat and a continuous stream of people walked by.

I stood for a second, puzzled, then laughed. “Oh!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t hear any of that. I just saw you put your arm up, and all I heard you say was, ‘Out!’ I thought you were telling me to get out.”

“No, no!” Cheryl said. Autumn laughed. “Please, sit down!” Relieved that I had done nothing wrong, I sat in an empty seat on the end of the table. Cheryl and Todd sat on my left, Autumn and Leah sat on my right, and John was facing me on the other end. “How’s your morning going?” Cheryl asked.

“Good. Only two classes today. Then I have a tutoring group this afternoon.”

“How’s tutoring going? You like it?”

“Yeah. It’s good experience, now that I know I want to be a teacher. I’m going to do another internship in a classroom at Jeromeville High winter quarter. I did that last spring, and I really liked it.”

“Did you guys hear Jeromeville is getting an In-N-Out Burger?” Todd asked excitedly.

“No!” Autumn exclaimed.

“Is that place good?” Leah asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“I used to live in California,” Todd explained. “It’s huge there. It’s so good.”

“There’s one now in Gabilan, near where I grew up,” I said. “My parents went there and said it wasn’t all that good.”

“That’s weird,” Todd replied. “Everyone loves In-N-Out.”

“I’ll have to try it sometime. I love burgers.”

“Hey, are you going to JCF tonight?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Romeo + Juliet is playing at 199 Stone tonight. We’re probably gonna get some people together to go. You wanna come?”

“Sure. Is that the new Romeo and Juliet movie that came out not too long ago?”

“Yeah. With Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.”

“Okay,” I said. Those actors’ names did not mean anything to me, I did not follow movies closely, but I was always looking for opportunities to hang out with friends, especially those that did not require a lot of work on my part to plan.

“Isn’t Leonardo DiCaprio in that Titanic movie that’s coming out soon?” Autumn asked.

“Yeah,” Todd replied. “That one’s gonna be good too. I heard they built a replica of the actual Titanic for the movie, just to sink it.”

“Wow,” I said.

I was running a little late when I got to Jeromeville Christian Fellowship that night, since I made spaghetti for dinner and spilled it all over myself, necessitating a change of clothes. The worship team was already playing when I arrived, and the room was mostly full. Maybe the spilling of the spaghetti had been divine intervention, I thought, because as I walked into the room, I found myself looking directly at the back of Carrie Valentine’s head. She sat a few rows down, one seat in from the aisle, with an empty seat next to her. I walked over to her, pointed to the empty seat, and nervously asked, “Is anyone sitting there?” Hopefully she understood what I was saying over the music.

“Go ahead!” Carrie replied, smiling. I sat next to her. As we sang along, then listened to announcements and a talk delivered by Cheryl, I realized the great irony of this situation. I was sitting next to a cute girl. This would provide an opportunity for a conversation afterward. But I could not make plans with her, because I already had plans tonight, to go to the movie with Todd and Autumn and all of them. Go figure. Nevertheless, after the ending song, I asked Carrie how her week was going.

“Good,” she said. “I just had a midterm today. I don’t think I did very well.”

“Maybe you’ll surprise yourself,” I said. “I’ve been trying to get ahead on reading and studying, because I’m gonna miss class Thursday and Friday next week.”

“Why’s that?”

“Some of us from Jeromeville Covenant are taking a road trip to San Diego, for the National Youth Workers’ Convention.”

“That sounds like fun!”

“It will be. Apparently a lot of big-name speakers will be there. And a lot of Christian bands play live there.”

“Like who?”

“DC Talk. Audio Adrenaline. Five Iron Frenzy. The OC Supertones. I don’t remember who else.”

“Wow!” Carrie said. “San Diego is nice! Have you been there before?”

“I haven’t. I’ve only been as far south as Disneyland. So this will be a new experience for me.”

“Have fun! I’m jealous.”

“Thanks. I’m excited!”

“How is that going, working with the youth group at church? You work with junior high kids?”

“Yeah. It’s a lot of fun. Over the last few weeks, I did an unofficial project, not an actual church activity, where I made a movie based on some characters I created several years ago. I got a lot of kids from the church to be in the movie. And I filmed some of it at church, like we used the youth room for a school dance scene.”

“That sounds like so much fun! How did the movie turn out?”

“Pretty good. A little unprofessional looking in some spots, but it was fun. We had a watch party after youth group this week. Not a whole lot of people stuck around, but it was fun to watch the movie on the big projector screen in the youth room.”

“Nice! I’ve never done anything like that. My sister and I used to make home movies sometimes when we were kids, but nothing as complex as what it sounds like yours was.”

“That sounds like fun too,” I said. I smiled, looking into Carrie’s big brown eyes, desperately trying to think of something to say to keep this conversation going. I wondered if Todd would be okay with me inviting her along to see Romeo + Juliet? “What are you doing tonight?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Carrie replied. “I heard some people were going to see Romeo + Juliet, but I don’t know if I want to go.”

Perfect, I thought. Carrie knew about the movie without me having to be awkward. “I’m going,” I said. “I think you should too.”

“I’ll wait and see how I feel later. I need to go talk to some people from my Bible study before they leave. But maybe I’ll see you at the movie tonight?”

“Yeah. I’ll talk to you soon.”

William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, spelled with a plus sign but pronounced “Romeo and Juliet” like the play it was based on, was the movie that made actor Leonardo DiCaprio a household name. I did not know much about the movie, except that I vaguely remembered hearing about its existence last year. The lecture hall at 199 Stone Hall showed second-run movies on weekends, and this was often a destination for people hanging out after Jeromeville Christian Fellowship on Friday nights.

Carrie did end up coming to the movie. A group of eight of us walked down Davis Drive from Evans Hall to Stone Hall, the next building to the west. When we left, I was in the middle of telling Autumn about the Dog Crap and Vince movie that I made with the kids from church. Autumn and I were near the back of the group, and Carrie was closer to the front. As we walked into the theater, I could not position myself next to Carrie without looking conspicuous and awkward. When I sat down, Todd was to my left, then Autumn, then three more people between Autumn and Carrie. The aisle was on my right. Carrie was here, but I was not sitting next to her.

When I was a freshman, movies at 199 Stone would be preceded by classic cartoons, an experience normally associated with past generations of moviegoers. This tradition had fallen away at some point since then; tonight the screen showed a silent slideshow of advertisements before the movie started. The lights darkened, I saw the name of the movie studio appear on the screen, but I became confused when a television with a news broadcast showed up on the screen. Was the movie starting? Was this the movie? Surely this television was not part of the movie, since Shakespeare’s play was set in the sixteenth century.

The reporter began talking about the Montagues and Capulets. Those were Romeo and Juliet’s respective families, so this was definitely the movie, but why did Verona look like a city in a gangsta-rap music video? What were these police cars and helicopters? I quickly realized that what I was seeing was not going to be a faithful reproduction of Shakespeare’s work. Instead, the story had been adapted to a modern urban setting, with the Montagues and Capulets rival crime families. As the movie continued, I noticed that all of the characters still spoke their actual lines, unchanged, from the Shakespeare play.

It was kind of brilliant, but it was really weird.

As the movie continued, I noticed more and more creative interpretations of Shakespeare’s words for a modern-day context. The police chief was named Prince, for example, and it took me a while to realize that he filled the role of the actual Prince of Verona as written by Shakespeare. The characters fought with models of guns named after the blade weapons used by Shakespeare’s original characters. Even with these changes, though, it still seemed odd to me that these gangbangers spoke in Shakespearean vocabulary and iambic pentameter.

When the movie ended, as the credits played, I stood and stretched. “That was weird,” I said disdainfully.

“That was so good!” Todd exclaimed.

“It was weird!” I repeated, louder.

“You didn’t like it?”

“It just seemed really unnatural having modern characters use Shakespeare’s language.”

“That’s what makes it so good!”

“I don’t know. I guess it just wasn’t for me. Thanks for inviting me, though.”

“Any time.”

As we walked out toward the parking lot, many of the others talked about how much they loved the movie, and I remained silent. I tuned out the conversation, so I did not find out what Carrie thought of the movie. I did not want to say any more bad things about the movie, in case Carrie loved it as much as Todd did. I may have already ruined any chance I had with Carrie by not liking the movie, and I did not want to open my mouth again and make things worse.

I never watched that movie again, although now, with a quarter-century of hindsight, I would not rule out giving it another chance if the opportunity arose. Maybe I would enjoy it more knowing from the start that the movie was a combination of Shakespeare’s words and a modern-day setting, and not having my thoughts darkened by the frustration of not getting to sit next to Carrie.

Why was it so difficult to ask a girl out? Why was this process so difficult for me to understand? Romeo and Juliet had no such problems. Romeo crashes a party because he wants to bang some other chick who he knows will be there, he and Juliet see each other, he goes to the balcony, and boom, they were in love that night and married the next day. What was wrong with me that love never dropped into my lap like that? Of course, as a direct result of all of this, Romeo and Juliet both end up dead after a few days. Maybe it was for the best that my life did not turn out like Romeo’s life; this story was, after all, a tragedy.

Readers: Was there ever a movie that all your friends liked but you didn’t? Tell me about it in the comments.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

Late October-early November, 1997. I made a movie. (#150)

November 13, 2022 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 9 Comments

These days, in the era of YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, it is difficult to believe how recently it was that common people did not constantly make their own videos. In the 1990s, doing so required a camera that cost hundreds of dollars, and was the size and weight of a medium-sized textbook, at minimum. Also, it was necessary to record these videos onto a tape, and to make sure that there was enough room on the blank tape to record the video without erasing any existing footage. Showing someone a homemade video required a television connected to a VCR or to the camera itself. The Internet existed, but the processing and connection speeds of computers in that era limited most Internet uses to text and standard-definition photos and graphics.

I never had a video camera growing up. I wanted one so badly. I had many ideas for movies and shows I wanted to make. My brother Mark and I, along with whatever neighborhood kids were around, would sometimes act out performances that would have made good home movies. We had a weird variety show called The Mark Show, full of characters based on various inside jokes, and a game show called Messy Room, inspired by Double Dare and Fun House and the other kids’ game shows that briefly became popular in my preteen years. For some of our shows, we would record the audio so we could at least listen to them later, but they were the kind of performances that would have worked much better with video.

Now, in my early 20s, my creative project was a website called Dog Crap and Vince, which I began shortly after I taught myself the basics of HTML, the code used to make websites. Dog Crap and Vince was a series of crudely illustrated stories about the adventures of two quirky high school students, and it would have worked much better as video or animation. I still did not have a video camera, nor did I have the money to buy one. But I had more connections now than as a child, so when I showed Dog Crap and Vince to the boys from the youth group at church, and mentioned that it would work better as a TV show or a movie, Zac Santoro offered to ask his dad if I could borrow their video camera. And thus one of my most involved creative endeavors of my life so far was born.

That night, we had talked about beginning the project Sunday after church, so when I walked up to Zac, Ted Hunter, and Danny Foster after church and asked if they were ready to start filming, I felt inwardly frustrated when Zac replied, “Huh?”

“The Dog Crap and Vince movie. You said you talked to your dad about borrowing your video camera, and that we could start filming today.”

“Oh, yeah! He said you could borrow it.”

“So, like, now? Are we going to your house?”

“Sure.”

“I can’t,” Ted said. “My mom said I have to come straight home.”

“We talked about this on Wednesday,” I reminded Ted. “You said you’d be free on Sunday, and that you would play Vince.”

“I forgot.”

“Well, I can still get the camera, and maybe we can film some scenes that don’t have Vince in them.”

“Film some scenes?” a voice behind me asked. I turned around to see Jim Herman. I knew Jim from seeing him around church; he was older than me, I would guess in his mid-thirties, presumably single because I never saw him with any sort of family. Everyone at church seemed to know Jim. “What are you guys doing?” Jim asked.

“We’re making a movie,” I explained. “I’m borrowing a camera from the Santoros.”

“You think I could go along and help out?” Jim’s question caught me off guard, and when he saw me hesitate, he added, “That way you can all be on camera at the same time, and I can be the cameraman.”

“Sure,” I said. “That would be helpful for scenes I’m going to be in.”

By the time we got to the Santoros’ house, we had already made a change to the script. The boys had decided to film a scene that broke the fourth wall, in which I would knock on Zac’s door asking if Zac could come make a movie with us. Although I had carefully worked on this script for several days, this change seemed like it would fit the quirky, offbeat nature of the Dog Crap and Vince world.

Zac, Danny, Jim, and I walked up to the front door of Zac’s house. I knocked on the door, and Zac’s dad answered a minute later “Hi, boys. Hi, Greg,” he said, shaking my hand. “Jim.” Had I been more observant of body language and subtle cues, I might have noticed a shift in Mr. Santoro’s tone when he addressed Jim, but at the time I thought nothing of it. “Here’s the camera,” Mr. Santoro continued, handing me the camera. “Please be careful with it.”

“I will,” I said. “They wanted to film a scene here first. Is that okay?”

“Sure!”

I handed Jim the camera as we filmed the new scene. Zac’s six-year-old sister answered the door, and I asked if Zac was home. Zac appeared a few seconds later, and I said, “Hey, Zac. Let’s make a movie.”

“Okay!” Zac announced excitedly, acting overly dramatic in a way that I had not intended.

“Go get Danny,” I said.

Zac turned his head toward the inside of the house and called out, “Danny! Let’s go make a movie!” Danny ran out of the house a few seconds later, Zac following, me following both of them, and Jim following us with the camera. “We’ll pick up Ted on the way!” I shouted, since Ted was not there. The two boys, for reasons unknown other than the fact that they were teenage boys, jumped onto the hood of my parked car.

“Cut,” I said to Jim a few seconds later, taking the camera back after he stopped recording.

“Ow!” Danny said. “You kicked me in the head!”

“What?” Zac asked. I played the footage back on the camera’s small screen, and just before Jim had stopped recording, I saw Zac’s foot connect with Danny’s head as they climbed on my car. “You have to leave that in the movie!” Zac said. “Sorry, Danny, it was an accident.”

“It looks good,” I said. “I think it would be hilarious to leave that part in the movie. Especially since it was an accident.”

The leaders from The Edge, the junior high school youth group from church, would have dinner at the Parkers’ house before youth group on some Wednesdays. The Parkers’ oldest son, Brody, was a sophomore at the University of Jeromeville and one of the Edge leaders, and their youngest, a girl named Michelle, was a student in the youth group, the same age as the boys I was making the movie with. Michelle was playing Kim, Dog Crap’s love interest in the movie. I had arranged with the Parkers and Michelle’s real life friend, a girl from the youth group named Shawna Foreman, to film a scene when the leaders came to the Parkers’ house for dinner. The two girls were in Michelle’s room, talking about cute boys, when Michelle’s character, Kim, admitted that she liked Dog Crap. I held the camera for that scene, and one take was good enough.

The Parkers had two telephone lines in their house. Adam, the youth pastor, was downstairs using one phone to call the other, so that I could record Kim answering the phone in her room. After Shawna’s character left, the final film would cut to Dog Crap fidgeting in front of his phone, working up the courage to call Kim and ask her to a school dance.

“Hello?” Michelle said in character as Kim. The final film would then cut to Dog Crap chickening out, awkwardly shouting into the phone, “You have the wrong number!” I continued running the camera as Michelle got a confused look on her face and said, “Oh, sorry.” Michelle hung up the phone. Then she looked up and said, “Wait a minute! How could I have the wrong number? I didn’t call anyone!”

I played the tape back on the camera’s small screen. “It looks good,” I said. “Thanks. We’ll do the dance scene after The Edge tonight.”

“Sounds good!”

“Do you need me again?” Shawna asked.

“Those were your only speaking lines, but you’ll be in the background at the dance.”

“Great! I’ll see you tonight!”

Five Iron Frenzy, a punk-ska band with a Christian background who were too edgy to get much attention on Christian radio, was very popular with the Edge kids at the time. Ted told me that he had gotten the band’s permission to use their music in our movie; he was probably not telling the truth, but I did not bother to check. After The Edge, I filmed the school dance scene for the end of the movie in the youth room. Five Iron Frenzy’s “Where Zero Meets Fifteen” played while Dog Crap and Kim danced. The others in the background danced in much sillier ways than I had imagined; I was losing control of just how quirky this movie was, but I just wanted to get it done. And quirky was good for a project like this, I thought.

“I love this song!” Zac said in character as Dog Crap.

“Me too!” Michelle replied in character as Kim. “It’s my boyfriend’s favorite song!”

“Boyfriend?” Dog Crap said.

“Just kidding! Vince told me to say that.”

I wanted to imply that Vince was playing a prank on Dog Crap by telling Michelle to pretend that she had a boyfriend. I wanted Dog Crap to say something like “I’ll get him back for that,” but what Zac did instead was shout, “Vince!” and run out of the room. At this point, I was not going to be picky; that would have to be good enough.

Kim’s comment about her boyfriend was a reference to a scene from earlier in the movie. I had to shoot the film out of order, to accommodate everyone’s schedules, and I took careful notes of what had already been done and who was needed in each scene. In the boyfriend scene, which we had not yet recorded, Dog Crap and Vince were at school, talking at lunch. Dog Crap said that it is hard for him to ask a girl out because, whenever he starts talking to a girl, she will start talking about her boyfriend, so that he will not ask her out.

“That’s not true,” Vince replied encouragingly. “There’s Christine. Go talk to her.”

Dog Crap walked up to Christine and said, “Hey, Chrsitine. Did you figure out that one math problem you were confused about?”

“Yeah,” Christine answered. “My boyfriend is good at math.”

Dog Crap walked back to Vince with a look on his face as if to say I-told-you-so, and Vince said, “That was just one girl. It’s not everyone. There’s Samantha. Go talk to her.”

Dog Crap walked up to Samantha and said, “Hi, Samantha.”

“My boyfriend says hi to people,” Samantha replied.

At least that was how I pictured the scene in my head. When we recorded it a few days later, Vince said “go ask her out” instead of “go talk to her” for Christine. That seemed out of place if the whole point of the movie was that Dog Crap wanted to ask out a different girl from these two.

Christine and Samantha each had only one line, and I recorded their parts for that scene after we finished the school dance scene. It turned out better than I had planned. When I first started working with The Edge last year, a girl named Samantha Willis had said some awkwardly silly things to me. When I wrote this scene, I named this character Samantha because I had Samantha Willis in mind to play the role, and fortunately, she agreed. “My boyfriend says hi to people a lot!” she exclaimed excitedly on camera, before adding “Bye, Dog Crap!” It was perfect.

We filmed one more scene in the youth room. I played Matt, the school bully, who was also trying to ask Kim to the dance despite Kim’s frequent rebuffs. In this scene, near the end of the movie, Kim turns Matt down again. “I’d rather go out with someone who crawled out from under this table!” Michelle exclaimed in character as Kim, lightly shoving Matt away.

Just then Zac, in character as Dog Crap, crawled out from under the table, where he had been looking for something he dropped. Dog Crap greeted Kim, who smiled at him, and he used the opportunity to ask her to the dance. I thought that scene was particularly brilliant writing on my part, and Zac and Michelle acted it perfectly.

On Saturday, I picked up Zac, Ted, Danny, and Michelle, as well as Jim, who did not have a car. We went to a nearby school, with classrooms that opened directly to the outdoors with no hallway in between, to film the scenes taking place at school. It was more common in those days for school grounds to be left unlocked, open to the public, and all of the school scenes took place outside of classrooms, so this would be good enough for my purposes.

While Dog Crap was trying to find a way to ask Kim to the dance, Vince was training for an upcoming video game tournament. My bully character, Matt, in addition to trying to steal Kim, was also bragging that he was going to win the tournament. Dog Crap’s cousin had told him about Fish Boy, a mysterious video game master who lived in Jeromeville. I also played Dog Crap’s cousin; my two characters were distinguished on camera by Matt wearing a hat and Dog Crap’s cousin not wearing a hat. Of course, though, in one scene I forgot to wear the hat as Matt, and confusion resulted when I showed the movie to people later. I did not know how to run a costume department.

In character as Dog Crap’s cousin, I suggested that we all travel to Jeromeville to meet Fish Boy, and Ted replied as Vince with a brilliant ad-libbed rant. “Jeromeville?” he said with a crazed look, grabbing my shoulders to get my attention. “I’ve heard about this place! They have frog tunnels! And roundabouts! And you get arrested for snoring too loud! It scares me!”

I was not expecting this, but I stayed in character and calmly replied, “But Fish Boy is there! You’ll win the video game contest for sure.”

Vince, instantly back to normal, said, “Oh, yeah. Let’s go!”

Later, we drove around to film scenes from the Jeromeville trip. In character, I got lost several times and made multiple wrong turns, including getting stuck in a roundabout circling multiple times. I took Jim and Michelle home, since I was done with their scenes, and the rest of us went to the Fosters’ house to film the scenes with Danny playing Fish Boy.

Danny’s eighteen-year-old sister Erica, a leader with The Edge, joined us as we walked a quarter mile to the nearest gas station, where the characters had to stop to ask for directions. I had intended this scene to be a shot-for-shot parody of the scene from The Empire Strikes Back where Luke Skywalker meets Yoda, without realizing at first that the little green stranger who finds him is Yoda. The boys wanted to go into the gas station store and get snacks. I wanted to focus on getting my movie done, but since these boys were doing a favor for me for free, I let them. Afterward, I reminded everyone of their lines and started the camera.

“We’re being watched!” Zac said in character as Dog Crap, noticing a girl next to them.

“No harm I mean you,” Erica replied, using her normal voice but Yoda’s characteristic syntax. “Wondering what you are doing here, I am.”

“We’re looking for a video game master.”

“Fish Boy! You seek Fish Boy!”

“You know Fish Boy?” Dog Crap asked.

“Take you to him, I will!”

For the next scene, we returned to the Fosters’ house. After an awkward blooper in which Ted forgot his lines, Ted, in character as Vince, angrily spoke up about how they were wasting their time. Luke Skywalker had done the same when Yoda took him to his house.

“I cannot teach them,” Erica said, turning away. “They have no patience. They are not ready.”

“I was once the same way,” Danny replied from off camera.

Dog Crap and Vince looked at Erica, wide-eyed. “Fish Boy?” they said. They turned to each other and added, “Fish Boy’s a girl?”

“No, silly!” Erica replied, no longer speaking like Yoda. “I’m no good at those games! Fish Boy’s my little brother.”

Danny emerged from his bedroom, wearing some weird mask and carrying a hockey stick. Neither of those details was in the script, but this movie was already weird enough, so I allowed it. I continued recording as Fish Boy showed the other two shortcuts and special techniques for the game they were playing. After we finished, I thanked Danny’s parents for letting us their house. I took Ted and Zac home, then went home myself.

Over the next couple weeks, when I had time, I finished recording the remaining scenes. I edited the movie with a very unsophisticated setup of two VCRs connected to each other. We had a watch party on the big projector screen in the youth room at church after The Edge the following week; most of the Edge leaders and some of the kids who were in the movie stuck around to watch.

By modern standards, the movie was pretty terrible. I knew nothing of acting, directing, or editing, and with my rudimentary equipment, the video and sound quality was subpar. The characters’ clothes inexplicably changed from one shot to the next within the same scene, and twice during the movie, my shouts of “Cut!” were audible at the end of scenes, since editing a video with two VCRs was not a precise technique. The film was only half an hour long, too short to be considered a feature film. But we had so much fun and made so many memories during those few weeks.

The Dog Crap and Vince movie had a lasting legacy in my life. The boys from The Edge and I quoted lines from the movie to each other for years to come. I watched that movie so many times with so many people that I still remember much of the dialogue by heart. And Samantha, the boys’ classmate whose boyfriend said hi to people, became a regular character in the web series. It was later revealed that the character’s last name was Whitehead, and years later, among my adult friends, the act of bringing up a significant other in conversation out of context became known as “pulling a Samantha Whitehead.”

Those few weeks that I spent making the Dog Crap and Vince movie also set in motion a chain of events that took a much darker turn. I had no idea at the time that anything like that would come to pass from it, or that anything like this would happen among a Christian community such as Jeromeville Covenant Church. Looking back, though, in that context, it makes sense now why Mr. Santoro, normally a warm and friendly man, seemed aloof when he greeted Jim Herman on the day I borrowed the camera. But that is a story for another time.

This project was also the beginning of my realization that I prefer creative projects I can do alone over ones requiring the involvement of others. As much as it is fun to bring others into my creative mind, coordinating everyone’s schedules and dealing with flaky people caused much frustration. The same thing invariably happened every other time I tried to involve others in Dog Crap and Vince projects. But for the people who did stick to their commitments, I now have a record of the role they played in my life.

Readers: Tell me in the comments about something creative that you worked on with others. Did it all go according to plan or not?

As always, the episodes featuring Dog Crap and Vince were inspired by Cow Chip & Lance, an actual creative project that some people I know have worked on for decades. It has been inactive for a couple years, but some of their material is still available for viewing (click).

Also, if you like music and aren’t following my other site yet, Song of the Day by DJ GJ-64, go follow that one.

And I updated my Greg Out Of Character blog for the first time in several months, with a post that has little to do with 1997. Go follow that one too.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.