HISTORY OF WEIRDSVILLE PRODUCTIONS, BOOK ONE: Sunshine in Winter Park (1993 -- 1996)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

2011-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

THE PREMIERE

JESSE: The premiere party was a special event for DIP. We would gather together all of our friends (and family on Joe's side) to watch our two short features, Laugh A Little and Blood Pudding (with Blood Turd thrown in for good measure) at St. Philip Neri. Each movie would be introduced by the father of the project. Except for Blood Turd, which was cruelly bestowed upon Jeremy to introduce. I was to introduce none of them and that was fine with me. I would gladly sit back and let the original members of DIP do all the hard work.

At least, that's what I figured. As it turned out I had a whole boat-load of work in store for me that day.

MY MORNING AT CIRT, OR THE BLOOD PUDDING PREDICEMENT

My Mother's voice woke me early that morning. Peering out at her from the blankets I was cocooned in I saw her standing over the bed with a phone in her hand and a concerned scowl on her sleep-heavy face. She handed the phone to me with a stern warning: "Your Father says if he calls this early ever again he will personally kill him in his sleep." She started to walk away, stopped halfway and looked back. "And you know he'll do it too."

I said a sleepy hello into the phone, following it with my Father's warning. I heard Darren laugh on the other end as if it was a joke. I assured him that my Father was a man of his word and death loomed on the horizon. I heard Darren clear his throat and then say, a bit shakily, "Maybe you should get a private line for your room."

I laughed this off. I didn't want him calling this early in the morning either. I treasure my sleep very much. While Darren has always been an early morning person I was always a night owl. Now me, I don't call people at midnight simply because I'm too full of myself to realize that just because I'm awake it doesn't mean the rest of the world is too. Darren, on the other hand, didn't give two shits. So, my Father's threat was a brilliant play to get me more sleep. I leaned up in bed and asked him what in the name of all fuck he wanted.

Darren went through the plan for the day of the premiere. He and I would go to CIRT at seven to finish adding music and tightening the edits of Blood Pudding. We would then go pick up Joe and Jeremy as well as a TV to play the movies on. And after that it would be off to Marsh to pick up a couple of specially ordered cakes and some drinks. Then it was off to the school to begin preparations for the big day. This sounded like a fine plan except for one thing: "Why the hell am I getting up at seven for?" I whined.

"I need help with all of this. You and I are the only ones allowed to use CIRT's equipment and you know it," Darren shot back.

My thought process was simple and it repeated the same question over and over again: What the hell does he need me for? So I decided to double my bitchiness by telling him he'd do fine by himself and that I was going to hang up the phone and go back to sleep.

Darren grew agitated. "Look, you're a member of DIP and I need your help to finish this. You do want to be a member of DIP, don't you?"

This was the first time Darren threatened to fire me from the group. In the months to come Jeremy and I would both be fired every other day but at the time I felt this to be a legitimate threat (I think the lack of sleep and the impending threat of my Father going to prison for murder had something to do with it as well). I finally gave in but hastily added that he was buying me breakfast.

Darren quickly conceded to breakfast. He told me he would be at my house by 6:45, which in Darren terms meant 7:30ish. I agreed and got out of bed, grabbed my things and began getting ready. As I pulled on my shirt I was struck by a sudden thought: The previous day Darren had borrowed ten bucks from me so how the hell was he going to pay for breakfast?

Around eight o'clock that morning I sat at CIRT with the granola bar Darren had brought with him from home. As I gnawed on this barely edible piece of driftwood I thought that maybe I should've just let my Father kill him and been done with it.

Darren pulled out the tape with Blood Pudding on it and rooted through a collection of music tapes he had borrowed from Jeremy and Joe for the soundtrack. I looked through the selection, noting such classics as Blade Runner, Once Upon a Time in the West and True Romance. Darren had a list with a few songs Joe had picked out and which tape they could be found on. He gave me Carte Blanche to pick out the rest of the music. I chewed on my granola bar and scowled at him periodically.

I put on the earphones and began searching through the music. Darren went to work on tightening the edits. The first thing we did was watch the footage, which looked as if it had already been edited together in its entirety. I told Darren that it already looked pretty good and we didn't need to touch it. I asked who had edited it and Darren told me that Joe had done the editing from VCR to VCR and all we had to do was tighten everything up, which made no sense to me. Everything we'd been taught about editing had driven this fact home to us.

I was determined to give him my two cents worth, so in the sternest voice I could muster I said, "I want another granola bar, you cheap bastard."

He threw me another bar like a trainer throwing a seal a fish. I unwrapped it and went back to work on the music. While searching through the tapes I would hear an occasional curse from Darren. I'd turn around and watch him tinker with the editing board then watch the footage on the monitor behind him in an attempt to fathom what music I should use for which scene. Darren looked as if he was about to rip his hair out. He kept going back and forth trying to perfect the cut.

After an hour of hearing the Lord's name in vain Earl walked in. He sat down behind Darren and asked him what was going on. Darren explained the task at hand. Earl actually looking interested in something we were doing for once. He watched the footage with Darren all the way through. Earl looked at Darren when it was all done and said, "Why the hell are you editing this, it looks done to me."

Darren told him he was just tightening it up.

"Well, you can't do that with this footage, it's already been edited. You try to edit over an edit and you're only going to fuck it up. I would just leave it alone if I was you. "

Darren's response to this was to simply ignore the man. Earl got the hint and stood up. "Well, I better get going. Oh and Jesse, could you please stop singing 'Sugar, Sugar' at the top of your lungs?"

I took off my headphones and looked sheepishly at him. "Sorry, man. The Archies are the coolest."

Darren looked back at me, confused. "I didn't bring the Archies."

"Who said I was listening to them?" I said before putting the headphones back on and resuming the song.

Now, Darren didn't do a bad job on the edits. He was able to tighten a lot of the scenes. Of course, the only reason these worked was because Joe let the footage in each scene run a tad too long. This gave Darren a chance to edit before Joe's edit. Unfortunately, once or twice he hit Joe's edit, which caused the screen to blur. We didn't know any better at the time. We were young, dumb and full of granola bars. Darren did the very best he could and I think he delivered more than he missed.

At last the music was ready to be layered in. We went ahead and added everything the boys had chosen as well as a few of my own. By the end of the day we had the soundtrack complete but noticed one scene was lacking music. We were tired by this point and still had a load of chores to complete. So we just threw the first thing we could get hold of over the scene. The scene in question was when Patch and Byron first meet on the stairway to the basement. Lucky for us the music we put in fit perfectly. All we had to do now was add music over the credits.

I asked Darren if he had made the credits yet using the toaster. He said we didn't have time and Joe had made his own using trash bags. The fact that this was only now being brought up puzzled me as I could've been working on the credit sequence while I was doing the soundtrack had I known we needed to. Darren was adamant that we didn't have time now. I knew this as well and grudgingly complied. He said not to worry as Joe wanted us to use the trash bag credits anyway. I said "Whatever" and we quickly put a sonata from Dracula over the credits.

I knew in my heart that Joe would have preferred computer credits but went along with Darren simply to save time. After about ten hours of editing and choosing music we were done. We took the final tape and headed to Jeremy's place.

JOE: That really ticked me off! Having to make credits that way when Darren had access to computer generated graphics! Oh well!

JEREMY: I was both excited and nervous on the day of the Premiere. Excited because I’d had a hand in the creation of two short features that were going to be played before a group of my peers and nervous because the girl I had a crush on, Amy Ford, would also be there (Come to think of it, I suppose I was a little excited in that respect as well).

Joe was on good terms with the preacher who ran St. Philip Neri so we were able to secure the place for the party, just so long as it didn't involve booze, drugs, human sacrifice, sex outside of wed-lock...you know, the usual. We had ordered two cakes from the Marsh bakery, one would say Laugh A Little and feature a big smiley face, the other would say Blood Pudding with droplets of bloody icing splattered across it.

Joe came over early with Jim and we kicked around ideas for the Lamia script as well as a feature length version of Blood Pudding. By the time Dar and Jesse arrived we had exhausted our imaginations in both areas and eagerly sat down to watch the final version of Joe's movie.

JOE: It was fun to see the final edit of Blood Pudding. The best part was the music. I never realized how much music actually adds to a movie. I had seen Blood Pudding many times before but never with music. That is what I remember most about the first viewing of the completed movie.

JESSE: Jeremy, Joe and Jim were very pleased with what Darren and I had done. They did throw out some complaints about the blurred moments in a couple of scenes but Darren sweet-talked his way out of that. Joe was proud and gave Darren a victorious hug. Jeremy and I just looked at each other, each of us dreaming of the day when we would be able to direct our own features (that bastard Jeremy beat me to it. I hope you're happy, ass-munch).

JEREMY: Not really, what I ended up directing was crap-on-a-stick.

JESSE: For a moment, with the future laid out before us like a hooker who had just collected her twenty dollar admission I felt there was nothing that could stop us so long as we stuck together. We sat there, basking in the moment. Not a word spoken. Jim sat off in his own corner, wondering what was going on. Finally, he cleared his throat and said, "I think the fat kid passed gas. I mean, I can really smell it."

Damn him for ruining our moment and damn him even more for ratting me out. The four of them ran from the room, unable to stop the tears flowing from their eyes. Sadly, they were not tears of joy but the kind one gets while cutting onions.

Ah, fart humor, once again you've gotten me out of a tricky little story gap.

We went to Marsh to pick up our cakes and some other supplies. I went to the pop aisle and picked up two twenty-four cases of Dr. Pepper. Jim followed me around as we traveled through the store. The first question out of his mouth was as simple as it was practical: "Who the hell are you?"

I was quite amused by this little vagabond. "I'm Jesse," I said. "I shot Laugh A Little and am going to Florida with your brother."

"Oh really, that's very nice to know," he said, disinterested.

Jim then followed me into the chip isle where I picked up some chips and cheese spread. "You sure do cuss a lot, Jesse."

"Fuck you kid, you don't like it then it's your loss."

We finished our shopping before the boys and stood around in the Marsh video store waiting for them. The bastards were walking around, strutting like peacocks. They mentioned to whoever they knew (and some they didn't) about the big premiere they were having. Jeremy was especially proud and bragged about it to every hot female employee there (and they were in short supply).

JEREMY: Hey, those two girls were special in their own ways.

JESSE: While we waited Jim and I went through the movie display and discussed which ones we liked and didn't like. We were especially vocal about the video games section. Jim, like his brother, is a whore for games. I was bragging about the games I owned. Jim bragged about how he could kick my ass at any game there. We traded barbs for a few minutes (mine laced with colorful obscenities) until Darren finally walked over and announced that we were ready to pick up the TV.

As he walked away Jim and I agreed that we would demolish Darren at any video game we played. Ah, to be young.

Of course, Jim and I still have the same discussions to this day. I guess we always will.

JEREMY: Jesse gets sentimental about the damndest things.

JOE'S GRANDMA AND THE ICE COOLER

JESSE: Our next stop was Joe's Grandma's house. This would be the first time I met Joe's Grandmother. She was a rather nice old lady who had this uncomfortable way of watching you like a hawk. As she watched us disconnect her TV she said in a quivery voice just short of disbelief, "You boys aren't selling my TV for drug money, are you?"

Joe reassured his Grandmother that we needed it for the premiere. He had told her all about it earlier in the day. Her memory kicked up a few shards of that brief (and most likely one-sided) conversation, and she nodded in agreement. She then proceeded to tell Joe that she had since changed her mind. There was a show coming on that she wanted to watch. Joe asked her if she could watch it on the television in her bedroom. She was having none of that, So Joe compromised. He, Jeremy and I brought her television from the upstairs bedroom down to her, set it up and we were then on our way.

We carried the rather large and awkward TV to the car with Darren trying to lead us. Luckily, we got it there in one piece. The problem now was that the TV took up half of the back seat. Jim, being the smallest one, would have to sit on his brother's lap. Jim didn't like the idea, Joe wasn't too hot for it either, and the rest of us thought it was funny as all get out. In the end we settled it the Democratic way. We had a show of hands. Out-voted, Joe and Jim would have to suffer while the rest of us rode in comfort.

In a stroke of luck the school wasn't too far from Joe's Grandmother's house. We made it there in record time and quickly unloaded the stuff into the main room. Joe and I went to work setting up all the equipment. Jeremy tried to help where he could and Darren stood around watching us. I remember most fondly that we had a good time talking about Kids in the Hall. We all loved the Kids and were cracking each other up reenacting our favorite sketches.

JOE: We tried to hook two TVs together so the movies would play on two screens at once. I don't really remember the reasoning behind this. It may have been because we had two TVs there and we wanted to see if we could do it. The experiment ended in failure. We wept openly for a few minutes until Jeremy slapped the shit out of the both of us.

JEREMY: I always seemed to be slapping somebody in the group.

JESSE: While setting up I noticed two things were missing. We had no ice for the pop and nowhere to keep the ice even if we did have it. I volunteered to walk to the local Village Pantry. I was the logical choice to go because nobody I knew was coming. My friend Dave was working and Mom and Dad decided to have a night to themselves (hell, they deserved it). They all agreed and I was soon on my way.

The Pantry wasn't too far away and the walk there took only twenty minutes. I found a Styrofoam cooler and ice and was back out in minutes. The walk back was a bit more arduous. I was weighed down by three bags of ice. So, a twenty minute jaunt was now doubled to forty. As I crossed the street a small miracle happened. My parents drove up next to me. I was stunned and pleased at the same time. My Dad leaned out the window and told me to get in.

I almost leapt into the van. I asked my parents what they were doing up here. My Mom explained that they'd dropped by my Aunt Belle's and were now on their way to the movies. In what is almost a reflex action for me I asked what movie they were seeing. My Dad told me it was a sneak preview of Forrest Gump.

I was about two seconds away from begging them to take me with them. I had seen a Behind the Scenes for the movie the night before. I really wanted to see this film and here were my parents on their way to see it before me. I was jealous and they knew I would be quizzing them nonstop when I finally got home. They dropped me off and, probably sensing my indecision, quickly sped away.

I came back inside and poured the partially melted ice into the cooler. Jeremy exclaimed that I'd certainly made a quick trip. I told him that my parents had picked me up on their way to see a movie. Jeremy asked which movie and I told him.

Jeremy looked at me like I was an idiot. "If I were you I would've went with them. That movie looks pretty good."

I knew then and there that I could always count on Jeremy to be on the same page as me. That would become an absolute fact on our journey through Florida.

HOW LOVELY TO MEET YOU, ENJOY THE SHOW

We had an eclectic number of guests coming to our show. Let's meet them:

GINNY KEEFE

Darren's ex-girlfriend and inspiration for the character Jennifer Charles. This would be the first time I ever met her. Ginny was a short, skinny girl with blue streaks in her hair. She looked like someone who was trying to be someone they weren't. Darren was uncomfortable for the rest of the night because of her presence.

JOE WOODRUFF & DAVE MATTINGLY

These guys were Joe's friends. I remember they all had fedoras on, Joe included. They all wore the same wardrobe too, which consisted of a suit jacket, a t-shirt and jeans. They looked like they belonged to some poor man's Groundlings.

JESSICA DEVINE

Joe's sister came with one of the above mentioned. I believe at the time she was dating Joe Woodruff. Another girl was with this bunch but I don't remember her name nor does it matter much.

THE MYSTERY GIRL

Joe invited some young fine thing to the party. I don't remember her name or maybe I just wasn't told it. All I know is Joe hung on her like a fly to flypaper. Joe, shine your wisdom down on us.

JOE: This would be Cicely Campo. I actually invited two girls to this little shindig. The one that couldn't make it is the one I had the crush on. I’d had a crush on her since Freshman year. Too bad she couldn't make it. Cicely was super nice (she had to be; why else would she come to this little get together?) and very pretty, but we were just friends.

ROSE (LAST NAME UNKNOWN)

Now Rose was a girl who went to Tech and worked with me at O' Malia's. She showed up because she had a crush on Darren. I had a crush on her, she was a beauty. She was of Mexican-American descent. Of course, she showed me no interest and hung on Darren all night.

AMY FORD

Amy was an actress in Blood Pudding. Jeremy hung on her all night. I'll let a better writer tell you all about her. So, get to writing, Riley, and tell us about your lusting for Amy Ford.

JEREMY: I lusted for Amy Ford.

LONG INTRODUCTIONS TO SHORT MOVIES

BLUD TURD

JESSE: Jeremy was the first up to introduce the films. Jim and I laughed at him from the back row (Jim would be my constant companion through the night). Jeremy made sure everyone knew right off the bat that he did not direct this piece of shit. He went on to explain the genesis of Blud Turd, pointing out that this was really the brain child of Joe and Darren. He was taking no credit for anything on this movie, though he did admit there was a fine looking fellow in the piece whose acting reminded him of a young Brando. He was too modest to mention names but proceeded to point at himself. He then started the movie and flicked off the lights. After a few seconds Blud Turd lit up the room.

This was the first time I saw Blud Turd. I remember I was tickled by this little movie. It had no plot and no characters. It was just an excuse for them to do something silly. They succeeded and it was a pretty good short.

JOE: Jeremy insisted on introducing Blud Turd. I remember the night before the premiere he was almost in tears about the issue. It seemed only right. Jesse got to introduce everybody to the snack table so what was left for Jeremy? For his sake, we decided to run BludTurd with Laugh a Little and Blood Pudding. After all, Blud Turd was the result of Darren wanting to shoot us reading our poetry in front of the camera. Jeremy was the one that added the little narrative to it. I was just in the room at the time of the shooting. I was shocked at the amount of clay Darren ingested during this shoot. I think the clay has gone on to affect his brain.

Jeremy proudly introduced Blud Turd as his movie. I remember the big smile on his face as the adoring multitudes hung on his every syllable. It was a great shining moment for Jeremy.

JEREMY: Joe is lying his ass off here, by the way. And for the record, I never put all the blame for Blud Turd on the other boys' shoulders. I simply stated that the movie was a total piece of crap, which it was.

BLOOD PUDDING

JESSE: Joe stopped the tape (all three movies were on the same tape) and then introduced his movie. Joe was quite proud of Blood Pudding. He regaled us with stories of the production and then decided he no longer wanted to be up there. He told everyone to just see for themselves. He started the tape and flicked out the lights.

Now, as far as memory recalls Joe's feature played the best of all the movies. I'm not saying it was the best but people responded to it the most. Of course, this might be due to the fact that Joe had the most supporters in the room. The crowd really seemed to be affected by it in a weird way. Joe was quite pleased, although I think his mystery girl wasn't too thrilled to be in the same room with him by this point. Eh! Can't win them all.

JOE: Actually, I think Blud Turd played the best.

LAUGH A LITTLE

JESSE: It was Darren's turn to introduce Laugh A Little. Darren was so nervous he looked as if he was about to pass out. He started babbling about the movie in a non-coherent manner, starting sentences and then stopping in the middle to start another. No one knew what the hell he was going on about. After about ten minutes of suffering (well, it felt like ten minutes anyway) he just gave up and told everyone to enjoy the movie.

By this point I had seen the movie like a million times. Any humor, dramatic tension or amazing camera-work no longer had an effect on me. The only thing that could bring that original enthusiasm back was to watch it with an audience, to see how they reacted to it. No one made a sound during the viewing, leading me to believe for a moment that everyone in the room had died. When the lights came on I was shocked to see everyone still breathing. I looked around and noticed Darren was gone. I was sure he was torn apart by the total non-reaction to his movie. This was one hell of a way to start a party.

I LIKE TO BOOGIE, I LIKE TO GET DOWN

While our guests tore into the cake and cases of pop I went in search of Darren. I found him in the nearby kitchen staring out a window. He turned around and saw me standing there. He had a look on his face as if someone had just killed his puppy. I told him who cared if nobody liked the movie. Fuck 'em.

Darren looked at me as if that was the last thing on his mind. "Ginny's here," he said. "What's she doing here?"

"What do you mean? You invited her...didn't you?"

"Well, of course I did, but I didn't think she would come. Seeing her again brings back all the emotions I had for her," he cried. "And if that's not bad enough she brings her lover with her."

Lover? I thought. You mean her and the other girl...

I couldn't resist being a smart ass. "Well, Darren, if you're a real man you'd try to score a threesome."

Darren smiled, patted me on the shoulder and went to charm his guests. I saw Jim standing in the doorway, a puzzled expression on his face. "Um, Joe sent me to get more paper plates," he said.

"Sure, kid."

"What's a threesome?"

I smiled. "You have cable right? Well, stay up late and watch Cinemax."

"I can't, Joe's in there at night with the volume turned all the way down."

"Well, he'll be in Florida soon and then you'll see. Hell, it's a damn rite of manhood staying up late and watching Cinemax. Your brother does it, I do it, and, damn it, son, the President of the

United States

does it."

Back in the main room Joe was cornered by Ginny Keefe. He had a look of pure disgust and hatred on his face. I could tell that if Joe had an arch-nemesis it was this girl. She seemed to be going on about nothing at all. I could tell by listening to her talk she was a pretentious ass. I walked over and told Joe I needed to talk to him. As we made our escape I told him I was just trying to save him from Lady Death over there. He thanked me and went over to hang with his friends.

JOE: It's true. Ginny and I did not get along.

JESSE: He stuck with them the rest of the night. Darren stuck with Ginny and Rose. Jeremy was with Amy. And me, well, Jim and I spent the night hanging out. After about twenty minutes we had only one thing to say about the party: it was a total and utter bore.

Now, I won't lie. We had nothing planned but the movies. Afterwards, people were supposed to enjoy cake and conversation. My idea of a party is radically different. I was picturing a party like the one in Teen Wolf or maybe Animal House. Our party had nothing like that, just people all wanting to go home but too polite to make an early exit. Jim and I tried to liven things up with a little limboing. Jim ran and got a broomstick and we tried to convince the others to join in. Jeremy had the only good excuse for not participating: "Limboing will muss up my hair."

So the party went more and more south. Finally, I told Jim that I saw a fireworks store on the corner and I was going to buy some fireworks and set them off as a capper to the night. Jim liked the idea and joined me. We picked out some pretty good fireworks and a lighter. I became a little worried though when the cashier took my money and I saw he had only two fingers.

JEREMY: I walked Amy home about a half hour before the party ended. I remember saying good-bye to her, knowing it was for good. I stood there on the street corner as I watched her enter her house, forever disappearing from my life. I thought about what a fine scene it would make in a movie and then returned to St. Philip Neri in time to see it clearing out. Two preachers had shown up to make sure we were minding our ps and qs. I introduced myself to the youngest. He looked at me like I just wiped my nose on his shirt and said, rather coolly, "I didn't ask."

Right there is the reason I will never be part of an organized religion. People seem to be of the opinion that faith equals asshole.

JESSE: The party petered out and the DIP group formed outside to see everybody off. Jim and I started lighting fireworks in celebration. We all stood there and watched the explosions while dreams of future celebrations danced in our minds. We only had one more thing to do in Indiana and that was a little half-hour movie by Jeremy called Wastelands. After that it was Florida or bust. We could feel the weight of the trip on our collective shoulders, but also the exhilaration of the adventures yet to come. The party was over and our lives had begun.

NEXT: WASTELANDS

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

2011-04-24T19:31:00.000-04:00

LAMIA

JOE: Lamia was to be our vampire epic. I don’t remember who came up with it, Jeremy or me or maybe we're both equally guilty. Anyway, we decided to write a short vampire movie to shoot before we went to Florida. We weren’t sure what the heck it was going to be about other than it would revolve around two vampires that were bitter enemies. Jeremy named the characters Tauin and Deucalion. Deucalion loved being a vampire. Tauin did not. Tauin was actively searching for a cure to his affliction. He enlisted the aid of a strange doctor, so named Polidori. Can you guess why we named him that? Because Polidori wrote the first vampire story! Ta da!

Okay, Polidori was an evil bastard who pretended to help Tauin find a cure when in actuality what he wanted was to discover the means of creating a vampire in his secret laboratory. He was developing a serum with the blood of Tauin and other vampires as the main ingredient. He intended to use the serum on himself in order to transform into some sort of super being. There ya go, short plot rundown such as it was originally intended.

JEREMY: Ah yes, Lamia. Sometime between Laugh A Little and Blood Pudding Joe and I started toying around with the idea of doing a horror movie. I had seen some footage of an unfinished vampire movie Joe and Dar had worked on before I met them and thought it had potential. I asked Joe why he hadn’t finished it and he said that they didn’t know where to go with the story. My first thought was that he and I should come up with a premise and work it around the material already shot. Joe one-upped me and suggested that we scrap the original footage as he didn’t think it was all that good and do something new.

Joe came up with the title ‘Lamia’, explaining that it referred to a female vampire. I thought it sounded both exotic and creepy and was all for it. The next step was to name our antagonist and protagonist. I remembered the name of a vampire-like character my cousin, Chris Nicholson, had created a couple years earlier named Tauin Bright and, dropping the last name, decided to use that for our hero.

The Deucalion handle originated from my having read The Odyssey in high school. Out of all the names mentioned in that epic poem that particular one stood out for some reason and I never forgot it. I intended to use it for one of my comic book characters down the road but decided it would make a cool name for a badass vampire instead (Ironically, Tauin Bright did make an appearance in comic book form in the last few issues of my Decade series).

The plot would revolve around Tauin, who longed to be rid of the vampire curse. He made an unholy alliance with the mad doctor, Polidori, who assured him that through modern science it was possible to find a means of curing him. To this end he talked Tauin into hunting down and either capturing or killing other vampires for experimentation. The vampire community didn’t take well to one of their own preying on them and Deucalion, an old rival of Tauin’s, brought together a gaggle of vampires to aid him in tracking down and destroying the rogue vampire.

This allowed for me to write several high-energy action sequences, which have always been a staple of my writing. Some worked, like a scene near the beginning with a scuffle between Tauin and another vampire under a bridge in the pouring rain; others didn’t, like when Deucalion and the other vampires corner Tauin in a restaurant and during the ensuing battle Tauin stabs one of the vampires in the heart with—get this—a shish kabob.

I believe it was at this point that Joe and I began to rethink the nature of what we were creating here.

Vampires living in packs, trading blows with each other, and searching for cures are pretty much part of the norm nowadays, what with Blade, Underworld, et al, but in 1994 this concept was still pretty underused. Joe and I felt like we were treading on new ground with our idea of a vampire action film. The problem was that our vision of it was steering dangerously close toward satire.

And where was the titular character in all of this, the female vampire, the Lamia? As far as I can recall we either forgot about adding a female character in the midst of all of the battles and kabob-stabbings or, being relatively geeky and lonely guys in those days, just didn’t know any girls who wanted to act in it. We attempted to rectify this oversight in a later draft by having a woman named Rebecca Kane become infected by a vampire at the beginning of the movie (the same vampire Tauin fights under the bridge). Tauin works to find a cure for her as well as himself while Deucalion attempts to seduce her into backstabbing her potential savior, thus creating a sort of bizarre love triangle.

JOE: If memory serves, Jeremy was to direct this movie as well as play Deucalion while I was to play Tauin. Seeing as how we wanted Lamia to be a homage to all sorts of vampire literature and films Jesse was to play a character named Gorff, a weird little Reinfield-type character who assisted Polidori. I really don’t remember if Darren was going to be in it or not. Unless he was to play Tauin and I was to work on cinematography. Oh well, doesn’t matter now.

JEREMY: Actually, I’m pretty sure I was to play Tauin and Joe Deucalion. I always thought Joe could pull off a pretty nasty villain, and by this point I had already played villains in both Joe and Dar’s movies and was looking to expand my horizons. We wanted Dar to play the role of Polidori as we felt that with his kinky bird’s nest of hair, hawkish nose and comic nature he would make the idea mad doctor. Jesse playing the deformed, simpleminded Gorff was a no-brainer. I mean, if we had a movie poster with all of the principle actors on it and asked someone to point out which character was Gorff the odds were good that they would point to Jesse.

JOE: Jeremy and I did quite a bit on the development end of Lamia. He did a lot of concept art, some of which is shown here. We had costumes and locations as well as storyboards and actors at the standby. And even though we didn’t have a camera we were serious about making this movie before we went to Florida. Then it happened. While Jeremy and I were trying to iron out the ending of the script along with some of the characters motivations it dawned on us that Lamia as it currently stood just wasn’t very good.

After some serious consideration we decided not to make it. Time was growing short in Indiana and the script just wasn’t as good as we knew it could be. One problem may have been that we were using a role-playing game for a source of ideas instead of just using old vampire lore. What role-playing game you might ask? The 'Vampire Masquerade', that’s what. Silly, I know. That’s why Jeremy and I decided to put Lamia away for a while.

JEREMY: I believe this was a wise decision on our part, though I was crestfallen that I would not be able to direct the film. I was itching to try out my directorial talents at this point in my life.

JOE: So we shelved Lamia for the time being, though we still kick the concept around from time to time.

So there you have it, the tale of the Lamia that never was.

NEXT: THE PREMIERE

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

2011-04-24T19:09:00.000-04:00

THE MOVIE OFFER

JESSE: The newspaper article brought us a lot of attention. Now 90% of this attention was from family and friends and really didn't count (and not one chick wanted to have sex with me for being famous for a day; what a gyp!!!). Although we did get an offer that managed to intrigue us at the same time that it made us apprehensive.

I was hanging out with my sister one day while she was working at Hooks Drugstore (damn, I'm cool). I was sitting on the counter, watching her tear covers off of books. I was quite disgusted by this action because, as you know, when a book is taken off the shelves the retailer is required to rip off the cover to prevent it from being sold. The books are then dumped in the trash bin. I was there to sneak into said trash bin and grab a few books I wouldn't mind reading, though my sister thought I was there to help her do some inventory (sorry Sis). I was bored by the whole book-butchering ritual so I decided to give Darren a call.

Darren answered the phone with his usual stone-like demeanor. We then had a long conversation about nothing in particular, at the end of which, just as I'm about to say goodbye, Darren decides to mention an important phone call he received earlier in the day. This is and always has been Darren's M.O. He will start talking about something trivial, like how his potato chips look like celebrities or something, going into great detail as if you are as interested in the subject as he is. Then, at the end of the conversation, he'll say something along the lines of, "Oh, by the way, I lost my left foot in a horrible accident", like it was an afterthought and not really worth mentioning.

Okay, now back to the phone call.

Dar mentioned that Shari Finnell had called him (at this point I was praying to God that this attractive African American woman hadn't bought into his charms and wanted to go out with him.). Apparantly she'd received a phone call from a local film producer who told her he would like to contact us with the possible offer of a business deal. Shari took his number and called Darren. She explained the situation to him and gave him the number.

I asked if Darren had called the gentleman in question. Darren said yes and that a weird conversation had ensued. I asked him what he meant by 'weird'. Darren said that the guy had been very aggressive (he is a fucking producer, of course he was aggressive). He also mentioned that the gentleman wouldn't be distributing the movie in

America

. The movie would be made for the Japanese and the Asian market. He told Darren that he had already produced a movie in Indiana called ‘Pushed Too Far’. He told Darren to discuss the proposition with the rest of us and then call him back to set up a meeting.

Naturally, I was thrilled to hear this. Someone with a track record wanted to do business with us. This was like a dream come true. I say 'almost' because I have a problem with people just coming out of the blue and handing me something on a silver platter. I instantly grew suspicious. I asked Darren to give me the gentleman's number. Dar wanted to know why. The answer was simple, I wanted to talk to this man and get a feel for him myself.

JACK ROONEY

I had a very good reason for doing this, and that reason was Darren.

Darren is, in a lot of ways, like Forrest Gump (no, not retarded, I'm saying this with affection). He just has this natural ability to become instant friends with people. He could walk into a bar full of bikers and exit a short time later with four new buddies. I don't know why this is but I have a few ideas.

For one, Darren talks to you in a questioning tone ("What do you think of the state of the world today? What would you do if a giant spider appeared right now? Are you going to eat your pickle?"). It makes you feel like you have to take care of him, as if you're the mentor and he your eager young student. Secondly, he is the most out-going son of a bitch in the world. If all of humanity were to die Darren would simply talk to the trees and be perfectly happy. The man has charm, I'll give him that. This charm, though, can sometimes lead him to bad people.

So, Darren gave me the number and I in turn gave this producer a call.

"Hello," a deep, rich voice said after four or five rings.

"Hi,” I said. "My name is Jesse Handlon and you talked to one of my associates in DIP Entertainment earlier." Associate hell, Darren always thought of Jeremy and me as his employees while we were a part of DIP.

"Jesse...oh, you're the fat guy in the picture."

Alright, a quick pause. I hate it when people describe me as the fat one. I had many other things going on in that picture. I had a crazy shirt on, my hair wasn't combed and I was the only one wearing sunglasses. However, this asshole decides to pick out my weight problem as a means of identification. I wanted to scream “fuck you” but was able to maintain my composure for the group's sake.

"Well, I do like to eat, can't lie about that," I politely responded.

"What can I do for you, Jesse?" He said, sounding bored.

"I was just calling to find out a little more about you, Mr. Rooney."

"Why, don't you trust me?" he angrily blurted out.

This was about the time I started to worry. The film business is famous for people fucking people over. Anyone worth their salt is going to do some research on the other person. This guy going on the defensive thirty seconds into the conversation wasn't a good sign.

"I can't say that I do or don't," I said. "After all, we just started talking. I just find its good business to get to know the other person before plunging head long into anything we might both come to regret later. You don't mind a few questions do you?"

There was a pause on the line. I waited for him to answer or hang up. Then, at last, "I guess I don't mind." You could hear the sarcasm in his voice.

"I was wondering what kind of movies you've made here in Indiana," I said.

With a hint of bitterness he said, "You ever heard of Herb Johnson?"

I had. Herb Johnson was semi-famous around the Midwest for starting one of the very first karate schools in Indianapolis. I also knew he’d starred in a movie called 'Pushed Too Far'. The movie was made around 1988 and also starred Claude Atkins (Sheriff Lobo). I also knew of Herb because Dave Patrick was a student at one of his studios. Dave told me that he was a total dick. I told Rooney that I had heard of him (omitting the dick reference) and mentioned the movie 'Pushed Too Far'.

"Yeah, well I directed and produced it," he said, "do you trust me now?"

I gave him a bewildered look and then remembered I was on the phone. So I decided to ask some more questions pertaining to this new movie he was looking to make, like if it was going to a major distributor or what?

Rooney then went on a long tangent about

Japan

. You see,

Japan

buys everything that's American and American movies are no exception. His plan was to sell the movie to

Japan

for theatrical release and then work something out for the video market here. With the profits he would earn off this he would then make another movie.

I listened with interest and then asked what our roles on the production side of the film would be.

Rooney grew quiet for a moment and then said, "Maybe we should talk about all of this at the meeting."

The point was finally driven home. Rooney didn't want to talk to some dumb kid anymore. I politely said my goodbyes and hung up. I knew what we would be doing on the film, I just wanted to hear him say it. I could almost hear Rooney's voice now, directing us on the set: “Jesse, fix those lights; Joe, get me some coffee; Jeremy, find my actor; Darren, daddy needs some lovin'.”

We would be nothing more than gophers. This wasn't necessarily a problem, but the way Rooney was selling Darren on the idea he had him believing this would be our movie. This wasn't the feeling I got from my short conversation with him.

I called Darren back and told him what Rooney and I discussed. He asked me to hold on the line and the next thing I knew Joe was on the line too. We discussed the situation, all of us feeling uneasy about it. I suggested we go through with the meeting; that it wasn't like we would be forced at gun-point to sign anything. I also said we should have an adult we trusted with us during it. I felt that no matter what happened it would be a good experience for us.

The meeting never happened. The reason why is up in the air. I was told that everyone was just too suspicious of this guy. He seemed to be misleading us and that was a problem. Then I heard that Darren could only borrow the car once a week. He had a choice between taking the car for a meeting or taking the car out on a date. Darren chose to get laid. Here's my problem with that excuse though: My Dad had a van and would have gladly driven us to the meeting had we asked him. Hell, he would have sat in with us as the adult at the meeting. We should have never given Darren that much control over our destinies.

Do I regret not going to the meeting? You bet your sweet ass I do. Even if it had been a bust we would've at least known what to expect for future encounters with producers. Not only that, this guy could have been on the level. He could have set us up with our first movie or provided an opportunity to work with someone else in the industry. You never know unless you try. But the only way to die without regret is to never have been born in the first place. So, I'd rather have the regret.

JEREMY: Joe was hanging out at my place when Dar stopped by and told us about his phone conversation with Jack Rooney. He said the guy had chewed him out, telling him he didn't know anything about the industry and that he better get his shit together if he wanted to succeed as a filmmaker. This put me on the defensive. Of course we were ignorant of the movie industry, I was the oldest member in the group at twenty and we had all spent our lives in bum-fuck Indiana. We were still in the process of going to Florida for the sole purpose of educating ourselves on the industry. Who the fuck was this guy to talk to one of us like that? As if he was some big shot Hollywood producer or something.

Dar, Joe and I immediately formed a plan in which Dar would call Rooney back and discuss the business proposal while Joe and I listened on separate lines. That way we could ambush him if he started to get out of line. So Dar called the guy back and began talking about the movie deal he'd supposedly offered us. I saw right away what the problem was. Dar was too damn tense, fumbling words and making himself out to be meek. Even at my young age I knew that producers were wolves and would go for the throat at the first sign of weakness.

Sure enough, one minute into the conversation Rooney said something along the lines of, "You really have no idea what you're doing, do you?"

"More than you know, bub," I said. There was silence on the other end, which I hoped was surprise and/or confusion (either that or the guy was repressing a yawn; hard to gage a person's reaction when you can't see them). "We're good. Real good."

I was putting on an act of confidence because it was what the guy wanted to hear. Sure, we were inexperienced; he was well aware of that, but faith in your abilities could go a long way. The guy was testing us, no doubt about it. It's a producer's job to be on the lookout for up and coming talent. All we had to do was play our cards close to our vests, show him that we were stand up guys with a passion for the film industry, and he would be sold.

"I'm sure you are," Rooney said, "you were in the newspaper, after all."

The ice was pretty much broken after that. We talked about movies in general and his 1986 Claude Akins vehicle, 'Pushed Too Far', in particular. He asked what our plans were for the industry. I don't know why, but I was picking up a bad vibe from this guy. There was something smarmy about him. It wasn't necessarily in the way he talked, but something else...something instinctual. I didn't trust him. Of course, I reasoned with myself that he was a producer and by the very nature of who they are and what they do they aren't to be trusted, but it seemed to go deeper than that. Eventually, we agreed to hold a meeting in person at a later date, said our goodbyes, and hung up.

I discussed my ill-feelings with Dar and Joe and they likewise expressed similar concerns. Still, we reasoned that if this deal turned out to be on the level it could be our ticket into the business. The only problem was that if we took Rooney up on his offer Florida would be out of the question. We would have to remain in Indiana for another year or more. It was a gamble with the mysterious producer who may or may not be on the level, working as grips for a movie we had no love for, as opposed to moving to Florida, acquiring an education, and making contacts through the school. It was a tough choice, and I was leaning more towards Florida for the single reason that it was an adventure, plain and simple.

It was Dar who eventually solved the dilemma for us. Since he was the only member of our group with a driver's license at the time we relied on him for transportation when we needed to go somewhere outside of the bus route. Well, Dar called us up the night before the meeting and told us that his mother had given him an option: he could either use her car to take us to see Rooney or he could use it for a date with his girlfriend-at-the-time, Ginny.

Dar had thought long and hard on this and had chosen the latter. In a way I was relieved that the decision had been taken out of my hands, though it isn’t fair of me to use Dar as a scapegoat. If we had wanted to go to the meeting bad enough we would’ve found a way. I think the bottom line is that the whole Rooney thing was too big for us at the time. We weren’t prepared yet on an emotional level.

Jesse says that his father would have taken us and, having gotten to know the man shortly before he passed away, I have no doubts that he would've done just that, but I wish Jesse had let one of us know in advance. Perhaps he too was having his doubts. I wish I had been a little more vocal around the guys in those days, but they were the first friends I'd ever had and I was afraid to speak my mind a lot of the time for fear of losing them. Hell, I don't know what I was worried about, these days I can't seem to shake them for a minute of peace.

All said though, we should have gone to the meeting. They say opportunity knocks only once, maybe that was it for us. But then, I'm a firm believer that one shapes his own destiny, so while I still have a breath of life in me I will hold on to my dreams.

JESSE: I too should have been more vocal about this. I was concerned over the matter but wanted to do it. I get the feeling nowadays that Jeremy and I are the only ones to regret the decision (I don't know about the others, they never mention it). I don't believe this was our only chance, though; especially since Jack's other movies haven't really been big hits. Besides, had we done it we would never have gone to Florida. You'll see our names yet in lights, I know it.

JOE: I wanted to go to the meeting with Rooney as well. I talked to my parents about it and they thought I should concentrate on Florida and going to school. I wasn't that bothered when the meeting didn't happen. I do wonder what could have come of it. Maybe if we had stayed in contact with him through school we could have worked with him later down the line. Who knows?

What if? What if? Onwards and upwards!

NEXT: LAMIA

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

2011-04-17T22:16:00.001-04:00

MAKING NEWS

JESSE: The genesis of this interview began with Darren and Mike Wallace. Wallace had started an independent magazine called Apathetic Zealot. Shari Finnell (a reporter with the Indianapolis Star) had somehow gotten wind of Mike spreading this magazine around Tech. She called him and set up an interview for a new section of the paper called YEP. So, Mike invited Darren and me to join him and his cronies for the interview process.

When we arrived for the interview in one of the school's conference rooms I made myself useful by eating the donuts offered by the paper’s staff. Everyone else just sat around, nervous, unable to eat. I had nothing to be nervous about as I really didn't do anything for the magazine. I just helped them staple the paper together and hand them out. So this was all a free ride for me and I got the most out of it.

Shari Fennell finally came into the room and asked if we were being well taken care of. Darren and the others were acting really shy. I held up my donut and said, "You journalist type sure know how to treat a guest, but next time may I suggest pizza instead of donuts?"

Shari laughed at what she perceived to be a joke. Sadly, I was a fat boy and was dead serious. She sat down at the table and pulled out her notebook before asking us to go around the table and state our names and what we did for the paper. They all introduced themselves and when she came to me I said, "My name is Jesse and frankly I do jack shit for the paper. I sometimes hand them out but mostly for toilet paper." They all laughed at what they perceived to be a joke. Sadly, I was serious.

Wisely, Shari ignored me for the rest of the interview (this would become a trend for our group's interviews, even when I had a lot to say). During a break Darren told me he was going to mention DIP to her. I smiled and said "Yeah, we do need some dip, I would like some chips". Darren laughed (dammit, doesn't anyone know when I'm being serious? I wanted some fucking chips) and walked over to her.

Darren went into one of his patented acts of salesmanship, telling her all about our group. She listened patiently with a smile on her face. When he finished she said she’d rather do an article about that, alluding to the fact that this whole magazine thing was just a fad anyway. She gave Darren her office number and told him to call her. Darren walked over to me and said, "I think she wants to fuck me." Darren thinks all chicks who say hello to him want to fuck him.

We finished the interview and went into a studio for the photo shoot. I was asked to get into the picture. I told them I was still eating the chips and dip that Shari just got for us. They all laughed and pulled me into the picture (I was starting to hate these people by this point). The photographer snapped some pictures and then sent us on our way.

A week later, Darren called and said our interview was in the bag.

PICTURES AT ST. PHILIP NERI

I had gotten up rather early that morning. I was going to have to walk all the way to St. Philip Neri for a ten o'clock photo session and I didn't want to be late. As you know by now, I was fat, slow, and it was going to be quite a walk over many miles. I had decided to wear my most eye-catching shirt as well as my coolest pair of shades. The way I figured it, this would focus the attention instantly on me and people would say “Hey, that fat fuck, he's cool.”

As I started my long trek through my run-down, crime infested neighborhood a thought struck me: My coolest, most eye catching shirt was made of wool with long sleeves. Having chosen to wear this particular garment turned out not to be such a good idea considering it was a hundred degrees outside. I was sweating my balls off. The heat was unbearable and I had to stop several times to catch my breath and wring out my sweat-drenched shirt.

On my journey I found a friend. A small Dauschaund had started following me. I stopped and picked up the dog to look at its nametag. The damn thing began licking the sweat off my face so I put it back down, but it kept following me. I tried to leave it in the dust but I was already at my top speed. After about four or five minutes I stopped and the dog stopped too. He again tried to lick my sweaty face but I shooed him away. A sound caught his attention then. An even fatter bastard than me was tramping along across the street. The dog ran to him and the fat bastard picked him up. The dog began to lick him wildly, which the fat guy seemed to enjoy. He walked off with the dog in the folds of his arms, both happy as corn in shit.

I finally arrived at St. Philip Neri, took a seat on the well shaded steps, and waited for the others to arrive.

JEREMY: I was so excited on the night before the interview that I couldn't sleep. When morning came around I threw on the tackiest shirt I could find, a real eye-sore with prehistoric drawings of lizards and the like all over it. Why I chose to wear this type of clothing to have my picture taken for a city newspaper is beyond me. I've never had much taste in the style department but at least these days I know what looks good on me and what doesn't. Back then I dressed to stand out, though not always in a good way. Anyway, Joe stopped by soon after and we walked to St. Philip Neri where we met up with Dar and Jesse.

I was relieved to see that nobody else had bothered to dress up for the event. Joe wore an Edgar Allen Poe shirt and his trademark fedora, Dar a white shirt with a smiley face tie, and Jesse a shirt even tackier than my own. We met with the photographer, a gruff old geezer named Gary Moore.

It seemed that Moore was under the impression that we would be dressed in costumes from our movies, and was vociferously disappointed by the fact that we weren't. In not so many words we told him to live with it. He gave us some pointers on how he wanted us to pose, then, when Shari arrived he complained to her about us not being in costumes. Shari told him to live with it and then led us to a brick wall behind the main building where we posed for about fifty pictures from which Moore would inevitably pick the worst ones.

I remember him telling us to get “Closer…CLOSER!” So we'd crowd together a little more, none of us too thrilled about being cheek to cheek. He yelled "CLOSER!" in that gruff, tobacco-stained voice of his and my immediate thought was that if we got any closer our atoms would mesh together, transforming us into some horrible mutated creature that would run amuck through the Midwest until eventually being brought down by the military.

When Moore was satisfied he took our pictures and went his merry way, his part in this grand tale done. Ironically, the caption under our photo in the newspaper reads, "Mugging for the camera are (from left): Joe Devine, Jeremy Riley, Dar Parsons, and Jesse Handlon." Now, to set the record straight, there was no mugging involved, unless you count the part where I beat up Moore and took his wallet. Um, but you didn't hear that from me.

JESSE: I honestly believe that one of us should have taken the pictures, because Moore's finished work looked like crap. I thought it would've been cool if the pics showed us as a 'rock group' type. You know, all of us standing around in different positions, just trying to look cool. But all Moore seemed interested in was taking a bunch of pictures of us next to a brick wall. Shari even suggested that he get some snaps of us on the nearby playground. Our group liked the idea and we all started to go around and play on different things, swings, the slide, teeter-totter, etc. Moore reluctantly snapped away, mostly of us posing together on the slide. We gave our opinions on what we thought would be cool for the photos but lost out. I think the photographer resented us for not bringing costumes.

JOE: The pictures! That was fun! We did nothing right for the photographer. He wanted us really close together. We could not get close enough for that dude!

I don't remember picking out anything special to wear for this occasion. I just dressed for a normal day. When Jeremy and I arrived at St. Philip Neri, Jesse was waiting for us. Something wasn't right about him. That couldn't be Jesse. This fellow had his hair combed! Jesse would never do that! I never saw Jesse with his hair combed before. And I never would again.

THE KING AND THE INTERVIEW

JESSE: After Mr. Photographer left for his cave to rest his weary head Shari decided to conduct the interview. She didn’t want to do it at St. Philip Neri so Darren suggested Burger King. An unlikely place but it had food and drink and that's what mattered most.

JOE: The interview was supposed to take place in the school library. It was too hot and the air conditioning unit was not on. So we ended up going to a relatively more comfortable place.

JESSE: Darren's mind was probably where mine was: free grub! Shari suggested we all take her car. Darren said he would follow right behind us. We headed out and arrived at Burger King within minutes.

Shari picked a table near the back and we all gathered around. Darren started talking about his drawings and said that he and Jeremy were the artists in the group, to which I responded, "Being able to draw isn't the only thing that makes you an artist."

Shari reacted to this with a quick smile. Darren sheepishly conceded the point. Shari pulled out her trusty notebook and went to work. She started to ask us questions about our likes and dislikes. Jeremy and I gave her some truly wonderful answers. She gave us a look like “very interesting, but shut up.” She then had a long conversation with Darren about the movie 'Ghostbusters.'

Jeremy and I both felt the interview slipping away from us. It was apparent she had more of an interest in Darren and Joe. This was enforced by the fact that Jeremy and I got fewer and fewer questions sent our way. Jeremy (God bless him) didn't let this deter him. He would put in his two cents wherever he could. I also threw in wherever I could, which was far and in between.

The interview seemed to go on forever and I started to get bored. Finally, when I was about to enquire when we were going to get a free meal out of this whole deal Shari turned off the tape recorder and said her goodbyes. Darren walked her out to her car (he still thought he was going to get laid) while Joe, Jeremy and I sat around and discussed the interview.

Darren came back in and said how impressed she was with us. I had to leave and get home. I was tired and I had to work later in the day. We went our separate ways. I walked home, suffering more through the extreme heat. I was an ocean of sweat by the time I reached my front door. I collapsed on the couch and fell into a quick, dreamless slumber.

THE ARTICLE:

MOVIE MAKERS

A bunch of 'Dips'
head to Touchstone

By SHARI L. FINNELL

The Indianapolis News/YEP

WHEN THE MOVIE "Ghostbusters II" came out in 1989 Joe Devine and Dar Parsons decided to make their own ghost trap. They took a fish tank, lined it with sheet metal, finished it off with a heat lamp and then turned it in for an 8th-grade science project.

"We figured that since ghosts were cold the heat would keep them in," Joe said with a laugh.

Their teacher wasn't impressed. He said it was nothing but a giant microwave and gave them a "D."

But they weren't discouraged. After watching "Weird Science" Dar tried to make a girl out of a Barbie doll. Using power cables. Then there was the "Back to the Future" project. Dar and Joe schemed about how they could get plutonium and build a flex capacitor for a time machine.

Eventually they gave up.

Now, five years later, they're at it again. This time around, though, they're making their own movies, on video.

Joe, 17, and Dar, 19, have teamed with Jesse Handlon, 18, and Jeremy Riley, 20, to form Dip Entertainment, which has produced a handful of short movies. One of Dar's movies, "Laugh A Little," was selected Best TV short feature in the Indiana Association of School Broadcasters annual contest this year.

And this fall, all four will put their movie-making talents to the test at the Center for the Recording Arts in Orlando, Fla., an academy sponsored by Touchstone Pictures. After a year, the students expect to earn specialized associate's degrees.

Although "Laugh A Little" is a drama in the style of Charlie Chaplin movies, most Dip movies are gory. "'Laugh A Little' is about a guy who doesn't think he's funny," Dar said. "He's trying to find hope for himself."

Other Dip movies include "Blood Pudding" and "Vampire Thing." Blood Pudding is about a deformed man, who is abused by his father who dresses like his deceased wife and thinks he's her. The son later befriends "The Unicorn Boy," another deformed man who travels with a freak show.

"It's kind of a colorful red movie," Dar offered. "It's bloody. It has a lot to say about how people treat other people based on the way they look, instead of what's inside."

Joe added, "It's like the Hunchback Meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

Up until now, Dip Entertainment has had to improvise when making movies, most of which were filmed in their homes with small camcorders. They also have used Comcast's public access equipment and facilities. They've been creative with props, mixing corn syrup with red food coloring to make blood. And they have performed their own stunts, sometimes with unexpected results.

"In one Charlie Chaplin-like scene (during "Laugh A Little"), Jeremy and I were fighting," Dar said. "Suddenly, I didn't duck fast enough. Bam! I was knocked out cold."

After completing their one-year program at the academy, the four students expect to go their separate ways--at least for a while--before regrouping again as Dip. Their movie tastes vary widely. Jeremy, who acts, leans towards westerns like "A Fistful of Dollars." Jesse, who operates the camera, is into "weird and odd" films. Dar, who directs, acts and edits, prefers comedies, fantasies and melodramas.

"I can't get into horror that much. They bathed me in blood for one scene. When I look at the movie, I get queasy," he said.

And Joe, who writes scripts, directs and acts, likes "Weird out-of-the-way-type" movies.

But Dip Entertainment will continue to exist, they all said.

"It's going to stay. It will always be there and it will always expand," Dar said.

JEREMY: There you have it. Dar being the most charismatic member of our group naturally received the lion's share of attention in the article, as did Joe. I suppose it's only right, because, technically, they were the two who began the group. What struck me was that I talked as much as Dar and Joe and didn't receive one lousy quote; Jesse either, though he spoke less than any of us. And I love how we were categorized. Dar is a director, actor and editor. Joe a writer, director and actor. I'm just a lowly actor. And apparently Jesse's just a cinematographer.

As I recall it (and recalled to Shari as well), I began in the group as a writer, graduated to acting, and was planning to direct my first feature soon. But I suppose Shari didn't have time to throw in: Jeremy, who writes, acts and plans to direct. I suppose I really shouldn't be bitter, I made the news; even made the front page (well, there's a small pic of our group 'mugging' in the upper right corner of the front page), which is more than my old man ever did.

JOE: The article was Darren's all the way. I got lumped in with him on stuff he did when he was a kid. Like the flux capacitor thing. That's right, he started telling Shari stories of things he did when he was a kid; things he did before he met any of us and I got lumped into some of that. I think he did that to make Shari laugh and get himself more comfortable. She liked it so much she put some of it into the article. As a result, Jesse, Jeremy and I got very few questions. That suited me just fine. I've always liked to be behind the scenes more than in the spotlight. You know, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

JEREMY: Ironically, I would receive the largest slice of attention in a follow up interview in a 1997 article for the Indianapolis Star. The beginning quote is even: Indianapolis screenwriter Jeremy Riley loves to make movies that keep audiences guessing. So POOM! Vindication! Though, sadly, Jesse not only gets stiffed yet again in the quote department but his last name is misspelled. Poor, dumb clod.

JESSE: I had to work the day the article came out. At the time Indianapolis had a morning paper and a nightly paper, The Indianapolis Star and The Indianapolis News. Our article was going to be in the latter. I went to work and bought four or five copies of it. I knew my parents would also have one at home. My Dad always got both papers. So, I just had to get a few for my friends. I showed it to everyone I worked with. They were all impressed (or at least they acted impressed) and one person asked for an autograph. I knew this person was being a smart ass so I signed it to 'my whore' (luckily for me no one can read my handwriting, including me).

The article got us a couple of looks from other people. In fact, it led to a movie offer I'll get into in another chapter. For now, however, we had ourselves an article and some movies to show around. We were on the top of our game and it felt good.

JEREMY'S SHOWDOWN

JEREMY: On the day our article came out Dar, Joe and I met early in the morning and made our way over to the newspaper dispenser where we grabbed a handful of copies. We then headed to Marsh where we proudly distributed the papers to everyone we knew. Needless to say, we basked in all of the attention and praising. Swelling with pride, the three of us decided to take a walk and discuss the article as well as our future plans.

Well, we walked for hours (at least, it seemed like hours) and the temperature was just below cremation-level. As we crossed Christian Park near where I lived I decided to fall to my knees in the street with my arms raised to the heavens and cry out, "How much further must we go?" This was meant as a lark; just me goofing off in front of my friends, hoping to get a snicker out of them. But, as luck would have it, a car passed by at the exact moment I did this. It stopped halfway down the street, screeched around and started back.

I was at a loss as to why and then Joe said, rather worriedly, "I wish you hadn't done that, Jeremy." Then it hit me: The asshole thought my falling to my knees and yelling was aimed at him. Man, what an ego! But I didn't care, as I stated to Joe seconds before the car pulled up alongside me. My hand inched to the knife on the back of my belt and undid the clasp. If this asshole wanted a fight I'd give him one.

I saw that he was of the white trash variety, with a shaved head, wife beater T-shirt, and a lot of grime, which surrounded him almost like an aura. He cussed me out, wanting to know why I had mocked him. I said I had done nothing of the sort, my hand tightening on the haft of my knife all the while. Then, without warning, the guy pulled a gun on me.

That froze me for a second, but only a second. This wasn't the first time I'd stared at the muzzle of a gun, and I had a fifty-fifty chance that this dipstick was smart enough to realize he couldn't shoot me in a residential area with witnesses all around and get away with it. Odds were he was just trying to put the fear of God into me. But if he thought I was going to piss my pants and beg for mercy he had another thing coming. The first thing that ran through my mind was: If this is the end of your life, face it like a man. The second thing was: Dar and Joe are being awful quiet; how are they taking all of this?

I risked a look in their direction only to discover that they were no longer there. What the hell, did they abandon me? There were several large bushes along the walkway and I heard a twig snap behind the middle one. Realizing there would be no help from that department I eased my hand off the knife as I turned back to face Mr. Dipstick. I was figuratively as well as literally out-gunned. My only chance would be negotiation.

"I don't need nobody fuckin' with me!" Mr. Dipstick drawled.

I coolly told him I wasn't 'fucking with him.'

"Yeah, well that's good, 'cause I don't want no trouble!"

I told him neither did I, that I had merely been goofing around with my friends.

"Alright then," the welfare collecting, foodstamp saving, wife-beating piece of trailer trash said. "'Cause I ain't lookin' for no trouble! I don't wanna have to use this!" He shook the gun at me as if I hadn't noticed it in his hand.

"Well, I don't want you to use it either," I said.

"Okay then." The reject from Deliverance then took off, burning rubber and trailing a cloud of exhaust fumes in his wake.

I heard rustling in the bushes behind me and turned to see Dar and Joe easing cautiously out. Dar had a long, thin tree branch in his hand. His idea of a weapon, I surmised. "What happened?" He asked.

"Where were you?" I shot back.

"What, did you think we were just going to stand there?" Joe said in his defense. I couldn’t really argue with that. The only thing that had allowed me to stand my ground was the very reason that I felt I was supposed to. Clint Eastwood always stood his ground against the baddies, as did Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen, and so on. Running had not been an option for me, though it surely would have been the wisest path.

"We would've helped you if we heard a gunshot," Dar quickly pointed out.

"If you’d heard a gunshot it would've been too late," I retorted.

We continued our walk in relative silence, the day sullied now with this unexpected and unwelcomed intrusion. One thing I knew for sure, I had to get out of Indianapolis. I just had to.

JOE: I'm not proud of this episode. It was afterward that I realized what I had done. I had abandoned one of my friends. I, like Jeremy, place a high value on loyalty, integrity and standing by your friends; and here I was cowering behind some bushes. I've always felt Jeremy thought less of me after this incident. I hope that somehow I've regained whatever I lost. I swore I'd never do that again. And I haven't.

JEREMY: You haven't lost anything, Joe. Like I said, you took the wisest path. Onward and upward.

NEXT: THE MOVIE OFFER

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

2011-04-17T19:28:00.002-04:00

BLOOD PUDDING: ACT FIVE

JOE: The death of Unicorn Boy was a bittersweet moment in the making of Blood Pudding. How did it happen, you ask? Patch finds Byron and Unicorn Boy in the house they broke into. They are on the way up the basement steps to check out the rest of the house. Before Unicorn Boy reaches the door at the top of the steps Patch bursts through the door causing Unicorn Boy to stumble down the steps and gut himself on Byron's knife. How sad! How touching!

Byron holds Unicorn Boy in his arms as he dies.

Unicorn Boy (coughing up blood): Byron...my friend...run...save yourself!

Byron: Not without you!

Unicorn Boy: Byron! W...What's my name?

Byron: It's Charlie.

Unicorn Boy: Then it was all worth it. (Unicorn Boy dies in Byron's arms. Byron weeps as Patch approaches.)

Cue the sad music! I shed tears even today at this tender scene.

Byron panics as he draws the knife from Unicorn Boy's gut. Another classic line from Blood Pudding was then uttered by Darren Parsons.

Byron: What have I done?! (He looks at Patch) What did you make me do?!!!!!!

UNICORN BOY PICKS A NAME

As stated above we did end up giving Unicorn Boy a name. Unicorn Boy picked Charlie because...well, here’s some more of that wonderful dialogue...

Byron: What's your name?

Unicorn Boy: Uni...I...I don't have a name except for Unicorn Boy. That's all Mr. McCorman has ever called me.

Byron: That's not right. Everyone should have a name. What kind of name would you like?

Unicorn Boy: Well...there was this old man who worked at the circus who helped me escape. He was always kind to me. His name was Charlie.

Byron: Then call yourself Charlie, if that's the name you want.

Unicorn Boy: Oh I do! This...this is too much! I've got a real friend and a real name! I couldn't be happier!

This was a charming scene in a strange way.

THE FIGHT SCENE THAT WAS NOT TO BE

Now we come to a sad moment in the tale; that of the never filmed battle between Byron and Patch. The day we shot this, we literally shot all day. The last thing we planned to shoot was the end confrontation between Patch and Byron because we wanted it to be dark outside when we shot it. I discussed this with Jeremy. He was fine with shooting a whole day. I then talked to Darren about it. He also gave me a thumbs up.

There were only two real hiccups that I can remember. Darren was late for some reason that I cannot comprehend (JEREMY: Dar late to a shoot? Never!). That, of course, caused a late start, making us fall behind schedule for the day. The whole point of shooting the whole day was so that we could finish the movie. All the scenes left to shoot took place right there in my Grandmother's house. So it should have been relatively easy to finish the movie. But what happened next really ticked me off.

As we were nearing the point to shoot the end fight between Patch and Byron Darren began to complain about the length of the shoot. He said he’d told his mother he would be home at a certain time and that time was drawing near.

"I don't want to disappoint my mother," Darren said. This came out of the blue to me. He'd known about this shoot and the planned length of it for some time! Where was this coming from? What should we do? Reschedule? I was tired of rescheduling and reshooting. Finishing the movie was within my grasp! I feared that if we did not shoot the end battle that night we'd not have the opportunity to finish it. I was determined to finish the movie that night despite Darren's incessant whining. Darren continued with his line, "I don't want to disappoint my mother." I don't believe he was being entirely truthful here. Something else was afoot. I don't remember if we ever got to the bottom of it. All I can do at this point is speculate and I'm not gonna do that.

JEREMY: I have no problem speculating. I think it had something to do with his girlfriend at the time, Ginny.

JOE: It became clear to Jeremy and I that we would not get to shoot the ending scene we had envisioned. We wanted to have Byron and Patch fight each other up the basement steps around the first floor of the house and then out the door and into the back alley where the final showdown would take place. Since Darren insisted that he had to go we cut it short...way short. While they faced off on the basement steps Byron hit Patch in the shoulder with a hatchet and then ran past Patch and out the door into the alley where the final fight would occur. Not a great thing, but given Darren's whining I'd take that over nothing.

We thought about using the bright light we'd found in the basement to light the scene in the alley. But Darren would continually repeat, "I don't want to disappoint my mother." We ended up using ambient lighting. That was a mistake. We should have at least tried to us some kind of controlled lighting. It was very hard to see what was happening. Byron ended up subduing Patch on a hill at the corner of the alley overlooking a very busy street.

There was a street light directly above us so this scene wasn’t too hard to make out. Byron throws Patch to the ground and hacks him to death with a hatchet. Byron was not carrying a hatchet when he got outside. Where'd the hatchet come from? Well, we planted it there on the grassy hill beside them just to finish the scene. It also made me laugh. We were sorta lucky that no one called the cops on us. The street was pretty busy, even at midnight.

JEREMY: All you can make out of Dar and I in this scene are our silhouetted figures pummeling each other in the foreground while in the background car after car zooms by, its occupants no doubt wondering what the hell was going on, or just accepting it as a drug deal gone bad (this was and is a pretty shitty neighborhood). When Dar grabs the hatchet and does a Lizzie Borden on my character's head he was really slamming the hatchet into the earth inches from my cranium. Had I moved so much as an inch I would've lost an ear or even my life, for what it's worth.

I was always disappointed with this scene, it could've been so much better if we’d had the time to do it properly.

WHOSE CAR IS THIS?

JOE: Right outside my grandmother's back door is a small deck. Parked right next to the deck was some person's car. Whose? I didn't know, but it sure would be cool if Byron jumped from the deck onto the car in his hasty attempt to escape from Patch. Darren agreed to this. That sort of made up for the screwy fight scene we were forced to shoot. I don't remember how many times he jumped from the deck to the car, but I'm sure I tried to push the limits on this. It turned out quite well in the finished product.

JEREMY: I was given the option of jumping from the deck to the top of the car as well, but it was pretty cold out and a thin sheet of ice coated the car's exterior and since I was wearing cowboy boots that are not known for their traction I opted to simply walk down the stairs in pursuit of my prey. Probably the wisest choice in the end as I was certain I would've slipped and broken my neck had I attempted the stunt.

JOE: So that is the story of the final fight between Byron and the bounty hunter, Patch.

MR. McCORMAN IS DEAD

Byron goes to Mr. McCorman’s office and kills him. Nice ending, eh? The movie starts out with a murder and ends with a murder. What was supposed to happen was soooooo much better than what we ended up with. Byron steals Patch's coat and hat in a feeble attempt to disguise himself as Patch. Byron then gets into McCorman's office and drops Patch's severed head on McCorman's desk. A brief scuffle ensues. Byron kills McCorman. The hero lives happily ever after! Right?

Not quite! The main show piece of the scene, namely the severed head, had been thoroughly eaten and digested by Darren! What to do? What to do? I know! We'll have Byron drop Patch's bloody eye-patch on McCorman's desk! Yeah! That will be sooooooooo much cooler and spookier than a severed head!

So here’s the scene as shot: McCorman is on the phone with an unidentified person. Byron slowly strolls into the office dressed in Patch's coat and hat. What a disguise! McCorman was not the sharpest knife in the drawer so the disguise fooled him until Byron dropped the bloody eye-patch on his desk.

Mr. McCorman: What is this? Who are you?!

Byron answered by shoving an electric screwdriver into his gut. Ha! Where did he get an electric screwdriver? From Jeremy's grandfather's tool-chest, of course! Well, that's where we got it. We were always switching up Byron's weapons for no reason other than I thought it was funny. If anyone ever noticed the weapon switch-a-roo, they never mentioned it. Not to me at any rate.

JEREMY: Of course, Byron could've snatched the screwdriver from the basement of the home where he killed Patch and the owners and poor Unicorn Boy as well, though that was an accident. At least, that's what Joe tells me.

MR. HANDLON, ARE YOU ON SET?

JOE: This shoot took place on the same night we shot Byron stabbing the homeowner to death, Byron killing Mother/Father and the hiring of Patch. It was a busy night! This was also the one and only shoot that Jesse Handlon attended. I remember being extremely exhausted during this scene. Jesse handled the camera chores and helped with the lighting set-up. I had to play McCorman so I needed to wake-up enough to do that. I think Jeremy made some tea or coffee for me. He must've had some as well.

As far as I recall, this scene went fairly well. Darren had no lines. That was a plus. The only snag was the severed head. Yes! I cried over the loss of the severed head! I'm man enough to admit it!

JEREMY: That poor, poor severed head. Sniff.

JESSE: I was here for this shoot and did the camerawork (didn't get a credit. Fucking Joe). Joe told me what he wanted the shots to entail and handed me the camera. I asked him if I could do an Evil Dead shot of following the electric screwdriver into his stomach. He shrugged his shoulders. I took this as a yes. He then told me that he wanted to start and end each shot with a fade to black. I took a few seconds to figure out the camera's fade buttons and gave him the thumbs up. We shot the scene and it didn't take very long.

Darren didn't have any dialogue and Joe...well, Joe is Mr. McCorman so he was in total character. After the shoot was done Joe snatched the camera and pulled out the tape. I knew he was anxious to see the footage. He popped in the tape and we all sat back and watched. Now, on the first attempt to fade I goofed a little. As a rule I try not to add too much pressure to things. I'm always afraid I'm going to break it or something. The fade didn't go too well; in fact, it barely faded at all. Joe looked at it and said, "Nice fade."

I wanted to respond by shoving my foot up his ass. Instead, I just said, "Hey, check out the rest of them."

The rest of them were great because I added the proper pressure to the button. Jeremy and Darren liked the Evil Dead shot. Joe simply nodded and said, "That's adequate."

I wanted to wring his neck but instead I smiled and nodded. This was all on the first night I met Joe Devine and Jeremy Riley. I was going to like this bunch.

THE MOON

JOE: One more scene to shoot and the movie is done! The scene in question was simply of Byron walking down a lonely stretch of road into the night. The moon was full and bright so I decided that the last shot in the movie would be of this celestial wonder. I don't know why, but my shooting the moon really seemed to tick Darren off, and as I shot it he would not shut up! He would spew profanities at me for some reason every time I would call action. I didn't know if we could edit out his blabbering or not. So after I got the shot, I called him every profane name I knew.

JEREMY: Oddly, for having been raised a strict Catholic he knew quite a few. I believe Dar was sick of shooting the movie by this point and just wanted to go home, so Joe's moment of inspiration of having Dar walk down the darkened street and then pan up to the moon sent him over the deep end.

JOE: That was it. The end of principal photography of Blood Pudding. I shed a tear.

LET'S EDIT THIS SUCKER!

Jeremy and I got together at his place to make a rough edit of the movie. Jesse had some type of consumer quality editing apparatus. So there we were, two VCR's, Jesse's editor, a note pad, a TV and I believe we ingested some pizza at some point that night in between editing. At the time Jeremy and I loved getting together and watching B-level horror movies or MST3K episodes. We always had pizza at these little get togethers. So, seeing as how we were making a B-level horror movie that would be right at home on MST3K, pizza seemed to be the obvious choice.

JEREMY: Ah, good times.

JOE: We tried to use the editor. No dice. I unhooked the editor and smashed it to bits. Jeremy was upset that I didn't leave any parts for him to smash. Oh well! So we ended up just using the two VCR's. It was fun! We just hit play on one and recorded on the other. It went pretty smoothly, all things considered. I don't remember having many problems. It was just a tedious and time consuming task.

CREDITS

The only thing left to do was the credits. For some reason Darren refused to use the computers at CIRT to make the credits for Blood Pudding. So Jeremy got some black construction paper and red paint. Now we had some credits. We placed the construction paper on a black trash bag to keep the background black. Jeremy and I then shot the credits ourselves. They were ok. They worked. Not what I had in mind, but they got the job done.

Darren had told me he created a credit sequence for Blood Pudding. Then, for some reason, it was unusable or lost or maybe Darren ate them. I don't know why he didn’t want to make credits for Blood Pudding. The trash bag credits would have to do.

JESSE: Alright, let me take over here. Darren had made the credits for Blood Pudding like a hundred times while we sat around CIRT. He always had two problems, the first being Darren wasn't much of a speller and the second that he never saved the fucking things. He'd do the credits and then turn off the computer. I would, of course, inquire why he did this and he would always reply, "Oh, I'll just do them again."

He never did though. We even had a chance on the day of the premiere, but, ah, that is another chapter.

FINAL THOUGHTS

JOE: I enjoyed making Blood Pudding very much. It was a lot of fun and I made some new friends along the way. The only thing I wish we had done was let the camera roll a bit longer. We just shot enough to get the shot and that was it. We did plan to shoot some behind the scenes footage, but that was not to be. I still have fond memories of it though. Thanks guys!

JEREMY: Totally my pleasure.

JESSE: Final thought: My ass itches a whole lot. I still use the Blood Pudding tape to scratch it. Ah, relieving.

JOE: Thank you for that, Jesse!

NEXT: MAKING NEWS

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

2011-04-17T15:14:00.015-04:00

BLOOD PUDDING: ACT FOUR

JOE: My grandmother had a creepy old basement that was perfect for a horror movie. We chose this location as the house that Byron and Unicorn Boy break into when they hide out from Patch.

The scene goes something like this: Byron and Unicorn Boy break into the basement of an occupied house. They settle in and decide it's time they got to know one another. Basically, they form a bond because they are both deformed and mistreated. It is at this point that we had the most difficulty. We could never quite get the dialogue to sound right. It sounds goofy and corny and in some ways pretentious. Oh well, we tried to make the most of it.

JEREMY: We were still pups learning our chops, so don't feel too bad there, Joe. The core of what we shot for the movie took place in this stiflingly diminutive basement cluttered with every knickknack, tool and doodad imaginable. I believe we all seriously screwed up our lungs from the amount of dirt and dust we inhaled and the stuffiness combined with the heat issued by the lamps made it damn near intolerable on some days. In between takes those who weren't needed to set up the next shot scrambled upstairs to ring the sweat from their costumes and drink gallons of water in hopes of replenishing our dehydrated bodies.

JOE: I used the lighting to help give the scene what we could not give it through dialogue. All through the movie one side of Byron's face is covered in blood as a result of the beating he took at the hands of his Mother/Father. We did a close-up of Darren spewing out some of our awesome dialogue. I put a red light on the bloody side of his face and a green light on the other side and then a blue light above his head, shining down on him. It looked great! If only the dialogue was up to par.

JESSE: Oh yes, I was here for this shoot as well. I was the one who held the red light on Darren's face. We did this shoot on the first night I ever met Joe and Jeremy. I remember we did this take for what seemed like a gazillion times because either Darren messed up his lines or Joe didn't feel it was right. Jeremy (who held the blue light) quickly grew tired of this. At one point he got on Darren about it and Darren defended himself with the statement, "I'm an actor!" Jeremy shot right back with, "Well act then, dammit!" I felt Joe was going Stanley Kubrik on our asses. He just kept shooting and shooting. I never question my directors (unless it's Darren) so I kept my mouth shut.

JOE: Darren also seemed extremely nervous shooting this scene. He couldn't remember his lines and was fidgeting too much. I asked him what the problem was. He said he couldn't concentrate with everyone in the room so Jeremy and Jesse left the basement and we shot it a couple more times until we finally got it right.

JESSE: It turns out that Joe was right to drag us through so many takes because when the right one came along it was gold. That still didn't make up for the cramps in my arms from holding a light for nearly two hours.

EATING THE PROPS

JOE: All through the shooting of Blood Pudding props were misplaced, footage was lost, cameras were broken and make-up pieces were EATEN! Unicorn Boy's original prosthetic horn disappeared before shooting began. I did not know this until it came time to shoot the first scene involving Unicorn Boy. The horn was made out of liquid latex. I didn't have a vat of that stuff on hand to conjure up a new appliance so we tried out a few experiments.

Our first idea was to bake a croissant, paint it white and attach it to Jim's forehead. Didn't work. Sure was tasty though! What ended up working best and what we ended up using was...drum roll...paper towels. We rolled them up into the shape of a horn and used masking tape to maintain its shape. We then taped it to Jim's head and covered it in white make-up to match the make-up we used for Unicorn Boy's face. As stupid as it sounds, it turned out fairly well.

With that problem solved we were able to proceed with the shoot. It went along smoothly until some of that snappy dialogue started to turn our stomachs. We had to trim down as much as we could in order to keep from performing the Technicolor hurl. You don't believe it was as bad as all that? Here is a sample! You brought this on yourself, mister!

BYRON: She didn't know I existed. (almost teary eyed he lowers his head to one side) Silly of me to love when I look like this.

UNICORN BOY: No it's not. When you put everything else aside love is all there is. All anyone can ever hope to achieve.

Oooooch! I can't transcribe anymore! There you have it!

At some point during the shooting of these dialogue scenes Darren decided out of the blue to bite Unicorn Boy's horn right off of his head! This was troubling because we couldn’t just stick the horn back on Jim's head. We would also have to apply more make-up to make sure it matched the other shots. That was time we did not want to waste. We had trouble with the horn from that point on.

JEREMY: First Dar eats the head I crafted for the decapitation scene in the movie, which led to us having to completely trash that idea, and then he goes and tears off Unicorn Boy's horn with his teeth during a take because he thought it would be funny. The genuine look of confusion that crossed Dar's face when he realized he was the only person in the room laughing was almost worth all the trouble. I really believe he thought we would all get a kick out of it.

JOHN MATTINGLY IS A PILLOW

JOE: We wanted to shoot a scene that showed the audience what happened to the homeowner Byron gutted on the steps. John was at work by this time so we improvised a little bit. I wanted Byron to tear out his insides and eat them. Why? I thought it would be cool! We dressed a pillow in the shirt John wore as the homeowner. We did a tight shot of Byron stabbing the pillow. We had it set up so blood was covering the pillow. Byron then threw away the knife, pulled out some guts, and chowed down. It always made me laugh after seeing the completed scene. Byron does not hesitate; he simply rips out the guts and eats them as if he has done this many times before. I was also amused by the fact the Unicorn Boy seems unfazed that Byron is cannibalizing this corpse. Maybe he was too busy brooding over being called a freak.

JEREMY: In this shot Byron is in the foreground ripping out the homeowner's guts and feasting on them while Unicorn Boy stares at his reflection in the mirror in the background. "Why am I the freak?" He asks nobody in particular. "Why aren't I normal?" Byron looks up at him in between bites and says, "You're not the freak, they're the freaks." And then proceeds to gorge himself on more raw intestines.

DAR: Blood Pudding was fun except for the fact that I was eating all of this raw meat. I don’t know, I guess in Pink Flamingos Devine had it harder than me when John Water’s had him eat that shit and he ended up having to go to the hospital. But I could’ve gone to the hospital. When they turned on the lights after that scene in the basement where I had to eat those intestines it looked like a bowl of fucking puke. We did so many takes of that.

JOE: This shot also set up Unicorn Boy's flashback to his time at the circus. The camera zooms into his reflection in the mirror and then dissolves to Mr. McCorman lighting a candelabrum so that he can make his way through a dark passage where he is keeping our little horned freak tied up in a chair.

SIXTEEN CANDLES

JOE: We now come to Jeremy's favorite part of the shoot, the lighting of the candles! This is the beginning of Unicorn Boy's flashback to life at the circus. The flashback opens on Mr. McCorman lighting three candles. We found a beautiful old lamp that looked like a fancy candleholder and put some candles in the slots where the light bulbs were supposed to go. Since we couldn't find anybody else to play McCorman Jeremy talked me into performing the character myself. I didn't want to. I wanted to concentrate on the directing and that was all. But it was not to be. So I did it.

I had to rely on Jeremy's direction of this scene. I trusted him. I do to this day. He's got a good eye. All I had to do in this shot was light the candles and open a door that led to the room where Unicorn Boy was tied up. Jeremy called action. I lit the candles and opened the door. That was all there was to it, right? Wrong! Jeremy called for another take for safety. Fair enough. We did it again. Done, right? Jeremy called for a third and a fourth and, much to my disbelief, a fifth. Finally we get through sixteen takes and I say, "It's time to move on." Jeremy relented and we did just that.

JEREMY: Joe's lying his ass off here, by the way. I may have called for two takes because I always like to have a backup handy in case something goes wrong with the first take. I'm a cautious guy in that respect. However, Joe was nervous about being in front of the camera as well as a bit frustrated that he couldn't see how the shots were turning out until we rewound the tape after each shot. I'd show him and he'd say, "Let's do it again." So we did it again, and again, and...well, you get the point.

He states above that he trusted me with the camera but I don't think that was the case. Joe was a control freak on the set of Blood Pudding. Not in a bad way. He never yelled at or demeaned his actors, but he was very particular with what he wanted and to trust someone else with his film, particularly somebody who had never directed anything in his life must have made him very uneasy. So, to make a long story short (too late, I know) we ended up doing somewhere in the ballpark of sixteen takes because Joe wanted to make doubly sure he got what he wanted since he was no longer in control of the camera.

DON'T YOU LOOK PRETTY IN THAT LITTLE GOWN OF YOURS!

JOE: Unicorn Boy's flashback was short and pretty straight forward. Mr. McCorman enters the room where he is being held captive and prepares Unicorn Boy for his nightly performance. He does this by slapping white make-up on his face while he taunts him.

My grandmother's basement had a room in it that was partially dug out. It was like somebody had begun digging out part of the floor and then had inexplicably stopped. The floor was dirt and it was separated from the rest of the basement by a cinder block wall with a crooked door as the only means of access. A dilapidated stairway led from the door up into this tomb-like dwelling. It was a tight fit and you had to stoop when you entered because the ceiling was no more than five feet from the ground.

I thought this would be a good place to shoot Unicorn Boy's flashback. It looked great! My character was to carry the candles I lit in the previous shot into the room, piercing the darkness and revealing the partially silhouetted form of Unicorn Boy sitting at the back of the room.

At one point we discovered this large lamp gathering dust in a corner of the basement and decided to put it to good use by setting it up in the tiny dirt room as the main light source. The only problem was that we wanted McCorman to enter the room with the candles. If he had this massive light hooked up in the room why would he need the candles? We basically said the hell with it and decided to use both. When McCorman reaches Unicorn Boy tied to a chair in the back of the room he blows out the candles and then claps his hands. The lamp clicks on and bathes the room in light.

CLAP ON! CLAP OFF! THE CLAPPER! That cracked me up.

We shot this a couple of times. Since my character applies the make-up to Jim's face he had to wash it off in between takes. That make-up could be stubborn. I applied the make-up roughly to his face. He was squirming and cringing in the chair which was beautiful. That's what his character should've been doing.

JEREMY: Joe put his actors through a lot, but I think his little brother suffered the most.

FINISHING OFF MOTHER/FATHER

JOE: It was finally time to shoot the end of the Mother/Father death scene. All that was left to shoot was Byron getting off the floor, grabbing a knife and stabbing Mother/Father to death. Jeremy and I did the best we could to match the lighting from the earlier footage we shot for this scene.

JEREMY: An interesting bit of trivia here is that the first half of the Mother/Father death scene leading up to Byron’s brutal beating was shot during the day and this last bit of Byron jumping up and committing patricide was shot in the middle of the night. Since we matched the artificial lighting from the previous shoot perfectly nobody appears to have noticed. Ah, the magic of movie-making.

JOE: Jeremy got into costume and was ready to go. There was only one thing to do now, wait for Darren. We discovered that the latex pieces that constituted the deformed section of Byron's face were lost! I wondered aloud if Darren had eaten them. I figured Darren had to have some other form of make-up on hand but, alas, it was not to be. We had to think of something quick. At one point, Darren poured some liquid latex directly on his eye-lid and howled in pain:

DARREN: OOOhhhhhhhhwwwwwaaaaaaaaaaa!

Darren runs out of the bathroom. Jeremy and Joe are seated at the dining room table.

JOE/ JEREMY: What the hell are you doing!

DARREN: I poured some latex on my eye! It fucking hurt!

JOE/JEREMY: You moron! You can finish the shoot, can't you?

DARREN: Yeah. I think so.

JOE/JEREMY: Okay then.

Darren cleaned up as Jeremy and I figured out how to solve this problem. We took the cardboard center of a roll of paper towels and unraveled it. Darren had part of a bottle of liquid latex left (Not much after the eye incident, granted). He poured it on the cardboard then used a hair-dryer to dry the latex. He then applied some flesh colored make-up to it. I don't remember how we got it to stick to his face. It was not great, but passable for the few shots we needed.

As I stated before, all we had left to shoot were a few quick takes of Byron getting off the floor and stabbing Mother/Father . We conveniently placed the prop spring-knife on the washer. So when Byron put his hand on it to pull himself up he could easily grab the knife. We always made weapons easily accessible in Blood Pudding. If the character needed a weapon, we put it just within reach. I must admit, I thought that was funny.

After Byron has stabbed Mother/Father multiple times and dropped him to the floor he menacingly approaches Mother/Father while the dying wretch gurgles on his own blood. Jeremy did a good job here. As Byron stabs Mother/Father one final time Jeremy spits into the air creating a disturbing image. Well, I know of at least one person who was disturbed by it. I just thought it was cool.

MR. HANDLON! WHERE WERE YOU FOR ALL THE OTHER SHOOTS?

Finishing off Mother/Father was one of the very few Blood Pudding shoots Jesse attended. I was glad to have another hand on set. Yep, I put him to work. He did some camerawork and even helped set up some lights. I've always considered this the first time we actually shot something as a group. Yes, I did go to a couple of Laugh A Little shoots but I contributed nothing to them. I didn't even hold a light. I was just an observer.

At this shoot each one of us contributed something. Darren and Jeremy were acting while Jesse and I did the behind the scenes stuff. It was a fun shoot. Even though I didn't really know Jesse all that well I trusted him with the camera and I trusted his input. I figured if Darren let him DP Laugh A Little then he must have some talent.

JESSE: I remember the shoot moving fairly quickly. We got all the shots in and since there was no dialogue we were finished in no time. I remember Joe covering Darren with fake blood. Darren laid on the floor as Joe dumped a huge bowl on his head and face. The syrupy blood oozed over him and he suddenly let out a high-pitch cry and told Joe he’d poured the corn syrup in his eyes.

I, being the asshole that I am, laughed and asked why the fuck he had his eyes open in the first place. Joe whole-heartedly agreed and said, "Yeah dumbass, you knew I was pouring it."

Darren decided to toughen up. He took it like a man. He went through the rest of the shoot and only bitched between takes. When the shoot was over I moved into the living room. Joe and I were sitting there talking when out of nowhere Darren comes out of the kitchen wearing nothing but his underwear. He had his hands over his eyes, trying to wipe the blood out. Joe and I sat there in shock, unable to quite grasp what we were seeing. We both agreed that Darren had no shame when he really should.

WE'RE WELL WORTH THE MONEY SPENT

JOE: Now we come to Patch's flashback scene. This is when Mr. McCorman hires him. We shot this right after finishing the Mother/Father death scene. Unfortunately, Jesse could not stay to shoot this with us. What an asshole!

JESSE: I got into a shitload of trouble for this shoot. I had told my parents I would be home by 11:00 p.m. This did not go according to plan. Darren was supposed to drive me home between scenes but he was busy showering in a vain attempt to get all of the corn syrup and spirit gum off his skin, hair and eyes. He hopped into the shower around 10:45 p.m. and I didn't see him again until 1:00 a.m.He came out of the shower bitching about his eye. I bitched right back about my Father killing me. I told Darren we needed to leave right away. If we didn't I would convince my Father it was his fault. So, my Father would have two people to kill instead of one (he would have enjoyed that).

When Darren finally dropped me off I noticed the living room light on. I walked into the house and received the riot act from my Mother. My Father said only one thing: "Your freedom doesn't begin until you leave my house."

I was forced to be home by eleven until we left for Florida. I will say it was worth it though. I enjoyed the hell out of this shoot. It was pure fun until the underwear incident.

JOE: The scene is McCorman hiring Patch to track down Unicorn Boy and bring him back with a minimal of publicity. We shot it in my grandmother's dining room. The room was painted gold so we used yellow lights to bring that out. Jeremy looked great as Patch. He got to sit and twirl his knife while he did his dialogue. I just sat there and looked annoyed that Patch wanted to be paid to bring back Unicorn Boy. McCorman is a cheap sleaze-ball. The part where I hand over half of the money shows McCorman on the brink of tears at having to pay Patch anything.

Darren handled the camera chores on this shoot. He did a good job with it. This was one of the better dialogue scenes in Blood Pudding. I find dialogue scenes boring to shoot. So it was good to get another perspective on it.

JEREMY: This was Patch's big scene in the movie and we shot it around two in the morning after Dar had returned from dropping Jesse off. Nevertheless, I wanted to do a good job so I kept myself awake with lots of caffeine while Joe and I read over our dialogue.

Actually, I think Joe and I were the only ones on Blood Pudding who memorized their dialogue. Joe did a really good job playing McCorman. He hammed the character up, giving him as much depth as he could with the limited screen time he had. He plays McCorman as a weasel through and through.I enjoyed showing off my knife-twirling skills and speaking my tough guy dialogue: "We don't come cheap, but we're well worth the money spent. At least I am anyway." This is also one of the best lit scenes in the movie. Everything had a soft golden hue to it, which mixed beautifully with the shadows. If I was to put together a demo reel of what I consider my best performances (it would be a relatively short reel, granted) this scene would be on it.

JOE: Well, there you go. That brings us to the end of this chapter and almost to the end of the movie.

NEXT: BLOOD PUDDING: PART FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

2011-04-16T21:52:00.008-04:00

BLOOD PUDDING: ACT THREE

JOE: We planned to reshoot the scene in which Byron kills his Mother/Father in early spring after we had finished Laugh A Little and were set to concentrate entirely on one project. We had never liked the scene as we'd originally shot it and since the footage was now lost to us we had no choice in the matter anyway.

My grandmother was going to be out of town for a couple of weeks so I secured her permission to shoot in her kitchen and basement. We were set. I relayed the good news to Jeremy and Darren and we scheduled a day to begin filming.

Jeremy came over early as usual and helped me prepare everything we needed for the scene. We would require more eggs to destroy and more corn syrup and red food dye for blood. All of these things were readily available at our place of employment. Something was missing though. I couldn't quite put my finger on it at first but we were shooting Blood Pudding on consumer quality equipment. How do you make it look cinematic on equipment that isn't designed for that purpose?

Sometime earlier Darren and I tried to make a vampire movie and I used a lot of colored lighting to give it a unique look. Either Jeremy or I thought that the colored lighting would work well in Blood Pudding. The amalgam of colors would make it sort of surreal and give it a dream-like quality. So, we bought some colored light bulbs (red, blue, green and yellow, not to mention the standard white lights) to give the movie a distinctive look.

JEREMY: As much as I would like to take credit for the colored lights idea this was entirely Joe's doing. He wanted to experiment with lighting, to enhance the color of blood with red lighting and create a mood by casting a room or a character in a particular color. As the movie progressed Joe became more experimental and began blending lighting in scenes, creating almost dream-like sequences. It really upped the quality of the video, making it look more professional than it actually was.

JOE: Jeremy and I set everything up for the shoot. We got the eggs ready, mixed the blood and positioned the lights. We'd shot the scene before so we already knew what we wanted. We figured it would be a relatively simple task; begin at noon, end around five or six, tops. All we had to do now was wait for Darren. We did that a lot on the set of Blood Pudding. Darren arrived around one-thirty without so much as an explanation for his tardiness and began applying his Byron make-up.

JEREMY: It usually took Dar around two hours to apply his makeup, and this wasn't because it was some monumental task but because he screwed around and talked a lot while doing so. He'd begin in the bathroom with his makeup kit and latex, add a touch here and there on his face and then wander into the kitchen where Joe and I were doing last minute testing on the equipment or planning out a shot and talk with us. We'd ask him to please hurry and finish so we could begin shooting. He'd wander back into the bathroom only to re-emerge a moment later wanting to talk to Joe about something that happened at school that day and so on. Sometimes Joe or I would strategically place ourselves in front of the bathroom door and chat with him in hopes of keeping him in one place long enough to finish his transformation into Byron.

JOE: The scene opens with Mother/Father cooking some eggs for breakfast. Byron is crouched in the corner, minding his own business. I know you've heard this song and dance before but the difference this time was the lighting. The first shot of Byron shows him eating a stick of butter and some bread. We lit him with a yellow light. The Mother/Father started off in a green and white light. When we got to the part where Mother/Father beats Byron in the head with the hot frying pan we lit the entire kitchen in red. We then did a close-up of Byron to show the aftermath of Mother/Father's handy-work. We poured red colored corn syrup all over Darren's head. It was a simple shot. Byron was to then taste the blood. I don't really remember why we wanted him to do that. It just seemed like the thing Byron would do.

The shoot was going great up to this point. We were all very relaxed on the set, cracking jokes between takes and just having a great time hanging out and doing what we all loved, making movies. Jeremy was to crouch down and hold the red light just above Darren's head to give it the desired look. It was a very uncomfortable position to be in. Easy shot though, wouldn't take that long to get. Yeah, right! For some reason it was at this point that Darren and I got the giggles. Before Darren could complete any of the takes either he or I would start laughing. This went on for at least seven takes; far too many for such a simple shot. Jeremy got a bit irritated at this point; and rightly so. Finally, we got a usable take and were able to move on.

JEREMY: I had to squat into a rather unpleasant position for this take from which I wasn't allowed to move while I shined the red light on Dar. Now, the first ten to fifteen minutes of this wasn't exactly a walk in the park but I finally had to be the sourpuss and yell at them to finish the shot as I had lost all feeling in my legs. Joe said alright, called for the next take, and there was more laughter.

From that point on I think they were doing it just to spite me. The bastards.

JOE: The next thing we shot was Mother/Father standing over Byron, waving the frying pan at him as he shouts, "Haven't my lessons taught you anything?" Of course they have. They taught him how to kill! The shot was at a low angle looking up at Mother/Father. I placed the camera on the corner of the washing machine after the take while I considered our next set up. We were still having a great time, cracking each other up and as I went to reposition the camera it slipped from my grasp and tumbled to the floor.

It seemed to happen in slow motion. The camera hit the floor and we all just laughed. There was nothing else we could do in that situation. I picked up the camera to assess the damage. The laughter stopped. The camera needed to be repaired. No more shooting could take place that day. Tears streamed down our faces. We put the camera in the case and caught a bus to Best Buy.

JEREMY: The camera really did seem to fall in slow motion. I remember the three of us stood there, watching in shocked horror as it plummeted to the hard tile floor. The thought that raced through my mind was I can catch it. If I reach for it now, I can catch it. But I couldn't seem to get my body to follow through with the ideation. Since none of us had a car at the time we trekked to the nearest bus stop and waited impatiently in the scorching hot afternoon sun.

For a moment I thought our luck was changing for the better when one of the co-managers of our store spotted us as he drove by and asked what we were doing. We told him what had happened, all of us secretly hoping he'd offer us a ride since he was driving in that direction anyway, but he just said that was a bummer, told us to be on time for work tomorrow and drove off.

Man, that'll teach us to horse around on the set.

THE DANCE OF JOY

JOE: After the camera was repaired it was time to move onward and upward. The next scene took place right after Mother/Father's death. Byron, very excited that he was now free, leapt out the front door of his house and did a happy dance through his backyard. We shot this simple scene in my parent's expansive backyard.

It was just some random shots of Byron skipping and hopping with joy. Some filler before he met Unicorn Boy. The shoot went smooth and everyone was in good spirits. There was, however, a shot where Byron rolls around a bit on the ground. I noticed later that under his Byron costume Darren was wearing jeans. It didn't look right. I don't know why I let this happen. We were running out of time perhaps? Oh well. It turned out to be an amusing scene that makes me chuckle every time.

JEREMY: For those with a watchful eye it’s interesting to note that the knife Byron carries throughout the movie changes from scene to scene. Sometimes it's a kitchen knife, other times it’s my old hunting knife and by the end of the film it is an electric drill! The drill part is easy enough to explain away, since Byron could've snagged it from the house he eventually holes up in with Unicorn Boy. It's still funny as all get out though.

DON'T HURT ME! THE INTRODUCTION OF UNICORN BOY

JOE: After the happy dance, Byron wanders into a wooded area and comes across a horned boy in a sheer costume seated regally on a tree-stump. This is the freakish Unicorn Boy. When he spots Byron walking towards him with a knife in his hand he is, of course, startled and a bit afraid. The exchange of dialogue goes a little something like this:

UNICORN BOY: Don't hurt me!

BYRON: I won't hurt you.

UNICORN BOY: How do I know that?

BYRON: Because you are like me...different.

It's very funny to watch this scene now. It was funny then as well, come to think of it. Jeremy and I had a difficult time with a lot of the dialogue in Blood Pudding. It always came out sounding corny. Oh well. We just moved on and let the visuals do most of the talking.

JEREMY: The dialogue was pure crap, that's all there is to it. I wish I could blame the actors but even Brando couldn't have made this stink-burger of a script sound good. It was corny, yeah, and in a weird way that was part of its charm. Kind of like Edwood D. Wood JR.'s films were charming. Of course, there was more to the dialogue than the few unintelligible remarks mentioned above, but neither Dar nor Jim could remember their lines and we ended up paring it down to the basic elements instead of the whole shebang.

Would more dialogue have improved the overall quality of the story? I doubt it. Sometimes less is better.

PATCH

JOE: Unicorn Boy tells Byron that he escaped from a circus freak show and he thinks someone is following him. Byron tells him they should travel together for protection and the two leave. Just before the scene ends, the bounty hunter Patch appears and surveys the area. I believe this was the first time Jeremy was in the full patch costume for a shoot. He looked pretty cool. He wore a long black duster, a black patch over his eye, black boots, and a black hat. Patch picks up the knife that Byron left behind and then heads after them.

JEREMY: Of all the characters I have played (and I have played quite a few, believe it or not) Patch is my favorite. I loved dressing up in those duds of his and speaking in a low, raspy voice ala my idol of the time, Mr. Clint Eastwood. There's just something about bounty hunters that I've always found appealing.

THE RAILROAD TRACKS

JOE: Byron and Unicorn Boy make their way to some railroad tracks. This scene was just the two of them walking along while Patch watches them from a nearby bridge. Patch unfolds and looks at a Sideshow poster of Unicorn Boy he is carrying with him. He then looks up as the camera zooms into his eye. This set up the flashback scene where the Ringmaster (aka Mr. McCorman) hires Patch to retrieve Unicorn Boy, which will be discussed later. The camera then zooms back out and Patch turns and watches Byron and Unicorn Boy trot along in the distance.

A location we always seem to use is railroad tracks. They are close by and give the movie a gritty look, which is what we like.

JEREMY: The Sideshow poster Patch looks at was drawn by yours truly the morning of the shoot. I didn't have a lot of time so I drew the basic elements of a young man with a horn growing out of his head along with that weird-ass yellow dress-thing he wore. All and all I don't think it turned out too bad. And another reason we used the railroad tracks a lot was because they were near my grandmother's house and were, for the most part, an isolated spot to shoot exteriors at.

MURDER OF THE HOMEOWNERS

JOE: The next scene involved Byron and Unicorn Boy hiding out in the basement of an occupied home. The day we shot this Darren was very late. Our friend John Mattingly was to play the homeowner. A girl Jeremy had a crush on, Amy Ford, was to play his wife. John didn't have a lot of time that day because he had to go to work later in the afternoon so Darren being late was very annoying.

The scene went like this: John hears a noise in the basement while playing cards with his wife. He goes to check it out, finds Unicorn Boy and Byron, and attempts to beat them to death with a broom-handle. Byron overpowers him and kills him. Then Amy hears the commotion and also goes to check it out. Before she gets there, Patch arrives and grabs her shoulder.

JEREMY: We rigged a broom handle so that it would break in two when John hit it over Byron's arm. We wanted John to really lay into Dar with it but John must have been afraid of hurting him because he would only whack Dar hard enough to break the handle. Still, it remains one of our better attempts at special effects.

I also love John's line when he bursts through the basement door and spots Unicorn Boy. "Who's down here? What the...? It's a freak!"

Cracks me up to this day.

JOE: John made the most of his brief appearance. He hammed it up big time. He was very funny. Amy on the other hand was a piece of cardboard. She would not make any facial expressions. Nope! Only a blank stare! That's all we got from her.

"Your husband's just been killed."

Amy just stares at me blankly.

"Your husband's insides have been scattered all over the basement."

Amy stares at me like I'm speaking Greek then looks blankly into the distance.

All she would do when I called action was walk over to the basement door and stare vacantly into space. All I can say is she must have been wondering what the hell she was doing here with these nerds!

Okay, if that was all we were going to get out of cardboard-girl, so be it. When Patch sneaks up on her and startles her she's supposed to scream, but she can't even do that! She was made of cardboard I tell you, or at least some brand of pulped or pressed paper! So I screamed for her. I did my very best girlie scream (which I do quite well). It's funny because she would not even open her mouth to mimic a scream. The scene turned out pretty good despite these obstacles.

JEREMY: Amy was as a cashier at Marsh. I took a liking to her and bragged about our budding production company every chance I got. She expressed a genuine interest in acting (JOE: Are you sure you want to use the word "expressed" to describe her?) and asked if there were any parts she might be able to play. I told her the only one available was that of the wife of a guy whose house is broken into by a couple of freaks who end up killing both of them.

She distanced herself from me after that but when she learned that John Mattingly was going to play the homeowner she was all for the role. It seems the girl I had a crush on had a crush on John. It was a strange mixture to have on the set, what with the three of us sitting around ogling each other between takes. Ah well, I don't hold it against John, he's a good guy. Amy left acting by the wayside after this brief stint (small wonder, eh?) and the last time I saw her she was about to become a mommy.

JOE: With his scene over John headed off to work. Amy bolted out of there as fast as she could without a backwards glance. However, this was just the beginning of the shoot for me, Jeremy, Darren and Jim. And what a shoot it turned out to be.

NEXT: BLOOD PUDDING: ACT FOUR

CHAPTER TWELVE

2011-04-16T18:47:00.003-04:00

BLOOD PUDDING: ACT TWO

JOE: The next thing we shot was some outdoor stuff at a small creek behind Jeremy's house. Easy enough, you say? Oh, how wrong! The first problem was that it was very cold out, it being the dead of winter at the time, and the ground was covered in a thick blanket of snow.

Okay, I thought, no problem there. The snow'll just give the exteriors of the movie a cool look (pun intended). I figured we'd get out there, do the scene and get back inside where it was warm within a reasonable amount of time. Of course, if life went as planned there'd be a far lower suicide rate, believe me.

THE SCENE

The scene we were to work on that day involved Unicorn Boy being chased by some Jerk with too much time on his hands. Unicorn Boy hides in a ravine under a bridge next to a frozen creek. It is here that Byron encounters and befriends the little freak. The bonding moment between the two is cut short when the Jerk finds them and is delighted that there are now two freaks to pick on. Byron, still fresh from murdering his Mother/Father, quickly dispatches the Jerk and pulls out his insides. This, of course, frightens Unicorn Boy. Still, he has no one else to turn to, so he leaves the area with Byron because, as he puts it, "I think someone's following me!"

THE PLAYERS

So! The scene involved more murder and mayhem! I was pretty excited about this shoot. Darren would be in full bloody Byron make-up, and my brother, Jim, had agreed to play Unicorn Boy. I don't remember where we got Unicorn Boy's costume from but it was a skimpy little yellow gown with white sleeves. It looked like something the character would perform in at the side show. The only problem with it was it offered zero protection against the cold weather. I told Jim, "This will be a quick shoot. We'll just get out there and knock out these two scenes." he said, "Okay." And that was that.

Our friend John Mattingly had shown up to portray the Jerk. Darren and I had worked with John the summer before on our live comedy sketch show. He was not much of an actor, but he was a stand up guy who showed up when we needed him. Jeremy was also there, playing the bounty hunter, Patch, for the first time. Patch was to make a brief appearance at the end of the scene to show that someone was indeed following Unicorn Boy.

BEHIND THE SCENES WITH THE MIXING BOWL

I wanted to shoot some behind the scenes footage of Blood Pudding for a documentary. Unfortunately, the first and only thing we ended up shooting was us all standing around Jeremy's grandmother's kitchen while we mixed sausages and chicken livers we'd bought at Marsh with corn syrup and red food dye in a large mixing bowl while Jeremy paced restlessly around, periodically peeking out the window and telling us to hurry up and finish before his grandmother got home from work and saw what we were doing.

This goulash of the damned was supposed to be the Jerk's guts after Byron rips them out. That footage ended up getting lost along with the outtakes, bloopers, etc. I have no idea what happened to it or why that's all we shot for it.

SHOOTING UNDER THE BRIDGE

JEREMY: Once everybody had assembled and were in their costumes we headed for the creek under the bridge. It was a short walk from my grandmother's house, five minutes at the most, but we had to climb over a tree-studded hill, cross the railroad tracks at the top, and navigate down an even steeper, snow-laden hill in order to reach the creek. Dar was in a mood that day, and he was snapping at everybody within earshot. Naturally, this led to us all teasing him every chance we got.

Joe went through the scene with Dar and Jim, explaining how he was going to shoot it and how he wanted their performances to be. Simply put, Byron was to come across Unicorn Boy being tormented by the Jerk, rush to his aid, kill the Jerk (this is where that bucket full of gore would come into effect), exchange some brief dialogue with Unicorn Boy, and then they would go about their business.

Dar suggested that his character should rush across the creek when he spies the commotion. Joe agreed it would be a good shot if he was willing to do it. Dar said he could, no problem, seemingly disregarding the fact that it was the middle of winter and the water was ice cold. Joe called action; Dar put one foot in the water and immediately broke character. "The water's cold!" He shouted, jerking his foot back onto land.

"Of course it's cold!" Joe shouted back. "It's winter, what did you expect!" Joe told him to just run across as fast as he could and that would be it. One take, then they'd move on, no big deal. Dar tried it again, got about a quarter of a way out, broke character, and ran back to land where he tripped and fell in the snow. Now his hands were cold and he was complaining about that. He told Joe the shoot was taking too long and we all needed to get inside before we froze to death.

Joe lost his cool and yelled at Dar, telling him the shoot would've been nearly finished by now if he'd quit his belly-aching and just do it. Dar countered that he couldn't perform when he was half frozen.
While all this was going on my immediate concern was for Jim, whose sheer costume was the only thing between him and the chilly weather. The kid sat with his arms crossed, shivering violently. I removed my trench coat and gave it to him. He took it gratefully. I then turned to the others and shouted something to the effect that this pointless arguing had gone on long enough. Joe agreed and tried to get Dar to comply as well. We attempted to finish the scene but Dar just refused to cooperate, repeatedly complaining about the cold, as if he was the only one freezing his ass off. Eventually, we gave up and headed back to my grandmother's house, all of us in a rotten mood now.

JOE: Darren really irritated me that day. He told me beforehand that filming in the snow would be fine as long as it did not take a long time. I assured him that it would be a relatively easy shoot. There was not much dialogue and I knew exactly how I was going to shoot the scene. We had all the props and equipment we needed to get it done. Darren was fine with this until we actually got outside. He began to complain almost immediately. I really messed up in that I allowed his complaining to get to me. That didn't help my brother who had the skimpiest costume and was most affected by the cold, even if he did wear Jeremy's trench-coat.

Before we went to the creek we shot the Jerk chasing Unicorn Boy around on the railroad tracks. This little chase ended with Unicorn Boy falling down a hill and eluding the jerk. My brother fell into the snow and rolled partially down the hill. He did this with zero complaining. Did I mention he was wearing what amounted to a sheer dress? Darren, on the other hand, had on long pants and a trench-coat. He had it better than my brother yet he whined like a little bitch! The other thing Darren complained about was that we did not provide hot chocolate for this shoot. Baby!

JEREMY: As noted, Dar was in a bad mood that day. It doesn’t excuse his actions (or lack thereof) but I don’t want to paint him in a bad light. We all have our off days. I just wish Dar hadn’t picked that day of all days to have his.

JOE: The shoot for the day was a bust. Jeremy and I decided that if that was the way things were going to go we shouldn't shoot in the winter. We put a hold on filming for the next couple of months and concentrated on rewriting the script, adding more interior scenes and cutting out the bit with the Jerk all together.

We patiently waited out the last days of winter and when spring finally came we resumed filming in all its gory brilliance.

NEXT: BLOOD PUDDING: ACT THREE

CHAPTER ELEVEN

2011-04-15T23:54:00.000-04:00

BLOOD PUDDING: ACT ONE

JEREMY: We began production on Blood Pudding before Laugh A Little. The exact details of our first shoot are lost in the convoluted passages of time, but if I was a betting man I would say that it was the scene where Byron murders his mother. We ended up shooting this scene twice. The first time was at the apartment of an acquaintance of Dar's named James Bolt.

Now, to say that Bolt was mentally unstable would be like saying Howard Hughes didn't like to get dirty. Rumors abounded that he was a borderline genius who was slowly being driven insane by his mental superiority. He could see the shadows left behind by mice in his apartment hours after the fact and he had no sphincter so a tube was surgically implanted in his side that allowed him to relieve his waste by lying sideways on the toilet.

We all gathered for the shoot, which was to take place at Bolt's diminutive upstairs apartment. Bolt was this skinny little white boy who lived in a predominately black neighborhood, and not a nice upper class neighborhood either. Drug deals were taking place right before our eyes as we arrived at the apartment. As previously stated I was going through a cowboy faze at the time and was decked out in black leather cowboy boots and a white wicker hat. Bolt took one look at me and said with a wry grin, "Boy, are you in the wrong neighborhood." I declined an offer of meth from a passerby and agreed with him.

We decided to grab a bite to eat at a nearby pizza hut before we started. We all squeezed into Bolt's jalopy, which was minus a passenger side window and a heater (this was during a particularly cold fall) and afterwards, as we drove back from Pizza Hut, a cop car flashed its lights and pulled us over.

Bolt started gibbering to us about how much he hated cops and how they had dragged him from his car on more than one occasion and beat the tar out of him. Dar and Joe told him to be cool and I sat silently in the back, hoping the cop wouldn’t frisk us because, as always, I had my knife sheathed on the back of my belt. The cop, a large and corpulent man, ambled over like he was king shit of fuck mountain and told Bolt to hand over his license and registration.

"Yes, officer!" Bolt hissed in an acidic tone.

I felt my stomach do an elevator-length dive. No wonder this guy was constantly getting his head bashed in by cops, and now he was about to get our heads bashed in as well. While the cop waited for Bolt to retrieve the registration from the glove box he shone the flashlight in my face, studying me for what seemed like fifteen minutes before finally turning his attention to the others. He asked Bolt if this was his car and Bolt hissed, "Yes, officer!" He asked him if he knew he was speeding. "No, officer!"

It took the cop about twenty minutes to do a background check and all I could think of was Man, I'm going to jail tonight! The first chance I have to be part of a movie and I'm going to spend it in some cell where a hulking guy named Bubba will declare me his bitch.

In the end the cop let us go with a warning. Bolt thanked him in that acidic tone and we made it back to the apartment without any further delays.

CAN WE SHOOT THIS PLEASE!

JOE: I do not remember why I agreed to do the first shoot of Blood Pudding at Bolt's apartment. It was all wrong for the scene. As Jeremy stated above, we were shooting the part where Byron murders his mother, but what we shot here is not what ended up in the finished movie. As I had originally planned it, the scene was to feature Byron, his mother and his sister gathered in the kitchen one early morning, preparing for breakfast. We were going to shoot this at my house but that changed as my house's kitchen didn't fit what I had envisioned.

When we changed locations my little sister could no longer be in the movie. That wasn't really a problem; I just dropped the role of the little sister all together. Next, my other sister, who was to play the mother, decided not to be in the movie. This was at the last minute. What the heck were we going to do?! We couldn't just cut out the mother! This was the scene that was supposed to reel in the audience! So I did the only thing I could think of at the time. I asked Jeremy to play the mother. Jeremy just stared at me. I don't remember if I asked him the night of the shoot or if this happened before the shoot. I'm leaning toward the latter.

JEREMY: Yes, it was the night of the shoot. Joe and Dar conspired against me. I was just there as an extra hand to help out in whatever way I could, but I didn't realize to what extent my dedication to the group would ultimately take me. They had brought the dress and wig with them with the idea of Joe playing the role, but Joe changed his mind and asked me at the last minute to assume the role as he wanted to concentrate on directing (likely excuse!).

JOE: Jeremy put the dress on over his clothes and we all burst into laughter at how ridiculous he looked. It would take Jeremy a lot of hormone therapy to pass himself off as a woman. So we just changed the story a little bit to fit what we had. Jeremy would now be playing Byron's father. Why was he wearing a dress?! Well, Byron's father was all messed up in the head because his wife died in childbirth. The baby lived and was deformed. The father had a hard time dealing with this so when he had the most trouble coping with this fact, or if certain issues arose that he could not deal with, he would dress in his dead wife's clothes and, more often than not, use this as an excuse to abuse Byron. It worked and also added a little something extra to the movie.

JEREMY: I wasn't too thrilled about playing a woman my first time out of the gate as an actor, but once we cooked up the idea of me playing the father who was in turn playing the mother to escape the pressures of his life I felt a bit more comfortable about the whole thing (or as comfortable as one could feel in a dress, wig and makeup). To my way of thinking this added another notch to the overall quirkiness of the movie.

JOE: It was only Jeremy, Darren and I at this shoot. Darren applied the Byron make-up to his face, Jeremy donned the dress and wig, and I set things up for the shoot. As far as I recall the shoot went smoothly enough. Bolt left before we started. To where I haven’t a clue, but he was gone the rest of the night. I think we were all thankful for that. We could get right down to shooting with no distractions.

SHOOTING

I had played this scene so many times in my head that I knew exactly how I would film it. Here it is in a nutshell: Mother/Father (as we now called the parent) was cooking breakfast for himself and Byron. Because Mother/Father was sporting a dress today, Byron sat quietly in a corner, knowing the situation could become abusive in a heartbeat. He was snacking on a loaf of bread and a whole stick of butter. Yummy! Everything was going well until Mother/Father says, "Byron, could you get your mother some more eggs?" Byron does not want to get up but does so to maintain the peace. He grabs a handful of eggs but on his short journey from fridge to stove he stumbles and drops them all.

JEREMY: There's a bit here after Dar drops the eggs where Joe has him step on them. Joe never came out and said it but I like to believe this represented Byron's situation: He's literally walking on eggshells around his Mother/Father.

Mother/Father is furious. "You shit! You ungrateful little shit!" Byron shudders. Mother/Father snaps and throws Byron to the floor. Then Mother/Father bashes Byron in the head several times with the frying pan. Byron lays there in a pool of his own blood. Mother/Father storms out of the room and returns a moment later, asking Byron, "Haven't my lessons taught you anything?" Now it's Byron's turn to snap. He leaps to his feet, grabs a large knife and stabs Mother/Father multiple times in the chest. Mother/Father dies and Byron leaves the house, free at last.

JEREMY: The whole shoot went fairly well with few complications. There were, of course, some kinks we had to work out in all of our departments (Joe's first time directing, Dar and I acting, etc.). The hardest thing about the evening was cleaning the fake blood off Bolt's kitchen floor before he came home. Dried corn syrup isn't exactly the easiest substance to wipe off a linoleum surface, I can assure you. We later re-shot this scene at Joe's grandmother's house, which turned out to be a marked improvement. We re-shot it for two reasons; the first being that we lost the footage. Secondly, we thought the scene as originally shot wasn't all that impressive.

JOE: Ahhh, losing the footage. What an epic tale of hardship and woe. Darren gave Bolt the footage to watch. Why we did not watch it with him is beyond me. Darren did not tell us that he gave Bolt the footage until we asked him where it was. That certainly was irritating! So, weeks went by, we shot some more of the movie, no word from Bolt. We shoot some more of the movie, still no Bolt. No one could get a hold of Bolt. It would seem Bolt picked this particular point to fall off the face of the Earth. Great!

We ended up re-shooting this entire scene at my grandmother's house. Bolt finally reappreared shortly thereafter. Turns out he was holed up with some chick he just met, engaging in wild orgies every night. Well, at least we got the footage back. In retrospect, I'm glad the footage was considered lost. The re-shot Mother/Father death scene ended up being far superior to the orginal version. We had learned a lot since we shot that scene. Things were coming together nicely. Or so we thought.

NEXT: BLOOD PUDDING: ACT TWO

CHAPTER TEN

2011-04-15T16:18:00.001-04:00

INTERLUDE: BLUD TURD

JEREMY: While filming Joe Devine's Blood Pudding he and Dar often hung out with me at my grandmother's house, where I was staying while I saved money for our eventual trip to Florida. I had a large bedroom that was nearly a miniature apartment in its own right, and it sort of became our unofficial headquarters. The house was also right down the street from Marsh, so it was the natural place to convene after work.

We did a lot of planning for Blood Pudding here. I worked on storyboards with Joe, discussed the script, shot a couple of scenes (only one of which ended up in the finished product), and even edited parts of the film here via two VCR's. Joe and I had come to the conclusion that Byron would decapitate the villainous Patch in the film's climatic confrontation, so I had secured some flesh colored clay from Dar, borrowed one of my grandmother's Styrofoam heads she stored her wigs on, and went to work on creating a dummy head for Patch.

I covered the Styrofoam head with the flesh colored clay, smoothing it out from neck to forehead until it resembled human skin if viewed from a distance. I then used a marshmallow for an eyeball (the other socket would be covered with a patch), sculpted the nose and lips, and used one of my grandmother's wigs for the hair. It didn't quite match my hair, but I figured I could overcome this problem by pinning my character's black Stetson to the head. I doubted I would win any awards in the field of special make-up effects but I thought the end result looked pretty damn good.

As written, Patch and Byron have their final confrontation in the basement of an old, dilapidated house. Patch knocks Byron to the floor and raises his sword over his head, smacking a light bulb dangling above him. The light bulb swings back and forth, creating a cool light and shadow effect. Byron manages to secure the knife he'd been fighting with, stabs Patch in the guts, steals the sword from him as he collapses to his knees, and lops off his head.

We planned to use fishing wire to yank the false head from a dummy body. A tube would be inside the neck area in which we would shoot out fake blood. The head would fly through the air and land in a corner of the basement. The audience would only catch a brief glimpse of this; just enough to give the impression of what had happened, and it would mostly be masked in the shadows. For a short feature shot on camcorder in a friend's basement on a shoestring budget, it would do the job quite nicely.

I was excited at the prospect of shooting this scene and stayed up all night in order to finish the head by the next day. I then invited Joe and Dar over in order to bask in their praise. They indeed liked it. I remember Joe being equally excited about using the false head in the upcoming fight scene. In fact, we were so pumped up that we decided to shoot something that very night. Since we only had a couple of hours before everyone had to go home we decided not to work on anything as complex as Blood Pudding and Laugh A Little. Besides, we were just in the mood to experiment with lighting and camera angles anyway. So we decided to come up with something off the top of our heads; maybe a short, short film.

We made up a half ass story on the spot. A detective is looking for a serial killer who leaves poems at the scenes of his murders. Joe had a folder containing some of his dark and brooding prose as did Dar (though his work bordered more on the weird side than dark and brooding), so we decided to use them with Joe playing the serial killer and me playing the detective. From time to time we would cut from us to Dar narrating the ‘story’ from behind a desk, beginning and ending each narration with one of his own poems.

We made no attempt to be serious about the work. We cracked jokes, hammed up our performances and made the overall work as off the wall as possible. We edited the film as we went along by shooting only one take per scene. If we screwed up, too bad, we worked it into the so-called story. The finished product had a fever dream quality about it, like a nightmare that makes little sense once you wake up and try to contemplate it. But the lighting and visuals looked great.

All we needed now was a name for this little stink-burger. I don’t remember who came up with the title Blud Turd, but I'll go out on a limb here and say Dar is the most likely candidate. I have no idea what it means. Never did, never will. But for some strange reason none of us ever questioned the fact that it fit the short film perfectly.

Now, the only thing that sticks in my craw about this little endeavor of ours was that Dar, out of the blue, decided to eat the dummy head of Patch on camera. Okay, maybe he didn't eat the Styrofoam, or the wig—well, not all of it, anyway. But the flesh colored clay and marshmallow eye all disappeared down his gullet. I suppose it was my fault for handing the dummy head to him in the first place, God knows I should have known Dar well enough by then, but I figured that a short about a serial killer would be the perfect place to showcase my proud work.

I told Dar to hold up the head in one scene and announce to the audience something along the lines of, "Here then is all that remains of the killer's latest victim." (Pure cheese, I know). Dar did just that and then said, "Look at that nose, looks rather tasty," and proceeded to bite it off.

Joe and I were stunned and appalled by this senseless act. "What are you doing?" We demanded. "Relax," Dar said, "you can fix it later." Well, I thought, it is only the nose, it shouldn't be that hard to redo. The only problem was that each time we did a shot of Dar narrating he would bite another hunk out of the dummy head. We'd chastise him about destroying our prop, he'd promise to stop, and then do the exact same thing again.

In the end, Dar suffered a stomach ache (Gee, I wonder why) and since he couldn't get us any more clay and my grandmother, understandably enough, wouldn't allow us to use anymore of her Styrofoam wig heads, Joe and I had no choice but to cut the decapitation scene from the film.

Ah, a moment of silence for what could have been.

JOE: As I recall, Darren wanted Jeremy, him, and I to record ourselves reading our poetry in front of the camera. What! Why? I don't remember who, though my money's on Jeremy, decided to spice it up by adding the story (such as it was) to it. We each read at least one poem, which were supposed to go along with the story. Serial killers, cops and poetry! That is a winning combination for any motion picture! All we were missing was a Waca Chica beat! We shot this whole thing in Jeremy's bedroom. Sounds pathetic and boring, you say? I remember watching it when we were finished. It struck me that it didn't seem like it was shot in one tiny room! That amazed me.

The other thing that amazed me was the willingness of Darren to eat clay. The fake head Jeremy created for Blood Pudding was also a prop for Blud Turd. All he had to do was put the head on the table. That's it! I couldn't believe it when he bit the nose off of that head! Jeremy really did a good job on that fake head and Darren ate its face off without batting an eye! Unbelievable!

I don't remember who came up with the title. It seems to fit though. It was a lot of fun making that little thing.

JESSE: I remember seeing this later at the premier and thinking, These guys are nuts, what have I gotten myself into? Which means I enjoyed the fuck out of it.

JEREMY: Yeah, I remember Joe and Dar making me introduce the movie before we played it so that everybody thought I directed it. I cringed then, and I cringe now.

JOE: I recall Jeremy insisting that he introduce Blud Turd! He wouldn't take no for an answer! He thought it was the best movie we had there!

JEREMY: Lying bastard.

JOE: You're just in denial!

NEXT: BLOOD PUDDING: ACT ONE

CHAPTER NINE

2011-04-15T16:16:00.003-04:00

BLOOD PUDDING: THE BEGINNING

JOE: Now our film-circle was complete. It’s funny that by the time we all met we already had two different movie projects going. One was headed by Darren Parsons (he'll try to tell you his name is Dar. Don't believe him! It's Darren!), Laugh A Little. The other was mine, Blood Pudding.

Blood Pudding came about because I wanted to make a movie, and Darren was getting pretty good at doing some gory make-up effects. I picked a horror movie for that reason. I've always loved horror films. I remember the library in grade school carried the book Everything you Always Wanted to Know About Monsters but Were Afraid to Ask. I loved that book. I never wanted to return it. I checked it out a lot. It mostly covered, but wasn't limited to, the classic monsters from Universal studios, Dracula, The Wolfman, Frankenstein, The Phantom of the Opera and so on.

JESSE: Years later I bought the book at Half Price Books and gave it to the fucker.

JOE: I remember staying up on Friday nights with my mother to watch the local horror show host introduce that week’s fright fest! He was called Sammy Terry. The opening theme always spooked me. I wouldn't turn out the lights until that was done. Oh, then Sammy would laugh. Spooked me out as a kid. It's too bad the horror show host is no more, but maybe I'm getting too off the subject here.

Originally, Blood Pudding was to be called The Slasher (imaginative 'eh? I changed the name to Blood Pudding after a priest friend of mine told me about an oriental dish of the same name). It was about just that. Some deformed dude who slashed people up. I wanted it to be simple and showcase Darren's make-up talents. The original plot was that a deformed guy seeks shelter in a house and kills the inhabitants.

Simple, yet there was enough there to play with some make-up effects. I wanted to do severed heads, scissors in the eyes, that sort of thing. The main character was named Byron. One side of his face was severely deformed. It looked like it was melting off. The idea for the character’s look came from a practice make-up session Darren and I did on the last day of summer vacation.

Darren wanted to teach me a bit about make-up. He had some pieces of latex that we could use to make somebody look scarred and deformed. We decided to make some zombies. Luckily, my little brother, Jim, and little sister, Jill, were home for us to practice on. I used one of the latex pieces to completely cover Jill's eye. It looked like her face was sliding off her skull. So later, when it came time to make Blood Pudding, I thought that would be a good look for the hero, who would be played by Darren.

DAR: Joe didn’t want me in the role of Byron. He wanted somebody bigger. We had this argument in his parent’s pool. We would sit there and talk about Blood Pudding because at the time we were doing all types of special effects with latex and fake blood and he was creating this story of freaks in his mind. It was evolving and we would talk about it. He wanted someone bigger but I persuaded him to use me. He came around. I think he liked it in the end.

JOE: I wrote a first draft and added in a few things to make it a bit longer. The movie now started with our hero, Byron, getting fed up with his mother’s constant abuse. He brutally murdered her, along with his evil little sister, then ventured out into the real world. While hiding out in the woods he happened upon another deformed man.

This guy had a horn jutting out of the middle of his forehead, making him look like a Unicorn. This character also developed from hours of messing around with make-up. Darren had a couple of pieces of latex fashioned into horns he was using for a demon character in his acting class. It looked quite good.

So, on one of those days in the summer before we met Jeremy and Jesse, we made my brother up to look like a freak with a horn jutting from his head. We called him Unicorn Boy. I thought this character would work well in Blood Pudding, in which Unicorn Boy and Byron would meet and form a bond. Unicorn boy was being chased by a couple of rednecks with nothing better to do with their time than harass people with horns sticking out of their heads. These guys came across Unicorn Boy and Byron and started tormenting them. Byron brutally murdered both of them, thus protecting Unicorn Boy. This really made Unicorn Boy uneasy.

Eventually, Byron and Unicorn Boy broke into a house in search of shelter against the night. The homeowners didn't like this and Unicorn Boy was murdered by one of them. Byron then slaughtered the homeowners and wandered off into the night. That was about all it was when I met Jeremy. Jeremy read the script, thought of ways to improve it, and did. He added some stuff that it really needed.

JEREMY: When I first read Joe's short script my immediate reaction was to avoid Joe because he was one seriously screwed up individual, but after this initial reaction wore off I concluded that I liked what he had produced for its quirkiness and originality. Okay, horror movies have been done to death, particularly the slasher films. You can only do so much with some insane killer stalking a group of people from point A to point B and killing them in new and imaginative ways. To me Blood Pudding had a fresh concept in that it seemed to mix the old Universal horror films such as Frankenstein with the B-quality bloodlettings of Friday the 13th and Hills Have Eyes. Throw in some David Cronenberg with a smattering of Clive Barker and you've got yourself one funky stew.

I immediately found some problems with the story I wished to address with its author. Most prominent among them was that Blood Pudding lacked a villain. As written, Byron wasn't necessarily a bad guy. He was a deformed man who had suffered years of abuse from his unstable mother and lashed out at the world in the only way he knew how, which was through violence. We also shouldn't overlook the fact that the people he killed basically deserved it. Byron was the protagonist, the character with whom our sympathies lay. We needed an antagonist, someone to challenge the main character. After all, it's kind of hard to root for somebody who is ripping out peoples intestines and eating them like fine cuisine. We needed somebody whose actions would overshadow Byron's own brutality, who was bad enough in his own right to allow us to side with Byron and Unicorn Boy.

When I first mentioned this to Joe he went on the defensive, which is perfectly natural when somebody begins nitpicking at something you've poured your heart into, stating that the script didn't need a villain because society was the villain. It was a big juicy metaphor about how we judge people based on their appearance instead of what's on the inside. I waited for Joe to finish and then reiterated the fact that we needed a flesh-and-blood villain, a physical representative of society's hatred for all things different. Joe relented and asked me if I had any ideas. I said I did and gave a pitch I'd cooked up overnight.

What if Unicorn Boy was the star attraction of a traveling freak show? He, like Byron, was abused constantly by the person who was supposed to be his caretaker; though, instead of the mother figure we have it be the owner of the freak show, the Ringmaster. The other freaks can't tolerate this abuse and set Unicorn Boy free. The Ringmaster then hires a bounty hunter called Patch to retrieve his property. Byron encounters Unicorn Boy, steadily gains his trust, and begins an adventure with him; all the while they are being tracked by this menacing bounty hunter. As far as I recall Joe liked the idea from the get go and we immediately incorporated it into the script.

JOE: Jeremy's contribution really made Blood Pudding what it is. All I had was a skeleton and he put the flesh on the bones. At that time I had fantasies of being an auteur. It was after I met and got to know Jesse and Jeremy that I changed my mind about that. I had a lot of fun writing the final draft of Blood Pudding with Jeremy. I found out what a sounding-board was (that is, someone you bounce ideas off of). Jeremy was and is a great sounding-board. I found out later that Jesse is also a great sounding-board.

I came to the realization that I liked working on things with other people. That the idea becomes as much theirs as it is mine. Up until I met Jesse and Jeremy I'd only worked on stuff with Darren. Yeah, we brought a few other people in on stuff we were doing. None of those people had the vision, the fire, the love of movies and writing that Darren and I had. I used Darren as a sounding-board without realizing it. So why did Jeremy's ideas for Blood Pudding impact me so much? Darren was good to bounce ideas off of but the problem was (I think) I wanted to do things that Darren wasn't that interested in doing. I wanted to make a bloody in your face horror movie. He was pretty good at creating some simple, bloody make-up effects, but he did not have the same love of horror movies as I did.

At the time, I described Blood Pudding to people as The Hunchback of Notre Dame meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I found that Jeremy had a love of horror movies the same as I did. He was more in tune with what I wanted to do. We would often go to our favorite video store, Royal Video, and rent lots of horror movies. Some were really bad; some were charming and cheesy; all of them were bloody. After we made our selection, we would go back to his place, cook some pizza pies and watch the movies. Those were good times.

So I'm no auteur. Lucky you!

JESSE: don't you find it funny that we split into two filmmaking groups? Jeremy and you on Blood Pudding and Darren and I on Laugh A Little. I mean, we all helped at one point on the other's film but when it came to production there were two groups.

JOE: Yeah...I thought about that. The main reason was that we didn't know you that well (although I do recall wanting you at more Blood Pudding shoots). Then there was the matter of transportation. It was very easy for me and Jeremy to get together since we only lived a few miles apart, while you lived closer to downtown. With Darren being the only one driving at the time, well that didn't help much either.

NEXT: BLUD TURD

CHAPTER EIGHT

2011-04-10T20:34:00.002-04:00

WHY CAN’T ROBIN BE A FAT FUCKER?

JESSE: Back around the time of Laugh A Little I was 230 pounds. That's right. I was a great big huge fat ass. I was so fat breathing was a chore for me. I ate anything I wanted no matter how life shortening or calorie oriented. I never did an ounce of exercise (as long as you don't count lugging around all that equipment on the Laugh A Little sets and the long walks to and from work). Back then I saw no problem with my lifestyle. I was happy and was having no immediate health problems. I mean, come on, I was under 20 and that meant I was invincible.

In case you're wondering why the hell I'm telling you all of this it's just to give you a few clues about the title and my audition for the role of Robin in the movie Batman Forever.

A DAY IN THE TECH CAFETERIA

I was sitting in the cafeteria with two of my friends, Lance and Chris. Well, they weren't really my friends. They were friends of Dave Patrick, whom I occasionally came to the lunchroom to see. Lance was sharing another inane story about him and his cousin. Lance's cousin was a minor god to Lance. He was always getting Lance into some kind of boring adventure.

Lance was telling me about how he and his god cousin were being chased by a real mean ass Chihuahua while Chris, a devil-worshipper with a huge love for Cannibal Corpses, was taking his mid-day nap. This nap would prepare him for his little after mid-day nap, his a nap a little later in the day, which would then directly lead to a really good sleep for the night. I was contemplating whether or not to shove my spork into my eye socket rather then listen to another minute of Lance’s chatter when Dave Patrick walked in.

Dave sat down next to me with a newspaper. This was a rather odd occurrence as Dave with a newspaper meant a sign of the apocalypse. He threw it in front of me and pointed at an article. I took one look and then shot Dave a smile. "Don't worry, Dave, I wasn't enjoying these delicious mashed potatoes and gravy that you flung your paper onto."

Dave picked the paper up out of my lunch, ripped out the page he needed, and tossed the rest into a nearby trashcan. He handed it to me and said, "Look, they're doing auditions for the role of Robin in the new Batman movie."

You might remember Batman Forever as the movie where Joel Schumacher screamed that he had a hard on for Batman and he wouldn't mind having anal sex with Robin either. I had read rumors in the trade magazines that they wanted Marlon Wayans for the movie. Later, in a stroke of pure idiocy, Chris O' Donnell would get the role. Which brought up the question, what the hell was Batman doing with a 23 year old ward?

I read the article and handed it back. "Yeah, and what's your point?" I knew what the point was; I just wanted to hear it.

"I'm going down to try out for the role of Robin," he said with stars in his eyes.

Even though I thought it was a cool idea I knew there wasn't much chance in hell of Dave being cast in the part. But, at the very least, he could tell people he'd auditioned for the role of Robin. Heck, why couldn't I go down and audition for the role myself? What a bold piece of casting I would be. A 250 pound bald guy with a high pitched voice would definitely throw those casting bastards for a loop. I would be exactly what they wouldn't expect or want. "What the hell, Dave," I said, grinning mischievously, "I'll go down and audition with you."

After Dave finished laughing at me I told him that I didn't expect to be cast but it would be funny to say I did. Of course, there was also the outside chance that the casting director would say no to the Robin gig but yes to some other part. You never know what might happen unless you take the chance. Heck, maybe I could form some connections for us down the road. I told Dave I would scout it out and let him know if it was on the level or not. Dave nodded his head in agreement.

The auditions were at the Embassy Suites downtown. So I decided to cut the rest of the day from school. I would go downtown, hit the comic book shop and grab a bite of lunch since Dave had just ruined mine. I left Tech and walked downtown to—appropriately enough—Downtown Comics. I read through a bunch of comics, especially those about Batman and Robin. I spent about an hour there and actually bought some comics, none of which were about Batman and Robin.

I arrived at the Embassy Suites and approached the sign in desk where a lovely young lady stood. I explained to the young lady my reasons for being there, in case she mistook me for some homeless beggar looking for a handout. A true professional, she managed to look at me without bursting into laughter. With nary a snicker in her voice she politely told me to have a seat in the lobby. As I sat down I heard the lady call over a co-worker. These are her exact words: "Fat boy over there thinks he can be Robin."

NOW THROUGH THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DENIAL HERE’S WHAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED…

I walk up to the front desk with every ounce of charm oozing through my body. The attendant looks at me, immediately impressed and just a little dazzled by my magnetic personality. "You must be trying out for Robin, the Boy Wonder".

I wink and say, "I am a wonder in one department, if you know what I mean."

She leads me to the back room. We fight to get all of our clothes off. Then we make love like rabbits after they've taken a dip in liquid Viagra. After a long session we leave the back room. She looks at me and says, "You shouldn't play Robin, you should play Batman, 'cause you sure as hell ain't no boy."

I give her a playful peck on the cheek. She makes the telephone impression with her fingers and mouths the words "Call me." I wink, assuring her I would, even though we haven’t exchanged numbers or names. I sit in the lobby, cool as a cucumber, and wait.

AND NOW A RETURN TO REALITY. STUPID, BORING REALITY...

I waited for about an hour for the casting agent. Two other young men had walked in to audition. One was a blond kid who was a bit hyperactive. He sat there with his parents, talking a mile a minute and none of what he said was interesting. He just kept going on about himself to his parents. I waited for his Father to slap him and say "I helped give birth to you, you dumb shit. I know who the fuck you are." Sadly, this never happened.

The other young man, this one with brown hair, had also brought his parents. With the exception of the Mother they remained quiet. She would talk to the attendant every five minutes, constantly asking when the auditions would start.

The casting agent finally came to the lobby. She apologized for being late and handed out applications. It had the usual questions you'd expect to find on an application, but there was an additional line for size measurements. I had no clue what these were. I wanted to write ‘fat’ on each one and leave it at that.

The casting agent gave us some time to fill these out. She then took the blond motor-mouth’s application and looked it over. He went into a long monologue about why he should be Robin. The casting director had him stand up while she took his measurements. While this was taking place he bragged about how good of shape he was in. I just zoned it out and finished my application.

She next measured the quiet boy. His Mother sold up his high points while she did so. The agent seemed impressed. She then asked the young man a question. He looked at his Mother who translated all of this into sign language. He answered the question through sign language to his mother. The agent was still quite excited and started a whole conversation. I was puzzled by all of this. I know he had the build but Robin should be able to hear, shouldn't he?

This kid could kick the living shit out of me and, most likely, do everything else in the world better than me, yet, how could he play Robin? I could see Batman and Robin climbing up the side of a building. Batman goes into the peculiars of the case. Robin just keeps climbing, not even noticing. Batman starts yelling and turns to Robin to ask why he's ignoring him. Robin lets go of the rope to answer and falls to his death.

I know Marlee Matlin has made herself a career in show bizz but she always plays deaf people and she had the added benefit of being able to talk. I know I sound like an asshole but he couldn't be Robin. Now, if someone wrote a role to suit him that would be perfect. He just couldn't be Robin. Call me an asshole—

JEREMY: Asshole.

JESSE: —but I will say this. I don't think the kid was all that interested in the whole thing in the first place. To me it seemed as if his Mother was the one who was all into it. He looked as if he wanted to be somewhere else all together. I will also say that he suited the role of Robin better than I did, and that's the truth.

It was finally my turn. She gave me a strange look as she approached, as if she would rather piss on a downed power cable than look at me. She took my application and glanced over it. She found a problem and said, "What high school plays have YOU been in?"

I looked at her like "What, a fat guy can't be in a high school play?" Now, I had never been in a high school play but she didn't know that. "Well, I played Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth in, well, Macbeth," I said, lying through my teeth.

She gave me another look. I don’t know if she saw through my ruse or just couldn’t imagine someone casting me in those roles. She then came to my measurements, one of which I had forgotten to fill in. She said, "Well, all of these other measurements are okay but you left out your neck size. What's your neck size?"

By this point I was pretty pissed from all these looks she kept giving me. "It's 12 inches," I said, beaming.

"12 inches is your neck size?" she replied.

"Oh no,” I corrected, “I thought you said my dick size."

The security guards escorted me out of the Embassy Suites. One was holding my backpack while the other had me by the arm. Once I was off the property they handed me my bag and gave me a stern warning that I was never to come back again. I just gave them a "so what" look and headed off. I walked through the crisp, sunny day knowing I blew my chance at some connections but at least I could say I tried out for the role of Robin. Two weeks later Chris O' Donnell got the role.

Let me just say this, I never wanted the role of Robin. I never liked Robin. He was just there to make Batman look softer for the kids. I like Batman better alone, brooding and ready to kick some ass. The biggest reason I didn't want to play Robin is best told by this picture:

Robin is extremely gay in Batman Forever and Batman and Robin.

Next: Blood Pudding

CHAPTER SEVEN

2011-04-10T04:31:00.007-04:00

EDITING AND AFTERMATH

JESSE: Alright, I'm sure even a duller knows that editing is where the movie is finally pieced together. However, for those who still are unable to grasp this concept allow me a moment to explain the process. You sit in a small room and watch hours of raw footage over and over again until you find the takes you like best. You then put those takes together in chronological order to form your movie. Sometimes you just cut some scenes down and occasionally you cut them out all together. This is a very boring and monotonous process for those who don't love making movies. We all love it in our group. Yet, if you don't it's just like watching an episode of a TV show three thousand times in one sitting. It is the final tool in the storytelling process.

THE RETURN OF DARREN PARSONS

You may have noticed all through the film's production that Darren was not himself. He was tense, angry, and ready to explode at the slightest provocation. This is so unlike Darren that working with him during this period was like working with a complete stranger. I will say this: Darren is usually easy going, generous, nice, and my brother in every way. It was not my intention to paint him as an asshole but at the same time I had to tell the story as it happened.

So, it gives me great pleasure to say that during editing he was the old Darren Parsons again. He was full of energy, fun to be around, and in a great mood every day. He came to class each day with a great attitude and ready to work. Editing was always his favorite part of the job. He enjoyed it and it showed in his attitude. He had to make some tough decisions about the movie and he couldn't wait to tackle them head on.

FIVE HOURS OF FOOTAGE FOR A FIFTEEN MINUTE MOVIE

The first day of editing was also our first day back to school after spring break. We gathered the tapes from my locker and watched them all in a row. After we finished one I would write down how much footage we had on it and plop in another. When all was said and done we had about five hours of raw footage. A lot of this was additional takes for each scene so it wasn’t that bad. It’s not like we had five hours of an actual story to trim.

DAR: No, we probably had thirty or so minutes of story. We could’ve added more to it, I guess, but in order to enter it into the contest it couldn’t be more than ten minutes long. And we still went over by five minutes.

JESSE: We decided to edit each tape in order of their scenes in the script. We went to work on it the next day. At this point Darren and I were the only ones showing up to class. We went through the first tape, which contained my ‘acting’ scene and the video store scene. After watching and re-watching my scene we began to realize how pointless it was. Darren and I agreed that it should be the first to go. We then skipped ahead to the video store scene.

After an hour of editing it still didn't feel right. For one, looking at it now you could easily tell it wasn’t a real video store. Two, we both couldn't find a take that we thought was good. Class time was almost over and we decided to just cut it out. That whole first day of editing ended with nothing to show for our efforts but two deleted scenes.

We started on Jeremy's opening scene the next day. I thought we had a pretty good edit for it. It was a good scene with underlying tension to it. Darren apologized as we watched it and I kept saying "Don't apologize to me." We finally finished it and began work on the meatloaf with ice cream eating scene. This rather simplistic scene didn't take long and we moved on to the next.

This is how it went for the next couple of days, just going through everything and either paring it down or removing it all together. By Friday we had everything edited. All we had to do now was piece the movie together. This is the most rewarding part, as you get to see the story come together. We put all of the footage in chronological order on a single tape and both agreed to come in that Saturday to finish it.

Darren and I met fairly early in the morning. He told me that Becky would be by later to help us edit the film. This was fine with me. All we had to do at this point was piece it together. As Darren and I watched the footage we kept an eye on how long it was running. If memory serves, the movie wound up being somewhere around 30 minutes long. This meant we had to cut out about 20 minutes of material.

We were worried about what we could cut out while still keeping the story cohesive. We knew there were three scenes that could not be cut. Those were the Talent Show scene, the first kiss scene, and the last scene where Jenny breaks up with him. Darren devised a way to explain the story through soundcards like in the old silent movies. It seemed like a good idea, but first we had to figure out what parts of the story would have to be explained using this device.

Around this time Becky showed up and watched the footage with us. She agreed with Darren that Jeremy's opening scene was one of the ones that should go. I had to disagree here. I felt you needed a dialogue scene to introduce the villain. He is an integral part of the movie.

They agreed to put it on hold for the moment and asked what other scene we could cut. Well, I pointed out the first breakup shot at Darren's house. I felt it was never really a good scene and the acting was atrocious. I thought it wasn't integral to the story either. Darren wanted some kind of turmoil to be shown between the two. I suggested using a single shot from it, explaining the rest away with a soundcard. They both agreed but that was only the tip of the iceberg, what else was expendable?

We had to cut something and finally the axe came down on Jeremy's scene. I felt the theater scene and the front porch scene were more important to the relationship between David and Jenny. I was still under the impression that we should include Jeremy's scene and maybe we could cut the final scene (or Darren's Ego Scene, as I call it), but I knew that wasn't going to happen.

In the end I had no choice but to accept the butchering of a great performance. We did use a shot from that scene for Skip's soundcard introduction. When we finally finished the process we had cut the movie down to about eighteen minutes without credits. Darren and I would finish that on Monday. I wondered how Darren was going to tell Jeremy about his axed scene. I just remembered how much Jeremy went through during production and I felt bad that, in a way, I helped cut it out by giving up the fight. I’ve always felt bad about this and I know Darren did too.

JEREMY: In the end it's what is most important for the movie. I wasn't upset that my scenes were cut out from a purely whiney actor not getting his due standpoint, but rather the fact that the movie now had no antagonist; at least, not a fully developed one (hell, with somewhere around a minute or so of screen time with no dialogue, he wasn't developed at all). The villain is the second most important character of a story. He is the force which the hero has to overcome. You cannot have a good hero without a good villain. I understand Dar had to edit down the film, but maybe if he spent less of those precious screen moments with shots of himself posing for the camera (I'm ready for my close up, Mr. Deville!) he could have squeezed in a bit more characterization for Skip Wes.

I have always wondered why Dar didn't edit two versions of the movie, one for the contest and a thirty minute one for our group, which we all could have enjoyed as the one true version of Laugh A Little. Alas, it is never to be, as every scrap of that footage has disappeared from existence.

CREDITS

JESSE: Darren and I returned to CIRT Monday to finish the credits. When making credits and soundcards there is one rule that must be followed: Make sure all words are on the screen long enough to be read by the audience three times quickly. This was simple enough; the hard task was deciding which credits would go to whom. As you know, I had to fight for Dave's credit. The only other decision was what music to put on the end credit sequence. I had two songs I liked. They were both by The Smiths. The first song was called "Stop Me If You Heard This One Before". The other was "This Charming Man". I played Dar the second song first, but as I played it the silly goof started recording it to the credits. So, the decision was made and "This Charming Man" blessed the final credits.

The movie was finished and we were both saddened by the sudden realization that this great project we had worked on for so long was now behind us. He made two VHS copies and asked if I wanted one. I did not. I was just happy to be finished with the thing. The movie was ingrained into my memory just the way I wanted it to be. In the coming days I would see plenty more of it anyway.

THE ARSENAL TECHNICAL MOVIE TOUR

Darren decided to show the movie to every teacher at Tech that he liked. Our first stop was the desk of Alan Oliver. He watched it and told us every problem he saw with it. He then told us how good he thought it was. He went over to his desk and pulled out an envelope. Oliver would send the movie to the IASB competition. He said he liked our chances of winning. I separated from Darren to go to class. As far as I knew when I ran into him later that day he was cutting classes in order to show off his work to as many people as he could. I went with him to the library to show the two librarians.

When we went in we saw Mike Wallace sitting alone at one of the desks. He had yet to see the movie and Darren invited him to watch it with us. After it was over the only thing Mike cared about was the song on the end credits. We shrugged it off, took our tape, and left to find others to show it to. We ended up skipping the rest of the day. Everyone we showed it to (with the exception of that asshole, Wallace) liked it and heaped praise on it. The only people who hadn't seen it were Jeremy and Joe. I don't know when they watched it.

JEREMY: I remember Dar picking me up in his mother's car and telling me we were going over to Joe's to watch the finished movie. I couldn’t wait to see it, even though he said he'd had to pare my scenes down. I understood that director's sometimes had to sacrifice scenes and performances for the overall good of the film and told him so. As we drove to our destination ‘Mr Jones’ by The Counting Crows came on the radio. The song was brand spanking new at the time. Then and there, with that song playing, a finished movie by my side, en route to a good friend's house, and my future looking bright, I felt at peace with myself for the first time in my life. It was a moment I will never forget, and to this day when ‘Mr Jones’ plays on the radio, I have to stop what I'm doing and listen to it.

With all due respect to Dar, I wasn’t a big fan of the finished version of Laugh A Little. The movie looks great and I can appreciate it from a technical standpoint, but it was also damn depressing. Basically, David mopes around, bemoaning his lot in life, his girlfriend dumps him, he mopes around some more, the ghost of his grandfather shows up, he mopes, he becomes The Dar, poses for the camera for five minutes or so, wins his girlfriend back at the talent contest, loses her again right after, mopes, and then meets Hope Dawn on the rebound.

Jesse's cinematography is beautiful, the highlight of the film, but its stark black-and-white only adds to the overall gloominess. My hats off to Dar for being able to cut his film down to just over fifteen minutes and still maintain some semblance of a story, but I also think there should be a warning on the cover, "Not for the manic depressive".

JESSE: We left Tech that day with a good feeling about his movie. We had been entered into the contest by Oliver. More people liked the movie then disliked it. So, far as I was concerned, everything was looking pretty. And the next day they looked even prettier.

OUR COMPETITION

Oliver sat us down with, as he put it, "Some news". He pulled out a tape and told us it had our competition for the category we'd be competing in. My memory fades with the passage of years but I remember one movie was about a group of guys’ playing cards. One of them gets up and drives around for a while, and then comes back after killing someone. This movie was played entirely for laughs and I can assure you I didn’t and I am the type who would laugh at such a thing if it was funny.

The other movie featured some kid at a news desk. He was reading this bogus news that was supposed to be funny. I almost busted a gut running into a desk in a mad attempt to flee this horrible piece of crap. I looked at Darren and said simply, "Clear off a place on the wall, that plaque is fucking ours."

I know this sounds quite boastful, but I felt it to be true. I mean, for one, our movie was the only one to have a coherent story in it. Two, ours was worked on beyond a single day. Three, ours was the only movie that would actually be edited. The others were just a bunch of guys fucking around with a camera. The only reason they entered is because they figured, "Hey, why not? It'll be a hoot." As far as I was concerned we had no competition.

THE LONG JOURNEY TO IASB

The day of the competition arrived. Darren and I would be the only contestants attending the event. I don't know why just us, but it was. The competition would start at eight in the morning and last through the day. There would also be many live side competitions, like news readings and such. My sister was sweet enough to take the two of us. I got up at six and quickly gathered everything to be at Darren's house at seven.

We arrived at his house five minutes later (I used to be a maniac about getting to places on time). I knocked on the front door for about ten minutes and was about to give up when he finally answered. He had no shirt on, but thankfully he was wearing pants. He told me to give him another five minutes. I agreed to that and no more. I waited and after ten minutes had passed knocked on the door again. He came down wiping his eyes. The bastard had fallen asleep again.

We finally got into the car and headed to IUPUI. The IASB competition was held here every year. IUPUI stands for Indiana University and Purdue University of Indianapolis. The school has a huge campus in the heart of downtown Indianapolis. It is made up of many buildings, each one housing a different subject matter. We arrived at 7:45, giving us 15 minutes to find our building. My sister dropped us off at the administration building. I was hoping they could give us directions to the proper place, but the desk clerks had no clue what we were talking about. We had no choice but to wander around this huge campus until we found it.

After an hour of walking around the labyrinth-like halls of the building Darren and I ran into Alan Oliver. He laughed at us as the fools we were then took us to the judges room. In the judges room there was a banquet of food. Darren and I were both starving from the long walk around the campus. Oliver saw us slobbering all over ourselves and allowed us to partake. We, being the gluttonous bastards we are, stuffed our faces full. After having our fill of the food we parked ourselves on a couch in the corner. If we had cigars we would have lit them like the fat cats we were.

One of the judges walked over and pointed at Darren. He had recognized Darren from Laugh A Little and heaped praise upon us. He said that his favorite part was the camerawork. I casually mentioned that I was responsible for the movie's visuals. He said how grand of a job we did. He then brought out twenty comely lasses of virtue true and told us to take our pick (ah, memories, they are what you make of them). After we finished talking to this most generous of men Oliver asked if we'd like him to show us around. We excused ourselves and fell in behind Oliver.

THE POOR BASTARD AND THE PLAQUE

Oliver took us to the main auditorium where they showed every movie entered into the competition on a big screen. We saw a listing that showed what was being screened and when. Our movie was the first thing shown that day at 8 a.m. It would have been a blast to see it on the big screen but, alas, it was not to be. When we walked in they were showing the music video competition. We sat down and watched a few, which were actually pretty fucking good. Oliver told us he had to go over and judge the news reading competition. We decided to follow him and check it out.

We sat outside the studio and watched the competition on a TV monitor. There were only three contestants. The first one was a beautiful African American woman. She was also quite talented. She read the news without missing a beat and didn't mess up one word. She came out, saw that Darren and I had watched her try out, and walked over. Darren and I flirted with her, both making sure to mention how talented she was. As we sat there talking we noticed the next competitor preparing. We all gathered around the television to watch. This poor bastard sucked like a whore needing a new car. He skipped words, misread them, and was just totally out of sync.

Oliver called it to an end before the kid could finish the script. He wailed out of the room and saw us. Our young lady walked over and shook his hand, trying to raise his spirits. Darren also told him his performance was okay. He then turned to me and held out his hand, perhaps looking for a comforting word from me as well. I merely chuckled and left his hand hanging in the breeze. The poor bastard sucked (I was also a much meaner asshole at the time. I've let up some over the years, and the kid looked like an asshole to me anyway, so fuck him) and needed no false comfort from me.

Darren did all he could to contain his laughter. I just went back to talking to the young lady, whose beauty was mesmerizing. We finally noticed it was time to start announcing the awards. We walked over with our new friend and the poor bastard slowly trailing behind.

We sat near the back in the main auditorium with our new friend and her fellow classmates. We learned she had come up all the way from the border of Kentucky. Well, that meant hitting on her was now a waste of time, but we kept talking to her and her friends anyway. After a while the awards ceremony started. We didn't have to wait long. Since we were the first competition shown that morning we were also the first to be announced. The announcer walked up to the podium. Sitting next to him was a large number of plaques. He read each title and then showed a segment from the movie. When it came to Laugh A Little they showed the front porch scene. After all was said and done he looked at his sheet and proclaimed Laugh A Little the winner.

I wasn't shocked at all by this. Darren was so stunned he couldn't get out of his seat. I pulled him to his feet and sent him toward the front. He took his plaque and the Judge's sheets, still not knowing exactly what he was doing. He walked back to his seat, looked at me, and said, "I think we should leave". That was fine with me as we had gotten what we came for. We grabbed our stuff and were on our way out of there when we heard our young beauty calling out congratulations. We turned and thanked her and stepped out into what was still a relatively young and sunny day.

Since our energy levels were on high we decided to walk home. On the way we stopped at a hotel and called everyone to let them know the good news from the payphones in the lobby. Darren called his mother while I called mine. Then he called Joe, while I called Dave. It was a great feeling to be recognized as the best. We continued our long walk home. I started to look over the judge's sheets. Photography got the highest scores and mentions on the two sheets. We also had a certificate with Darren's name on it. We separated when we reached State Street. I went on to my house and he to his. I felt extremely exhausted and couldn't wait to catch some sleep even though it was only 2 p.m.

DAR: I stopped by the bar to show my Dad the plaque. He didn’t want to pay fifteen-thousand dollars for me to go to film school. I showed it to him and told him we won first place in state and he goes “Well, I’ll be damned. Alright, if you wanna go, I’ll send ya.”

JEREMY: “First Parsons in history to win somethin’!”

DAR: That’s right. “I wish it was the Hoosier lottery.” We knew we’d won the award after talking to the judges. They were only supposed to watch ten minutes of the short and then turn it off but they watched it all. They broke their own rule because they liked the film enough to finish it. So Jesse and I just went through the motions before we accepted our award. I really wanted Jesse to come up there with me, but Jesse’s frightened of people, like most of my friends are. They’re introverts. They hide in their caves most of the time.

JESSE: Are you kidding me?

JEREMY: I’m not an introvert. I’m an extravert with secrets.

DAR: There you go. They jumped my ass on that one I guess.

JESSE: That was your moment.

DAR: It was your moment too. And so I still regret that Jesse didn’t go up there and accept it with me, because he did basically film the entire feature.

JESSE: I felt that since you were the director you should go up there and accept it on behalf of everybody. Anyway, you went up there, they handed you the award and wanted you to get the hell out of there, so there wasn’t any reason really for me to go up there with you.

RODERICK USHER RUNS THE TWIRL A WHIRL

I slept from three till six that evening. My mother woke me up, saying I had a phone call. I really didn't feel like getting up, but did anyway. On the phone Darren still had the sound of excitement in his voice. He asked if I wanted to go to a carnival. It was right up the street from me at Willard Park. I thought, why not, we can celebrate at the carnival. He told me Joe was coming to help us celebrate. This was more than cool with me. I hung up the phone and took a quick shower.

Fifteen minutes later the two arrived at my house. They made their way to my room where I showed them a lot of my Super Nintendo games (the big system at the time) that I would be taking with me to Florida. We talked about other games we liked and finally headed out. We arrived at Willard about five minutes later by foot. The carnival was those white trash ones you see in Mall parking lots with cheap rides like The Octopus, or The Gravitron.

I went to the booth to buy some tickets for the rides. The lady at the booth handed me my tickets and smiled a toothless smiles. Now the thought was running through my head, Couldn't we have picked a better place to celebrate? The three of us decided to go on the twirl a whirl first. We ambled over and got into a very short line. I looked up to see the man who was running the ride. He was tall and gangly with crooked teeth and very pale skin. He looked like the product of years of inbreeding.

I nudged Joe and said, "Look, Roderick Usher is running the twirl a whirl." Joe laughed very hard at this (Joe is a Poe freak. In fact, years later, while helping him move, I saw he had thirteen different copies of the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe). We got on the ride, buckled in, and were soon on our way.

Normally, the twirl a whirl lasts about three to five minutes. We were on there for eight when I began to worry. I looked down to see Roderick flirting with a young lady (that I naturally assumed was his sister). He was paying no attention to the ride at all. After another minute Joe and I started yelling, "Roderick Usher is trying to kill us! Someone help us!" We then giggled like school girls. Darren looked at us strangely, the joke totally going over his head.

JOE: This spitting image of Roderick Usher frightens me to this day. Oh, and you can never have enough Poe books.

JESSE: Afterwards, I walked home while those two headed over to Marsh. Darren wanted to show the plaque to Jeremy. They asked if I wanted to go with them but at this point I just wanted to relax at home. I was plumb exhausted, so I bid them farewell. I went home, sat my fat ass on the couch, and watched a movie with my Father, all the while thinking of that glorious day I would finally cast off the shackles of Indy and head to Florida.

JEREMY: I wish I could’ve been there to celebrate with the guys but, alas, I had to work that evening. Dar was gracious enough to stop by and show me the plaque though. I was quite ecstatic that our group won. We were quickly on our way to carving out a reputation for ourselves.

BROWNIES AND BROWNIE POINTS: WHICH DO I PREFER?

JESSE: Darren and I had both decided to skip CIRT (as we both didn't want to deal with Earl) and were sitting in the school library when Oliver walked over and asked what we were doing after school. We both had the night off of work and weren't doing much. So he invited us to a teacher's meeting. At the meeting he was supposed to introduce himself and announce the changes he had brought to Tech over the course of the year. He wanted to tell everyone about the award Laugh A Little had won and have us take a bow. We agreed since it would be more attention shown our way. He then he asked us, "Why aren't you at CIRT?"

We told him the reason why and he told us how much he liked Earl, as if that should have somehow changed our own perspective on the man. After five minutes of this ranting we ran for the door, telling him we would be back later. We came back to the library after the final bell rang for the day. As we walked in our eyes honed in on the large banquet on the table (no wonder I was fat back then, look at all the food that was constantly shoved in my face). A teacher, noticing our hungry eyes and told us to partake of all we wanted. Of course, we being the gluttons didn’t hesitate.

When the meeting was finally called together we were still shoving food onto our plates. We sat down next to one of our favorite teachers (her name escapes me, but she taught Art and Stage Design, a class I was never told about until it was too late to join). We listened to the usual mindless bullshit associated with a roomful of teachers. Finally, Oliver was called to the front to talk. He went through the whole song and dance about his expectations of the class. He then started to talk about Laugh A Little.

He called our names and asked us to stand. Well, his timing couldn't have been worse. I was eating a very delicious chocolate brownie and had a piece of it in my mouth. Darren stood up and took his applause, and then I stood, holding my brownie high in salutation. We sat back down with Darren laughing at me and my brownie. Oliver then proceeded to pat his own back as he explained how much he did for Laugh A Little. Darren and I were disgusted by this. All he did was send the movie to IASB but he acted like he was an advisor and equipment provider.

The movie only had one man to thank in that department and that was Mark Watness. He got us the equipment, he advised us, and watched footage with us. Laugh A Little would still be a dream in Darren's head without him. Now this cocksucker Alan Oliver was stealing his credit. I got up right then and there and walked out. A minute later Darren followed me. We both hated what he had said and that would be the last time I saw Alan Oliver, thank God.

DAR: Over the years I’d go into Tech from time to time and Alan Oliver would show each new class what he’d taught his students to do. Alan would introduce me to these kids and you could see on their faces that they were like “I hate this film so much” because he would push it and push it. He would use it in his lectures. I’m sure they thought it sucked.

THE END OF LAUGH A LITTLE IN INDIANA

JESSE: Now it was all done and over with. I went back to work on some screenplays and other projects while occasionally hanging out with the fellas. We would discuss our upcoming journey to Florida. Ah, but we were still in Indiana, and it had a few more adventures left for us. Laugh A Little will always remain one of my proudest accomplishments, and it will stay with me until the day they put me in the cold, cold ground.

DAR: I think it was a memorable moment in our lives. We had to get it out of our systems. And that was the story that we were doing at the time. Looking back on it, yeah, we don’t like it very much and it’s not something we would do now but if it wasn’t for Laugh A Little we wouldn’t have gone to Florida or had those cool experiences. It showed people what we could do. It made them take us seriously in our endeavors. It was a good movie for what it was at the time we were doing it.

It was an experience.

Next: Why Can't Robin Be A Fat Fucker?

CHAPTER SIX

2011-04-09T14:53:00.002-04:00

LAUGH A LITTLE, ACT TWO: PRODUCTION

JESSE: Production started around the time Mark Watness became our new teacher at CIRT. The reason for this was because Mark allowed us free reign with the equipment. It was about this time I learned that Jeremy, who was supposed to be assistant director, was being replaced by Becky Sandlin. She wanted to get production started quickly and chose that coming Monday for our first day of shooting. She did this without consulting the rest of the crew (namely me) first. I had to work that night at my job at O’Malia’s Grocery. Since I had already re-arranged my schedule to fit in scenes to be shot later in the week I was already pushing the limit’s of my boss’s patience. Now I found out a last minute shoot was planned for a night I had to work. So either I called in to work or they would have to postpone the shoot.

I was in the mind-set of going to work. For one thing I needed the money to help fund the trip to Florida. Secondly, I knew it would piss my boss off if I didn't show up. Darren then went into salesman mode, explaining how badly he needed my presence on the set. After an hour of mind-numbing discourse I called into work. My boss wasn’t happy but eventually relented to my pleas. Now, we had to decide on what we were going to shoot.

JEREMY: I often joke that the reason Becky replaced me as assistant director was because she was sleeping with Dar at the time. I couldn’t compete with this so I respectfully stepped aside. Actually, Becky was a competent assistant director who tackled every scene with the same vigor that she showed Dar in the bedroom. Becky always had my respect on the set (to the extent that I show anybody respect), and though I would have preferred to remain the assistant director I decided to let it slide and instead concentrate on my role as Skip Wes.

A LITTLE DITTY ABOUT BECKY

JESSE: Becky was a freshman when we met her at Tech. She was smallish in stature; I'd be playing it nice by saying she was 5'4". She had a tendency to wear tight jeans and T-shirts and was never seen without her trademark bifocals. She became co-director about a week before the first shoot, during which she and Darren got together on a regular basis. He would tell me stories about wrestling with her while working out the basics of the movie. She was with us every day of the shoot, where her main job was making sure everyone did what they were supposed to do. Her other job was applying make-up for the cast. The way she applied the make-up was basically to sit on your lap while she did it. Every guy on the set loved this technique because she would flash her breasts and rub herself against your knee as she did it.

She didn't do much else until the talent show scene. Even then she wasn't doing much to deserve co-director status. Also, she had this weird quirk. Whenever you touched her throat she would laugh uncontrollably. This meant that every chance we got Dave, Jeremy and I would touch it; especially when she got into one of her bossy moods.

JEREMY: Here's a quick example of a day on the set with Becky:

BECKY (lecturing Jesse): You're not shooting this right. I want it from a low angle and then move in slowly on Darren as he turns around.

JESSE: I like my way better.

BECKY: I don't care what you like, I'm the assistant dir—

Jesse touches her throat.

BECKY: —eehahahahaha...Stop that!

THE FIRST SHOOT

JESSE: On Monday Darren and I sat around CIRT trying to decide what to film first. Since I hadn't seen hide or hair of a script I had no clue. We knew our leading lady, Maggie, would be on the set that day, so we had our Jenny Charles, which meant the most logical thing to shoot was a scene involving her and Darren. Darren mentally went through the scenes in his head, a lot of which were improbable because they involved locations we didn't have access to. He brought up a scene we could shoot on his front porch involving him and Maggie. It sounded simple so we decided to go with it, just to have something in the can.

We grabbed the equipment and rode the bus as far as we could to Darren's neighborhood. We then lugged the equipment to his house where we met up with our actress and our new co-director, Becky.

The scene in question takes place right after David and Jenny’s first date. Jenny drops David off at his house (that's right, she drove. No wonder she dumps the loser). They walk to his front door and exchange dialogue. After this they share a quick kiss and she's off. End Scene.

The four of us arrived at Darren's house at four o'clock. Darren and Maggie headed inside to get into wardrobe. Becky stayed on the porch and watched me set everything up. After an hour Darren and Maggie emerged from the house. Becky and Darren discussed the scene with Maggie. I sat there and waited for them to finish. I still needed these knuckle-knobs to stand in their arranged spots to make sure they had head room in the shot.

Around five thirty they finished their discussion and I was able to complete my work. The scene was set in a matter of seconds and we began shooting. The shoot went extraordinarily well. It took us about an hour and a half to do all the dialogue in a master shot and then we did close ups of the two saying their lines. We finished it all up with a shot of Maggie walking away.

Now let me tell you, the shoot went smooth as fucking hell. This would be the first time Darren and I worked together and I took this as a great sign. We were all laughs and giggles, having a good time. Darren fucked up his dialogue a lot 'cause he was nervous, but he remained calm and just went right back at it. He was most nervous when he had to kiss Maggie, but he nailed it in one take.

DAR: It’s the best scene in the movie. I was excited about kissing Maggie. I was a little nervous too because I was afraid I was going to do a bad job. She was a really pretty girl. Overall, I was excited because it was the first time we were shooting something for the film, things were starting to get moving, and I knew we were going to enter it into the contest. So I was also nervous about that.

JESSE: Now, on the directing front I got no direction, but I wanted none. I liked being left alone to decide the visual outlook of the movie. Darren worked well this night with his actors. I was quite happy and thought the rest of the shoot would go smoothly. Oh, but how wrong I was.

A BRIEF MOMENT FOR ONE OF MY BEST FRIENDS, DAVID PATRICK

David would be joining us for the second shoot, so how about a little background on the poor bastard. I actually met David Patrick when he was a freshman and I was a junior, but I didn’t actually talk to him until the following year. I had a commercial art class with a teacher named Mr. Price. I walked in and saw this skinny kid sitting at one of the desks. I barely recognized him, because the year before he had a crew cut and now he had long hair. We started to talk and became quick friends.

I then corrupted the poor boy. We started skipping every first class with Darren and going to breakfast at Hardee's. Dave and I even took over Price's class. Everyone looked to our lead as to whether we'd be fucking around that day or actually working. I invited Dave to work on the movie with us. He lived only a block over from Darren and was willing to help. Dave agreed and joined us for every shoot we had at Darren's house. After we finished the movie I got him a job at O' Malia's with me. We quickly took over that place as well. Dave is one of my brothers and he always will be.

JEREMY: David Patrick is one of the coolest guys I know and is in many ways the fifth member of the group. He can't act, he can't write, but he is a whiz when it comes to make-up effects. He can make latex mask that are as good (sometimes better) as any mask you will find in a store. Starting out he was just some guy I saw working on the set every day, I wouldn't get to know him until years later after our Florida adventures.

THE SECOND SHOOT

JESSE: The second scene we shot boiled down to this: David comes home after horribly losing a talent contest to Skip Wes. He enters the kitchen and in his depression grabs an unappetizing looking snack from the fridge. He goes upstairs, eats it and almost pukes his guts out. This leads to him looking in the mirror and telling himself how big of a loser he is. End scene.

We shot this fucking scene about a trillion times. Each time the food he grabs out of the fridge was different. The first time we did it he ate a jar of mayonnaise and he did almost vomit. The second time it was lemon juice. The third time I think it was cold meatloaf and ice cream. We shot this scene on three different occasions because Darren lost the first day’s shoot, then the second one was eaten by the editing machine and the third we cut from the movie due to time. He ate all that shit for nothing, which is hilarious to me.

Anyway, on the first day of the second shoot I arrived at his house right after school to get everything set up. I was upstairs hauling all of the equipment out of the bags and lugging it around when Darren walked in with Dave right behind him. I had, of course, invited Dave to the shoot to act as my assistant. He would help me set up lights, carry equipment and so on. Darren asked if he could have a word with me out in the hallway. I told Dave to just unpack the rest of the stuff and stepped into the hall with Darren. I noted how pissed he looked. The exchange went like this:

DARREN: What the hell is he doing here?

JESSE: I invited him. He's going to help me around the set.

DARREN: Well, I don't know if I like him being here.

JESSE: Well grow the fuck up, he's my friend and he can help out a lot.

DARREN: He's your responsibility. Make sure he doesn't fuck up.

JESSE: What the fuck ever.

I went back into the room and Dave and I finished setting everything up. After a while Darren came upstairs with Becky. We started to shoot the scene, which should have been relatively easy. Yet Darren was now tense and kept fucking up. The scene had no dialogue in it but he couldn't get it right. He ate fourteen spoonfuls of mayonnaise. Becky finally said the scene was good. I disagreed with her and said it was still crap (I admit that in some takes I fucked up a camera movement here or there, but only like two) and we should continue to shoot it until we got it right. Darren agreed with Becky and we moved on to the mirror scene. We shot this for about an hour and a half. It was never right and you could see Darren growing more and more tense with each take.

Finally, he couldn't go on and called for a five minute break. Dave and I went into the den while Darren and Becky went to his room. We sat around and shot the shit until I realized half an hour had passed. At this point I began to grow annoyed. I hate wasting time on a set, it pisses me off. I went to Darren's room and banged on the door (yeah, he might have been getting laid but I didn't care, we were there to shoot a movie). When there was no answer I walked right in (didn't care if they were naked or not). They were both lying on the bed, holding each other. I yelled for them to wake up and get to work. Darren decided to call it a night. He was too tired to continue and said he would take us home.

DAR: I remember that through the whole process of making Laugh A Little I was constantly driving everybody home. That got tiring after a while.

JEREMY: Of course, you were the only one of us at the time who had a license and access to a car.

DAR: My mom’s car, yeah.

THE RIDE HOME

JESSE: Darren dropped off Becky first because he wanted to talk to me. He asked if Dave was going to invite himself to any more shoots. I reminded him that Dave didn't invite himself, I did. I also told him that Dave would be at every shoot as I needed his help and it gave me someone to hang with while Darren made moves on Becky. He said that Dave was a distraction and made him tense. I told him to get used to it 'cause Dave wasn't going away. I never understood why he didn't like Dave and I guess I never will.

JEREMY: Knowing what I know now I believe Dar didn’t want Dave on the set during filming because he was nervous about acting in front of him. On the surface Dar was an easy going and confident guy, but beneath that exterior was a boy still searching for himself, who wasn’t as confident as he led others to believe. Hence his being pissed about Dave showing up and then screwing up take after take as a result. Of course, keep in mind I don’t hold a PhD in psychology so I’m mostly talking out my ass here.

WHAT HAS THIS MUSTACHE BROUGHT US TO? THE THIRD SHOOT

JESSE: The third shoot was this: Skip and David run into each other in the hallway at the talent contest and begin to argue. This scene was shot first at Darren’s house and then reshot at CIRT. It would ultimately be cut down to a single clip of Jeremy staring menacingly into the camera in the finished movie. End scene.

This was the first time my good friend and all around brother-from-another-mother Jeremy would be present on the set. Darren, David and I sat in Darren’s upstairs living room, bullshitting while we waited for Becky to finish with Jeremy’s make-up. After about ten minutes Jeremy entered the room in full wardrobe and white-face. Darren looked him over and said there was something missing. He walked over with a black make-up pencil and went to work on Jeremy's face. When he finished he moved aside to reveal a Hitler mustache he drew under Jeremy's nose. David and I looked dumbfounded at Jeremy. He looked back at us with a "what the fuck?" expression. He hurried to the bathroom to look in the mirror. A moment later we all heard him yell "Aw, hell no!"

He returned to the living room, livid about how stupid this was (I had to agree. For one, if anyone had a Hitler mustache shouldn't it be David, who had a thing for Chaplin?). Darren asked for my opinion and I said it looked stupid but it was his movie. Both he and Jeremy would continue to argue about this for the next hour or so. Someone finally suggested a Snidely Whiplash mustache. I liked this idea as it wasn't offensive and was also pretty funny. Jeremy agreed and the argument was settled for the time being. Dar drew the Whiplash mustache and we shot the scene.

JEREMY: The mustache scenario was the first seeds of a blooming animosity Dar and I would harbor for each other throughout the Laugh A Little shoot. I always felt that Skip Wes should have a pencil-thin mustache, ala Errol Flynn. The character was refined, sophisticated, a gentleman and a dancer, the last thing he was going to do was wear something as unfashionable as a ‘Hitler mustache’. I was never in love with the Snidely Whiplash 'stache either, but at least it called up images of the old silent era villains tying damsels to railroad tracks, which was the look we were shooting for. I just think the pencil-thin mustache would have fit the character better is all.

THE RIDE HOME

JESSE: Darren drove Jeremy and I home. In the front seat Jeremy and Darren continued their argument about the mustache. After listening to this for several drawn out minutes I finally screamed, "Would you two shut the fuck up?" Now, I had no worries about what Darren would do, but Jeremy, he could kick my ass with his pinky (he still can, as I am a weakling). Luckily, he saw that he was arguing about bullshit and let the matter drop. We rode in silence the rest of the way and I felt relieved my ass wasn't kicked (remember, I didn't know Jeremy all that well yet).

JEREMY: The whole deal in the car is a classic Jesse moment. Jesse has no problem with telling people what he thinks, people he doesn't know especially. So there's Dar and I telling each other to shut up when this high-pitched voice squeals from the backseat, "Why don't you both shut the fuck up?" I was so startled by this unexpected twist to the argument that I burst out laughing and decided to let the whole thing lay, at least for the time being.

JEREMY RILEY AS SKIP WES

JESSE: I think something should be said about Jeremy as Skip Wes. As written the role was this one dimensional asshole that David has to overcome. Yet, as played by Jeremy the character became more complex. Jeremy played Skip Wes as a man playing a character. His exterior was all bluster and confidence. Deep inside, however, you could see that Skip Wes and David Daryl were one in the same. Skip just covered up his insecurities with this character he created for himself. It was a brilliant performance. I have to mention it here because almost all of it was ultimately cut from the finished film. All that survives of Jeremy's great performance is a single silent shot of him staring menacingly into the camera and the talent show scene at the end in which he has no dialogue. It's a crying shame such a wonderful performance was cut out. I might be bias; he is one of my best friends after all.

JEREMY: Nobody was more surprised than I when I watched the film for the first time and realized all my scenes had been butchered more than a teenager camping at Crystal Lake. I had always intended for Skip and David to be mirror images of each other. Deep down both men had a considerable lack of self-esteem; however, where David wore his heart on his sleeve, constantly bemoaning his lot in life, Skip understood that nobody could respect a person who didn't respect himself. Skip wanted to be liked, he wanted to be respected, looked up to with almost godly awe, so he created the very image of that which he longed to be. If there was a party he made sure to be the center of attention; if there were important people in the room he made sure to shmooze with them; if a date was required, he brought one for each arm.

Here once again is why the ‘Hitler mustache’ just didn't work (Snidely Whiplash 'stache either). A man as self-conscious of his appearance as Skip Wes would never go for something so unstylish. Of course, at the time I don't think Dar had a full understanding of Skip Wes. Yes, he created him, but Dar's version of Skip was simply a one dimensional obstacle for the hero to overcome (as he inevitably became in the finished project). I believe Dar was more interested in exploring the depths of the David Daryl character, which he was playing and had more of an emotional connection with. Thus poor Skip Wes was destined to be so much background filler, which is a shame, because the character deserved better.

MY TURN TO BE THE ASSHOLE: THE FOURTH SHOOT

JESSE: This was the shoot where I was the tense asshole on set. The scene was where Jennifer breaks up with David. They argue and it ends with her walking out in a huff. This was ultimately cut down to a single, silent shot in the finished movie. It was the first shoot in which we had the entire day to do it in. It was a Saturday and we planned to do this as well as finish the mirror scene. I showed up around the same time as Dave. The two of us went to work setting everything up. By this time Dave and I were getting really good at this. It got to the point where we could have everything unpacked and set up in half an hour tops. Dave was so in tune to what I wanted he could almost set up the lights himself, but I'm too much of a control freak about camera and lights to give anybody free reign. I'm trying to get better, honest.

Maggie and Becky arrived shortly after we finished. A half hour later we were shooting. The first shot was over Maggie's shoulder looking at Darren. They went through the scene and it sucked. I let it go and suggested we shoot it again. Becky agreed and we gave it another go. We wound up doing this one shot twenty times. By this point I was really getting sick of this. I said to Darren, "Hey, where's the cue card reader?" He looked at me like, "huh?" I told him it sounded like he was reading his dialogue from a cue card. Maggie gave her two cents about how she thought it was fine. I looked at her and said, "Of course you think that, you're doing just as bad as he is." Like I said, they were wasting time by not being prepared and time is a precious commodity on the set.

Becky got into a huff, saying I was over-stepping my boundaries. I shot back with "I wouldn't have to if you two were doing your jobs." This was pissing everybody off except Dave. He felt their performances were bad too, and if Dave of all people can spot a bad performance then you are in fucking trouble. I told them we should stop shooting and the two actors should rehearse for a while. Darren again asked to speak with me in private. It went like this:

DARREN: What's wrong, man?

JESSE: This is sucking really fucking hard.

DARREN: Do you really need to be so angry though?

JESSE: Yes (no, I didn't really) you guys are giving the worst fucking performances ever. You both are really wooden and this is an emotional scene.

DARREN: I'm not saying you're wrong, you just need to relax.

JESSE: Fuck you, I'm here on a fucking (I say fuck a lot, by the way, whether I'm happy, sad, angry, or just plain indifferent) Saturday and you're wasting time. You need to get your A-game going and you need to do it now.

DARREN: Why don't we take a break and you go get some air?

JESSE: Yeah, why don't we waste more time?

I finally relented and took a break. I walked around the block, calmed down and came back in. We finished the scene in about three hours. I just kept my mouth shut through the rest of it. We decided to break for lunch and then come back and shoot the mirror scene. Dave and I went upstairs to set up the equipment. A few minutes later Darren came in and said Joe and Jeremy dropped by the house. I asked why they didn't stay. Darren said they had too much to do. For the real story we must go to Jeremy and Joe.

JOE: Jeremy and I dropped by to pick up some pages of poetry Darren was illustrating for my poem book, An Apparition or Two. He knew we were coming by. I don't remember if I knew that he was shooting that day or not. I was never told when they were shooting. I did offer to help, but apparently he didn't need my help because he never asked for it. Darren didn't tell me much about the shoots other than they were going well. I hadn't talked to Jesse all that much at this point so the only way I knew what was going on was through Jeremy. The day we dropped by went something like this:

Jeremy and I stepped up to the door and knocked. A few minutes later, Darren answered.

DARREN: What are you guys doing here?

JOE: We're here to get the pages you promised me.

DARREN: Oh. We're shooting right now.

JOE: Okay. You knew we were coming to get those.

DARREN: Oh.

He retrieves the pages he finished. I stared at them, disappointed. I don't remember what I said at this point. He handed over some shoddy work. He was capable of so much better. I figured I'd deal with it because Jeremy was also illustrating the book and he was a fine artist in his own right. So either way at least some of it would be good. Darren didn't ask us to stay and help out with the shoot. He didn't ask us if we wanted to stay and watch the shoot. He didn't seem to want us there at all. I don't remember what Jeremy and I were doing that day. We walked from our houses to his, which took us about thirty minutes. His greeting to us is burned into my memory, "What are you guys doing here?" What was that all about?

JEREMY: I remember feeling left out when I saw the shoot taking place without me. At the time I had it in my mind that even if I wasn't the co-director of the film I was an important part of it. I had helped write the damn thing, I drew the storyboards, was playing the main villain, and was, over all, one of the founding members of the group. As I stated earlier I believe Dar was self-conscious about acting in front of people and the reason he didn't want Joe there was because he was afraid his best friend would disapprove of his performance.

As for me I sincerely believe that, for whatever reason, Dar had taken a disliking to me at this stage of our lives and was slowly attempting to exclude me from the group. I never quite understood why this was. By this point I had come to love Dar and Joe like brothers (more than my own brother, truth be told) and I believe the fact that he didn't return this sentiment, expressing his disdain in small ways like not inviting me to the shoots, is why I felt left out that day.

Dar and Joe were the first human beings I opened up to outside of my own family. Sure, I knew lots of people but I had never really had a person that I could call a true friend. I suppose in my mind-frame I considered myself the Doc Holliday of the group; the black sheep who latched onto the Earps (in this instance DIP Entertainment) and followed them faithfully to the ends of the world and back (or at least to Florida).

DAR: I know Jeremy thinks we didn’t get along at that time but I really liked him a lot. I was kind of stubborn and didn’t want to tell him that I liked him. And it was my way of testing him every second. But I really liked his creativity. I liked who he was as a person.

JESSE: Becky came upstairs after Maggie went home. She and Darren began to discuss the scene. Becky finally said, "Why didn't we finish this scene?" Dave retorted, "We would have if you and Dar weren't sleeping together." I laughed my ass off and Becky turned a bright red. Ah, I heard it from Darren about that later but it was worth it. Dave isn't known for his quick wit, but sometimes he lets loose a winner. We finished the mirror scene an hour later.

THE RIDE HOME

We rode home that night in complete silence. Tension filled the air like a cloud of noxious gas over a bean eating contest. The only words spoken were our goodbyes to one another. For my part, I wasn’t mad or anything, just emotionally drained. All I wanted to do at that point was sleep.

WELCOME TO THE MERRY OLD LAND OF OZ: THE FIFTH SHOOT

This was my favorite scene of the entire Laugh A Little shoot as it contains the strongest imagery. This was the dream sequence in which David's Grandfather visits him from beyond the grave. The two have a talk which leads to the creation of the Dar character. This then leads into a montage of David posing as the Dar in various settings around the house, like in doorways, on the stairs, etc.

The part where David's grandfather appears is shot in color. It reminds me of The Wizard of Oz, so I always call it the ‘Oz scene’. We all gathered for the shoot around six in the evening. Jeremy had come to the shoot even though he wasn't in the scene (I guess Darren finally decided to invite him). We assigned Jeremy as boom mike operator. I showed him all the equipment and how it worked.

It was nice to have an extra hand in helping with all of the equipment. Maggie was also at the shoot even though she had no part in it. She, Becky and Darren sat around talking while the rest of us worked. After about ten minutes everything was set up and ready to go. The scene was going rather smoothly. Darren was his usual tense fucking self. Jeremy, though, was consistently fucking with him, which kept us in good spirits

JEREMY: This might have something to do with why he never invited me to the set. I ruined one of the takes where Dar, as David, is talking to his grandfather. As the boom mike operator it was my job to position the mike over Dar’s head just out of camera shot. At one point Dar says his line and, thinking he had finished, I placed the mike in his open mouth as a joke, kind of like “Oh, oral fixation, huh?” I thought this would garner some laughs from the crew. Imagine my surprise when everyone glared at me instead.

JESSE: Darren announced that he was ordering pizza for everyone. He then took me aside and asked if he could borrow twenty bucks since he only had ten on him. I handed him the twenty and told him what pizzas I wanted since I was paying (I knew I would never see that money again). After he ordered them he said he was going to pick up Joe at Marsh. I was pleasantly surprised as this meant our entire group would be there.

Joe arrived at 9:30. By that point we'd finished our portions of the pizza and the only one left was a vegetable/pineapple hybrid Darren had ordered. Whether Joe liked vegetable/pineapple or not he ate every slice left in the box without blinking an eye (Joe is the king of bottom feeders. He will eat anything given to him. We still debate whether or not he’d eat a shit sandwich if someone offered it to him for free). He then turned on the X-Files and settled in.

I sat a few minutes and watched it with him. There was nary a word exchanged between us the whole time. I quickly grew bored and went back to work. Joe followed and asked to see the camera. Oh, so now that you're interested in something, you're Mr. Chatterbox, I thought. Actually, all he said was "Can I see the camera?" and not a whole hell of a lot more. Jeremy appeared and listened along with Joe as I showed them the camera and how it worked (I found out later that Darren promised them a chance to use it on Blood Pudding). I then had to get back to finishing the rest of the shoot. Joe returned to his X-Files and Jeremy helped us set up lights in the hallway. We finished the shoot an hour later.

JOE: I was allowed to come to a shoot! I don't remember why. I just knew Darren was gonna pick me up after work so I could watch the shoot. This would also be the first time I met Dave Patrick. I would not see Dave again until after I returned from Florida. Darren told me they were shooting with the fancy camera from CIRT. He also said he’d let me use it to shoot Blood Pudding.

First thing's first...there was pizza! And it was free! I hadn't eaten for a while, so I indulged (JEREMY: For Joe, an hour is usually considered "a while"). I sat in the other room where the X-Files was playing. Jesse followed me in and stared at the TV, commenting that the X-Files was a good show. Having said that, he left the room. "What an odd fucker," I thought as I finished my pizza. Keep in mind that I still hadn't had the chance to talk to Jesse all that much.

After finishing my pizza I went to see what was going on. Shooting hadn't started yet so I asked if I could see the camera. Darren pointed me Jesse's way. Jesse showed it to me. I thanked him and then grabbed a spot in the room to watch the rest of the shoot.

JEREMY: I remember how excited I was that the entire group was assembled for the shoot. I have always felt that when we are together with our interests aimed at a singular goal there isn't a force on earth that can stand in our way. Being there that night with Joe, Dar and Jesse I felt like I was on top of the world. We were young, had our entire lives ahead of us, and, most importantly, we were making a movie, the singular thing I had come to base my entire life around. Two movies actually, as we were shooting Blood Pudding at the same time as Laugh A Little.

In fact, Dar had created a snazzy opening credit sequence for Joe's movie, which I believe was one of the reasons Joe and I were there (the other being to check out the fancy CIRT digital camera, of course). The opening sequence had blood trickling down one side of the screen while red credits played over a black screen. It was a cheesy effect by today’s standards, but on our budget this was really high class stuff. Ultimately, that footage was lost (I have no idea how) and we had to go with a more simplistic opening credit sequence.

Oh well.

AFTER THE SHOOT

JESSE: I sat around on Darren's porch waiting for my Father to pick me up. Dave waited with me since my Dad said he would take him home too. Dave was telling me about how his Father was making fun of us. I wanted to know what he meant by this. Dave explained how his Dad thought all actors were gay. I was relieved because I wasn't acting at this point. I told Dave his Dad was a nut. Dave laughed and said "Yeah, that's what my Mom says" (by the way, I've always thought Dave's Mom was hot, especially after I saw her in a bikini).

JEREMY: Cough! Pervert! Cough!—Oh, and I’d like to see Dave’s dad make that gay crack about Lee Marvin or Charles Bronson.

JESSE: Dave and I just shot the breeze and enjoyed these few minutes of no tension on the Laugh A Little set. Jeremy and Joe walked by us and said their goodbyes and headed for their humble homes on foot. I will always remember this as a great shoot. Everyone was together for the first time and, most amazing of all, there was no arguing on the set.

BRING IN THE CLOWNS, THOSE HAPPY, HERPES-LADEN CLOWNS

As I said before, the character of the Dar was inspired by Charlie Chaplin. Yet, if you were to see him you would naturally assume he was a mime, due to the white make-up and black triangles under his eyes. His outfit consisted of a white dress shirt with a vest and suit jacket. He wore a pair of baggy pants and a small top hat on his head. He looked just like a mime filtered through Charlie Chaplin. The Grandfather, as Jeremy already pointed out, was a knock off of Emmett Kelly. The wardrobe consisted of a grungy looking suit while the make-up was a simple white outline around the lips and black smeared around his jaw-line to look like a five o'clock shadow.

I remember Dar mussed up his hair to match the look of Emmett. Becky, when applying the make-up to Darren's face, would comment on his pimples. The pimples were hard to cover with the white make-up. Darren was scared of STD's and was constantly asking his friends if they thought he had a disease. He asked this question only less frequently than if we thought he was fat.

JEREMY: Every time Dar saw a mirror he would whip up his shirt, look at his stomach and inquire if we thought he was fat. This became so repetitive that after a while we would just shout "Yes, you're a fucking whale! Get over it!”

JESSE: I got fed up with hearing him constantly ask this question so I walked over and told Becky those weren't pimples, they were warts. "He's been playing in some nasty areas." Darren went into a minor panic. He actually believed he had herpes for the next three weeks. I finally thought "Wow, this is more sad then funny" and at last told him he didn't have herpes; that I was just fucking with him. He then thought I was just being nice and trying to spare his feelings. Three years later someone finally explained to him how herpes worked. That person was not me.

SPRING BREAK AT CIRT…THE LAST WEEK OF SHOOTING

We decided to use CIRT for our last week of shooting since we needed a place large enough to pass for the location of the talent contest. Darren got permission from Scott to shoot there. Scott said he would lend a helping hand any way he could. So we brought back their field equipment and set up shop in studio one.

DAR: I was glad we were able to use CIRT for the finale. When you shoot outside in the environment you don’t have as much control as you do on a sound stage. We had everything we needed there. We had someone up in the director’s booth at all times. We had unlimited sound, we could control the lighting. It’s harder when you shoot out in the field, because it takes more work. You’re trying to find a power source; you’re trying to deal with ambient sound. I thought CIRT would be a better place to film a scene like the talent show. It looks drab now that I look back on it. I should’ve dressed the set up more, but we did the best we could with what we had.

With all that was going on we just didn’t have enough time to do everything we wanted to do. And everything was made up as we went. I think I strayed away from the script a lot. We shot scenes the best we could. But spring break was moving faster than we anticipated and we just couldn’t get everything that we wanted filmed.

JESSE: The days would basically go like this: I would wake up at six a.m. and walk to CIRT on Fletcher Ave. This was about a mile walk for me. I would get there at seven a.m. and set up the lights and cameras. Dar would arrive with everyone else around eight. David would not join us for these shoots. CIRT was too far away and Darren wouldn't bring him. Jeremy showed up for two or three days of the shoot. Joe showed up for one. This would be the most tension filled week of the entire project.

ALL IN ALL JEREMY IS PUNCHING THE WALL: THE SIXTH SHOOT

The first day at CIRT was a reshoot of the confrontation in the hallway between Skip and David. I finished the set up early and, to kill time, popped in a tape of Beezelbubba by The Dead Milkmen in the radio room. Jeremy entered a moment later with a tape. He said he found a song for a script I was writing called Life Insurance, which was, as I always described it, about gangsters in Riverdale. He played it for me and it was a kick ass song ("Mob Rules" by Black Sabbath). We talked about the Life Insurance script and I told him about a character he could play (Ace, the mute albino hitman). A minute late Darren busted in and wanted Jeremy to get ready. Jeremy left the room to do just that.

Darren and I then went over the scene’s set up. The hallway led to studio one. I had pulled one of the huge studio cameras out into it as far as I could. I then turned off the hallway lights and set up a light in every doorway and opening. I had also craned the camera up so it was at its top position. I explained to Darren that he would stand at the closest position to the camera without blocking it. We wouldn't see him because the camera was up high. Jeremy would enter the hallway at the other end. As he approached the camera would slowly descend like a crane shot until we saw Darren in the foreground, pacing back and forth.

I would operate the camera while Becky monitored the shot in the control room. Jeremy returned, dressed in wardrobe and in full make-up. I waited for Darren to explain the scene to him. Ten minutes passed and Darren hadn't spoken a word to Jeremy so I ended up doing it myself. He was pleased with the idea and said it was a cool introductory shot for his character. I put down his marks and we started to shoot.

Things went bad right from the first take. Darren called cut and asked Jeremy to do it again. He said the dialogue wasn’t spoken right. He didn't say this in a nice manner at all. Jeremy picked up the negative vibe from Darren right off. After each take Darren’s verbal abuse grew worse and worse. He seemed to be berating Jeremy for no other reason than he could. This pissed Jeremy off considerably.

The scene was supposed to wrap by noon, but by 3:00 p.m. it still wasn’t finished and I had to leave for work. I told Darren where all the equipment went when they were done, gathered up my things and left CIRT. About five minutes out I remembered something and returned to the building. I entered the hallway in time to see Jeremy ramming his fist into the wall. Darren was screaming something at him. I have no clue what this was about. Maybe Jeremy will enlighten us.

JEREMY: By this point Dar's hostility towards me had reached its zenith. He was extremely tense on the set, feeling as if utter doom was lurking around the corner, ready to pounce on him. He was so nervous that he was making everybody else nervous. I believe his way of dealing with this problem was to take it out on the cast and crew; or, for a better scapegoat, yours truly.

We did the first take of me in the hallway. Dar yelled cut and told me my performance sucked. I let it slide and did the take again, and again he berated me. By this point I was really pissed off and tense and it was totally screwing with my performance.

Finally, after the third take Dar shouts at me "That sucked! Do it again and do it right!" That was it for me. I punched the wall and retorted with a "Fuck you! How am I supposed to do it right with you yelling at me?" He then looked at the wall and at me and said, "Don't you EVER do that again!" I'm not quite sure what happened after that, which is probably for the best.

JESSE: None of this footage was used for the movie. It was nothing more than a lot of unnecessary tension.

AT WORK, LATER THAT NIGHT

I called Darren later that night on my lunch break to find out what happened. He basically said that after the wall punching incident the shoot was over. They just returned everything where it went and headed home. He said that it was a total waste of time. This was bad news because if we didn't finish shooting by the end of the week we wouldn't finish, period. I never found out the reason behind the outburst.

JEREMY: Well, now you know, bucko.

A LITTLE HIGH TENSION

JESSE: Now, I know what you're thinking, "Man, that guy is fucking tense" (and if you're not that's your own problem). What was behind all this tension? I can't really answer this question to the fullest, but I'll play at a little psychiatry. Laugh A Little was Darren's first time staring in as well as directing a film. He had acted many years in plays and other productions, yet he had never directed before. This could be the reason behind all the high anxiety. He had a need to do everything to the best of his ability and it was killing him when things didn’t go the way he envisioned them.

Yet, I feel the main reason for all this tension stems from the painful relationship on which Laugh A Little is based. Darren’s doomed relationship with the real Jennifer kind of broke his heart. Here he was trying to capture some of this on screen. Does it excuse how he treated people on set? Fuck no it doesn't. He just didn't know what to do with that pent up anger.

WHAT DA' YA' KNOW JOE: THE SEVENTH SHOOT

The scene scheduled to be shot this day was simple. It would have David and Jennifer sitting in a movie theater on their first date. They have an extended conversation about life during the movie (if it was a real movie theater in real life and I heard them talking I would have beaten them both). I was finishing up the final pieces of setup when they arrived. The usual people were there, Maggie, Becky, and Darren. Surprisingly enough, Joe Devine also walked into the studio. I exchanged helloes with everyone then went over the scene’s set up with Darren. He looked happy and everyone got into gear.

While the actors changed clothes I showed Joe the studio and its equipment. A half hour later everyone was ready to go. The actors got in there places and Joe and I sat next to a TV monitor, which showed what we were taping. The scene went horribly with the acting being the number one problem. Darren also kept dropping his bowl full of popcorn, which were actually shreds of Styrofoam. After each take he would ask Joe what he didn't like about the shot.

Joe said he didn’t like the way the shot was set up. I told him it wasn't going to change. He then said the acting was bad. So we kept reshooting the scene over and over again. Joe and I lost total interest in the shoot. We both gave suggestions on how to improve it but were repeatedly shot down by Darren. So we both started to goof around. At one point I grabbed a pencil and was pretending to throw it. Well, at one point I actually threw it and it landed right in the popcorn bowl. Darren became super pissed and kicked Joe and I off the set. He said we were nothing more than a distraction. So Joe and I, feeling we had no business being there if Darren wasn't going to accept our help, happily left the set.

We walked over to one of the editing suites where I pulled out a copy of No Cure for Cancer and popped it in. We both sat there laughing our asses off. When it was over we still saw no sign of Darren so we started to talk about movies and The Simpsons. After a while Darren came out and said the scene was finished and we were done for the day. He was tired and needed to rest. He also said that he was pissed at the both of us. We just laughed and went back to our conversation.

JOE: This was a fun shoot, even if I did get kicked off the set. It's the only shoot that I was there for the entire time of filming. This was also a chance to get to know Jesse better. It's true that Darren needed popcorn for this scene but didn't bring any. He was supposed to sit down next to Maggie and offer her popcorn. To double as popcorn we tore up some Styrofoam cups. A lot of the time Darren would tilt the bowl toward the camera so we all could see the fake popcorn inside. The shot was fine. I just thought it needed to be tighter since they were supposed to be in a crowded theater.

After each take Darren would look to me and Jesse for thoughts on the scene. We were being so truthful that Darren and Becky could not take it. Jesse throwing things at them was the last straw and so we were kicked off the set. Also on this day Jesse transferred some of the Blood Pudding footage to some other tape so Darren could edit it at CIRT. We ended up shooting Blood Pudding on a consumer quality camcorder. I don't remember if it was finished yet or not (JEREMY: It wasn't).

THE RIDE HOME

JESSE: Darren read us the riot act all the way home. I really wasn't listening so I have no clue what he said. I was wondering how we were going to set up the next day's shoot since that was the scene I was supposed to do a cameo in and I was a bit nervous about it. We were also going to shoot the video store scene without a video store. So my brain wrangled around how we would accomplish this.

DIPS

I will say that through this whole shoot something strange was going on. Darren and Joe had formed their own production company called DIP. Jeremy was then added to the group with me coming in last (Dave was never a member of DIP as Darren didn't want him in the group). Yet the entire time we shot Laugh A Little I saw Joe twice and the first time all he did was eat pizza and watch X-Files. Jeremy, who seemed excited to be working on a movie, was there for his scenes and made it for a couple of others. I always got the feeling that when they were there Darren didn't want them there. I can't explain it, but it seemed that way. I always thought this was weird considering they were his production company. I mean, how did I get the job as director of photography when Joe was equally experienced in that area? How did Becky become assistant director (it had to be more than just sleeping with Darren)? I think those two would know better than me.

JOE: I really don't know what was going on. I remember in the beginning Darren told me I'd play Skip Wes, then, later, he said I wouldn’t. That didn't bother me. I don't really like acting anyway. Darren and I had shot a few things before and even did three live comedy shows together. So...I don't know. Not helping out on Laugh A Little as much as I would have liked did give me time to concentrate on Blood Pudding, which was a good thing.

JEREMY: Ditto on the Blood Pudding part.

YOU SMELL LIKE PUKE, BOY: THE EIGHTH SHOOT

JESSE: We were going to be shooting two scenes this day. Scene one was before the confrontation between Skip and David. David, nervous about the talent show, is puking his guts out. He comes out of the men's room and runs into a security guard. The security guard (played by me) tells him that he smells like puke. End of first scene. The second scene was David meeting Jenny in the video store. End of second scene.

I came in early like I always did to make sure everything was set up by the time everyone arrived. I had figured out how to shoot the video store sequence and was setting up the scene I would appear in when everyone arrived. Sadly, it was all the normal crew again.

Becky sat me down and started applying the make up for my scene. Darren walked by periodically to see what was going on. This was the first time I’d ever had make-up applied. I found it was cold on your face at first and became comfortable after a while. Darren started to make jokes that now I knew how he felt. Yeah, it wasn't all that bad; a nice set of tits to look at and a girl on your lap. I had no problem with this whatsoever. Actors had it easy as far as I was concerned.

We then shot my scene, which took us around two hours to do. This was due to the fact that Becky was on camera. Darren played his role to perfection and me…well, I overacted the fuck out of it. I played the guard like he was the biggest white trash in the world. It was fun and it seemed to go by quickly enough while I was acting. After that, it was time for me to get back into my regular role as cameraman.

JEREMY: I got to sit in the control room for this scene, watching the monitor and telling Becky via the microphone where to move the camera. It was one of my favorite moments on the Laugh A Little shoot.

JESSE: Now it was time to shoot the video store scene. I brought in a cart that was used to transport tapes and put it in front of a blank wall. It looked like one used in video stores so I figured it’d do the job. I then grabbed a movie poster I brought from home and hung it on the wall. We now had our homemade video store. I set up the camera and went to the control room where I watched as the two gave their performances. We shot it for about two hours and then were done. I changed for work and left them to clean up the mess.

I was quite pleased at how close we were to finishing the shoot. We had two days left and we'd be home free. There was the final scene, which was all dialogue and the talent show scene, which had no dialogue whatsoever. That was going to be a bit more trouble since it had a lot of running around in it. The talent show was scheduled for the next day. We would just have to get all of our ducks in a row before shooting.

MAGGIE MALLORY LEARNS SHE'S NOT AN ACTRESS

I learned a lot about Maggie Mallory on this day. She and I were sitting in CIRT's classroom, eating a couple of foot long Coney dogs. She told me that every dress she wore on set she had made herself specifically for the movie. I couldn't believe this since every dress looked professionally made. I told her that she had quite a talent there. She looked at me sadly and said, "I'm not an actress."

Knowing she wanted the truth I agreed with her. She told me it was something she always wanted to try. She was always told she was good and now knew this was just placating. I felt bad that I was the first person to smack her with the truth. We talked for quite a while. She revealed herself to be an intelligent, sweet, and beautiful person. Even though she was lousy in the movie I am glad I got to meet her and thought it was worth suffering through her performance for that honor.

JEREMY: Kind of a backhanded compliment there, Jesse, but quite moving nonetheless.

A LOVE TAP STRAIGHT FROM MY HEART: THE NINTH SHOOT

JESSE: The talent show scene went like this: The Dar sits on a bench with his girl Jennifer. Skip Wes comes by and tries hitting on her. This erupts into a fight with the two chasing each other around. Finally, The Dar gets the upper hand and knocks out Skip. This scene is highly implausible, so I always figured it as a metaphor scene. I mean how did David get his worst enemy to help him perform in the talent show?

For the talent show I decided to utilize all three cameras in the studio. I set up each camera and locked them into place. This meant I would have to sit in the control room and cut between the cameras. After I finished with the lights and cameras I grabbed three tapes to use. These being 1/2 inch tapes they were quite cumbersome. I loaded one up in the broadcast room and then showed Becky how the cameras were set up. I told her I'd be in the control room cutting between the cameras and that she didn't need to touch anything. She gave the affirmative and we got to work.

There are two things I will always remember about this shoot. The first being Becky screaming at the cast. When we first started shooting the actors did their thing, running around and acting like goofballs. Since the scene was supposed to be silent we had no audio running. So Becky started screaming instructions at them; telling them to run faster, to go here, to go there, and so on. This just confused the actor's and did not help them in any way. She continued to scream through the entire scene.

The second thing is this: At one point while Darren and Jeremy are chasing each other around they stop, put up their dukes and start swinging and missing each other. They went through this quite a number of times. The scene was going fine until one of Jeremy’s punches laid Darren on the floor. I saw Jeremy on the screen waving his hands around. Then I saw him laughing, so I figure everything was all right. I then heard Becky screaming, "You knocked him out! Somebody get some water!"

I started laughing too at this point. Jeremy entered the control room and asked if I saw what happened. My own laughter answered his question. Jeremy pointed at his pinky and told me that was all he hit Darren with. Jeremy had knocked Darren out with his pinky. On the screen I see Darren finally get up, looking woozy. Jeremy ran out of the room to check on him. Needless to say, this led to our first break of the day.

DAR: You know what? Jeremy knocked me out and it was deliberate. I still owe him a good knockout. I’ll wait until his back is turned.

JEREMY: The fight scene between Dar and I was the best part of the shoot for me. I had a good time running around the set and coming up with vaudeville type antics like tripping each other with canes, prop falling and so on. Since we didn't choreograph anything we were forced to improvise, which meant we did take after take of chasing each other around, trading blows, tripping, falling and stealing kisses from Jennifer who watched on like Olive Oil in the old Popeye cartoons.

After a while we began to wear down. Neither of us had eaten all day and we had been at it for hours working up a sweat in the hot studio lights. Dar decided to do one more take before stopping for lunch. We went through the scene same as the others but when it came time to duke it out I noticed Dar was a little off his game, sweating and breathing heavily. He threw a punch, which I dodged. I then threw a punch, which Dar was only partially able to dodge due to being so worn out from all the running around.

The knuckle of my pinkie grazed his temple and he went stiff, staring at me with this blank look on his face before collapsing to the floor like a marionette that's had its strings cut. I stared at him in shocked silence for a moment, part of me wondering if he was feigning being unconsciousness as part of the scene, but after a few seconds ticked by and he was still laying spread eagle on the floor I realized that I had accidentally knocked him out. Positive everybody was going to turn on me, yelling and accusing me of being a big mindless brute who had injured their star/director I did the one thing I felt was appropriate at the time, I laughed.

Jesse's voice sounded over the intercom, asking what had happened. Becky yelled frantically that I had knocked out Dar. There was a brief silence followed by Jesse's laughter filling the room.

I babbled something about not meaning to hurt him, still certain I was going to be blamed, that Dar would have to go to the hospital and be treated for a mild concussion, which I would have to pay for out of my own pocket. I felt uncomfortable with all of those accusing eyes on me so I went and talked to Jesse in the control room until Dar came around and groggily got to his feet. I hurried over to him and asked if he was all right and he said "Yeah, what happened?" I told him and he just shrugged it off and called for lunch. I later asked Jesse if he had recorded the incident and, sadly, he told me the tape had run out seconds before it took place.

JESSE: Once finished we sat down with the three tapes and watched the footage. Scott was switching tapes for us through the scene. Unfortunately, he didn’t change them at one point and we missed the punch. Since we were able to dissolve from camera to camera, creating one continuous shot from different angles, we already had the scene cut together. All we had to do now was put it in the movie.

THE RIDE HOME

All we could talk about on the way home was Darren's glass jaw. It was cracking us up that he went down so fast and easy. Darren did his best to defend himself, but in the end he just couldn't do it. Some people on the set felt Jeremy punched Darren on purpose (can you guess why?). I, on the other hand, knew that if Jeremy had full out hit Darren he would have broken his jaw. So, again, I go with what Jeremy says.

JEREMY: I was so physically and emotionally drained on this last day of filming that I literally fell out of the car when Dar dropped me off. I managed to get to my feet, say my goodbyes, and hobble up the walkway to my house. I was only on the CIRT set for three days, but it seemed like years. What I remember most about it when I look back is the constant battle of wills with Dar. But that’s what happens when artists work together on a project. Sparks are going to fly.

CIRT GETS PISSED

JESSE: During this time people at CIRT kept coming up to me with this seriously pissy attitude. I was totally blindsided by this. I did not know what they could be pissed about. Well, I found out that on the days I left early Darren didn't return everything to where it went. I also found out that we were leaving messes around and not cleaning them up. I don't remember anyone ever making a mess. I think that was a bullshit complaint, the other was true. I found this out from Darren himself. He always said they were too tired when the shoot was over. I could have beat him. CIRT allowed us to finish our last day, as long as I promised to return everything where it went. I gave them my word and I kept it.

THIS MOVIE IS ABOUT ME, DAMMIT: THE LAST SHOT

The last scene we shot for the movie also happened to be the last scene in the screenplay. It goes like this: After winning the talent show David sits in the dressing room, reveling in his victory. Jenny comes in and dumps him right there on the spot. He is heartbroken, but two seconds later a gal named Hope Dawn comes into the room, David asks her out, she agrees, and he is happy again. Fade Out. The fucking end.

I set up a shot that would be a close-up of Darren and move back to show the two girls. I showed Darren the close-up and what it would look like. He loved it so much he said he wanted the entire last shot to be this close up. I asked about the girls and he said that wasn't important. I was almost crushed by the size of his gargantuan ego. I told the girls what was going on. They didn't care as long as the movie came to an end. So we went with it. We shot the scene, which took an hour to do. That was it, the movie was over.

DAR: It ended up being where it’s just my face in the end that’s telling the story. I know that bugged a lot of my friends. They thought it was narcissistic, but they’re as narcissistic as I am. When my character starts crying in the final scene after Jennifer dumps him I think it makes them a little jittery and antsy.

They also like to comment on how quickly David bounces back after he’s dumped. That’s teenagers, you know? Teenagers go through that kind of thing. They’re so back and forth. They rebound easy because they’re not really sure what love is – what true love is. It’s not just about sex. There’s more to it. There’s friendship. So that’s probably why it was so easy for that character to rebound to someone else, because it was just a reflection of my own relationship with Ginny Keefe at the time.

JESSE: I can’t believe you just justified that shit.

THE RIDE HOME

We were all so happy to be finished with the shoot. On the ride home we started sharing stories about our experiences as if it’d happened years ago. We all went to our respective houses and enjoyed a good night's sleep. I knew a bigger job lay ahead of us: post production and that most dreaded of beasts, editing.

FINAL THOUGHTS ON PRODUCTION

Getting the movie in the can was the most tension-filled part of making Laugh A Little. Darren was a ticking time bomb the entire time. The most trivial of things would piss him off and the things that should have bothered him didn't. It was like he became a different person during production. He was angry all the time and for some strange reason he isolated himself from his two best friends, Joe and Jeremy. I still love him though. The film came out okay even though he left a considerable portion of it on the editing room floor. Though I must say it is impressive that he was able to cut out a major part of the story and still get his point across.

The actors did what they were supposed to do. I would say they were great but Jeremy was the only great one of the bunch. His performance was beaten down by Darren though. When Jeremy would start to take his acting to an interesting place Darren would berate him.

Maggie was sweet and she remembered her lines. She never missed a line. She couldn't deliver them worth a crap but she remembered them. Darren was playing himself; he really couldn't fuck that up. I still think it was a great time in my life. I was shooting a movie, meeting new friends, and learning a lot about my chosen profession. I was quite happy with the freedom I was given. I want to thank Darren for giving me that chance. I'd also like to thank everyone else involved in the production.

Next: Laugh A Little, Act Three: Editing and Aftermath.

CHAPTER FIVE

2011-04-04T23:31:00.001-04:00

LAUGH A LITTLE, ACT ONE: PRE-PRODUCTION

THE SCRIPT

DAR: Laugh A Little came about in this fashion: As a teenager I met a girl named Ginny Keefe. We had sex for a year. I thought I was in love only because I was dipping my wick every week. When she broke up with me I screamed all the way home in my car. Ginny Keefe was a bit abrasive. She was probably cheating on me at the time. But I was a kid. All I wanted to do was one thing. I wasn’t really in love with her, but at the time I thought I was. So I was heartbroken. And since I was creative and wanted to write and make films I created Laugh A Little as a means of channeling that pain into something positive.

I liked Charlie Chaplin. I liked the old silent films. I got into that because I was going through my little angst stage and those types of films attracted me because they were quiet and dark. I created the character of the Dar for our comedy show and wanted to do more with him afterwards. And, yes, I know it’s a little ego-ridden but all my friends are narcissistic anyway, so they have nothing to talk about.

The Dar was obviously created by my insecurities. As well as my love of Charlie Chaplin at the time (I could care less about Charlie Chaplin now as I’ve aged). Charlie Chaplin was a catalyst to me creating a character and I give him homage for that, but when I saw that the word Dar means “Give” in Spanish I thought “Oh my gosh, I’ll give laughter!” So that was kinda gay.

JEREMY: The plot to Laugh a Little is this: A young comedian/actor named David Daryl doesn’t think he’s funny. A fellow actor named Skip Wes feeds on that, putting David down at every given opportunity because he knows that David is more talented than he realizes and is jealous of that fact. David’s depression causes his girlfriend, Jennifer Charlie, to leave him for Skip Wes. David falls into despair until he is visited by the ghost of his dead grandfather who was an Emmet Kelly type clown back in the day (and the source of inspiration for David becoming a comedian). The grandfather basically tells him to pull himself together and go kick Skip’s butt and get his girl back. David adapts the stage persona of the Dar and challenges Skip to a comedy duel with Jennifer watching from the sidelines. David wins the contest but Jennifer gives him the brush off. David is crestfallen until he meets a new girl, Hope Dawn.

DAR: David Daryl was a depressing character. Since I was depressed I had to create a character that was likewise depressed, there was no way around that. I didn’t necessarily want it to do with a woman but it ended up being that way. In a lot of Charlie Chaplin’s movies his Tramp character would get the heroine even though he was the underdog of society. So I think that’s where a lot of that spawned from. In films of this genre there are usually two characters, the hero and the heroine, so I wanted to apply that. My only problem was putting these ideas onto paper. That’s where Jeremy came in. He boasted about his writing skills so I said okay, you take it from here. I didn’t know anything about writing. And come to find out, Jeremy was a good writer.

JESSE: So it was good boasting?

DAR: Yeah.

JESSE: Darren had been yattering for a while about a movie he planned to direct called Laugh A Little. He told me that he had written it with a fellow named Doc Riley. I laughed and asked who the fuck was that. He said Jeremy liked to be called Doc. I said okay, as it seemed like a good nickname for someone.

JEREMY: I've never liked my name, which I feel is too soft-sounding. Back in the day I thought that if I was going to be remembered after I died I needed a hard-edged name, one that was worthy of remembrance, like Wyatt Earp, Johnny Ringo, or Doc Holliday. As you might recall, I was big into westerns at this particular time in my life. I had even gone so far as to wear my hair long and dress in western style apparel to better stand out in a crowd (Yes, I know I looked like a goofball, don't rub it in).

I was always coming up with nicknames for myself because a fair share of old west gunfighters had nicknames, from Billy the Kid to Wild Bill Hickock. Since I couldn't use the Richmond Kidd for a screen name I chose Doc Riley after John "Doc" Holliday. The name was short lived as I recall (for one thing, what the hell was I a doctor of?), and I had already changed it by the time we began shooting Laugh A Little.

JESSE: Dar gave me the gist of the story. He asked me if I would help him with it and maybe direct as well. I never saw a script and was beginning to suspect that they hadn't finished one. He described the movie’s key scenes, mainly the talent show and the grandfather scene. In his original telling the grandfather was still alive and kicking (later that would change, and he would become the ghost of Christmas laughter). I gave him some ideas I felt might improve the script and also began drawing storyboards for the scenes he described (I draw poorly but I get the point across).

JEREMY: There was never actually a script. I just took Dar's plot outline and wrote the scenes as they needed to be shot, sometimes the very day of the shoot. Go figure, we were young and inexperienced. Dar had the story pretty much planned out by the time I came on board. All I did was beef up the writing and add some depth to the characters. One of the characters, the antagonist of the piece, was a dancer and all around smug bastard who opposed David at every turn. Dar needed a name for him, something along the lines of ‘Skip’.

Skip? I thought. That’s an odd name for a bad guy. I considered the last name for the character while I browsed through one of my books on the old west. I came to a picture of the outlaw John Wesley Hardin and immediately suggested we call the character Skip Wes. Dar liked it, and that was that.

DAR: I wanted a villain. I like the fact that Jeremy created a villain for me. Skip Wes was based on Dave Wilkinson. Dave was a six-foot-four black gay man. He would pester me constantly. I was doing set design for the school’s drama class and I would also act in some of the plays. He’d be upset because I’d get all the parts he wanted. So he would heckle me on the sideline when I was on stage. He’d try to distract me so I’d forget my lines, which, you know, Dar isn’t good at remembering his lines.

I’d get through the show but he would piss me off so much. Yet, he’d still want to be my friend. So that’s how Skip Wes was created, but then he turned more into a Jeremy character through Jeremy’s love of westerns. I remember when I first met Jeremy he showed me every Spaghetti western on demand. I thought they were cool and we’d study all the different camera shots. It was neat. It was fun. If it wasn’t for Jeremy I wouldn’t have learned all that stuff. He’s a cool guy.

CASTING & CHARACTERS

DAVID DARYL & THE DAR

JESSE: Darren wanted to make the movie for the express purpose of playing the lead character. You couldn't argue the fact that the character was him. The whole story is about how David tries to find what makes him funny. He also happens to pick up a girl along the way. The Dar is the character he discovers that makes him funny. This character is highly inspired by Charlie Chaplin (Darren loves Chaplin, although I can’t stand him. I prefer Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd). In fact, David discovers his character while watching Chaplin, like Darren did in real life.

JENNIFER CHARLIE

Jennifer is the "love interest" that David will discover and then lose. Jenny is sympathetic and you kind of understand why she dumps him. David is a perpetually sad character and after spending any amount of time with him you want to kill yourself. Jenny would be played by a sweet young lady named Maggie Malory. Maggie was a freshman from Broad Ripple High School. She rode the bus to Tech every day for a magnet class. In fact, the bus she rode was the bus that would take us to CIRT. We would chat with her and her friend, Becky Sandlin.

Darren, of course, broached the subject of our movie. Both girls wanted to be part of it. Maggie wanted to be an actress and Becky a director (I guess). What really interested Darren about both girls was that they were friends with his ex (strangely, her name was Ginny. Anybody else see a connection here?). So, right away he brought them in, even though Maggie couldn't act her way out of a wet paper sack, but she was good looking and a fun girl to hang with. By the end of the shoot she also knew she wasn't cut out to be an actress. Sweet girl though, and I hope she's happy and rolling in dough.

DAR: Jennifer Charlie was basically Ginny Keefe. She was the shallowest character out of the whole Laugh A Little cast. And Hope Dawn (these names, I came up with…sheesh), was the rebound girl after Jennifer broke up with him. More on her below.

SKIP WES

JESSE: Skip Wes was the villain of the piece. He is an enormously talented individual and outshines David in every aspect of his life. He is also competing with David for the hand of Jennifer Charlie. The character, from what Darren said, was based on a kid at Tech named David. I knew this guy and he was really fucking annoying. Yet I can't deny he was talented and could remember huge lines of dialogue. So, who could play a hugely annoying but even more talented Skip Wes? Well, one name sprung to mind immediately: Jeremy Riley.

Darren originally wanted Joe Devine to play the character. He also said that he cast Jeremy because Jeremy said he'd only help write the script if he played Skip (Jeremy says this tale is crap and I've got to go with Jeremy). So Jeremy was cast as our villain. Jeremy did a superb job as Skip. He suffered through a lot to play this role and would ultimately have 95% of his screen time cut from the finished film. The poor bastard, it almost makes you want to cry.

HOPE DAWN

Hope Dawn was just a voice spoken off stage at the end of the film. So Becky, who was the only other girl on set, was cast. Her name signifies what the character is supposed to entail: She is the hope that David Daryl's life will get better. That’s it in a nut shell.

THE CREW

The crew of Laugh a Little was about as shoe-string as you could get. I took care of all the technical parts of the shoot and enlisted the help of my friend David Patrick to carry stuff around and hold mikes and such. So I was director of photography and everything else while Dave acted as my assistant. Darren was the director, but he dealt mainly with the actors. Jeremy, when not acting in a scene, would help out in every way he could. When the shoot was over Darren didn't want to give a Grip credit to Dave. I told him if he didn't do it I would take my name off the project. Dave was there every day of the shoot and he lugged around a lot of heavy equipment. He was extremely helpful so he really deserved a credit and I made sure he got one. This was the only crew we would have on the set.

VISUAL LOOK

Pre-production wasn't all that difficult, basically just a lot of discussions on how best to shoot the film. We decided we wanted the movie’s look to be that of an old silent film so I set down a couple of ground rules of how it should be shot. 1.) Every shot had to be done on a tri-pod. Silent movies were always shot on tri-pods because the fuckers were part of the camera in those days. 2.) No moving shots. Silent movies did have tracking shots but 90% of the scenes were done singularly. I told Darren I would not change my mind on this matter and if he didn't like it he was to speak up now or forever hold his peace. He agreed to it quickly. He didn't have much room to maneuver really, if I didn't shoot the movie he was screwed considering I was the only one who knew how to use CIRT’s equipment.

Of course, even if he’d said no I would have shot it the way he wanted too. It was his movie and he was my friend, but he didn't know I would have just as easily gone along with anything he suggested. I was a weaker man back then, just happy to have such a good friend. Now the question was how would we get the movie in black and white? The camera we used for shooting shot only in color. Luckily, CIRT had a computer graphic system called The Toaster. The Toaster was basically a tool used to create digital effects.

It could not only render the movie in black and white but also add grain and visually age it as well. It was perfect for the silent-movie era look we wanted the film to have. We then discussed how to light the movie. I suggested a harsher light. If we did that it would really highlight the white makeup he wanted the actors to wear (little known fact: In silent movies the actors used green makeup, not white). I also told him how using harsh lights would create shadows and give the film a haunting look. He loved the idea.

INDIANA YOUTH BROADCASTERS ASSOCIATION

DAR: Around this time we decided it might be a good idea to enter Laugh A Little in the Indiana Youth Broadcaster Associations’ annual contest. Every school had a broadcasting program, some better than others depending on their budget. Different schools would enter their students’ projects in the IYBA once a year. CIRT at that time had a bigger budget then Tech. Tech had just started with their broadcasting program. So, we thought entering our film might help move us forward.

JESSE: CIRT took pride in everything it entered. They wanted to enter a feature every year because it was good publicity for the school. This kid that was a year ahead of us named Gary was always going on about how he won an award for one of his broadcasts. But we never went to CIRT to learn how to do news broadcasts.

DAR: Yeah, we had an agenda. It was fun to learn the technical side of filmmaking. It was cool to be up there in the director’s studio speaking into the mike “Camera one. Okay, cut. Go to camera two.” It was fun to see all of that stuff. But ultimately we were there to learn how to make films.

FINALIZING THE SCRIPT

JESSE: The only problem with entering our feature in the IYBA was that it couldn’t exceed ten minutes. Laugh A Little, as Darren described it, was a pretty long film. Damn near feature length if I remember correctly. So we were going to have to trim the script severely before shooting began. I had Darren write me an outline of the scenes he had so far in order to get a general understanding of what the movie was about. After reading it I saw only one part that didn't quite fit. There was a subplot involving gangsters, which Jeremy was the spearhead of.

At its heart Laugh A Little is about a guy who learns how to be funny and to love again. So you need every scene to reflect that emotional core. The gangster scenes did not do that. I also felt the movie had its antagonist in Skip Wes and we didn't need to add more of them. I know Darren said Jeremy wrote these scenes. I barely knew Jeremy but I didn't want him thinking "What's up with this asshole cutting out my shit?" Yet, the scenes just would not work in the context of the movie.

I called Darren and told him I felt the scenes needed to go. Losing them would cut the movie down significantly. He told me he felt the same way. I was amazed; if he felt that way then why were they still there? He too didn't want to cut it out of respect for Jeremy. I understood completely, but the scenes still needed to go. The movie wasn't about them. Darren said he would call Jeremy and tell him. I said if he wanted to tell Jeremy it was my idea I had no problem with it. I also told him to give Jeremy my number if he wanted to discuss it. I was open to that.

Darren said he would take care of it and the next day the gangster scenes were gone. To this day I feel bad about convincing Darren to cut them out. I felt I overstepped my bounds. I was only trying to do what was best for the film. When Jeremy came to the set he showed no ill will and I felt better about it. I was glad that we had cut the movie down and were moving forward. I always wondered how Jeremy felt about all of this.

JEREMY: There was never actually a gangster element to the script. When Dar approached me to help him write the screenplay he made it clear to me that this was to be a full length movie and we had to figure out a way to pad the film to at least ninety minutes. at this early stage of preproduction I knew nothing about a short film contest.

I racked my brain for ideas and came to the conclusion that David Daryl was a manic depressant, and that he would take drugs to escape the dark veil of his existence. He bought these drugs from a friend of his, the name of which escapes me, but we'll call him Steve for clarity sake. Steve in turn got his drugs from some local hoodlums. David and Steve weren't buddies or anything but they had some interesting conversations when David stopped by to pick up his latest score.

Later, when David's own personal crisis was nearing its peak he received a frantic call from Steve who confessed that he'd been stealing from the hoodlums and they were coming for him. David then heard the front door of Steve's apartment burst open and Steve cry out. Several shots caused David to yank the phone away from his ear. He called Steve's name over and over until someone hung up on the other end. Rushing to the drug dealer’s apartment David found the door kicked open and Steve dead in a chair.

This was supposed to be a form of shock therapy to help snap David out of his self-pitying state and realize that there are much bigger issues going on around him, and if he wasn't careful his addiction could lead him to a similar end. This would be David's first step in cleaning up his act and reclaiming his life. That was all there ever was to it, and when Dar approached me with the news that it would have to be cut I wasn't torn up about it because even I thought it didn't quite fit.

At this point I hadn't been cast as Skip Wes yet and I was supposed to play the Steve character, so my biggest worry was that I would be reduced to an "extra" role if I got to act in the film at all. I don't remember how I eventually landed the role of Skip Wes. I believe it just kind of fell into my lap because there was nobody else to play him.

FINDING LOCATIONS

JESSE: This to me was one of the biggest tragedies of Laugh A Little. Darren had picked his house for the home of our protagonist. This made perfect sense since there is such a thin line between Darren and David Daryl to begin with, and I had no problem with it. We needed three other locations to shoot in. One was a movie theater for Jenny and David's first date, another was a stage to shoot the talent show finale at, and we needed a video store where Jenny and David first meet.

I went to work finding a stage to shoot at. I wanted the place to have a classic look to it. My first and only call was to the Madame Walker Theater. The theater had been around since the silent film era. I thought it would be perfect for the movie. I talked to the lady who staged bookings. I told her I was a teacher and I wanted to bring my students to film a scene for their movie. She was polite and was interested in helping us anyway she could.

We discussed what I needed for the shoot and how long I would use the stage. I told her I would need it for an entire day if possible. She put me on hold. When she came back she had the whole thing set up. I could have it for one day on a certain date. The only catch was that we'd have to pay fifty bucks for it. To me fifty bucks was a steal to film on one of the oldest and most famous stages in

America

. I told her it sounded great, I would just have to approve it with the school (this would give me a chance to get Darren's approval).I called him immediately afterwards and told him the good news.

After I calmed down long enough to shut up I heard a long pause on the other end. Finally, Darren said, "No, I don't want to pay anything." I went into a fit, telling him I would split it with him. He reiterated his answer and I hung up, defeated. I called the lady the next day and cancelled. The talent show would be shot in Studio One at CIRT. My disappointment was huge. I had gotten a real theater, and a historic one at that, through the use of my negotiating skills. I was so proud I had accomplished this and yet in the end it meant nothing. The only tragedy bigger than this was the one Jeremy suffered. He trumped me by scoring a video store for free. He was even told they would work with him for whatever he needed but I'll let Jeremy tell you about that.

JEREMY: Guess that's my cue. There was a video store down the block from where I lived at the time called Royal Video. They had a great selection of B-horror films and Joe and I used to rent an armful of these, buy a pizza and liter of coke from Marsh, and stay up all night watching them (Ah, the good ol' days). I was a regular at the store and got along great with the owners, who were really cool, laid back people. Well, when Dar told me that the critical scene involving David's first meeting with Jennifer Charlie would take place in a video store I immediately took him to Royal Video, introduced him to the owners, and asked if we might be able to shoot a scene for our movie there, adding that it would be great publicity for their store and we would give them a special mention in the end credits. They were all for it, as was Dar.

Like Jesse, I felt proud that I was able to help Dar add a depth of realism to his movie, and, like Jesse, I was ultimately disappointed when Dar dropped the video store and covered the whole David meets Jennifer sequence in the film's opening narration (with him supplying both characters voices nonetheless). I weep for what could have been.

JESSE: All of the locations would be shot at CIRT. The video store scene was the only scene not to make it to the final cut. Pre-production was over and we were ready to move into production territory.

Next: Laugh A Little, Act Two: Production

CHAPTER FOUR

2011-04-04T23:29:00.002-04:00

A SIDE ADVENTURE TO BROAD RIPPLE

JESSE: During the course of our time at CIRT we had to shoot a news piece as part of our training. Darren came up with the idea of shooting at Broad Ripple's Ballet Class. I had no problem with this and neither did that eternal scum Mike Wallace. Darren invited him along to shoot it. He was closer to Mike at this time and thought Mike knew how to use the equipment. I knew I did and it was lucky that I went along, not because I wanted to shoot it, I have no interest in ballet; no, something happened at Broad Ripple that boggled my mind and thrilled my bones.

A BROAD RIPPLE QUICKIE

A brief note on Broad Ripple High School. Broad Ripple is a Magnet High School on the west side of Indianapolis. It houses the Center for Performing & Visual Art. That means it houses all of the entertainment venue for IPS. The only reason CIRT isn't connected with them is because the technical side is considered a trade. They teach Dance, Music, Acting, and other things involved in the visual arts.

Darren had come up to me while I was sitting in front of the library one day (I'm a nerd, I know) and we discussed going to Broad Ripple. Darren had hit upon the idea of shooting the ballet class there for the CIRT news piece. Enjoying a day away from TECH sounded good to me so I agreed right there on the spot. He left to find Mike Wallace, who was to be our ride. This was a part of the trip I wasn't looking forward too.

MIKE WALLACE. OR, THE TRUE NEANDERTHAL

Mike Wallace was a know it all prick if there ever was one. He liked to think of himself as some renegade writer. He was nothing more than a dick trying to rile people up. He had started an alternative magazine (it was fashionable at the time) called Apathetic Zealot that was crammed with articles centering around his own likes and dislikes but was basically just an excuse to bitch. His theories and such were nothing more than an asshole's rhetoric.

Darren had done the covers for all of them. They were good covers; hell, they were the best part of the damn thing. Mike also attended CIRT with us. I never liked him but hung out with him only because Darren wanted to. So I suffered through his presence. Sometime during the year he met Jeremy, and, being the cocksucker he is, called Jeremy a Neanderthal. I didn't know Jeremy well, but I still felt he was being a true asshole to reference anyone in this way. Darren told me about it and I just remember saying "Fuck Mike". The only thing this asshole had going for him was that he owned a car.

JEREMY: I only met Mike once and that was when I went over to his house with Dar because Dar needed to pick something up. What that item was I don't remember. I do remember that Mike's parents were well off financially and owned a large house crammed full with expensive furnishings. Mike was hanging out with another friend of his who was just as big a prick as he was. They only said a few words to me, which were in a condescending and patronizing tone. Mike disappeared with Dar for a few minutes and when they returned Dar had whatever item he had come for.

We left and on the ride home Dar told me that when he and Mike were alone Mike asked him why he was hanging out with such a Neanderthal. For some reason I really let this get to me. I allowed it to rule my own perception of myself for the next several years. I would see these clean cut, expensively attired individuals with perfect smiles and well-paying jobs and I would become ashamed of myself for not being able to live up to their standards. "Well, what do you expect," I'd say to myself. "You're just a Neanderthal, after all."

I’ve often been misjudged as dimwitted. I remember an incident later in Florida where I had a conversation with a young woman named Holly. She was taken aback by my intelligence and sophistication and said I had impressed her considerably. I smiled wryly and asked her if she had me pegged as some country rube, to which she replied, “Well, don’t take it the wrong way, but yeah.”

I’ve since learned not to take the words of a person I barely know to heart.

ON THE WAY TO BROAD RIPPLE

JESSE: Mike and Darren droned on through the entire car ride, their conversation revolving mainly around the magazine. I didn't do anything for the magazine but help Darren hand them out so I had nothing to add toward the conversation. At one point Darren switched gears and started talking about his ex, Ginny. He went on about how he wondered if he would see her in Broad Ripple, where she was attending school at the time. He said he hoped not, but everyone could tell he really wanted too. You could almost see the pain on his face as he thought about her.

In some ways Darren wanted her back while in others he didn’t. At this point in our friendship I feel Darren and I were really like brothers. He had already invited me to join DIP and to go to Florida with them. I felt bad seeing him in this pain and switched the subject to movies. Mike was not the type who could hold his own in a conversation like this so he switched it back to the magazine. Darren lightened up and returned to his jovial self. I went back to thinking about nothing and quickly became bored.

BROAD RIPPLE HAS A STRICT POLICY ABOUT OPEN NUDITY

We arrived at the school around noon. I carried the camera and the light kits to the class. Darren helped carry everything else. Darren led us through the hallways to the classroom. We entered this one big room, two walls of which were composed entirely of mirrors. It had two little bathrooms (one for boys, one for girls) and there was also a little space behind the bathrooms that had a stand with a makeshift wall in it about five feet high. This stand covered about five feet of a twelve foot space. We were setting up all of our equipment when the class, comprised of all girls and one boy, arrived.

The teacher (whose name I don't recall) brought the class over and introduced us to them. We planned to do interviews and she asked for volunteers. Three girls raised their hands. We thanked these girls and went back to work. The teacher told everyone to get ready for class.

While I was checking the camera Mike Wallace tapped me on the shoulder. I looked back at him with a "What the hell do you want?" look on my face. However, as I turned I noticed why he was tapping my shoulder. A bunch of naked girls stood behind this makeshift wall, giggling and conversing, completely oblivious to us. We just sat there looking at this plethora of naked chicks. Now, most people would act all cool and make it look like they weren't looking. Not us, though, we all three had a full stare on going. We just kept watching and watching.

After about five minutes of this the teacher walked over and asked us if we got an eyeful. I was the only one to reply with an enthusiastic yes. I then turned around and started to mess with the camera again. Luckily, I could look into the mirror wall and still see everything going on behind me. Darren and Mike just continued to stare until Darren came to his senses and joined me. Mike was less inconspicuous and didn't detach his eyes until the girls began to come out.

The interview portion of this shoot was awkward. Darren had to sit and interview girls he had just seen in all their glory. You could tell as he talked that he was hiding his arousal. Mike just walked around hitting on the other girls. After they all had turned him down he walked over and sat down. He did nothing else through the rest of the shoot. Darren and I filmed the rest of the interviews by ourselves. We then filmed the class as they practiced their dance moves. When class ended they went back to the small room to change. Mike Wallace then came over to make it look like he was helping us pack up as he grabbed himself another eyeful.

In a first for both me and Darren (it's crazy, I know) we didn't succumb to temptation and sneak another peak. I suppose we didn't want to push our luck anymore than we already had. Mike, on the other hand, didn't feel that way and ogled the goods until he was content. The two of us finished our work, thanked the teacher, and ran for the car like thieves in the night. The ride home at least gave us a conversation we would all enjoy as the perverts we were.

DAR: It was a sight beyond sights. Every single girl was butt naked, bush and all. It was like a scene out of Porky’s. It was a good time.

WATCHING THE FOOTAGE

JESSE: Mike dropped us off at CIRT. Darren and I watched the footage. It wasn't too bad and the interviews were really good. Unfortunately, the footage was never to be used as we lost it shortly thereafter, and, well, we started Laugh A Little around this time and lost all interest in it. Oh well, that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.

Next: Laugh A Little, Act One: Pre-production

CHAPTER THREE

2011-04-04T23:23:00.004-04:00

CIRT

JESSE: Before we go any further I think I should write something about CIRT, seeing as how a lot of our adventures before Florida revolved around this place. CIRT is the Center for Instructional Radio and Television. IPS had their own public access channel back then and CIRT made the shows for it, like IPS Weekly and so forth. On top of that, they also had their own classes for television production and radio. In order to get into CIRT Dar and I had to go through an interview process with a gentleman named Alan Oliver.

Oliver was the school’s instructor. He was a tallish fellow with a full head of white hair intermingled with gray and he wore a pair of Buddy Holly glasses without the tape. He had a hankering to fling his loose wrists around when he walked (I’m not saying he was gay, just weak-wristed). We all thought he was a tad weird, and that’s saying a lot.

Now, in order to be approved you had to meet with Mr. Oliver and he’d ask you questions like, “So what do you want to do with your life? What do you see yourself doing in the future?” And we’d say we wanted to be filmmakers and stuff like that. He wanted us to read a copy from a news program. Then he wanted us to rewrite it so we could read it in our own words. Only after all of that would he decide whether or not he wanted us in his class.

Oliver was hardcore on us learning every aspect of television production. He would start us out on what he called the hardest part and move us to easier parts later. Most days we sat in our classroom wondering what the hell we had gotten got ourselves into.

DAR: We learned how to do broadcasting. We had access to all sorts of equipment, and we had access to an editor, or at least what they called the Toaster. It was this effects machine. And we thought it was, like, amazing special effects. Like “Imagine what we could do with this!” They had these big ol’ 8 ½ inch tapes that we used to record everything on.

JESSE: On our first day at CIRT we were shown our classroom. It was a small, square room with assorted desks for the students. There was a window on the left side that looked into a small radio studio. Oliver had his desk at the front with a TV and video deck hooked up behind him. The room was rather dull with its mustard colored walls and lifeless tiles beneath our feet. It looked like something out of the early works of David Cronenberg.

We were then taken for a tour of the building. It only had five rooms which we would use; the first being a huge producing studio/radio studio. It was quite impressive. I could’ve spent all day there playing with knobs and all the other cool shit. Oliver explained the basics of the room and said we would be spending our first six weeks here. That's right; we would be starting off with Audio. The next six weeks would be a living hell in this room. I still have nightmares.

Our next stop was the tape library where we were shown the useable tape section. These were the tapes we could use to film with. He also showed us numerous tapes filled with shows CIRT had made over the years, including his own little feature, IPS DIGEST (I took IPS DIGEST home with me that night and watched it. Total suckage. Technically good but content-shitty). He then went through the labeling system and other boring crap.

The next room was Studio One. I must admit, the big studio cameras and the massive lighting system above me sent a chill down my spine. It was a wonderful sight to see. Oliver looked at me and smiled. I knew something was up. "You won't be seeing this room again for a long time," he said. I now hated this man. These were the toys I wanted to play with and he was holding them from me.

Next we entered the control room for Studio One. We were shown all the controls and given a brief run down on how to use them along with the teleprompter and other assorted toys. Oliver repeated the same loathsome sentence he had before. We wouldn’t be seeing this place again for a while. This man wanted me to slap the fuck out of him. He saw the hatred burning in my eyes and hastened us on to the next room. This was the broadcast center, where they sent out the signal and where the studios recorded into.

We met a gentleman named Scott here who was a helluva nice guy. He told us to hold on and went into another room. He returned a moment later with a case. Inside was the most beautiful 16mm film camera I had ever seen. It was fully functional and, to my surprise, they were getting rid of it. I asked how much it was going for. Scott said they were planning to auction it and they expected around three hundred bucks. I had five in the bank and I told him I'd give him four now. Oliver said they would take their chances at the auction. He pulled us out of the room and took us to our lockers to give us our books.

This was our first day and it was good and shitty at the same time. I never did get that camera. I heard they sold it at the auction for about a hundred fucking bucks. My dislike for Oliver was intense from that moment on. I know Scott would have sold it to me in a sec. Oliver, though, looked down on all of us as scum. And you know what, I may be scum but I was scum with four hundred bucks and an eagerness to buy his camera.

DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL

Shortly after this Darren asked Mr. Oliver if he had a preference for men. Mr. Oliver turned all red and asked him why he would ask such a thing. I was standing there at the time and also asked Darren how the fuck he could ask that. Darren was under the impression that this was a normal question to ask somebody. I grabbed him and pulled him into the hallway. I then had to explain why this was an embarrassing question to ask a person, especially when that person was your teacher.

Darren finally realized his mistake, so the next day we went back and Darren apologized, but not in a normal "I'm sorry" way. Instead, he goes all crazy about it, falling to his knees, thrusting his hands in the air and begging for forgiveness. The evil in me couldn't resist and I shouted out, "For a guy you think is gay you sure picked the right way to apologize." Oliver turned red and hauled Darren to his feet. I turned around and walked out. Darren hurried out after me, laughing his ass off. Like Darren I was a natural asshole, but unlike Darren I felt no reason to apologize for my little outburst and just kept on going.

THE FIRST SIX WEEKS

Oliver started us out with heavy doses of book learning. Every day we had to read one chapter of a book and answer the questions at the end of that chapter. Darren, his friend Mike Wallace and I would always go into Studio One to work. Nine times out of ten I read the chapter while they discussed Apathetic Zealot (a little ’zine Mike started in order to piss off the school). I would answer the questions afterwards and they would copy me.

DAR: I liked Mike Wallace. He was an alright guy. Wallace did most of the writing on Apathetic Zealot while I did the artwork. It was just a bunch of rebellious retro-punk scribble.

JESSE: We would break sometimes to do audio work. Oliver showed us how to use every piece of equipment in the radio studios. The hardest thing to learn was the reel to reel stuff, mainly because I have poor hearing from an ear infection as a kid. It's why I talk loud, and it's important to listen when recording something on reel to reel in the middle of something already taped. After showing us how to use it Oliver would let us play around with it for an hour. The three of us happened to record five minutes of Darren and Mike arguing about how to operate it. This was my fault for letting those two do it instead of me. I wasn’t great at it but it was still better than anything they could do.

Oliver showed us the various microphones and what made each one different. This stuff I could handle so long as it had to do with filming. I excelled in anything that involved taping and not just radio and producing. It also gave us a chance to see the field camera for the first time. We had to learn how to hook the audio equipment up to it. I loved this portion of the class.

We had five straight days of testing during our final week of audio. The first day was our paper tests. The second and third days were all radio/audio work. The fourth and fifth days were all television audio. Needless to say, I failed every test when it came to radio/audio. The other three days of testing I did really well in. Everyone in the class received an F on the first six weeks. I was told though that I received the highest F. I asked him how we failed the six weeks and he said if you failed two tests you failed them all. So, we all failed, and miserably at that.

On the last day of testing Oliver had an announcement. He would no longer be our teacher. He had taken a position at Tech's new television production class. The older students (who didn’t have to suffer through any of this book learning crap with us because they were out making segments for an IPS show) were distraught because they liked Oliver. They had grown accustomed to his ways. I was happy as hell, my only hope being that the new teacher was cool. Oliver apologized to the older students, explaining that it was all about money. My only question was who the new teacher would be. He said his name was Mark Watness, but he was only temporary until they hired a new guy. It all sounded good to me since I was just happy to see Oliver go.

MARK WATNESS

Mark Watness’ first day of class was the following Monday. No one showed up that day but me. Mark arrived wearing a huge winter coat. He took it off and revealed a grungy look, which was popular at the time, though his was due more to a state of poverty than keeping up with current trends. He looked like Toad from the X-men comics, if Toad wore glasses. He was shocked by me being the only one there. I asked if I could order a pizza and if so I would share it with him. I swear I saw the drool running down the corners of his mouth; this guy was starving. We ordered a pizza and sat around talking about movies.

DAR: Mark Watness was a great individual, great teacher. He kind of looked like what you’d get if you mixed a comic book nerd with a troll. He had a really good attitude and he was soft spoken. But he was also really poor and always hungry. We kept the guy well fed. We’d go to the Dairy Queen down the street nearly every day and get him a Sunday. We respected him. It was like having the mentor of our dreams, or at least a mentor who let us do whatever the hell we wanted.

JESSE: Mark told me he planned to give the students a bit of free reign around the place. He also wanted us to shoot things about the Indianapolis Zoo for a promo video (he worked there with the dolphins). I loved the idea of free reign. He said only way to learn something was by doing it, screw all that book work. I laughed and said "Well okay, then give me a camera." That night I went home with the camera and the light kit. Mark Watness was the answer to my prayers. A very cool teacher.

The next day Darren joined me in class along with Mike Wallace. We started planning what kind of project we wanted to do. I had written some scripts that Oliver told me were crap (but only because he didn't like me). Darren wanted to use the equipment for a short feature he was cooking up called Laugh a Little. And Mike—Well, who gives a flying fuck what Mike wanted. Mark told us we could use the stuff for whatever we wanted but we also had to do the zoo promo as well as shoot a segment for the school.

We all agreed to go the full nine yards on it. But what kind of school project could we do? Darren came up with an idea to film the ballet class in Broad Ripple. So that would be our school project. We just needed to figure out a promo. Mark said he would take us all to the zoo the next day to do field work. That night Darren and I took the equipment home to familiarize ourselves with it.

We spent the rest of the year running around. We would be at the Zoo one day and working on our own stuff the next. Every night we were checking out the equipment and I finally figured it all out. We never did anything at the zoo. Well, we did get some animal footage, but that was it. I started helping out around the studios after school (when I had a day off from work). I operated the camera on the Math Tutor show. I worked with Scott (who had taken over Oliver's show) doing most of his camera work. Darren and I also worked cameras for a Model UN project. They had a professional behind every other aspect, except us. I was told I did a great job and we both got a credit for it and the other shows I worked on. I had a damn good time doing all of this while I learned how to handle all of the equipment.

Then came the day I dreaded the most. It was about six weeks before the end of the year. I went to class hoping to order a pizza and work on my various projects. When I entered the classroom I saw a light-skinned black man sitting at the desk. Oliver's permanent replacement had been found. None of us ever saw Mark again.

EARLEarl was the name of our final teacher. He wasn't a very cool guy at all. We were never allowed to borrow the camera again. So for the rest of the year we sat around in class shooting the breeze, bored out of our skulls. Earl could've cared less about the class. This was the last year for students at CIRT. So all Earl had to worry about was his show. He was a rich kid and it showed. He wore the most expensive stuff you could find. He acted all superior and shit too. We constantly made fun of him. After a while I showed up at class maybe twice a week. We were all bored by him and he could’ve cared less. Hell, he gave everyone A’s at the end of the year. Not too long after that I graduated and left CIRT behind.

I loved my time there learning to use the equipment. If it wasn't for CIRT I wouldn’t have met Dar and the rest of the dominoes would never have fallen into place. I also loved that time when we had free reign over the place. We shot so much stuff and had so much fun. And, of course, there was the story of our adventure at the Broad Ripple ballet class, but that's another chapter.

Next: A Side Adventure To Broad Ripple