[Through the magic of cinema, the author of this piece appears to perform a one-finger handstand pushup, playing the role of Merlin Forbes in 1997’s That Darn Genie Kat.]
I must ask for more than the usual indulgence from my reader this week, for I am going to be talking about movies that few, if any of you, have seen or will ever see. These are not lost masterpieces, but movies that have almost no aesthetic and historical interest. In describing them, and thereby describing one unimportant case study in amateur filmmaking, however, I hope that I can say something about the cinematic impulse at its most embryonic, for many great careers in cinema have begun in the same humble locations: the backyard, the attic, the vacant lot.
When George A. Romero was a teenager in the Parkchester section of the Bronx, filming The Man from the Meteor with an 8mm camera borrowed from a rich uncle in Scarsdale, he was picked up by the police after chucking a flaming dummy off the roof of an apartment building, inspired by viewings of Howard Hawks’ The Thing at the RKO Castle Hill. Concurrently, on the other side of the Bronx River, the twin brothers George and Mike Kuchar regularly haunted the RKO Chester, probably consuming the same bill-of-fare. The Kuchars would go home and make 8mm burlesques of what they witnessed at the RKO and elsewhere, co-starring with neighborhood kids and classmates from the School of Industrial Art. When these films eventually came to be projected in Ken Jacobs’ loft, they brought the Kuchars to the attention of Manhattan’s Underground tastemakers. The Kuchars’ earliest surviving title is The Naked and the Nude, a World War II epic shot at the Bronx Botanical Gardens in 1957, when the boys were fifteen years old. Just a few years later, Little Stevie Spielberg would complete a WWII epic of his own, his 1961 Escape to Nowhere, in which the suburbs of Scottsdale, Arizona stood in for “SOMEWHERE IN EAST AFRICA.” (The tradition of backyard moviemaking would come full circle when, through seven years of the 1980’s, three kids in Mississippi produced a shot-by-shot video remake of Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, eventually gaining a cult reputation when screened as Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation.) Spielberg would apply unsuccessfully to the University of Southern California’s School for the Cinematic Arts, where he might’ve had young John Carpenter as a classmate. Carpenter was a disciple of H.P. Lovecraft, like the Kuchars, and worshipped at the altar of The Thing, like Romero. And while growing up in Bowling Green, Kentucky, young Carpenter also amused himself by making 8mm shorts—a pastime for many an imaginative young person, allowing for a sort of escape from nowhere.
I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Spielberg’s hometown and three hours from Bowling Green as the crow flies. Super-8 had been replaced by the camcorder by the time that I was in my amateur filmmaking years—which roughly span the ages of thirteen (as with the precocious Spielberg and Kuchars), and eighteen, which is when film school education or access to more professional equipment begins to sand off the rough edges. (The Kuchars, who chose never to allow themselves to become sophisticated—itself a form of extreme sophistication—are an exception to the rule.)
It is a short hop from amateur theatrics to backyard movie-making, and in remembering the genesis of my filmmaking impulse, the first thing that comes to mind was my involvement with a theatrical troupe called “The Renegade Garage Players.” The organization was founded in 1993 and continues to exist as the Marjorie Book Continuing Education Society, named for a longstanding member of the troupe who died in 2004. Marjorie, a sweet lady with whom I treaded the boards more than once, happened to be blind—RGP billed itself as the “Cincinnati’s inclusive theater group,” for its casts were comprised of physically and mentally handicapped adults as well as non-handicapped teenagers. I will leave it to the organization’s web copy to tell its story:
From 1993 to 1999, the Renegade Garage Players remained an unincorporated theater group producing one or two plays each summer. Significant efforts were made to recruit actors with physical, mental, and emotional disabilities from the Cincinnati community. The group formed partnerships with the Clovernook Center for the Blind, Stepping Stones Center, and LADD in recruiting actors. The group performed at various locations including the Northern Hills Fellowship Unitarian Church, the College Hill Town Hall, Winton Woods Middle School, and [co-founder] Joe [Link]’s parents’ garage.
By bringing up my involvement with the RGP, I do not mean to create the impression that I was or am a decent or charitable-minded person. While I enjoyed the opportunity to meet people from very different walks of life, I didn’t participate in this group with an eye towards “making a difference.” For whatever reason, these RGP productions, which by their very nature required the wild combination of discordant acting styles and accommodating alterations to the text—a Down’s Syndrome actress reading the dictionary definition of “Rhinoceros” before Ionesco’s play of the same name, for example—appealed to me, though I have no idea what it might have been like to experience one of these disorienting spectacles from the audience. I had no involvement with official high school theatricals, and had no stifled desire to, but for RGP I played a cuckolded husband in Neal Simon’s Chekhov farce The Good Doctor, Henry Antrobus in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, and Matthew Harrison Brady in Inherit the Wind. The last-named, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, is preachy garbage, but I fancy that I enlivened it somewhat by doing my Brady as a conscious impression of Chris Elliott’s pompous Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a fixture when Elliott was on Late Night with David Letterman and the subject of his absurdist 1986 Showtime special FDR: A One-Man Show. (Which, if you haven’t seen it, is one of the most perfect of all comedies.)
The co-founder and director of the RGP, Joe Link, had also previously directed a handful of “films” for Cincinnati public access. One of them, 1991’s Pink Sweat—the title is an anagram of Twin Peaks, which it fondly parodied—actually starred my older brother, the rare individual who can recite a line without any trace of emotional inflection whatsoever; he was a Bresson model and he didn’t even know it. My brother had presumably been cast because he was visually compelling, for he has bright red hair and at that time it hung down to the middle of his back—at some point he had been nicknamed “Malachai,” after the character played by Courtney Gains in 1984’s Children of the Corn. My eyes, then, had been opened early to the possibilities of amateur filmmaking, and by the time I was fifteen I had already begun to dabble, completing a handful of shoddy shorts with friends, including Side Order of Blood, I Went All the Way to Foreign Country and All I Got Was This Deadly Virus, and The Thames River.
These were shot after school at the stately Federal-style home of my friend Norm Charlton*, whose family owned a Hi-8 camcorder, and who was the most “theatrical” of my high school friends. (This is, of course, a coded synonym identifying Norm as a homosexual, a fact that was then implicitly understood.) Norm was also an RGP participant, along with my friend Rob Dibble, who had starred opposite me in The Thames River. (In said film we played two splenetic, alcoholic English clubmen voluminously debating whether the eponymous river was made of sand or water. I am sorry to report that this was the most promising of our juvenilia.)
Rob was in the grade above Norm and me. He and I shared an interest in what was then called “indie rock” and hardcore punk, and it was through music-related social circles that I met the last element to fall into place: Randy Myers. Randy didn’t go to our school, but came from an adjacent town. I’d first clocked him at a midnight screening of Vertigo at The Real Movies in downtown Cincinnati. He was a chubby kid with a shaved head; the back of the tee shirt he was wearing depicted an X’d up hand holding a submachine gun, alongside the motto ‘STRAIGHTEDGE: IF YOU AREN’T NOW, YOU WILL BE.’ Randy was already working at the Graeter’s Ice Cream parlor at nearby Tri-County Mall when I started collecting my $4.75/hr. there. For some reason this location had become a haven for hardcore kids—maybe it had something to do with Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins having been co-workers at a Georgetown Häagen-Dazs? Anyways, Randy taught me how to quadruple my wages by not ringing up any exact change transactions and pocketing the cash, and we became fast friends talking about Ray Dennis Steckler and shoplifting from the nearby Half-Price Books. While Rob, Norm and I had edited our early shorts using dual VCRs, Randy’s high school actually had video editing facilities for students, and he brought a heretofore-lacking postproduction prowess to the group.
Around this time, Rob and I were trying our hand at writing a screenplay. It was, oddly enough, a parody of the 1995 film Empire Records, creatively titled Kingdom Records, and was meant to be a goof on certain tropes then-prevalent in Gen X-ploitation. (I think we rented S.F.W. for research.) We would get together a couple of times a week after school to hammer out the script and quaff Big-K, then would wind down by firing up Rob’s N64 and playing head-to-head GoldenEye, in which Rob consistently dominated. After maybe six weeks of strenuous, regular work, the screenplay was complete and, upon reflection, completely without merit. Anything that had once seemed amusing about the premise had been sapped of novelty. And so Kingdom Records would be the first in what would become an ever-growing heap of incomplete or never-begun projects, among them such potential classics as The Most Dangerous Gay-me, Night Desires: An Erotic Thriller, The Secret of the Soldier**, and It’s a Retarded, Retarded, Retarded, Retarded World.
Rob and I learned a hard lesson from the failure of Kingdom Records—that once the element of headlong spontaneity was removed from a project, we would quickly grow bored and give up on it. The seat-of-our-pants, make-it-up-as-we-go-along working methodology that we would pursue through the duration of our collaboration evolved from this. The first “feature” that Rob, Randy, Norm and I actually completed as a foursome was born on an idle Saturday afternoon, and captured within two weekends. (The word feature is in scare quotes because we favored the Simon of the Desert-esque 40-odd minute runtime.) It incorporated the same sense of disgust with the glib, smarmy, smirky voice that the media had designated as being that of Gen X—that Tarantino/ You Don’t Know Jack/ The Ben Stiller Show voice that was so ubiquitous in the early-to-mid-90s—which had powered us through the writing of Kingdom Records. It also tapped into our mocking obsession with a 1995 movie called Walking Between the Raindrops, which had been brought to our attention by our friend Marge Schott—it was a boilerplate rom-com shot in black-and-white video, written, directed by, and starring a wombat-eyed fellow called Evan Jacobs, who distributed his terrible films through independent punk record label mail order, and who obviously harbored a desire to be the Woody Allen of the Southern California hardcore scene. (I am overjoyed to report that Jacobs is still plugging away, and that his Walking Between the Raindrops can today be viewed via Amazon Instant Video.)
Our movie was told in flashback by its protagonist, the pop-reference spouting Dirk. I donned a stupid fedora to play Dirk, while Rob and Randy played my best friends, Terry and Grove—almost exactly contemporary to Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson, with Bottle Rocket’s “Future Man” and Rushmore’s “Mr. Littlejeans,” we were exploiting the comic potential of dumb names. To play Dirk’s love interest, Randy somewhat begrudgingly dressed in grunge drag. It wasn’t that we didn’t know any girls, exactly—I had a girlfriend at the time—but we didn’t know any girls that we’d have been comfortable asking to play the film’s denouement. It goes as follows: When Dirk and Terry are away, Randy’s character is raped by Grove. In a daze, she wanders into the street, where she’s run over by a car containing the returning Dirk and Terry. She dies in a pool of gore just moments after relaying what has happened to her to Dirk. He races inside and, after a brief struggle, beats Grove to death with a shovel. Terry finally arrives on the scene, surprising Dirk, who turns and throws the shovel into his innocent friend’s throat. He expires choking and gurgling up stage blood, and we flash forward to Dirk, who finishes his monologue, delivering the title line a second before blowing his brains out against a Reservoir Dogs poster, thus tying up any loose ends. Temperamentally, we did not have a great deal in common with Anderson and Wilson.
It wasn’t that we didn’t care about our characters, the direst accusation that a critic can level at a filmmaker—it’s that we absolutely hated them, having created them with the specific intention of leading them to the slaughter. By association, it may be extrapolated that this was a version of self-hatred, for we were playing caricatured versions of ourselves—the flipside of self-hatred being self-love, with narcissism being at root of the performance impulse.
The film, which was titled Love Sux, was shot almost entirely on the premises of the four-room, single-story house that I then shared with my father, which is also where it premiered to a tight-packed audience of maybe twenty friends. It absolutely slayed. My high school girlfriend, who self-identified as a feminist and who detested me, probably with good reason, stormed out sometime during the rape scene, which everybody else thought was a panic. The rest of us went out to a celebratory dinner at Steak n’ Shake.
Norm, Rob, Randy and I were sufficiently proud of our bitter slab of teenage nihilism to pay for a run of fifty copies of it. We sold a few from a merch table outside of hardcore shows at the VFW hall in Norwood. We slipped one to Margaret A. McGurk, then the film critic for The Cincinnati Enquirer, who was appearing at a local Border’s bookstore to make her Oscar predictions, despite having a nasty-sounding cold. I never heard back from this amiable, enormous woman, whom I had interviewed the previous year for a school project. (I still remember that she cited The Seven Samurai and Raging Bull as her favorite movies.) Our abovementioned friend Marge, who was a clerk at Everybody’s Records, then the best record store in Cincinnati, agreed to sell the remainder from a tank-shaped display stand that had been meant to contain No Limit Records releases. They sold out, more a testament to the curiosity-piquing quality of the endeavor than the quality of the work. A form letter containing Randy’s contact information was enclosed with each tape. One night Rob, Randy and I were hanging out in his room when his phone rang. It was a call from far-off Akron!
“Did you make Love Sux?” the caller asked.
“Yes,” said Randy.
“Oh, we just watched it.”
“What did you think of it?”
“Uh. It was alright.”
In the spirit of independents like No Limit, Dischord, and SST, we created a corporate home for our future endeavors, naming our upstart company after an obscure member in the Periodic Table of Elements: Technetium Films. In addition to the many stalled projects listed above, not to speak of the numerous fake titles listed in the photocopied, cut-and-paste catalog The Technetium Times (the only one that I recollect is Goblin Surprise!) we did manage to finish shooting on two more short features under the aegis of Technetium in the following year: Lucky No Charms and The Incredible Adventure. Lucky was a single joke stretched to the point of snapping for around 50 minutes. The film begins with the eponymous Lucky (Nick Pinkerton) fatally slashing his wrists. After his funeral, Lucky’s friends gather to exchange fond memories of him, though flashbacks reveal the deceased to have been an outright monster whom the world is almost certainly better without. At one point, while filming a sentimental montage of Lucky wreaking all sorts of havoc, which eventually would be scored to Life of Agony’s “Angry Tree,” we shot a scene in which I hog-tied Randy to some railroad tracks as a passing car slowed to watch. After we’d got our shot and were moving on, a police cruiser pulled up, an officer jumped out, ran frantically onto the tracks, and brought an incoming freight train to a screeching halt, brakes showering sparks. This was about as near as we came to Romero’s incident with the flaming dummy. The Incredible Adventure concerned a group of four friends approaching high school graduation—as, indeed, most of us were at this point—going on a camping trip together. (Our friend Tim Layana joined the cast, allowing Randy to do much of the camerawork; Randy also played the small part of a hunter lost in the woods.) The convivial atmosphere of the trip becomes poisoned on the first night, leading to the formation of various backbiting factions, and ending with—surprise!—the violent death of all but one of the friends.
Rob and I, who had pretty laissez faire parents, also completed a host of two-man wonders on our own, usually shot between the hours of midnight and five AM when my father wasn’t home. The resulting films consisted of both of us performing for a fixed-position camcorder in a proscenium arch staging, a setup not much more complex than what had gone down in Edison’s Black Maria. The titles produced in this manner included The Blunder Years, Boredinary People, That Darn Genie Kat (and its sequel, That Darn Genie Kat II: The Wedding), as well as the universally-reviled Gays of Our Lives. All of these indicate a fondness for MAD Magazine-style punnery, an alchemy that would, for example, transform Basic Instinct into Basically, It Stinks. The last-named, along with the abovementioned The Most Dangerous Gay-me, also show a decided interest in juvenile gay panic jiving—this despite the fact that not a one of us would have identified as a homophobe, that our troupe was 25% gay, and that we were, in an irony which wasn’t lost on us at the time, engaging in highly homosocial behavior.
How would one define the Technetium Touch? If I had to identify an “auteur” signature in our collective output, it would be best summarized by Dirk’s pre-suicide monologue in Love Sux, improvised and delivered with uncommon conviction by yours truly: “What I’ve learned is that any relationship between two living, sentient human beings is bullshit…” Though exact contemporaries of America’s most famous high school filmmaker, Dawson Leery, we weren’t particularly enamored of Spielberg. There was a dedication to puerile “sick” humor, with a particular emphasis on murder, rape, general barbarism, and especially suicide. Our house style was totally unscripted, wholly communal. In all of our output, there was no credited director or, obviously, screenwriter. Whoever wasn’t in any given shot would be looking through the camera. The ad-libbed dialogue was hectoring, obnoxious, artificial, and usually unduly awkward. The jokes were “jokes,” followed by braying, overemphatic fake horselaughs belted square into the camera. Again, a primary influence was Chris Elliott, whose deliberately grating comedy style we were all fans of. Our recurrent theme was entropy, the inevitability of things falling apart, with a particular emphasis on the ease with which toxic ill-will could spread among close-knit social groups. This is somewhat ironic given that all of the Technetium personnel have remained good friends to this day, with nary a killing or self-slaughter occurring between us. Given my subsequent career, I have been tempted to think of these early videos as acts of criticism, though other than certain stated targets—Empire Records, Walking Between the Raindrops—it’s difficult to see what we were being critical of, save perhaps life itself.
Our viewing habits were more sophisticated than was usual for Midwestern teenagers—we made and updated and exchanged Top 100 lists, like proper junior cinephiles—though you certainly wouldn’t guess this fact from the ugly art brut that we produced. By the time of The Incredible Adventure, however, a certain refinement had begun to slip into our work—we shots scads of Malick-y cutaways to indifferent nature, and the film’s coda was pure high school Antonioni. Between our three features, our technical prowess, compositional eye, and even the quality of the equipment that we were using increased significantly. (We took classes at a local public access station, and were able to check out their equipment and use their editing facilities after Randy had graduated.) The following year I started in an undergraduate film production program where, along with other eighteen year-olds without the slightest comprehension of life, my wildest pretentions were freely indulged. (In this respect my experience was similar to any arts education, and probably better than most.) Dutifully, I began making “poetic” films that cribbed from Tsai Ming-Liang and Jean Rollin. One, based on a Nick Cave song (!) with a title lifted from an e.e. cummings poem (!!), gave me a pretext to murder the same girlfriend who’d stormed out of the Love Sux screening. (As a sophomore I would make a Pialat-inflected psychodrama video about our breakup, which was received to great acclaim. LOL.) Subsequently, a few women in my life have had occasion to view Love Sux, a copy of which is even now prominently displayed in my apartment. Most have been appalled, and I can’t say that I blame them: “Never,” to borrow from Werner Herzog speaking of the work of Ulrich Seidl, “have I looked so directly into hell”—for what could be more hellish than the unloosed id of a gaggle of teenaged boys? A couple have seemed to really enjoy it, which is worrisome to say the least.
Norm, Rob, Randy and I began a final, unfinished Technetium feature over vacation the summer after my freshman year, a moody black-and-white travelogue of the Midwest shot on a road trip through Chicago and Madison and the House on the Rock and Green Bay and Mackinac Island and Big Bear Dunes. This was to have been our self-reflexive movie about making a movie, our The Last Movie, with experimental interludes and all. We used the words “jazzy” and “freewheeling” a lot when we discussed it, and promptly lost interest in the concept sometime before hitting the Upper Peninsula. The last thing that I remember shooting with both Rob and Randy, who was my college housemate for a time, was a faux-cyber thriller, based on the premise that the Internet, and movies about the Internet, were funny.
I imagine that, all things being otherwise the same, we still would have made videos had we grown up in a Web 2.0 world, though I wonder if we might’ve tried to put a bit more polish on the work, or if the work would have turned out less unpleasant: The unblinking eye of the Internet has a tendency to smother un-self-conscious behavior, and this was not art made with the intention to delight, but a form of rambunctious primal scream therapy. In fact it wasn’t art at all… just a footnote to a footnote in the great, ongoing story of American amateur moviemaking, the wellspring that continually refreshes our national cinema. There are many stories like it, but this one is mine.
*- In the interest of protecting the guilty, I have replaced my friends’ names with those of the Nasty Boys, the relief pitching bullpen of the 1990 World Series champion Cincinnati Reds.
**- After reading this column, Rob reminded me that this Vietnam-set movie was intended to end with a tongue-in-cheek flying peace sign.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.
