Pictures of You

On a lark, I dug out a VHS dub of some B&W Super-8 films I made after college in the early '90s to see how they held up after all these years. (In school, I double-majored in English/Media Studies - with a concentration in film.) One, "The Killer Inside of Me" - the title ripped-off from a trashy Jim Thompson crime novel - was pretty damn awful. Visually, it wasn't too shabby, but the voice-over I did was really cheesy and melodramatic; it ruins the film. Here's the plot: our heroine meets a stud at a party, they sleep together, and many days later she's sick. She sees an ad on TV for a generic HIV test kit (all my films from that era featured generic brands of beer, etc.), and then visits a doctor who informs her that she is positive. That night in her bedroom, she's visited by unseen men telling her that the government is monitoring her every move. The next scene finds her about to undergo some sort of procedure, when the Feds bust in and arrest her for trying to kill her unborn child (!). A judge declares that the state will remove her viable fetus - and then she'll be executed. The screen goes black as we hear the sound of a vacuum (yes, she's sucked apart). Sick and paranoid, but it was at the tail-end of the Reagan/Bush nightmare...Clinton was still a gleam in the Democrats' eyes.

"The Approach of Impending Doom," on the other hand, ain't half bad. I'm thinking about digitizing the footage and re-editing it on my wife's iBook. "Doom" relays the tale of a man we believe to be a bike messenger, who breaks into an apartment, rifles through the owner's belongings, and then comes across a dead man. The messenger then appears to clean (even anoint) the body, places him in the bathroom tub, and then sprays some sort of liquid on the shrouded corpse. A scene later, we find that the flesh has dissolved, as the messenger fishes out the man's skull from the tub filled with blood. It's influenced by Albert Camus' "The Plague" - especially the nightmarish vision of a city filled with corpses that must somehow be disposed of. For the film's soundtrack, I do a voice-over where I convey two semi-true stories about racism and AIDS.

In a rare instance of shameless self-promotion, you can watch the music video for "Two-Tone Army" that I created for The Toasters, which debuted on MTV's 120 Minutes back in '96 (I was the promotions/marketing director at their label at the time). The band wasn't too cooperative about it, so I shot some B&W Super 8 footage of them at a gig at FIT and at a photo-shoot, and intercut it with some goofy stuff (my sister-in-law's boyfriend skanking, etc.) filmed in my living room. The craziest thing is that band decided to switch songs after I shot all the footage! Of course, we didn't have any synched sound, so everything was faked when we digitally edited the video: the guitarist/singer's mouth was largely obscured by his microphone, and both songs had the same rhythm. The price tag for the whole thing (most of which went to the edit house) was a jaw-dropping $2,500 (a mere drop in the bucket compared to what most bands spend). The band was psyched that their video received a lot of airplay on 120 Minutes, M2 and elsewhere (and an excerpt from the song was used in the Jenny McCarthy/MTV dating gameshow "Singled Out" for a season), but I know the band thought my style filmmaking was too DIY for them (not enough rock star power) and they hired another director for the rest of their videos (and spent loads more money on 'em too.) I still think I gave them the best bang for their buck.