3 Weeks in Huntington

I have often groused about my non-existent "film career."  I mean, when I was a kid, we took the family vacation camera around and made our own Super-8 Star Wars, and later a camcorder became the sole piece of film equipment (along with a lighter and a can of hair-spray) to make Dursin the Firestarter, but after film school, I thought it was time to get serious and actually make a go of it.  It never quite worked out that way, and now, ten years later, I think I'm ready to open the body and determine the cause.  I'm going to try and present an unbiased view, so maybe anyone reading this can determine for themselves if it was just me being whiney or if I just wasn't cut out for the movie biz.

After graduating from Emerson, I decided to give a serious go at this, but I was slightly disillusioned by my set experiences, so I concentrated on writing.  Then, life kind of got in the way, and girls and jobs came calling.  I shifted my writing to comics as a cool side project, and The Secret Monkey was my focus for awhile.  No one bought that, either, but it was damn fun.  My girlfriend at the time was then asked to play the female lead in a movie being directed by a friend who had just directed her in a community theater production of the Diary of Anne Frank.  There were two catches: one was it was filming in Indiana, and the other was that there was no pay.
So, Keri (my girlfriend) asked that I be included on the crew, and we were off to Huntington, Indiana (the birthplace of Dan Quayle) for three weeks.  We were put up in the house of an older, very nice, very religious woman.  The rest of the crew, unlike myself, were getting paid, so the 16 hour days didn't seem to bother them.  And not only that, but they were younger (I was only 25 at the time, but most of them were around 20), and impassioned.  I was not.  I one day complained about working into the next day after starting around 9:00 a.m., one of them said, "That's when you know it's a good day."

Not only were they long, arduous days in the sweltering July heat of Huntington, but that's smack in the middle of the Bible belt.  I don't have a problem with that, really, except that I curse a lot and have had lots and lots of pre-marital sex, which most of them did not agree with (One rule of the house was Keri and I were not allowed to sleep in the same room).  One of the guys, Tommy, who I found hilarious, used to say "stinking," where I would use a slightly different word.  I don't know why I have a problem with certain religions, but it was something that made me uncomfortable for some reason.  I think it was put best by one of the actors, who had traveled from Boston like me, to play the lead's father.  He asked if there were any bars around, and I responded I didn't know (and in fact, I doubted it.)  He said, "I gotta get out of this place.  Too much thumpin'"  I couldn't help but agree.

To illustrate how the movie was going, that actor was suppsoed to get beat up in a dream sequence by his movie-son with a baseball bat.  I found this to be pretty compelling when I read the script, and the prop girl had told me that she had to hunt down an old looking bat to make it credible.  In the actual filming, however, it was changed to simply fists, which I found less interesting.  Plus, he actually punched the guy.  A whole other definition for thumpin'.

*****

The movie itself was sort of a coming-of-age story about a young man living in, I assume, Huntington, IN.  He is asked by his best friend to take out his sister, who is dying of leukemia.  Why this guy had never asked his best friend to hang out with his sister before the leukemia kind of bugged me, but whatever.  This young man, who was played by the writer of the script, was apparently wrestling with all of the depressing issues that 20-somethings deal with.  I wish I could recall more at this point, because I'm hardly doing it justice, but as I recall, he had impregnated a girl in high school, had an alcoholic, abusive father and his band was floundering.  Although, I must say, the band scene was probably the most fun scene to shoot.  We had to do it in the wee hours, after the club we were using had closed.  There had been a casting call for this scene, and dozens of rowdy teenagers had shown up (probably all the ones who lived in the area).  I think I even got in the background several times as a club-goer.  Inexplicably, this punk band, who couldn't agree on what kind of music to play at their gig, played some sort of love song (Whitney Houston or something), and the crowd turned on them.

Beyond that, my memory gets sketchy.  I remember a scene in a zoo, one in a cemetery (I remember one of my jobs was to clean the bird-poop off of a tombstone), several in a diner, and one where I had to hold up the boom in some very murky water for whatever reason (I think Keri had to swim out to a dock to get away from her brooding movie-boyfriend.)  Other than that, I can't recall what it was about, except that this dude had to deal with the fact that his new girlfriend was dying of leukemia.  In fact, I now recall that, while filming, the disease she was dying from changed form leukemia to "unnamed illness."  I don't know why, except maybe that it was 2001, and Googling "symptoms of leukemia" to find out what the Hell to do with Keri would have been more difficult than it would be today.  As it was, my background in screenwriting told me that it needed a polish to add some drama, but the changes they made were subtractions that I thought took away from the script.

***** 

So, this is where things go a little... oogie.  This young actor/writer and I never got along for most of the shoot.  One day, he screamed at Keri during a scene when he was the one who missed the line, and she was so upset she wanted to go home right then.  I naturally was protective, but convinced her to stay.  To his credit, i asked him if we were okay, and he said, "Matt, you should just punch me right now."  In retrospect, I should have, but I think I saw a lot of myself in him. Now only was his name also "Matt," but he reminded me of myself at 21, except here he was trying to make his dreams come true, where, when I was his age, I was figuring it would just happen.  Maybe I was slightly jealous of that fact, and that's why I disliked him.  Although, he also swore at my girlfriend.

When taken in total, the three weeks in Indiana, staying in a house that resembled a church, not getting paid to work long hours, and not only disliking the man I was working for, but not even believing in him, it's probably obvious why I don't chalk this up as a "win."  Add to that the final nail in the coffin: I never saw the movie.  It was supposed to go to festivals, and I was promised as part of my contract that I would receive a copy, but it never happened.  A couple years later, one of the actors, a nice kid named Travis, who lied about his age to be in the movie, emailed everyone he could about getting a copy, so even the principles had not received it.

The real "oogie" was that, by the time I received that email two years after the shooting, Keri and I had broken up, so I responded to it with an embittered reply about how we were all promised things that were never delivered.  Obviously, this was my anger spilling over, and the director replied to call me out on it.  I apologized, and explained, and she seemed to understand.  However, that was the end of our communication, and to this day, I never did get that movie.

Since then, my film work has been sporadic at best.  Mostly extra work, although Darth Vader: A Day at the Office was a really nice return to my roots.  I'm not sure if it's really a case of "It never worked out," or more a case of I never wanted it to work out.  There was a great scene near the end of Six Feet Under when Clair's aunt, who had convinced her to become an artist, tells her "Maybe you're just not an artist."  Claire is incredulous, of course, but all her beleaguered aunt can say is, "I was wrong."  It's a tough pill to swallow when a creative person has to face the fact that they didn't become what they envisioned at 20.  I'm pretty sure the other Matt from Indiana didn't.  So, no jealousy there.  But I hope he's still working on something.  I hope they all are.

(That's me in the Vader suit.  Yes, that's my hairy chest.)