Finnegan Begin Again, Part III

This time last year, I was camped out at my sister-in-law's place, house- and dog-sitting, recovering from a grueling day's shoot. I thought I was tired. I look back on that now with the same admixture of amusement and bemusement that I normally reserve for remembering high school. I think, aww, I was cute back then.

Holy shit, am I tired. And sunburned. My ass is quite literally chapped. We just finished getting the abbatoir/lockerroom smell out of the house. Missustool just hosed the salad dressing off the front porch. The air conditioner is, mercifully, running. I've just taken my second muscle relaxer of the evening and my second shower of the day. I'm also drinking beer to celebrate.

So to sum up, I'm tired, sore, red-assed, stoned, burned, working on drunk, fat, dumb, and happy.

Here's what happened.

As I said, we drew the worst movie genre option imaginable, Musical/Western, one of only two we had decided in advance to chuck in favor of a wildcard. By the grace of a merciful God did we land a workable genre — the other two wildcard teams got Coming of Age and Buddy Film, respectively, but we got Disaster.

The writing staff had been discussing story ideas for several days, with special emphasis on those stories that had potential to bridge several genres. A good mob story, for instance, would certainly work for Drama, Action/Adventure or Detective/Cop, but could also work for Comedy, or, for that matter, Family Film. You follow?

Robert had thrown out an idea at IHOP last week that had only at the time drawn one or two responses, but it began to grown on me as the project got closer and closer. He had suggested that if we drew Mockumentary, the idea of doing a Metafilm, a film about film, specifically a mockumentary chronicling the death of a 48 Hour Film, would almost certainly work. Young, idealistic team gets genre, writes questionable script, things go steadily downhill in production, and the whole thing collapses under its own weight.

You may be surprised to discover that, to our knowledge, no one in the (admittedly short) history of the Project has done this. I certainly was. And the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. Comedy. Mockumentary. Could be stretched to Buddy Film or Coming of Age, maybe. Historical? Set it back five years ago. Film de Femme? Easy enough. Horror, certainly.

Disaster.

We debated trying to do a straight disaster film, but let's face it, that's just one bear of a genre. No matter what subgenre you choose, you need effects, and for a poorly-funded amateur team, we knew we risked teetering on the brink of unintended comedy. We tried hashing out a zombie film or postapocalyptic "last man on earth" scenario, but really, it's been done. I'd love to make a zombie film, but I'll be damned if I could come up with a fresh one in three hours. So we took the fallback. The Death of Robert's Movie. A mockumentary with an actual by-God arc, not just riffing on a premise and hoping for yucks. Characters, developments, reversals, the Death of the American Dream.

David Koon and missustool and I had it written and ready to go by midnight, give or take. The specifics had Team Arkansas Times trying to shoot an alien apocalypse film in earnest and watching the thing unravel right in front of them. Robert Kirkpatrick would of course be the director, but Robert demurred at playing the part, citing the difficulties of directing and acting in a movie that we had to shoot in a single day. We finally agreed that I, a hairy man with no acting experience and only slightly more personality, would be the perfect man to play Robert. Tucker Steinmetz, our star from last year, would play the producer/executive producer/actor/key grip that tries to...well...I'm going to save the details. I want you to see it — that is, having not seen the final product, I still want you to see it. Once I see myself on the big screen, taking a giant wooden shit on all our hard work, I may change my mind on that. But for now, I'm still able to call myself proud of my contribution.

As promised, I wore Le Drawers through the entire shoot, and paid the price. It seems wearing ill-fitting snug synthetic underwear while running around all day in 96-degree heat tends to chafe a bit, and so now I squeak when I walk. In addition, I have one of the worst Farmer's Tans of my life: beet red from the neck up, mid-bicep down, and where the gaps in my sandals were. So with that in addition to a locked-up neck and jaw, right now I'm pretty miserable, physically speaking.

But I'll live. I just wrote and starred in a movie that just might not suck. I also have beer.

We shot half of our outdoor stuff down by the Arkansas River (the source of the burnage) and half at my place, then shot all the indoor stuff in my bedroom, kitchen and living room. The place looked like hoboes had taken over by three o' clock, and pretty much smelled like it, too. About fifteen to twenty people stuck in high-nineties heat in my house, having to shut the air and fans off for the sake of noise, and with bright lights burning in the background quickly equated to a smell on par with that found in your average petting zoo. Toby, one of the actors and crew members, kept issuing apologies to "anyone within a three-foot radius of me." Upon finishing a love scene in my now thoroughly-bestanked bed, I and every member of the crew practically sprinted out of my bedroom in a torrent of gags and cries of mercy. It could have been worse only if we'd been tanning hides and eating hot gorgonzola cheese in there at the same time.

But we managed to get the place cleaned and deloused, minus the mosquitos that snuck in the front door, and after a thorough scrubbing and slathering of aloe vera, I am now a puddle of jelly just hanging on long enough to finish these last few sentences so I can sleep.

I have no profound judgments to give you, no penetrating insights born of our seemingly interminable labors, no witty flip of the hand to sign off. I'm bone-tired. I just spent the last seventeen hours of my life making a movie. I have only this wisdom to impart: thank God for air conditioning, showers, and cold beer. Without them, my wife and I might well be pondering divorce right now.

It was tons of fun, as always, and I thank my teammates for their hard work and love. This is truly a passion-filled labor for us all, in between bitching about the heat and making dick jokes, and I'm blessed to work with people so dedicated and determined to make something worth seeing. Thanks, guys, and I'll see you at the screening.

There should be another (probably short) post up Sunday night with reports from our fearless leader and his team of editors. I'll also add some other preliminary housekeeping regarding how you, dear readers, may come to witness our waste of seven minutes. But for now I'm spent and ready to fall over, so for tonight, I bit you auf wiedersehen.