DEAD THINGS
— Screening Thursday October 11, at Nueva Onda Mexican Restaurant, 8:00ish. 2218 College Ave.
For anyone who hasn’t had a chance to witness the Nueva Onda movie nights, now’s your chance to catch the LAST SHOWING OF THE SEASON and a question and answer session with YOURS TRULY!
It’s not quite an Austin premier (I played "Dead Things" in the courtyard of my old co-op) but this is the first time that most people in Austin will have a chance to watch my senior film project from the University of Wisconsin Communication Arts Department.
"Dead Things" is a heavily Jan Svankmajer, Brother’s Quay influenced mixing of stop-motion animation and slow-motion live-action. Like much of the art that I’ve created, I made the mistake of making something that I would think was really cool, as opposed to something that would actually make sense. There’s a man chasing some sort of land-calimari through his house and encountering various creatures culled from the meat aisle at the local asian grocery. there’s a chicken/fish, a climbing pig-stomach, and headless smelt.
I shot this film on 16mm film, way back in 1997, about fifteen minutes before everybody in the world turned to digital video. It’s an insanely expensive medium and cumbersome. Just to do something simple like make titles with flaming letters involved shooting five different lengths of film. One length of film was footage of burning newspaper, another was the black mask of lettering, another was the blank filling of the lettering, another was the double-exposure of lettering and flame footage, and then a final composite projection of black masking and flaming lettering. The titles probably cost me a day of work and fifty bucks, but were no more than 15 seconds of actual film footage.
At the time, "Dead Things" was probably the second most ambitious film made in Madison, Wisconsin for all its 12min length (I’m always a distant second to Scott Rice). During the premier screening of "Dead Things" in my communication arts film production class it blew everyone away. Instead of picking the film apart, my classmates greeted it with awestruck silence. Jim Kreul, the TA, phrasing himself very carefully said, "The technical sophistication of this film makes it difficult to critique." Which was his way of saying, yes it’s really cool, but it doesn’t make any sense.
"Dead Things" was supposed to be my ticket to the big time. I got the "Dead Things" rough cut transferred to an actual 16mm print, which UW communication arts students almost never did. Have you ever tried to get an industrial film laboratory to work with an ignorant student from Wisconsin? It’s not fun. And it’s not cheap.
With the print, I was able to submit "Dead Things" to film festivals. All the major festivals at the time rejected it. But it did get accepted to "The Wilmington Exchange Festival". I talked to the programmer on the phone for an hour, because the festival was just that cool. Unfortunately I was too poor and lame to visit the festival. It also got into the "Athens International Film Festival." No, not that Athens. The Athens that’s in Ohio.
My second round of failure came in the following couple of years with the rise of internet film. By this time I had transferred the "Dead Things" film print to a halfway decent video format. Have you ever tried to get an industrial film-to-video transfer house to work with an ignorant graduate from Wisconsin? It’s not fun. And it’s not cheap.
Back in the day it was actually difficult to get your film online. You had to physically mail them a copy of your film that you would never get back. You had to fill out legal documents and contracts. And then, when it was actually online, it would take people ten minutes to download it into a crappy-resolution format. I got onto ifilm this way, and a couple of others. I doubt if more than a couple of dozen people actually bothered to watch it all the way through.
The most interesting of the these online film experiences was the spectacular burnout of anteye.com. Their six-month rise and fall and their zany dot-com business plan is cogently detailed here. From my perspective, it seemed like anteye was offering me vast wealth and fame, and all I had to do was have the most popular film in Madison. I don’t know how close "Dead Things" came, but I went to their premier party in the Barrymore Theater. Anteye was flush with imaginary internet money, so they rented this huge movie palace and hired SPAM sculptors and local fusion music groups to make themselves look cool. Because I had a film on the site, I had this anteye membership card with a computer-chip looking thing in it that got me as much free beer as I could drink. Which you can bet I did.
Then came the height of the festivities. The movie-screen lit up with a digital-satellite link-up with the other anteye parties in the other anteye.com creative hotspot communities around the country: Portland, Austin, and Modine, Iowa or some other inane-ass town. The CEO of anteye came on, the fast-talker who conned honest capital investors out of their money in the first place. He was bald and he wore a pink feather boa. He looked like a gay Jesse Ventura.
Then they announced the winners. I stood in the Barrymore balcony, trying to hide my excitement, and the blossoming hope that a magic carpet of dot-com money would carry me away and make me free of that provincial dirthole.
Scott Rice won.
I hate him so much.
At least anteye.com was a huge wasteful conjob.
But if you want to see "Dead Things", the film to which I pinned all the hopes and dreams of my misspent youth, then you should head down to the Nueva Onda Mexican Restaurant this Thursday, October 11. It’s near the HEB on Oltorf on that weird shortcut street that branches off South Congress. I’ll probably show up a bit early because there’s a happy hour with $2 beer (but I seem to recall that it ends at 7).
Also, there’s other stuff playing that will probably even make sense.
