Bored Kids with an 8mm Camera. (Excerpt from an as-yet-unpublished book.)

In 1992, I started scribbling down notes about my family history. 18 years later I have finished the project, and it’s now a memoir of  growing up in the ’50s and ’60s with my five brothers in a big house in Rochester, Minnesota. I’m  proud of the work and though my good agent couldn’t find a publisher, I don’t hold it against her. The market is in fact saturated with memoir: seems everybody came from a fucked-up family, everybody has a dead dad or a rock ‘n’ roller in the basement with a needle in his vein. Christ, did everybody have a dysfunctional childhood? Oh well… like I said, I stand by the work and one day I plan to publish it as an iBook. In the meantime, here’s a small excerpt. It may be of some interest to the creative crowd out there, given that it’s about making movies when we were kids.

Hang on, hang on….what??? … Christ, someone just told me everybody also made movies when they were kids. Jesus.

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Watching the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night gave us the idea of making our own funny movies. They were all victim comedies and we called them “The Ridiculous Films.” They were shot with an old 8mm movie camera that Dad had given up on and if they had a theme it was “Fourth Graders Getting Killed.”

Their structure was classic.

We open on our protagonist, a fourth grader with buck teeth (that would be me) strolling along in front of the Millstone. In Act II, the antagonist is introduced with swift and economic story telling – brother Jeff comes around the corner with a baseball bat and beats the shit out of me. (A pillow hidden in the victim’s coat allows for the delivery of many cinematically robust and satisfying blows.) The fourth-grader collapses on the driveway.

Had the film ended here critics might have rightly argued the work lacked finality; that the entire piece was ambiguous and left the audience asking, “What, ultimately, happened here?” But Act III ties up the storylines in a tidy denouement. Thanks to a cleverly wardrobed body double, when the camera rolls again we see Jeff driving Dad’s car over the crumpled form of our Fourth Grader. Fade to black. (Cut, actually; there’s no fading with a Brownie movie camera.)

Audience test scores were off the chart. Squeals of delight filled the living room when the little 50-foot reel premiered on Dad’s projector. “More blood,” demanded the audience and a sequel was released the following month (after we talked Mom into getting us a new roll of film).

What might now be called “Dead Fourth Graders II” built on the original’s success and used the same opening: fourth-grader stands in front of Millstone. But this time it is brother Dan who enters screen right, grabs the victim and throws him into the house through the open door. The camera, still running, tilts seamlessly up to third-story window where a stuffed body double suffers the indignities of defenestration and thuds on the pavement below.

[pro-player type=”mov” height=”500″ weight=”500″]https://heywhipple.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Defenestration1.mov[/pro-player]

Where’s this going? a savvy audience might ask. Will the narrative clarify the victim’s back-story? Who is he, really? What issues in his past led him to this development? Act III, while answering none of these questions does address the test audience’s earlier suggestion for “more blood.” A crowd encircles the protagonist, now lying unconscious on the concrete. They’re lining up to pay Dan a quarter. But for what, dammit, what?

Ah, it’s the rental fee for the baseball bat, making its second appearance in the Ridiculous Films. As the curtain falls on Act III, the brothers pound the bejesus out of me.

2 Comments

  1. We made movies too, of course. Most of the ones that still exist are from high school and feature humor not a whole hell of a lot more involved than this.

    Actually, the bat rental is comic genius. I almost did a spit take.

    Reply
  2. Hey Luke,

    I’m in the process of finalizing a book myself, and I say explore self-publishing. Whether it’s Lulu, Lightning Source, or publishing on demand, you have a lot of opportunities. It puts a lot more of the onus on you to make things happen, but you retain control of a lot of things as well. It’s funny, I’ve spent 14 years marketing other people’s products. Now I’m looking at my book as my own product, and I’m thinking of all I know about marketing possibilities out there to launch my own product. The publishing world is like any other in our world nowadays: technology and the Internet came along and kicked the establishment in the nuts. Sounds like an interesting book though. Roll with it.

    Reply

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Luke Sullivan

Author, speaker, and ad veteran available to recharge, reinvigorate, and refocus marketing, advertising, and branding firms.

I give a hugely energetic series of presentations on innovation, creativity, branding, and marketing. I spent 32 years in the trenches of advertising (at agencies like Martin, GSD&M, and Fallon) and I’ve put everything I learned into my book, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This. But for me nothing beats taking the message out and speaking to living breathing audiences at clients, agencies, and conferences. You can book me on the button below.

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