Stoner Filmmakers In Love!

In 1998, I believe, my friends and I tried to make a movie. We were nerdy high school kids who tended to skip class more often than not to go smoke pot, which seemed a more worthwhile endeavor at the time. We tended to watch a lot of movies in those days, as well.

This was in the days when the DVD was newborn, and we were still slaves to those glorious analog wonders, the VHS cassette. I prided myself on my vast collection of tapes, some bought new, but most picked up second-hand from various video stores and supermakets.

I had a lot of hard-to-find movies, which I thought was cool. Of course, nobody else seemed to care. It was difficult in those days to find somebody to watch a well-worn copy of "Street Trash" with me.

Come to think of it, that hasn't really gotten any easier.

I remember when Anchor Bay released "The Evil Dead" on VHS, digitally remastered, packaged in a sleek clamshell, with liner notes from Bruce Campbell. I skipped school that day to fetch it. I missed an important Driver's Ed lesson, that day. In retrospect, I believe I made the right choice.

One day, I had a conversation with my best pal, Scott. I'm not quite sure how it happened, but by the time we parted ways, we had agreed to make a movie. We decided that a slasher film would be an easy place to start.

We hashed out a story, involving a lonely, damaged young man who likes to butcher young children near a secluded creek. We called the story "Jonathan", and we wrote a script and everything. We even gave our "studio" a name: Taint Films.

We felt pretty good about ourselves when we printed multiple copies of our masterpiece and began passing them out to folks around school we thought might be interested in contributing.

Scott had a hi-8 camera, and my cousin Ky let me borrow his mother's RCA camcorder, so we had the tools we needed to film our opus. We found our titular slasher in my friend JD, a rather big fellow with sunken eyes who basically looked the part; we were in no position to be picky.

He even had a girlfriend who had agreed to play the female lead, a quiet young lady who likes to jog late at night (always a bad idea in slasher flicks).

We didn't know any young kids to play Jonathan's victims, but we were determined to figure something out. We didn't really do much planning, aside from a single location scouting trip around the neighborhood near our high school. But we weren't going to let our inexperience and ineptitude stop us.

We were going to shoot this fucking movie.

One bitterly cold and icy Saturday in December, we got together to begin shooting "Jonathan".

Then everything fell apart.

We all forgot to bring our scripts, so immediately we were in great shape. Neither JD nor his girlfriend seemed terribly interested in cooperating with their directors. Scott paid some random child we had never met five dollars to appear in our movie.

We managed to shoot one scene with the kid. In the script, Jonathan creeps up behind the kid as he plays on a swingset, coming from behind and smothering him with an ether soaked rag until the kid goes limp.

We didn't have any rags. So instead we just told JD to grab the kid and struggle with him for a minute until the little bastard stops squiggling. As we shot this scene, the kid's mother was calling his name, over and over again (this is audible on the tape). My cousin Ky walked into the shot. And JD started laughing.

As soon as Scott called cut, the kid bolted for home. We had nothing we could use. JD and his special lady went to Dillon's to buy some Chinese food. We went to my grandmother's house for no immediately clear reason, then just drove around for a while.

My cousin's car had a working 8 track player, and there just so happened to be an 8 track tape in the car. It was labeled "Seagull - WSU Sessions". Apparently, Seagull was a band Ky's father jammed with in the 1970's, and Ky somehow came into possession of their legendary "WSU Sessions" 8 track tape.

We popped the tape in, and grooved to the mellow sounds of Seagull for a few minutes, until the player ate the tape. This was the first time this music had been heard by human ears in at least 20 years, and we captured it on tape with Ky's RCA camcorder. Honestly, the music wasn't bad.

Suffice to say, "Jonathan" never got made. I did manage to edit together all of the footage we shot on that fateful day, cutting it into a "documentary" I called "Fiasco! The Musical". It ran nearly an hour, and it was atrocious. But it was technically a documentary about a movie that never got made. And we did it two years before "Lost In La Mancha".

So Terry Gilliam can suck it.

On New Year's Eve, 2000, we shot two very, very short films in the snow, called "Death Car!" and "Pig Fucker".

"Death Car!" concerned two young lads on a late night walk who get abducted by aliens. I had the brilliant idea of shining a keychain flashlight at my actors, to signify the presence of the alien menace. I also began the short with an ambitious tracking shot, following my actors (Scott & Ky) up the spiralling ramp leading to the overpass that crosses the highway near my house.

I fancied myself the new Alfred Hitchcock, I suppose.

"Death Car!" was disposable. Just a goof. But "Pig Fucker"... that was something special.

It couldn't be simpler. "Pig Fucker" was nothing more than 60 seconds of Scott dry humping a ceramic pig, set to Tool's "Aenima". We couldn't stop laughing. To us, it was the most hilarious thing we had ever seen. Our laughter is clearly audible in the footage. I have no idea how Scott managed to keep a straight face.

A year later, I got inspired, and told Scott and Ky that I wanted to shoot more footage, creating a "director's cut" of our beloved "Pig Fucker". In the extended version, Scott's character, named "Mr. Skool" for reasons I won't go into, carries on an illicit affair with a pig named Betsy. This disturbing sexual relationship creates great tension between Mr. Skool and his roommates, played by Ky (Joey Balls) and my brother Matt (Vinnie the Hardcase).

We shot the new footage over two weekends in the Summer. To be fair, we spent most of those weekends getting stoned and watching "Mr. Show", but we did manage to shoot some footage. It took forever to edit, because my only means of editing involved rigging two VCRs together and recording footage from the master tapes, it took forever and looked like shit.

I also inserted some random footage of Scott wearing a Halloween mask, wandering around with a butcher knife. I tried getting creative, rewinding some of this footage and recording it onto tape. I wasn't successful.

In the end, "Pig Fucker: The Director's Cut" ran 24 minutes, not counting the interviews and outtakes I tacked onto the end of the tape. It was too long, confusing, the footage looked terrible and sounded worse, and I was fucking proud of it. I had actually made something, and I didn't give a damn if it sucked.

We captured something on tape during the "Pig Fucker Sessions" that I still find haunting and hilarious in equal measure. There's a small snippet of this hallucinatory nightmare in the final film, but the full sequence is the stuff of legend in my admittedly small circle of friends. But I will discuss this no further.

We tried to make a few more projects in the intervening years, but nothing really came together. Our dreams of becoming a bizarre, stoner-filmmaker collective finally died some time around 2004.

I still use the name "Taint Films" for the photoplays I put together these days, but things will never be the way they were. We were young, idealistic weirdos who certainly tried, but never quite managed to get the job done. Except for "Pig Fucker", of course.

And that brings me to the reason for all this drivel.

I finally decided to post "Pig Fucker" to my YouTube channel earlier this week. It's not the nightmarishly boring "director's cut" from 2002. I managed to trim it down to 7 minutes, 16 seconds. It's leaner and more concise.

The footage still looks godawful, but there's nothing I can do about that. After all, "Pig Fucker" was filmed with a VHS camcorder that was antiquated in 1998.

The YouTube incarnation of "Pig Fucker" is simply as good as it's going to get. I'm finally at peace with this monster, and I'm moving on.

Move on with me by visiting my YouTube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/user/uncleoflies

Maybe one long, introspective night I'll share the rest of the sad tale of Taint Films with you, Dear Imaginary Reader. But not tonight. Tonight, I'm going to listen to Hank Williams and cry.

I saw "The Losers" yesterday, so I'll probably pop up with another lengthy, bitter post in a day or two. You've been warned.