On December 17th 1903, two brothers went to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, climbed the tallest dune, and set the world record for the shortest single unit of time it takes to change the world.  For all the fanfare that history has afforded the first manned flight of the Wright Brothers, this much sung enterprise lasted only twelve seconds. 

I can't imagine many endeavors we could attempt in our time where twelve seconds would be considered a success, but to them that twelve seconds was the culmination of a dream (and a considerable amount of work).  Twelve seconds in which the last six were probably more a matter of gliding than flying, but that doesn't matter.  I have stood at the top of this hill myself, and I can tell you that if I had fallen it would have taken longer than twelve seconds for me to roll to the bottom.  But that doesn't matter either.  What matters is that in those twelve seconds they proved to the world what they already knew to be true:  It was possible for man to take to the skies.

Those twelve seconds made the world believe in their dream and fired the imagination of a generation to usher in the age of aeronautics.  Sixty Six years later man walked on the moon.  Babies born in the moment of the Wright Brothers' historic flight would live to see man take not only to the skies, but to the stars.  In the century that followed those twelve seconds we have sent spacecraft to other planets and launched probes that travel beyond our solar system.  We live in an age of limitless possibilities because of the Wright Brothers and their twelve second flight.

So I reject any argument that I am incapable of changing the world.  Nothing is broken that isn't fixable, and no problem is so big or so wrong that it can't be put right with faith and hard work.  You just have to think "Twelve Seconds" - the shortest recorded amount of time required to change the world.  If they did that in twelve seconds, what could I do?

Because the world is changing anyway, a little bit every day, whether or not we take part in it.  And all any of us needs is one good moment - just a few seconds - to help change it in a way that makes a difference.

It's the Friday before St. Patrick's Day. The actual day is Monday, but some astronomical anomaly put St. Patrick's Day in the same week as Easter this year, something that apparently happens with the same frequency as visits from Halley's Comet.  The church takes umbrage at the prospect of the city engaging in wild frivolity in the week of Easter, so all St. Pat's festivities were scheduled for the Friday before, out of respect for Jesus.  It is a strange sliding scale we use to determine what we think would offend Him, but whatever.  It's a three day weekend, either way. 

                I'm starting to agree with the Guinness company:  Maybe we should just nationalize this holiday and be done with it.  A nationally accepted St. Patrick's Day Weekend would be easier to keep up with, not to mention a boon to the Savannah economy.

                The Rail understands this, which is why they offer a free breakfast every year. 

                We reached the Rail just before 8:00 in the morning, even though we'd been instructed by the management that we should shoot for 7:30 in order to beat the crowd.  There was indeed a crowd lined up outside the door when we got there.  Could the place be that packed already? 

                The year before this the signal that it was time to go home was when we'd reached the Rail and discovered that there was a line around the block and they'd been letting people in periodically in groups of four.  We'd been traveling in a group of twelve all day, which meant our party would've had to wait at least an hour for entry.  When you can't even get into the Rail, your welcome in this town has expired.

                Incredulous that we'd reached this point at 7:00 in the morning as opposed to 7:00 in the evening (as it had happened the year before), I walked past the line to the door to investigate further.  When I got there the door was closed (something else I was not accustomed to seeing), and the line begin at a rope set up just outside it. 

                Having no better idea, I asked the first person in the line.  Either this would be the man in charge of the door or the one who had decided to wait there. Either way, he'd better have a damn good reason for it.

                "Are they letting anyone in yet?" I asked him, still not prepared to believe the place was already filled to capacity.

                "They're still closed," he said courteously. "They don't open until 8:00."  So the plan was working perfectly; it was only a few minutes until 8:00.

                But as all okay people do, he had a douche friend with him. "Yeah, that's why there's a line," he said in a snide tone, mugging just slightly to the girl that was hanging out with them. Apparently he had mistaken my advance as an attempt to compromise their position instead of a simple recon and was using this opportunity to put me in my place. To illustrate his point he took hold of the rope that marked the line and added:  "Did you see this?"

                Taken aback by this discourtesy, I grabbed my crotch and retorted:  "Do you see this?" which seemed to quiet him.  Still smiling but not yet satisfied, I added: "motherfucker." Then I turned and walked to the back of the line.

The girl laughed and said "Happy St. Patrick's Day!" to the crowd, who had unfortunately all witnessed this indignity.              

The day had not yet begun, and here I was trying to start a fight. 

                And I hadn't even started drinking yet.

I have mentioned before that I have made a bid for the Presidency.

Perhaps that warrants a bit of explanation...

I should think my reasons for wanting to run were obvious, given the current state of things.  But how might I make things better?  That's the real question on America's mind.

The Gilberto Plan is centered on the principle of the 3 R's:  Robots, Ray guns & Rocket packs.  I firmly believe that the 3 R's can fix everything that is wrong with America.

First of all, there is the military issue. Why, with our wealth of resources, should we be putting our soldiers' lives at unnecessary risk when we could develop robot soldiers to take on that risk for them?  It's not like robot soldiers would be costing our troops their jobs, no, we'll need someone to operate these mechanical monsters by remote control (we're not going to give them minds of their own - I've watched countless movies on this subject and it never ends well).  What better method of warfare for the Playstation generation?

Because who's going to go to war with us if it means having to face down an army of terminators without ever getting the chance to cause a single enemy casualty?  There's a strong psychological element at work here.

Which is why I think ray guns are essential to the mental wellbeing of every American. Guns are great and all, but if everybody had their own personal Star Trek-style stun gun it would really even the odds.  You can't just go around shooting people, but if some lunatic came at you in an alley you wouldn't think twice about zapping him with a taser. A measured non-lethal response is all it would take to chip away at the victim mentality that seems to be a growing problem in this country.

Ray guns of a more potent variety would also be an effective tool in the hands of our robot soldiers. Bad enough for our enemies to be hurling rocks (or firing their puny bullets) at our titanium protectors, but now they have to be looking down the barrel of a laser death ray while they're doing it?  No one's gonna want a piece of that action.  Talk about peace through superior firepower!

The ray gun initiative would also see the invention of a doomsday-style space laser.  This is not intended to protect against alien invasion (although that would be a definite application if the circumstance arose), this is actually a crucial element of the Gilberto environmental plan.

The Gilberto environmental plan:  DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT.  That's right, I would be the first president to actively declare war on the Earth. 

I'm sick of being held hostage by all its ecological particularities and their sycophantic proponents.  No more, America; we'll free ourselves of Earth's atmospheric grip even if it means destroying the Earth itself.

Tired of hearing about Global Warming? Well, get ready for Global Cooling! That's where my space cannon comes in. I intend to melt the moon.  It's made of ice, right? Or has ice on it, or something.  So let's melt that bitch and nip this Global Warming crap once and for all.

I mean, do we really need the moon for anything? What, the tides? Fuck them tides! Am I the only one who's sick of planning my fishing trips around the temperament of the moon and its many phases? I'm sick of everything we do being dictated by the requirements of every fragile little eco-system anyway.

Like the panda.  Everybody wants to tell you all about pandas and how hard it is to get them to mate. Fuck them pandas!  Monochromatic maybe marsupials, can't fuck to save their own species... what the hell kind of survival instinct is that?  People can't relate to that level of apathy.  We fuck for no reason at all.  I'll punch a panda's face.  Mark me, world...

Oh yeah.  The third R.  Sorry, folks, I got a little worked up there for a second.

Rocket packs are my answer to America's dependence on foreign oil.  Forget oil, man!  And forget those vanilla hybrids.  And if an electric car were in the cards we'd have seen it by now. No, America is moving into the future, and it's the future that the American people deserve.  Robots and ray guns are a great start, but everyone in this country feels utterly betrayed by modern science that the promise of a personal jetpack was never upheld.

Not only are jetpacks wicked awesome and the very embodiment of the future, but they are also our alternative to fossil fuels (we could power them with hydrogen or something).  Forget traffic jams and gridlock. Hell, forget airports too!  What better way is there to get around than a jetpack?

The Gilberto Plan would see every American zipping around in their own rocket pack, zapping their detractors with ray guns and settling our disagreements abroad with remote control robots. 

It's time to start thinking about the future, and I'm just the man for the job.

(As a presidential candidate, I am also clearly a whore.  So if you want to hear other similar observations - and read about my personal brush with the end of the world - buy my new book "Apocalypse Party" available on the Dark Crazy bookstore, www.lulu.com/darkcrazy, or follow the link below)

http://www.lulu.com/content/2400952

St. Patrick's Day in Savannah is a little different for locals than it is for visitors.  Why fight the crowds to pay a cover to go to bars you hang out in every weekend anyway?  But we do partake.  Usually it's the better plan to start early, drink all day, watch the parade and be back home before sundown.

                Now, this parade business is something of a tradition for us as well, because of all the times I can remember "watching" or "following" the parade, it mostly consisted of elbowing my way through a mass of people within hearing of the parade but never actually seeing it.  This process typically finds you shitfaced and exhausted by the end of the day.

                This time the plan panned out better than most and Kris took us to the corner of Gaston Street, where her friend Holly and some people had set up camp.  Not only could you see the parade, but they had an office with a bathroom down the street and hundreds of jell-o shots in the fridge.  I tried to chip in cash for this and they would have none of it.  God bless them.

                Coming out of the bathroom into the kitchen I came across two extremely verdant, extremely attractive young ladies whose names I can't remember if I ever knew them at all.  "Are you going to do one with us?" asked the dark-haired one.

                "Yes," I told her, without the slightest concern as to the nature of the question.  This is the way I am wired.

                "Great!" said the fair-haired one (whose name may have been Gwen), opening up the fridge and taking out two syringes the size of turkey-basters filled with something green. "We don't have any more lime," she lamented. "What flavor do you want?"

                "I don't care." 

                She produced one filled with something purple and handed it to me.  Then entered our host, whose name I also don't remember (but really should try, since he invited us all back next year). I'm going to guess and say it was Bacchus. They served him as well and we squeezed the contents of the syringes into our mouths, swallowing it all down at once.

                Back out on the street they were handing out some home-made concoction (also green) that seemed to be in some part Gatorade and the rest some kind of liquor.  At this point I was like a child at Christmastime, pointing at the TV during every toy commercial and saying "I want that".

                "I want one," I said passively, pointing at the strange brew.  One of them heard me, seizing on the opportunity. 

                "You want one?"  Still it was like an exchange between an adult and a child.

                "Uh-huh."

                "It's got Tequila in it."

                "I don't care."

                So then I drank the Irish Tequilaide with the same fervor as I'd accepted the jell-o shot.  It had been hours since breakfast and we weren't in any danger of slowing down, even though we'd stopped buying alcohol.

                Russ had squirreled away a banana into the satchel that Kris had insisted on bringing (which came in handy even though she also insisted it was a communal responsibility to carry it).  He had finished the banana and was now approaching me with the peel.

                "What do I do with this?" he asked me.

                Fuck do I care?  "Throw it in the grass."

                "I don't want to litter."

                "It's a banana peel. It'll bio-degrade."

                "It's still littering."

                At this point I noticed that there were PETA representatives by the side of the street (Christ knows why).  They were cute and friendly, waving signs that said "Go Green - Go Vegan" and waving their cans around in bio-degradable bras made of cabbage.

                "They'll know the answer," I told Russ calmly, and marched over to raise the issue with the blond one whose name I will never know in this life.

                She very quickly admitted that she wasn't certain as to the banana peel conundrum but told me that I shouldn't eat meat because of the amount of fossil fuels required to transport meat and the atmospheric repercussions.  Now, friends, I happen to be a big believer in alternative fuels, so I immediately suggested that would it not be more efficient to find a more eco-friendly fuel than fossil fuels so we could eat as much meat as we wanted?  And for that matter, if everyone eating meat suddenly created an equal demand for vegetables wouldn't we expend just as many fossil fuels to transport the vegetables, with equal atmospheric repercussions? 

                This conversation continued only a few minutes before her handler interceded, handing me a brochure, inviting me to check out the web site and subtly suggesting that I get lost.  Then Russ arrived on the scene to inform me that he'd tossed the banana peel anyway, so any further discussion was unnecessary.  And I still feel that the very fact that she had a handler in the first place proves she was just a tarted up vegetable proxy trying to woo me with her cabbage tits and therefore I won the argument by default.  She was cute, though.

                I went back up to go to the bathroom again.  Kris was inside getting a drink.  "Where did you get that?"

                I was wearing a sticker that said "goveg.com".

                "I think I'm a Vegan now," I told her.

                "You pussy." With a stern not-on-my-watch sort of determination, she ripped the sticker off my shirt and tossed it in the trash.

                We mostly promoted the Bug premiere through print, as opposed to the radio blitz we were able to set up in Carrollton.  This mostly consisted of manlove doing interviews in which people kept assuming he was the director of the film (instead of me).  It's a different scene than in Carrollton; no one knows us here.

                Manlove arranged to have a large block of ice donated by a local ice supplier and arranged to have someone carve an ice sculpture for the Rape Crisis Center's 25^th.  That boy had an eclectic array of unusual powers. 

                I designed a fancy movie poster and we had two printed out full size on foam board (that's all we could afford).  I borrowed an easel from work so we could display one outside the entrance of the event.  We had to borrow a projector because the movie that followed ours was on film reel and ours was a VHS dub (we didn't have a Beta deck to screen the master).

                There was a lot of pointless negotiating with the movie boys about the number of reserve tickets we had to have available, but it all worked out.  We even managed to arrange for a TV news crew to cover the event.

                But the event goes well and we manage to screen the movie successfully, and after delivering a final "thank you" to the crowd with a plea for more donations, we step out for what seemed like an eternity of pictures with family and friends.  Brooks and Melissa are there, and Milford turned out too.  We've just recently reconciled whatever feud we've been having, so this is the first time I've seen him in public for a while. 

                "You're a poet," Milford assures me.

                Jessi has come down for the premiere also.  When the movie was over there was a long awkward lack of reaction from the crowd as the credits drug on forever.  We drew them out because we liked the end title song so much we wanted as much of it as we could fit in the movie.  "They're not clapping yet because they want to hear the music," I told her.  This turned out to be true.

                This is only the second time my father has seen one of my public screenings, the first being the Night & Day debacle.  "This is the first thing you've ever done where the execution was as good as the planning," he tells me.  I will never be prouder of anything I make than I am hearing my father say this.

                Then there is a prolonged discussion amongst our parents about how we're going to be famous filmmakers.  Then the pictures.  Then the news crew is outside to interview us about the event.

                Wilson and Philippe (our boom operator from the shoot) are outside with us, too.  The interviews start running long and we need to break down for the Band of Outsiders to screen some documentary about the Sex Pistols or something.  I can't get back in there so I ask Wilson and Philippe if they wouldn't mind breaking down the projector and moving around some chairs so the movie guys can do their thing.  Wilson complies without complaint, the whole exchange being further proof that he is a hero of my mythology and I am an asshole. 

                But it all happens so fast, and it's over very quickly, and nothing like this will ever happen for us again.  The interviews are over and the crew starts packing up their stuff.  "Don't you want to interview us?" one of the Band of Outsiders asks.

                "No," the reporter says dismissively, getting into the van.  "We've got what we need."  And off they go.

                On the way home we pass two guys between the hell out of each other off MLK; another ill portent in my estimation.  "I hope they send you a thank you note for this," my mother insists, referring to the Rape Crisis Center.  Did the one in Carrollton ever send you a thank you note?" 

                "No, mom," I tell her.  She's part of the thank you note generation; these things are important in that world.  Myself, I call on people all the time to do things for me and I don't remember ever thanking any of them.  I always acted like I was doing them a favor by letting them be a part of it.  So it'd be hypocritical to expect a thank you from anybody else for the same reason.

                "It's the least they could do," she insists.  Which isn't entirely true.  The very least you can do is nothing, which is about what you can expect from people most times.

                That whole event, despite making us the "talk of the town" as manlove put it, did not by itself lead to anything.  A lot of false starts and failed attempts followed, but we never really managed to get anything else off the ground.

                And years later, as manlove was packing up and moving out, he pulled two envelopes out of a drawer and said to me:  "Remember these?  I found them in my trunk."

                "What are they?"

                "They're thank you notes from the Carrollton and Savannah Rape Crisis Centers.  They must've been in my trunk the whole time.  Crazy."

                "They sent us thank you notes?" I asked.  For years the mere mention of either of these events elicited incredulity from my mother that we were never formally thanked for our role in them.  All this time the thank you notes in question had been hidden away in manlove's trunk and the addled recesses from his ego-driven mind.  He'd been hoarding the only real accolades we'd ever gotten all for himself.

                "You never saw these?" he asked innocently, trying to cover his tracks but not thinking it through enough to support the effort.

                "How would I have seen them if they've been in your trunk this whole time?"

                "Well, here they are if you want to see them."

                Thanks.

                It's the night of The Bug's premiere. We've managed to secure a screening at the Cafe Metropole, which is an old bus depot that's been converted into a posh eatery.  There's a grand piano in the dining area; the first time we walked into the place a guy off the street came in and just started playing.  It was a neat scene until they kicked him out.  For some reason this struck me as an ill omen.  They agreed to let us screen our film there as the opening act to their first weekly movie night. 

                This arrangement created an unsteady and dissatisfying association between us and a group called the Band of Outsiders, the guys who conceived of the movie night.  They weren't thrilled with sharing the venue or with splitting the profits, especially since our part of the door was promised to the Savannah Rape Crisis Center.  We'd arranged for our premiere to be a fundraising event to commemorate the center's 25^th anniversary.  An odd cause for celebration, if you ask me, but a just cause to support.  The compromise was that ticket sales would go to the Band of Outsiders and food and drink sales would be donated to the Rape Crisis Center.  I'm still not happy with that split, but our first benefit, a special screening of our movie Sublimation to raise funds for the Carrollton Rape Crisis Center, had only raised a couple hundred bucks.  Something's better than nothin', so we took what we could get.

                There's a guy sleeping on the couch when Mom and Dad enter the apartment.  "Who is that?" Mom asks me.

                "That's Doug," I tell her.  This is the full extent of information I have to offer on the subject.  I don't know who Doug is either.  He works at Ruby Tuesday's with manlove (his current day job), but for the duration of our preparations for the premiere, Doug is on hand to assist with various tasks and, apparently, live with us. Once this arrangement is complete Doug will no longer be around and will, to the best of my knowledge, disappear from the face of the Earth forever.

                Wilson is here too.  He's come to see the premiere and visit, but I keep trying to put him to work because I'm just exactly that kind of asshole.  The toilet keeps running, one of many issues I haven't had time to address.

                "You really should get that fixed," Wilson advises me.  It may surprise some people to discover that he is one of my ambassadors of common sense, but not if they actually know him (and me).  "That'll run up your water bill."

                Wilson says this in front of my mother, and for all the years that follow this statement the mere mention of Wilson's name will fill her face with a tranquil assurance that all is right in my world.  "I like him," she says each time this happens.  "He's sensible.  He's the one who cared about your water bill." In my personal mythology as represented in my mother's mind, this distinction has earned Wilson a place in the pantheon of heroes. Wilson - the Demigod of Water Conservation, Preserver of the Utilities.

                Wilson is aware of this with some delight, and will often just say to me in conversation: "You need to get that plumbing fixed."  This is a maternally approved euphemism for: "Listen to me:  I am wiser than you."

                My mother sighs disapprovingly, kneeling down to pick up a couple of pennies that have fallen on the carpet.  "You have money just lying on the floor," she says with reproach.

Summer 2000

                "What are you doing?" manlove asked, entering excitedly through the front door.

                I was standing over the stove. "I'm cooking dinner," I told him.  It didn't seem like something that bore explanation.

                "Well, turn it off.  We're eating downtown."

                "Why?"

                "I met a guy today that you're gonna want to meet," he said, in that oddly enthusiastic cadence that overtook his voice when he was on the verge of something he thought was going to be a big break.

                "It can't wait?  I've got chicken nuggets!"

                "They'll keep, now come on!"

                So I turned off the oven and we were on our way to meet with a guy who published his own comedy tabloid.  By meet  I mean pick up from his house in mid-town and take him downtown to City Market, where we discussed how he printed his paper and distributed it to local gas stations where it was then given away for free.  It was neat, but not illuminating as to how it could be helpful to us.

                "What exactly makes this a 'drop all chicken nuggets' emergency?" I asked them impatiently, devoid of sympathy for the fact that only one of them knew what I was talking about.  "What does any of this have to do with us?"

                He told us how he ran a theater that put on stage productions in the mall, which interested me because I had a play I wanted to produce.  He talked about how he'd been an extra on The Legend of Bagger Vance (Matt Damon's cool, Charleze Theron's a bitch, yada yada).  We hung out for a while downtown, but never actually ate dinner at all.  We talked about many things that were at face value interesting, but seemed to go nowhere, then we agreed that we should work on some kind of project together, after which we drove him back to his house and never heard from him again. 

                Then I re-heated my chicken nuggets, ate, and went to bed.

Reflections

People we met while trying to get famous:

                At an Atlanta fashion show we met a guy manlove insisted was "the biggest independent director" in Atlanta.  We had a big business meeting with him at his brother's house on the South end of Atlanta.  This was because it was a more professional environment, I guess, but it's not very professional to have to drive all the way past the airport to have a meeting in a house that doesn't even have air conditioning.  A dining table does not constitute a conference room.

                We busted our asses to get a write-up in a film magazine that was printed out of a woman's apartment.  Then we tried to sell her on a film project we were developing which hadn't even been written yet, despite the fact that we'd drawn up a budget.

                Manlove struck up a conversation with a guy in a bathroom because he was wearing a Steelers shirt and ended up being a producer for soft core erotica (mostly starring his wife).  He invited us to come hang out with him in South Beach because he was a strip club bouncer and owned a house there.  But did we?  No.

                A guy who owned a theater and production company was producing a movie in Savannah to be shot on digital Blair Witch-style.  I signed on to be  his Assistant Director, worked for him for free (or for "points of a point" of the net profit) for one day, then quit to take a job as a contractor and never even called to tell him.

                The special FX guy and Production Artist we met while making an awful and (thankfully) unfinished direct-to-digital psycho-slasher titty flick.  The kind of guys you could hang out with at the Pink Pony, and who very nearly helped us get our own feature film off the ground.

                  A gig he very nearly took until enough people called to warn him that that guy was the devil.

                And an endless list of people and stories I've already told anyway, so you get the point.  The real point is that, for the most part, the people who were the most helpful and the most instrumental in all our projects weren't the ones who wanted to help us get famous or the ones trying to impress us with all the little things they'd done to make themselves famous.  They were our friends.  When I look back at all the people I worked with, all the people I met while toiling to create something of significance, the only ones that stand out to me, the ones I'm happiest to have met, were the ones who are still my friends now.

                I can reminisce with these guys about all the times we had, the tragic missteps and missed opportunities, and the damn near inconsequential moral victories that always kept us going.  I can reflect on these moments with them, now that we're older and working real jobs, because we came out the other side still friends.  And even though we now accept that our big break may not be coming, we can laugh about it all because things worked out all right. 

                And we share those wild stupid nothing adventures, trying to make it without quite knowing what "it" is supposed to be.  But in that respect we did make it.  We made it out, we made it through, we made it work as best we could to make it last for as long as it could, and for a while there we made it happen. 

January 2000

        "Do you remember Joe Milford?" manlove asked me, coming through the door in kind of a panic. 

                "No."

                "I almost ran over him with my car!"  This may sound weird to you guys, but this is a pretty typical manlove conversation-starter.

                "Okay."  Manlove almost killed someone I never heard of.  Whatever.

                "He's coming over for dinner tonight!"  This, too, was about as linear as anything manlove ever said.

                "Why?"  Me and manlove were like the Odd Couple.  Not only did we work together to launch ill-fated film projects, but we were also roommates.  And like any couple, one of us (him) was always getting the other (me) involved in awkward social situations.  "You hit a guy with your car and now I have to have dinner with him?"

                "And his girlfriend.  So we'll have to clean the whole house, and vacuum.  She's allergic to dogs.  We'll have to put Thomas out until they're gone."

                "Fuck, man," I whined.  I am selectively anti-social, taking violent opposition to certain activities with very little warning and then randomly embracing other events which to anyone else would seem to require just as little effort.  This is why I need social people in my world to force me to leave the house.  All this aside, this was sounding like an awful lot of work with no promise of payoff.

                "You really don't remember Joe?" he insisted.  "From West Georgia?" 

                Manlove was always putting new people in my life.  It was what he did best.  He seemed to have an unlimited capacity for meeting new people and re-connecting with old acquaintances.  And this, in turn, generated no end of unwanted social obligations for me.  Because manlove was unequivocally convinced that everyone he met could make us famous.

February 2000

                "I'm going to call her  Gladys," manlove said proudly.  As we pulled away from the Universe Trading Company one of its legs (which was neither adjustable nor removable) jutted conspicuously out the back window of my car.  Gladys was a weathered full body mannequin who was in good shape despite her silver granny wig.  She also wore stylishly uncool glasses and came with a straw hat.  We were, presumably, in pre-production for a project we'd conceived with Joe Milford.  He was a poet and we thought it'd be interesting to do a sort of montage voice-over video project touring the city with a mannequin and shooting her in different locales, all with a narration supplied by one of Milford's poems.  Very artsy and avant garde. 

                We were still in pre-production for The Bug at this time, so the unnamed Joe Milford project was just something we were just kicking around until manlove discovered Gladys and decided we had to buy her.  I was the only one with cash at the time (not sure how that happened), so the mandate quickly shifted into I had to buy her. 

                So I bought a mannequin, and for years we told people it was "for a project", a project that never left the conceptual stage, never had a script, and was abandoned almost immediately.  In fact, the only thing we ever did to contribute to that project was buy the mannequin.

March 2000

           Milford was drunk as hell, singing an improvised ballad to a visiting friend of manlove's that he had decided to call "Calico" (for reasons I can't begin to remember).  Calico was using this visit as a pretense to meet up with a girl he'd met during some kind of live fantasy role-playing game in Atlanta.  After having dinner with Calico and his fantasy girl we drew the following revelations from her: 1.) She had previously been married and 2.) She was seventeen years old.  This information was disseminated in a formless void of unrelated rants about various oddball things she had done throughout the course of her short life, reinforcing the intuitive axiom that it's probably not a good idea to drive 200 miles to have a clandestine rendezvous with underage girls you met while pretending to be a medieval warrior.

                While we explained this to Milford over many beers, he drew a riotously karmic satisfaction from Calico's misfortune. Then he walked into the kitchen and proceeded to piss in the sink. This distressed manlove because his parents were supposed to come by later on that evening and we still needed to clean house.  I was preparing for their arrival by mopping the floor with dish soap. 

                The reckless abandon with which I blatantly ignored the prescribed usage of the dish soap sent manlove into a frenzy.  "You're going to leave streaks!" he screamed at me, somehow managing to remain oblivious to the fact that Milford was debasing the basin in which we washed our dishes.  The absurdity of this hypocrisy ignited an equal outrage in me, and I vowed to abandon all cleaning of any kind.

                Shortly after this incident Milford and I had a drunken falling out with each other over something frivolous that I don't remember, and stopped speaking to each other for months.

                Once we finished shooting The Bug, it was time to bring in the Orlando team to edit it.  By this time manlove and I had assigned GI Joe code names to everybody (for no reason at all).  I was Duke and he was Flint.  Wilson was Gung Ho.  And our editor in Orlando was given the honored title of Snake Eyes.  He was a cool dude who'd been an Air Force Para Jumper (which is basically their equivalent of the Green Berets) and for some time an actual street fighter.  I do not question that either of these are true.

                Me and manlove went down to Daytona for the weekend because Snake Eyes had access to an editing bay there.  We start setting up and Snake Eyes says "we just have to be out of here before morning."

                "What happens in the morning?"

                "The people who work here come in first thing.  If we're still here when they do, that would be bad."

                "Don't you work here?"

                And he kind of grinned at that.  "Well... not anymore.  Don't worry; I still have all the security codes.  It'll be fine."

                There was really no turning back at that point.

                And everything was fine, until the morning was close at hand and we were nowhere near finishing.  "Let's just wrap this up and re-schedule later," I decided.

                "I don't know if we'll be able to get back in here," Snake Eyes argued, then said to himself casually:  "We should put a title on this so we know what it is."

                Manlove and I exchanged nervous glances as Snake Eyes pecked away merrily at the character generator.  It wasn't that critical to put a title on what we'd done if we were all going to end up in prison over it anyway.

                "What time do people start coming in?" Manlove asked him.

                "Usually in about an hour.  Sometimes earlier."  He started dubbing down the rough cut to VHS so we could view it while finalizing our Edit Decision Lists.  We didn't have a blank so he just pulled a labeled tape out of a box on the floor.  "They've got plenty of these," he decided, and popped it into the deck to tape over it.

                "We should get going," I said.  It doesn't seem as cool to be an outlaw when you consider you might actually get caught by the law.

                "Relax," said Snake Eyes, never once hastening his pace or prioritizing what was necessary for a cut and run contingency.  At last he finished up what he was tinkering with and we evacuated.  The sun was cresting the horizon as we got into the car.

                We didn't have to wait long to re-schedule.  I put together a super-tight EDL (which is a time-coded catalogue of all scenes you want to use in the final product of a film) and we were off to Daytona again.  This time Snake Eyes had secured a position editing racing videos, so we finished The Bug in his editing bay at the Daytona Speedway.  The Academy Leader (the color bar countdown at the start of a film) on the finished edit actually has a little racecar on it.

                The guys at Full Sail did some awesome sound work for us, and we got the use of some great songs by Jessi Alexander for the soundtrack.  Jessi has an album out called "Honeysuckle Sweet", for anyone interested in hearing her stuff.  I can't emphasize enough the importance of sound and soundtrack on a movie.  By the time the film was finished, it looked and sounded better than anything we'd ever done (or would do since, apparently). 

                It was a real accomplishment that film, the only real thing we ever did, and by all rights should have been the beginning of bigger things for us, our first real step towards finding the Promised Land we were always purporting to be looking for.

                But it wasn't.

                I did a lot of stuff in college, butI didn't get to work on film until I got to Savannah.  In college everything we did was on Super-VHS (or VHS), and we'd just finished a digital short just prior to leaving Carrolloton, but film was inaccessible to us for a lot of reasons.  The two biggest reasons being that it was expensive and we didn't know anything about it.

                So manlove and I set out to produce a film short.  This was our fallback after we failed to get our feature film deal off the ground.  We would do something simple that we could get investors to support.  Then we'd have something to use in shopping for investors when we were ready to sell a feature again.  We were also at this time kicking around the idea of producing a TV show that would be marketed for direct to DVD sales.  DVD was relatively new at that time, but I was sure it was going to be a whole new world for independent filmmakers and production companies.  I'm still sure of it; it's just taking longer than I predicted.

                Manlove's cousin was a pretty successful photographer in Savannah, so he was sure we could get him to invest some money in our short film.  Manlove also had a whole team of folks in Orlando who went to school at Full Sail (a very prominent film school) who were willing to help for credit alone. I developed the script for a project called My Dark Secret, which was a very dark and gritty look at addiction, but at the end you discover the guy's addicted to masturbation.  I still like this script, but the investor thought it was too racy and passed.

                After that we were in an artistic quandary.  I didn't want to let the investor tell us what to do, but without money we weren't going to be doing anything, so I developed a script called The Bug, which was based on a one page short story I'd written back in '97.  It was more serious, and not at all racy, so we got a check for $3000 and went to work.

                We managed to get a Director of Photography who had experience with 16mm film (still produces some really funny stuff).  He lived in New York but came to Savannah a lot, so we scheduled our whole shoot around a three day window he had available.  To this day he's the only crew member who ever got paid for working on one of our productions.  Well worth it.  He had his own camera!

                Brooks came down and did some still photography of the shoot.  Wilson came down and shot a behind the scenes documentary of it.  That project is the most documented of all our movies, too.  I'm glad for that, because it's arguably our only good movie.