My First Movie

My first movie was a pirate picture called THE PIRATE QUEEN GUINEVERE.  It took place on the high seas of a muddy irrigation ditch behind our house.  The ditches and the mighty Rio Grande that they fed into a hundred yards away was the only water available to me for a hundred miles in any direction.  God knows why I didn't make a Western since I lived in the desert, but it was the spring of 1983 and all I could think about was pirates.  How did they comb their hair?  Would they approve of my cowboy boots spray painted black?  How about the saber I'd constructed from my Dad's car antennae?  Could you make people walk the plank with a 2x4 and reasonably large puddle?  

I was six years old and had just seen THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE staring Kevin Kline at his swashbuckling best.  For six glorious weeks everything I did had to be checked with the homunculus sized version of him in my head.  If the Pirate King said to wear one pair of underwear all week, then that's what I did.  No matter the crinkled noses, sour expressions and sharp words from my second grade teacher Mrs. Aguilar -- if the Pirate King said jump, I leapt for the main sail and never looked back.  The few friends I did have jumped on the pirate band wagon for a week, but then got bored.  In a town where kids got real guns at ten, car antennae and eye patches can't really compete.  They just didn't get it, and I didn't care.  I didn't care one bit -- not for two weeks anyway.  So by week three of my pirate phase, I found myself marooned at home after school.  None of my playmates wanted anything to do with me.  The PIRATES OF PENZANCE had not been a hit with age group, or anyone else's from what I remember, so unless I could convince people pirates were cool I was shit out of luck.  Alone, dejected and hungry for playmates, I was rescued from despair by the most unlikely of confederates -- my older sister.

My big sis was pretty cool.  Tough, athletic and big for her age, she played boys soccer and baseball because the local leagues deemed her "too aggressive and competitive" to play with the girls.  Only three years older, she was wise beyond her years.  She truly didn't give a fuck what other people thought, still doesn't, and it's always been an inspiration.  She abided hanging out with me for three reasons: 1) I was never without wit and imaginary games to keep her entertained, 2) I never ratted on her when she beat the snot out of me (happened a lot) and 3) she was a tomboy sick of pretending to like dolls and horses.  And the only cure for MY LITTLE PONY fatigue is to make the bitch walk the plank.  So we did it, over and over, until even I was sick of it.   The juggernaut of pirate zeal I'd hoped was sailing inside my sister turned out to be nothing more than a weekend regatta.  Bored, she fled across the street to play guns with Russell down the streets.  That night, I told my father all about my loner plight, and this is how it went:

Me: Everybody hates me because I'm a pirate.

Dad: Hates you? Really?  

Me: Yep. Haven't you noticed nobody comes over anymore.

Dad: I have noticed.  Why not just have your friends over to play DUKES OF HAZARD?

Me: But Bo and Luke aren't pirates dad. They wear cowboy boots for shit's sake.

Dad: Please don't swear at the dinner table. Any other place or time in the house is fine, you know that, just not at the dinner table.

(FYI -- I had a serious swearing problem as a child, I'm taking borderline tourettic. My parents realized after I started washing my own mouth out with soap rather than abandon my new vocabulary that it was a war they couldn't win. So instead of abandoning the words altogether, they got me to agree to certain times and places I couldn't swear like during school, synagogue, church or any room with people who had gray hair.)

Me: Sorry.

Dad: It's OK. So priates are the problem, huh?

Me: No -- everyone else is the problem.  Nobody understands that pirates could kick Bo and Luke's ass any day.  Swords, muskets and ale beats the General Lee any day.

Dad: I see your point. So remind me why you like pirates so much.

Me: Dad don't you remember?  PIRATES OF PENZANCE.

Dad: The Musical?  I thought you didn't like musicals.

Me: I don't.  I'm talking about the movie.

Dad: But there's music in the movie.

Me: Dad, I'm talking about the movie?  You know, with the Pirate King. None of my friends liked it.  If they liked it, then they'd want to play pirates with me.

Dad chewed contemplatively on my Mom's Michigan stew.  The beef was always a little tough, so you'll have to give him a second.

Dad: I see. So if they saw the pirate movie and liked it, then you'd have friends again?

Me: Exactly.

Dad: Why didn't you say so before?  I've got just the thing.

After dinner, Dad went to his Air Force footlocker in the attic and retrieved a dusty old Continental Airlines bag.  You remember those blue ones that looked like bowling ball bags? Inside it, he had an old Bell & Howell 8mm camera.  Dad had taken movies of everything he did in the Air Force -- bomb tests, T38 flights and his volleyball tournaments.  The Cold War wasn't just about stopping the communist scourge, it was also about winning volleyball tournaments.  If Dad's film was the only record left of that period in American Military history, scholars would likely deduce that the struggle for hearts and minds was won one side out at a time.

Dad: Know what that is?

Me: Wow a video camera!

Dad: No, that's a film camera.

Me: Right. A film camera.

(No idea what "film" is or the point of this gift)

Dad: Now you can go make your own pirate movie.

It took two weeks, twenty dollars and several ass whoopin's from my sister (aka, "the pirate queen Guinevere") to get my first movie made. The two things I had going for me was that Sis didn't mind getting dirty, and the dog could play dead like nobody's business. Drool, spasms, bared teeth -- truly Academy calibre stuff.  All it took was two dog biscuits and she'd conk out.  In hindsight, those might have been tiny diabetic comas, but they looked really gross and pretty nifty. 

The film was made up of three sequences that exploited these two attributes over and over. My Sis would hunt Sprinkles down inside the labyrinthine levee canals, fight her with the car antennae, but then Sprinkles would miraculous splash to freedom down a separate canal. The film ended with Sprinkles spectacular fight to the death against my sister on a delta of sun scorched soil in the Rio Grande.  

Two days later we got the film back. I paced around the house all afternoon waiting for Dad to get home.  The only place that processed Supper 8mm film in our town was forty minutes away near my Dad's office. Dad arrived home shaking his head, mustering as much of a smile as his mustached upper-lip allowed.

Dad: So we got the film back.

Me: I know, I know.  I can't wait to see it. All my friends are going to love it!

Dad: I don't think so. It's all been flashed.

Me: No. We all had our clothes on.

(There had been an incident at the junior high involving a septuagenarian in Mexican blanket. The only other time I had heard "flash")

Dad: You see with film you have to be careful not to expose your negative to sunlight.

Me: OK. So when can we see my movie?

We went back and forth like that until my Dad's somber tone gave way to hysterical laughter at my complete inability to understand what he was saying. I was six years old -- what did he expect. The moment of truth came when I made him string up the flashed film up onto the projector. He was right -- there wasn't a single image on the damned thing.  Disappointed, I buried my head in my hands for the last minute of footage. Dad didn't know what to say until --

Dad: Wait a second.

Me: What? (mumbled through my hands)

Dad: I saw something.  Take a look at this.

Dad backed up the film, but I didn't see anything. Dad rewound it three times until I saw what he was talking about. It was a very thin and ghostly image of my Sis with her foot planted triumphantly on Sprinkles belly. Somehow a single frame from the delta had been mercifully spared from the twiddling genitals of doom that is our sun.  Miraculous. Dad and I stared at it for about two minutes before I lost interest.  After all, DUKES OF HAZARD was on.

My first film wasn't made for art's sake, posterity, girls or money.  It was a propaganda film plain and simple.  I made the movie to convince my friends that pirates were cool and they should want to play pirates with me. It didn't work, because no one to this day has ever seen it besides my Dad and me. Comprised of a single ghostly image that has haunted my mind ever since.

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