Bobby's Film - Part One

Bobby dry humped Jody from behind while managing to smoke a cigarette and drink a beer, then he stared into the camera and laughed maniacally. Without any prompting from myself or the other filmmaker, Jody began to get undressed. Bobby looked a slight bit apprehensive, but he also seemed fully aware that his film image was at stake, so he followed suit and undressed as well. My film partner was becoming skeptical about the entire shoot, and this type of incident would only add to that skepticism, and yet I couldn't be distracted by a supposed artist's personal issues with morality, or the violence, or the drug abuse, or even the amateur porn that was unfolding in front of us. The original treatments I came up with were supposed to be for a documentary short abut an alcoholic poet whose life had turned out to be perhaps his most poignant yet tragic work. It was conceivable that we might have finished that film in time to enter it in some film/video festivals we had our eyes on, but instead we were in the process of shooting reel after reel of film, and hours of video on something we both knew would take years before we had anything to show for our efforts. I reasoned that it was too late to turn back now, or so I had convinced myself, so I aimed the camera at the very intoxicated, naked couple. The two of them tried to have sex in spite of Bobby's inability to achieve an erection. It looked good from my camera angle, but Jody wasn't an actress, and she tried in vain to get Bobby's dick hard. My film partner, and light meter, left the room in disgust. I pulled the camera off the tripod and found a comfortable location to squat on the opposite side of the bedroom, where I thought I might better be able to capture the shot, if an erection were to happen. Bobby, noticeably agitated by his losing bout with performance anxiety, pressed his face between Judy's legs and brought her to orgasm in a matter of moments. Satisfied with how the shoot had gone, I started to pack our gear up, but Judy advised me to stick around because she was multi-orgasmic.
Only a week earlier we had worried that our film might be turning into one of those overly intellectual, pretentious student films that we both despised. One day we'd shoot three hours of film and video about Bobby's poetry, then another day would be devoted entirely to Bobby's music, then the next to Catholicism. At one point we even attempted to recreate Bobby's greatest little league sports moment but fortunately, when we got it back from the developer, the 16mm film was too overexposed to use. The shoot began to turn dark the day we decided to follow Bobby to the quarterhorse races. Bobby swore that he had a system for picking horses, which we later realized he didn't when Bobby was unable to make sense out of the racing sheet (the daily paper that details each horse's history and career statistics). Our shoot started in front of The Gilman Street Project where Bobby claimed he often stopped to study the racing sheet before walking the last few blocks to the tracks. We were so inept at reading the light meter that the shoot took much longer than we'd anticipated, and our presence there was attracting attention. The lead singer of THE ABORTED or BUBBLESCRUMP, or one of those truly awful early nineties bands stopped to check us out, and so did some college students who probably thought we were shooting a RANCID video, or some such lame shit. Bobby grew impatient and asked if we would be able to reschedule this portion of the shoot for another time. Instead of gambling on horses, Bobby determined that the shoot could really use a crack run. The crack run turned into a krank run, which eventually placed us at the trailer of Rich "The Twitch". Rich "The Twitch" was an intravenous speed freak who suffered from touretes syndrome, and who had a fetish for the type of young boys who were disturbed enough to see Rich as some kind of father figure. Our semi-pretentious portrait of a dysfunctional artist had, in the span of one day, turned into a voyeuristic movie about a bunch of drug addicts who lie more on a daily basis than some people do in a lifetime. TO BE CONTINUED.
UPDATES: In last month's column I wrote a bit about the U.C. Theatre in Berkeley closing it's doors in for the last time in October, but now it appears that they will stay open until the end of the year. There have been some minor changes however. Landmark, the corporation that owns the U.C. and several other theatres in downtown Berkeley, has begun to block book films, which was an idea that was proposed years earlier when, for a brief time, I was an employee at the U.C.. So instead of getting, approximately, 100 films per calendar, you'll now find 12 scheduled on the newest calendar. All of this change, and speculation, is over $250, 000 in earthquake retrofitting that needs to take place in the building that houses the U.C. Theatre. Let's see, the average price for a ticket at a Landmark theatre is around $10, so if they sold 100 tickets a day (and that is a fraction of the number of seats they currently have in the East Bay alone) that would be $1000, and there are 365 days in a year. I'm no mathematician, but give me a break.
I know this is far fetched, but if anyone wants to send me 8mm films to discuss or review in this column, then please feel free to do so because I have a nice projector here just waiting for some action. If you want those films returned, then send some money for postage. The address for 8mm submissions, or any of your underground films and videos is: Jay, PMB 419, 1442A Walnut Street, Berkeley, California 94709. If you missed any of my past columns, then you can check them out at: www.wethepunx.com.