I, Katey, have spent most of my weekends this semester not partying, not sleeping, but running around campus with a bulky and dysfunctional 16 mm camera, trying to make something of myself. I have also been trying to make something by myself, with the aid of such stalwart problematicizers as my dearest friend Nat.
It began even before that stupid 16 camera (that’s what we call it in the biz) entered my life, with a lame-ass disposable camera to learn about “composition” (in other words, “if you can’t complete this one successfully, you’re totally doomed.”) There was Nat, tight muscles glistening in the sun, angelic face framed by a halo of light, weird glowy blotch covering half the photo. (Actually, the professor liked the glowy blotch. I pretended it was intentional. Pretending things are intentional turns out to be a large part of the biz.)
Then there was the picture for which I lay on the ground in order to make Nat appear to be the same size of Hi-Rise, and the mysterious black bar at the bottom of the frame that actually turned out to be my breasts. Unfortunately, their gentle curvaceousness wasn’t enough to win over the prof with this photo.
So the photos were a wash. Next was an ill-fated attempt to actually tell a story using the moving-pictures machine (“camera,” for those of us in the know), a tragic tale of a sandwich caught between two hungry men willing to fight to the death. It was beautiful! It was cinematic! It was a tale of tragedy on par with “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Chronicles of Riddick!”
It was drastically out of focus, and utterly unrecognizable. If you look at the film closely, you can see a little blur. That was Nat.
Next up was the one where we use giant, heavy and atomically hot lights to create a “narrative” (as we call it in the biz, which, by the way, is what we call the business in the biz.) This grade-A disasterbacle starred Nat as an average, milk-loving young lad destined to be murdered by a mysterious black-clad foe. As it turned out, the young lad was destined to be aggravated by a series of film loading errors, and was replaced by his friend, then banned from my sets from the rest of time.
Since then, things have been great. There have been the occasional hours of film unintentionally shot in slow motion, or the shot that required sitting in a shopping cart and being pushed up a hill that was too dark to even see. But those were flukes. Nat Webb is the man to blame for my filmmaking faults, and now that he’s out of my life and away from my the biz, I’m on my way to glory. Glorious failures. Glorious failures not unlike those of Alexander the Great as described in the great Alexander film, Alexander, by an aged Ptolemy played by an aged Anthony Hopkins played by an aged Peter O’Toole, as “failures which towered above the successes of other men.” Other men, I can only hope, who are in Sight and Sound with me.
Amen.
Additional reporting by Nat “You’ll Never Work in this Town Again” Webb
Now, to fill the remaining space, we give you a photo of us. With a goose. The Ar-goose.
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