How Someone Owes Tom and I A Writing Credit

It involves: a bad-looking beard, gibberish medical jargon, pointless references to injections, poorly developed characters, references to happenings that are never really explained, descriptions of people "going into the darkness" within, newspaper clippings, pages and pages and pages of printouts from the internet, organ transplants, close-up shots of someone underlining "Stem Cell Research" used as a dramatic device, inexplicable bad cuts back and forth between two scenes that are relatively action-free...

And a two-headed guard dog.

The newest movie from $now Bros. Films?

Nope.

It's the new X-Files movie.

While I sat and watched this atrocity, I couldn't help but think back on the nights Tom and I sat awake, slowly putting together what would be a Truly Horrible Script.

Late at night at the original Washington House, we started cobbling together a story from bits of student film footage, random story ideas written down long ago, and a list of supplies we actually had... all based around a film he made back in high school featuring our friend in a nine-year-old girl's bunny suit.

It was doomed from the beginning.

Not that we had any idea at the time. We couldn't step back far enough to really see what was on the horizon for us.

Whenever we encountered a road block (and I don't mean a stumbling point... I mean a road block with big bright letters that said "Do Not Continue!") we happily came up with something else to hurdle us over it, allowing the story to continue for some reason:

"Hey Nick, this seems like it's maybe not making much sense..."

"Well, let's create a government sponsored program/conspiracy thing! That should clear things up!"

Or:

"Hey Tom, this is starting to get a little convoluted..."

"Well, let's add another character to the mix then to help explain some things!"

Or:

"Hey Tom, it looks like I've got a square peg here..."

"Uh-oh... and I've got a round hole..."

"Let's use a BIGGER hammer then!"

We had grand plans.

And a storyboard for it all.

And revisions.

And rehearsals.

We got all of our friends involved and made a shooting schedule around them (almost exclusively taking place between the hours of midnight and 3am).

And we didn't want to wait to get started. I had just ordered an expensive camera but we wanted to get started on filming before it would arrive so we went ahead with a regular camcorder. We also didn't want to wait to go through all the trouble of finding the necessary props for the "action scenes", so we decided to save those for last, even though it would mean saving the most expensive part for last (another poor idea in retrospect).

We made our own microphones and sound equipment (poorly), figured out how to do lighting (poorly), and jumped into the deep end.

Let me say this: It was a lot of fun. We had a blast. Every night, hanging out with friends for a purpose. Everyone got involved.

And the end result was a mess.

I use "end result" loosely, seeing as how we never actually finished the film. We had no money, schedules became a problem, and we finally began to see glaring problems in the story.

Jeffery was our hero.

I was the villain (secretly...ohh-hoo!)

We had multiples "agents" from multiples "agencies" all double-crossing and triple-crossing each other for reasons that were unclear even to us.

Tom dyed his bright red hair dark brown so his transparent eyebrows and beard would actually show up on film (a definite plus that came out of this... footage I can show his children in the near future to scare the crap out of them).

The film now exists in a sort of stasis, forever to stay that way. Tom edited it as much as anyone possibly could and filled the blank spaces with text explaining what would have happened during the voids between scenes.

There's no way to finish the movie now (not that any of us see a reason to). It has been five years. People have changed or moved, sets have been destroyed or lost...

And while I sat watching the X-Files movie, full of it's ridiculous story arcs and plot devices, I couldn't help but picture the writers sitting down, saying to themselves, "We've had six years to put this together and put it off until the last weekend. Crap. Maybe we should have attended fewer conventions and played a little less Warcraft."

And I thought to myself, "This would be much better if it were just being screened to a group of giggling friends in a garage somewhere..."