Having conjured up enough botched screenplays and movie ideas in my lifetime to fill the Horseshoe, I can all the more appreciate an event like the Ohio Short Film Showcase. Everyone I know on down to even my own grandma has entertained making their own movie at least once, and yet the film showcase, held May 20, 2000 at the Wexner Center, highlighted those rare individuals who have actually done it, put all talk aside and created their own film.
At around 7 on Saturday, a near capacity crowd of around 250 poured into Wexner’s tiny theater to watch these homemade movies and videos. Back in the festival’s planning stages, submission guidelines were laid down as such: the films must be less than 20 minutes in length, and they must have been made in Ohio during the past 18 months. Aside from that, artists were given free reign, complete autonomy in matters such as style, direction, and content.
Out of roughly fifty or sixty films that were sent in for acceptance into the showcase, its curators had the unenvious task of selecting a scant twenty-four for screening. Some were scratched for length, while others didn’t make the grade for aesthetic reasons; whatever the case, even those selections that were eliminated no doubt possessed a greater creative spark than half the drivel Hollywood cranks out these days.
It would be near impossible to describe in this short space each film that did make the final cut. And, while each entrant deserves to be commended, a handful of works in particular stood out above the rest. Again, these were all written and directed fairly recently by Ohio residents, most of them college students. Aside from that single common thread, however, the end results they produced bore no semblance whatsoever to one another, varying wildly from movie to movie.
The evening began with Mentos: The Wrath Maker (by John Whitney). A spoof on those popular candy commercials, this black and white entry featured one man about to be killed by another near a deserted warehouse. Accompanied by some sunny salsa music, the assailant tries shooting his pleading target in the forehead, learns he is out of bullets, then beats the tar out of that man with a baseball bat instead. Mission accomplished, the brute procures a roll of Mentos, smiles broadly for the camera as he cheerfully pops one in his mouth. That famed Mentos logo appeared on screen and the crowd went bananas with laughing approval.
Reflex (Megan Griffin) was perhaps the most professional looking video shown this night. Running about eight minutes in length, this short picture is one of only a few to utilize dialogue in getting its point across, as opposed to music or spelling the words out on screen. Reflex centers around two women, one in her twenties, the other in her forties, who bump into each other at a bus station. Slowly, through their conversation, we learn that they are really the same woman at different stages in life, each having a lesson to impart the other. The younger woman views her older counterpart with almost contempt, chiding her for wasting her life in the same dull small town, all for some no good man; the older one, on the other hand, scolds her younger self, asking the girl how she expects a different fate when falling into the same foolish pattern herself. An intriguing, well written film, this one would have been fascinating to see in an even longer format.
Striking off in a completely different direction was Cellophane (Jesse Hemminger & Karen Soto). More experiment than movie, Cellophane found some interesting applications for what were then fancy new computer editing tools. A grid composed of nine different random images – such as a close up of Ms. Soto’s face, or of Mr. Hemminger staring at an Absolut bottle – made up the picture. These panels cropped in and faded out, pulsed in time with the ambient dance music, shimmered, fell out of focus only to come back in. Call me a stick in the mud, but I thought this to be a much more compelling and noble use of effects than your typical big studio action movie, with its countless car crashes and explosions.
On the other end of the spectrum, a pair of films shown later on exemplified how pure simplicity can sometimes be the best effect of all. A-B-C (Derek DiCenzo) featured the aforementioned local musician, well, singing his a-b-c’s, accompanied only by a strummed acoustic guitar. As he mouthed each letter, the picture stopped like a photo snapshot; then, for a rousing climax, he had a buddy do the same. Simple, brilliant. Tape Tent (David Drake), meanwhile, presented a man slowly enclosing himself in a womb of brown duct tape. It sounds like nothing at all, but I can attest that virtually the entire room, including me, was enthralled with this. Simple, demented.
Finally, there’s The Incredible Nth (Character Builders), a charming cartoon that proves one needn’t be necissarily born an artist to come up with some distinctive drawn images. Written and directed by Oscar Moore, it is a black and white cartoon about a lonely and struggling owner of a snow globe shop, Scott. Strolling through his store one day, Scott decides that what he really needs, to spruce up his sad existence, is to have a son. When we wakes up the following morning, Scott discovers that someone has left a baby named Eric on his doorstep. As Eric ages, the two of them bond over the love of snow globes, this one with a heart in particular. Everything is going peachy until Eric shows up one day with a girlfriend named Doris. She soon breaks his…heart filled snow globe, although Eric eventually meets a much nicer girl, and all is suddenly right with the world. Anyway, I found this to be a charming little tale (and still agree, watching it now) with a nifty original string score to boot. The story may not have been exactly groundbreaking, but it was a touching little flick nonetheless, and received the loudest applause of all.
While these short movies were, to me at least, the best of the bunch, every one of the twenty-four showed that a great deal of care and creativity energy had gone into its creation. Putting together even a five or ten minute piece is no easy feat, and these independent film makers should all be commended for their efforts. As the young protagonist in Reflex put it, “don’t let anyone else construct your universe.” For the bright, dynamic minds who created these works of art, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.
II.
I wrote most of the above, with only minor edits today, back in 2000. It was intended as a freelance piece for some lucky local magazine or paper – the only problem was, I couldn’t find any takers! Without even bothering to debate its merits, I am retroactively thankful (as has proven the case far more often than not over the years) that this was rejected, as it frees me up to use the material for anything I wish now. The $10 or whatever I might have received, I have learned on the few occasions I sold something to another publication or website, just isn’t worth it. One major reason is that most of these operations have eventually gone belly up, or else been sold to some conglomerate, or even in rare instances might remain intact, and yet either way the result is the same: this material no longer belongs to you. Actually the cases where a publication has bit the dust are twice as frustrating, because you’re in this murky legal quagmire where everyone seems to agree the out-of-business company does still retain the copyright somehow…but you usually can’t find a contact person at this point to confirm or deny it, or possibly release this stuff back to you.
Of course, it might be a stretch to say The Other Paper or whomever is going to sue me over these inconsequential little dispatches. Then again, maybe not. But I can tell you that stumbling upon that unpublished piece recently, it totally made my day – because right now my handwritten notes on this event are a jumbled, nearly incoherent mess that will take some serious sorting and deciphering, if that’s even possible at all by this late date. It’s also not helping matters that The Indescribable Nth is the only one of the above that I could find online here recently. Which may indicate that the fimmakers themselves were also not always the greatest preservationists, or else that they too lost the rights to their material.
Maybe they have dismissed their early work, which is understandable, though a shame in this instance. So though my notes are a mess, at least I have that one semi-polished article that I’m thankful to have cobbled together back then. Aside from that, in my original handwritten notes, I can tell you which films I put a star beside, as far as their being my favorites: Mentos, Cellophane, Reflex, Children Of Jacob, Republican, The Indescribable Nth, A B C, Children s + x (just guessing? I can’t even read my own handwriting on this one), and another near the end whose title I didn’t catch. At the moment all I know about it is that it involves “kid taping demented sample.”
Incidentally, it was right around this time that various loosely connected light bulbs started going off in my head. This may have in fact been the very first outing where I brought a notebook out with me. Though always writing compulsively, up until then I waited to get home before jotting down everything. Also, while not opposed to doing things like this by myself, if I couldn’t rustle up anyone else who was interested, it always felt a tad awkward doing so. To my surprise, I discover that bringing out these simple props of a notebook and pen makes those feelings go away. Now, you are reporter covering the event, or an academic taking notes for a project, or whatever. Like I said, that was another huge revelation.
III.
Okay so below I will display my attempts, made at some point, of typing up my handwritten notes. When I track them down again, I might upload images of the original written pages. Assuming anyone can bear looking at that chickenscratch. Either way, this will have to suffice for now:
Reading this stuff nowadays is pretty comical, because I seem to have been under the impression that these notes would make sense and be more usable than they actually are. Granted, the videos would have been more vivid immediately afterwards, when I first attempting writing that article about them. Even so, these are mighty sketchy – not to mention, I can’t even read my own writing in a couple spots.
