Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

Edward Champion is the Managing Editor of Reluctant Habits.
by Edward Champion

Offices Within Offices

The office was ensconced within a vicious slab that prioritized desperate spendthrift tendencies over comfort and efficiency. The man who rented out this thin rectangle on the 33rd floor seemed to believe that the $1,200 he paid each month granted him some illusory status. He took advantage of the economic downturn and shouted at the receptionist every time she failed to mention his firm name. The powerless receptionist, who had initiated with an attorney to secure her job just after the Dow first plummeted below 10,000, was forced to comply with a smile. She hoped she wouldn’t have to lower her adulterous standards, but there were enough office rumors to make her suitably feared. She fed her priest all the sordid details in confession so that she could live with herself.

With special permission, the man who rented out this tenuous office could use the floor’s conference room, where he could hold meetings and attempt to persuade people that he rented out a substantial percentage of the 33rd floor. But every client with half a brain noticed his firm’s dubious placard situated next to the firm renting out the floor. So he took it upon himself to only meet with people who made less money than he did. And he took it upon himself to persuade them to give him money. There was never a question of morality. After all, he had office he had to pay for at $1,200 each month and he had to spend money on people who had more money than he did.

The receptionist was fired in June when the attorney ended the affair. After all, the attorney soon found himself more heavily supervised by the partners and he could not risk any half dalliance on the public record. He paid the receptionist a lot of money to shut up. But the receptionist could not find another job and, therefore, could not find another man with money to fuck. But since she had a lot of money — enough to rent out a small office for a good year — and since the man who rented out the thin rectangle had stumbled onto hard times, she decided to sublet his office. For $600 each month, the ex-receptionist rented out half of the man’s office. She was able to secure use of the conference room more effectively than the man because people on the 33rd floor still feared her. The attorney feared that she would reveal his affair and offered to give her more money if she would go away. Instead, she decided to sublet his office too. Soon, the ex-receptionist was traveling between her two sublets. The partners found the situation within the attorney’s office quite awkward and decided to let the attorney go. (Because the attorney was stressed out about the subletting situation, and because his anxiety increased because he never quite knew when the ex-receptionist would start working in his office, his work began to suffer.) The firm, thanks to the economy, had fallen on hard times. And the ex-receptionist, who ran an under-the-table cocaine operation within the 33rd floor’s otherwise ethical business makeup, then bought out the ex-attorney’s office. She also told the partners that she would rent out the thin rectangular office for $1,600 each month. Soon the honest man was told he had to leave and a pimp soon replaced him. The ex-receptionist began doing good business on the prostitution front. As the firm’s finances grew more shaky, and the ex-receptionist was feared more than ever before, she began — after establishing a reliable relationship with a fancy hotel two blocks away — recruiting various support staff to fuck the remaining men who had money to burn. The firm, seeing no other option for survival, then merged with the ex-receptionist’s lucrative business. And the ex-receptionist made a lot of money. She adopted a new philosophy, independently arrived at. Always meet with people who made less money than you did and be sure to take it.

The office was ensconced within a vicious slab that prioritized desperate spendthrift tendencies over comfort and efficiency. The woman who rented out this thin rectangle on the 33rd floor seemed to believe that the $1,600 she paid each month granted her some illusory status.

by Edward Champion

Live Conversation with Sarah Hall — November 3, 2009

The Bat Segundo Show may be on temporary hiatus (with several shows still in the backlog). But that doesn’t mean that I’m not talking with authors. Sarah Hall, author of How to Paint a Dead Man (the subject of a recent roundtable discussion on these pages), will be coming through New York. She’ll be appearing at McNally Jackson on November 3, 2009 at 7:00 PM, where I will be chatting with her about her fourth novel.

Please note that this conversation will not be recorded or released as a future Segundo show. I am remaining a stickler about my hiatus. Thankfully, this particular conversation is permissible through a technicality. So here’s a chance to see the Segundo format unfold in real time with a very talented writer. Feel free to stop by on November 3rd for some high-octane conversation.

by Edward Champion

Scene from a Mall (1993)

In 1993, I took a film class and was grouped with an amicable ragtag crew. We filmed little shorts with the Panasonic PV-535, the only consumer VHS camera that had chroma key and that was compulsively used at just about every opportunity. The camera had a little mini-camera that you would mount on the top. You couldn’t directly feed in a video signal into the camera, but those who used the camera certainly improvised around the limitations. I would make long-distance telephone calls to video engineers and technicians around the nation, wondering if a converter existed to transfer the signal. I even attempted to persuade Panasonic to send me the blueprint, but they weren’t exactly flexible to some 19-year-old kid trying to hack their proprietary system. The camera had been given to me and I certainly wasn’t in the position to purchase another one to reverse engineer it. But it did serve me and several other folks quite well during the early 1990s.

As the guy with the equipment, I somehow ended up being the one who organized the shoots. I certainly never intended to seize control. I was just the guy who ended up with logistical ideas. I rotated crew duties, shifting directorial, editing, and photographic duties after I asked our crew members specifically what they were interested in doing. In Sacramento, we had a small ensemble of actors that included several friends, my sister, and all of the crew members. I solicited ideas from the group, often stepping in to help others flesh out their stories into a screenplay. I had spent much of high school studying screenplays (I once had my Terminator 2 screenplay book confiscated by my English teacher after my friend Tom and I were geeking out as the teacher delivered a lecture), writing scripts, and even attempted to make a feature film (called Three Kinds of Respect). Armed with this experience, I’d often sit next to a writer at a computer, asking the writer questions about the characters and the situations. We’d then bang out an intricate shooting script.

The above film, “Scene from a Mall,” was one of many films made during this period. It was built around an improvisational situation in which I played a disturbed man and Misa Whiteford played a woman waiting for her boyfriend. We shot this at the Country Club Mall in Sacramento, California, about ten years before the renovation. I suppose we approached this mall because, like Sunrise Mall, the 1960s aesthetic appealed to everybody. (It certainly reminded me of the original version of Dawn of the Dead.)

I’ve revised the film slightly, taking out about 40 seconds from the original version. At the time, I was editing these little films using two four-head VCRs. So you’d be able to cut two shots and get it roughly within a half second of where you wanted. This was trickier than it sounds. Because you had to anticipate that the output VCR would begin recording at precisely one third of a second after you pressed the RECORD button. And it therefore took multiple attempts for each cut. When I later learned how to cut and splice Super 8, and when I worked on flatbeds, it was a luxury to be able to cut on the exact frame. The present generation is spoiled with their NLEs.

Of course, now that I’m working with NLEs, I thought I would exonerate my 19-year-old self and offer the cuts that I had intended all along just before getting this film up on YouTube. What once took patient hours now takes about one twentieth of the time.

The editing limitations never stopped me from being ambitious. I would eventually make another short film that would contain more than 100 shots and would be filmed in San Francisco, Folsom Lake, and various points around Sacramento. (I even managed to shoot some video with an ancient black-and-white video camera, but the camera was on its last legs and it actually shocked the cameraman and never worked again. My mother yelled at me for this technical deficiency, as if I had deliberately killed the camera. But that’s another story.)

I’m going to slowly get some of these old films up onto YouTube — in large part because the videotape sources are starting to deteriorate. And if I don’t digitize some of this footage now, it may be gone forever. (These films are from fifteen to seventeen years ago. Given that videotape is known to deteriorate within twenty years, it appears that I’ve got my hands full.)

I don’t know if I still have the original sources for this film, but I wince at all the mall chatter contained within the audio. I may revisit this film again and do my best to filter out the background noise and boost the dialogue. But however I mess with these films, I promise that Han Solo will not shoot first.

by Edward Champion

When I Had Hair

In the mid-1990s, I made my way around various film and theater circles. My interests were mainly centered around the prospect of putting on a good show. I enjoyed being one of those wizards behind the curtain executing an illusion. And it didn’t matter whether it was coming up with a wacky storyline or perfecting a visual detail that only a handful of people would notice. But because I was often so lively when I worked on sets, friends began to insist that I should act in their projects. One even promised me a bottle of vodka for a day of work. And it seemed impolite to say no. I would begin to point out to them that, although I had taken several acting classes to understand the process, there were plenty of people out there who could act.

But no, they wanted me. I had something that these actors didn’t. Or maybe they just liked seeing me ham it up. So in my early twenties, I would often be enlisted to act in short films and plays. I would either play authority figures (attorneys and doctors) or completely crazy characters (psychotic killers and lunatics in a sanitarium). I would develop an intricate character backstory far exceeding anything the writer had intended, and I would often work out elaborate character relationships with other actors so that we would have additional facets to work from during a scene. And it was all a great deal of fun.

Recently I discovered a videotape containing one such scene. I was twenty-two. It was 1996. I was enlisted by my pal Han Lee to play a scene from Glengarry Glen Ross for his film directing class at San Francisco State University. The other guy, playing Shelly Levene, is Eric Gibboney. At the very least, the clip demonstrates to the world that there once was a time in my life in which I did indeed have hair!