Month / October 2009

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!

by Edward Champion

Eating Young Jewish Writers

[The following article is an excerpt from my soon-to-be-published book, Eating Young Jewish Writers.]

When I was young, I would often spend the weekend at my grandmother’s house. She would ask me if I was hungry. And when I would cry, she would tell me that I needed to toughen up and expand my gustatory horizons. It wasn’t until years later that I realized she was testing me to see if I had eaten a young Jewish writer for dinner.

jsfeatingYou see, my grandmother survived the Great Depression eating young Jewish writers. It wasn’t that she was anti-Semitic or anything. My grandmother would scavenge around America looking for inedibles. Unfortunately, other hobos had eaten the rest of the food. When the rotting potatoes, discarded scraps of meat, skins and the bits that clung to bones and pits had all been exhausted, the people who were still hungry would turn to other human beings to eat. This was before the Holocaust, when one could still eat a young Jewish writer and not be declared a National Socialist. I remember attending hotel buffets: while the rest of us kept our meals vegetarian, there would be some adventurous diners who would gnaw upon young Jewish writers and think nothing of it. After all, Jews tended to write a lot of books. This was one of the reasons that Alfred Kazin made so many infrequent appearances in his younger days. He feared being eaten by those who weren’t picky.

It was my grandmother who taught me that eating a young Jewish writer saved you money. The meat would last a long time. You wouldn’t have to go to a butcher. You could just show up at some shul, wait for some eager young Jewish intellectual to open up his notebook, throw a burlap sack over his head, and whisk him away. You could really make a young Jewish writer last a long time if you had a walk-in freezer. Of course, you’d have to inure yourself to his shrieks of anguish as you chopped him up with the hatchet. But if you were hungry enough, well, the possibilities were limitless.

We thought my grandmother was the greatest chef who ever lived. And we’d enjoy our meals until we realized that we were eating human meat. Then we’d throw up onto our plates and ask for seconds. There was always plenty of young Jewish meat to go around.

POSSIBLE AGAIN

When I was 2, the writers of all my bedtime books were young Jewish writers. The first thing I can remember learning in school was how to pet a young Jewish writer without accidentally killing it. This required some skill because many young Jewish writers were hypochondriacs. One summer my family fostered a young Jewish writer. I kicked him. My father told me that we don’t kick young Jewish writers. Years later, the young Jewish writer would write a three-volume memoir about how he had experienced severe anti-Semitism when staying with my family. He would base an entire lecture around the incident. Because of this, there were many years where I was banned from attending bar mitzvahs. When I had earned enough pocket money as a teenager, I was forced to hire a group of young Jewish writers to kick me repeatedly over the weekend.

When I was 7, I mourned the death of a young Jewish writer I’d won the previous weekend. I discovered that my father had chopped up the young Jewish writer and flushed him down the toilet. I told my father — using other, less familial language — we don’t flush young Jewish writers down the toilet. When I was 9, I had a babysitter who didn’t want to hurt anything. She put it just like that when I asked her why she wasn’t reading young Jewish writers with me.

“How is reading a young Jewish writer hurting him?” I asked.

“Because we goys can’t possibly know their level of suffering. We might hurt them accidentally if we read about their pain.”

The babysitter’s intention might or might not have been to convert us, but being a kid herself, she lacked whatever restraint it is that so often prevents a full retelling of this particular story. Frank is probably eating a young Jewish writer as I type these words.

Mark Twain said that quitting smoking is among the easiest things you can do: he did it all the time. I would add avoiding cannibalism to the list of easy things. In high school I refused to eat human flesh — whether Jewish or not Jewish, young or old — most often to claim a bit of identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly. I also wanted to be the biggest wanker in America. I wanted people to hate me because I crammed my views down their throat. Because I was a smug kid then and I’m a smug kid now. Eating young Jewish writers is certainly wrong and I don’t know if I can forgive my grandmother for what she did. But writing a boastful book on the subject is almost certainly worse. Thankfully, I have hired a bunch of young Jewish writers to beat me up at every stop I make on my next book tour. Together, we can correct the moral divide. But if you’re not willing to beat me up, perhaps you can find it within your heart to spend $25.99 on my 352 page book, Eating Young Jewish Writers.