Meme 10

I studied film in college, a shift away from The English Major Plan, one provoked by a senior-year AP English Literature course taught so thoroughly to the test that every novel became a jigsaw puzzle of fixed symbols meant to be fit together to produce one flat image of America at the time. Anyone in 1996 knew he could direct a feature film far outside Hollywood, because Jarmusch, because Tarantino, because Smith and Guest. It took only an earnestness, and a dream of independence. Because the Nineties.

The University of Pittsburgh contracted with instructional outlet Pittsburgh Filmmakers to get its film studies majors production experience. Otherwise it was all The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Citizen Kane, and Battleship Potemkin screened on interruptive Laserdiscs over sleepy afternoons in classrooms without windows, where aquiline retirees brought shawls and popcorn bags and perched themselves tight up near the dais. They never had to write any papers. Filmmaking 1's classroom was equally windowless—because cinema—but the talk from dais to desk concerned f-stops, focal lengths, and 18-percent gray cards. The stock was Kodak Super-8 Tri-X Reversal, bought in cartridges at the equipment counter, where Elmos and Minoltas were rentable for the weekend. Processing took the USPS. Editing took chopstick-thin rolls of Scotch tape, glossy yellow. The lesson was clear: you cannot live for art unless you're made to suffer for it.

Film came with high costs. On shoots it was mostly first-take best-take. To put a story together it helped to know the 180-degree rule, your storyboards. It helped to know some theatre kids, but theatre kids were scarce and proud. Theatre kids were full of their own hopeless spotlight dreams. Come project-screening days, each student self-projecting before an audience of his peers, one dreaming montage after another flickered in high contrast on the pulldown screen, the acting done through the eyeballs of one's most shameless set of friends. Suckers for a camera. One Point Park student was a pornographer, went the rumor, convincing scores of girls from behind an SLR's gaping eye to pose for photos he'd sell to schoolmates horny in those early days of the Internet.

Assignment 1 was just to film a space but assignment 2 was to form a narrative. M. Doughty's Slanky had dropped the year previous, with a short poem in it, readily memorizable:

Drunk, she was carried
and thrown into the pillows.
She stamped her foot on the floor
as she slept, to keep the world
from spinning away from her
like a troubled childhood.

It was not so readily filmable. Lamp poles didn't want to fit between desks and dorm fridges, and convincing Lisa not to look in the camera wasn't half as easy as convincing her to be shot in her bra. Getting post-jocks Damon and Brad to emote more with their beer-bottle props? This is what Hitchcock must have felt like.

And if all actors should be treated like cattle, what to do with the prize bull: the theatre kid grouchy about having to act without words in take-spans of under ten seconds? Because micro-budget. Because stock expenses. Tossing a semi-topless girl onto a mess of floor pillows and getting, as the camera made a fitful pan to the left, to stage-kiss down to just under her belly-button wasn't, in the end, any kind of compensation for having to say "What the fuck?" three separate times because the focus was always off.

His name was Mark. He's an editor at Ballantine now. Lisa's married to a man with enormous shoulders. Brad teaches P.E. Mike (née M.) Doughty's renounced his old band Soul Coughing, and Tarantino never won another Oscar. In 1999, Super-8-to-VHS transfers were inexpensive but in June 2003, DVD rentals surpassed VHS rentals in Blockbuster Videos around the country. Bedspins got two screenings, once for a grade and once for some other kind of acclaim. It sits—along with Dorm Stairwell, Roommate Trouble, and Belle Atlantique—in a box on a shelf in a closet, right next to a Polaroid camera.

Time does make a monkey of everybody. You look far more noble in yesterday's dreams than you ever could in the limelight of today. You stand taller. This doesn't make the present a letdown—the wrong-colored polish, the dish with pickles still in it—it makes the past unreasonable. The world will not have jetpacks, not because it can't have jetpacks, but because people shouldn't be given them. Leave the jetpacks for the dreamers. They look way better captured on film than they do on paper, in prose.