Friday, May 30, 2008

Cross-Country Part 1



Right here we're looking at the first part of Cross-Country, the first ever short film from Ron Mexico Productions. The main plotline of this movie was semi-autobiographical because I'm at that point of my life where I'm reaching the very end of college and on the one hand all I want to do is pursue comedy 24/7, but financial necessity is pressuring me to get out there and look for a "real" job. I want to go to New York and try to make it in television, but everyone is telling me the responsible thing to do is stay closer to home, get a job, and save up enough money to go to New York someday. The problem is there's no such thing as saving up enough money to move on someday. Indianapolis and Cincinnati aren't pit stops on the course of life, and I feel like waking up some day 40 years old and still in Indianapolis feels like an inevitability if I don't get far away right now.

Well that was too much seriousness. Anyways, for the first scene I thought it would be a good idea to lay Boyer down and just try to dump enough beer cans on top of him to hide him. After getting him covered in week-old beer that didn't evaporate from the cans like I thought they would and dropping a few bottles on him, we decided the lame towel trick was a better way to go. There's not really much to say about the scene where we play Monopoly unless interminably long dialog where not much happens is really interesting to you. Go rent a Kevin Smith DVD, weirdo.

What follows is a sequence that is essentially a rehash of Smoke Stoppers. When we made the sketches, Shane, Carter, and Peters were basically playing themselves, so I thought I'd stop pretending that they're imaginary characters and just refer to them by their real names in the movie. The scene is probably funny to people who have never seen Smoke Stoppers (or as the marketing geniuses at College Humor call it, "College Students Face Mortality" Ugh.), but people who have seen my other work probably find it very tame by comparison. This is because I turned this in for class, and while I stretch the boundaries for what is acceptable to be turned in for class, shitting in a girl's vagina is a line that not even I'm ready to cross.

The first part of this ends with a phone conversation between me and Shane. Although this scene is funny, it's also the one where anyone who watches the movie suddenly plays the role of cinematic expert. So here's the deal: I know there's only one person in the car for the shots of the car driving, I know the "tunnel" the car drives into is actually just a bridge in downtown Muncie, I know the car isn't really moving during my scene, and I know I'm not really inside a tunnel and I just shot those in-tunnel scenes at night. Delaware County doesn't have a lot of tunnels and I didn't have thousands of dollars to rent a camera rig that allows me to film inside the window of a moving car. Congratulatu-fucking-lations, you win the award for noticing obvious things.

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