My final cultural pursuit of the term was an entirely self-invented one. After eight weeks of preparation and practice in class, it was time to shoot my final project for my filmmaking class. Long ago it occurred to me that the movies I like the best are ones which have a fair amount of sex and violence, and I figured my movie should too.
The first step was to find some actors who would take off their clothes and grope each other for my planned love scene. I blitzed a male friend, who responded that no, he had never acted before, but that he would be more than happy to remove clothing and act in the movie. I figured that finding the female lead would be just as easy. Not quite. I spent the better part of the next week and a half searching for an actress. The pattern became very predicatable. I would catch a woman's interest up until the all important moment when I revealed that there would be a love scene. It was that same line in the script -- "Medium shot: cheap oral sex shot, camera behind the woman" -- that seemed to disturb everyone.
And then it happened. A day before shooting was to begin, I received a BlitzMail message from a woman who volunteered to play the part. I had never met her before, but she was willing and available.
But then came the guns. The final sequence in my movie involved a shoot-out at a bank. Figuring it would be best to avoid a real bank (Shawmut has enough problems of its own without me bugging them), I decided to try the Hopkins Center Box Office. The workers there were nice to me in the same way that so many Dartmouth administrators are nice. A friend calls it the "Smile while we kill you" syndrom, because they keep a bright smile plastered on their faces as they go about destroying your plans.
The folks at Collis were slightly more amenable, but that probably had more to do with my deceitfulness than anything else. I don't know where I learned this, but my general philosophy is to offer people only the amount of information they absolutely need to know. So when I convinced Student Activities to let me shoot in Collis and let the Information Desk double for the bank, I certainly didn't tell them that I would be using fake guns in the sequence.
But Catholic guilt got the best of me, and I decided to alert Safety & Security of my plans so that they wouldn't storm in and try to shoot my lead actor at 8:00 a.m. while I was playing with lights. Bad idea. I called Safety & Security at 11:00 the night before the shoot. Someone called me back at 2:30 a.m. to tell me that I would have to talk to Proctor Robert McEwan in the morning. That was a problem since my shooting was scheduled to begin before the Proctor would sit down to his first cup of coffee.
And so at 4:30 a.m., three hours before I was supposed to shoot, I canceled the Collis shoot and frantically rewrote the script so that everything could take place in two instead of three settings. By early afternoon, we finally began. Figuring it was best to jump right into the things, I decided to shoot the love scene first. Never mind that the leads had met each other less than fifteen hours ago. The clothing came off, the camera started rolling, and amazingly things went very well.
At some point during all of this though, I felt sort of dirty. It occurred to me that it wouldn't take much effort at all to make some pornographic skin flick -- just some willing actors, a camera and a room for the afternoon.
At some point later, it occurred to me why people choose filmmaking as a career. It has nothing to do with art or integrity or vision; it is motivated almost solely on a sadistic level. It's that smile while we kill you thing all over again, only this time I was the one smiling. Under the guise of schoolwork, I got to subject other people to do things that they would never consider doing in real life. Sure it's perverse. So what? Hitchcock made a career out of it.
What did all of this reveal to me about the Dartmouth experience? Firstly, distrust Dartmouth administrators ( I knew that already, of course). Secondly, there are some wonderfully talented, smart and creative people here (I knew that already too), so a special thanks to my cast and crew. And finally, there is something about Dartmouth that is addictive. By the end of the shooting, I realized that making this film was one of the best experiences I've had here.
You can complain about this place all you want, but every once in a while something happens, something comes along that restores your faith in the cult of the Big Green. Dartmouth is an institution that smiles while it kills us; only we're enjoying ourselves too much to realize how bad it is for us.
