6/5/23
Newsletter #358
The Crack of Dawn
I hated high school so much that after 10th grade, I lied and said that I was 18 (I had a beard), took the GED test and passed. Now, how could they force me to go back to high school when I already had a degree (as Chris Rock said, “GED stands for ‘Good Enough Diploma’”). I began Oakland Community College in September 1974, when I had just turned 16 a few weeks earlier. On my first day of college – to give you a soundtrack, the big hit song of that exact moment was George Benson’s Masquerade – I attended the class, Filmmaking 101, and found that it was geared pretty low. There were about 50 students in a large lecture hall. We were actually allowed to smoke in class, which is why OCC was referred to as, “High school with ashtrays.” It was also called, “Harvard of the Highway,” because it was beside the freeway. Anyway, half the people in the class weren’t paying the slightest attention to the utterly ineffectual teacher, Dr. Dan Greenberg, who honestly loved movies – he also taught Film History, which I took, and he was good at that. However, Dr. Dan didn’t know much about filmmaking, and it’s hard to teach a class for which you are unqualified.
So, I came out of the first day of Filmmaking 101, slightly depressed at the prospect of taking a class where I probably wasn’t going to learn anything, which, of course, turned out to not be true. Anyway, the cafeteria was right there outside the lecture room. I was hungry, so I got a tray and got in line. At the very end of the line were the desserts. Three women dressed in chef’s whites were stocking the display window with great-looking, huge pieces of cake. I then heard the loud, grating, utterly unique voice of Celia Raimi – Sam’s mom – belting my name, “Josh! What are you doing here?” It turned out that she was taking a baking course at OCC. Her lemon merengue pie was terrific. For one of my two semesters there, I saw Celia every time I took that class, and always got a wonderful piece of pie or cake. That was certainly the highlight of Filmmaking 101.
Dr. Dan taught filmmaking like this: go make a movie in Super-8 and we’ll show it in class. That ate up half of the semester. Dr. Dan had somehow finagled a couple of thousand feet of black & white 16mm film, and free processing. OCC owned a whole room full of oddball film equipment, including three or four 16mm cameras. But here is where Dr. Dan fell down on the job. He tried to be democratic. People submitted stories, we all had to read them, then choose one – which took the whole rest of the semester – then it had to be turned into a screenplay, then shot, edited, etc. And we’d already spent half the semester shooting Super-8 movies. My science fiction story was chosen, but it didn’t matter because there was nowhere near enough time to go through the process democratically, nor any other way, and the semester ended.
On the last day of class, Dr. Dan announced, “I have 2,000 feet of film with processing, does anybody want it?” I went directly to him and said, “I want it.” He asked, “Are you going to shoot your story, the one the class chose?” I said in what was no doubt my snottiest smartass tone, “Dr. Dan, it’s a science fiction story, it’s complicated, and it’s not suitable for black & white. I’m going to make a comedy spoof of a 1930s prison film.” He asked, “Is it written?” And I lied and said, “Yes.”
I went home and I wrote a 10–12-page script called The Long Walk, referring the walk to the electric chair. I then spent the entire next semester shooting the film after classes with a group of volunteers, no money, and absolutely no idea what we were doing. We shot with a camera right out of the Smithsonian Museum. It was an Auricon 16mm studio camera, that was huge, and extremely difficult to move.
As I said, when I came out of that Filmmaking 101 class on the first day, previous to running into Mrs. Raimi, and I thought, “I’m not going to learn anything in this class,” whereas in fact I did learn something. What I learned was that it didn’t matter if we made the science fiction story or the ‘30s gangster parody, we weren’t prepared, we didn’t have any money, or nobody knew what they were doing, particularly me. I was completely over my head. I got to experience a real-life existential nightmare, in black & white, along the lines of – for me – being pushed out on stage at a rock concert holding a Stratocaster that I cannot play at all.
The footage looked terrible, and the idea of editing it seemed nauseating. Luckily, I had been accepted to Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and the next semester I moved away. The reels of unedited 16mm footage repose in a box in my garage. The last I checked squirrels had made a home in it.
Thus, I learned very possibly the most important lesson I could possibly learn – as a film director the most important thing you can bring to the set is your preparedness. If you are as prepared as you can be, that’s the best you can do; everything else is out of your hands. If the movie gods decide to shit on you, as they often do, at least you know that you did your homework.
And there you have it.