For Thursday, January 7, 1999 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 732 words

Mileage footage

We had friends over the other night. My darling wife, out of the blue, in the midst of our random kitchen chitchat, mentioned that I had made an 8mm movie when I was a teenager. She suggested we all watch it and got the others psyched up for a viewing.

I was reluctant. I was hesitant. I was disinclined.

She ran to the movie closet and pulled it out.

To preserve it, 12 years ago I had it transferred to videotape. I had it copied down on First Street at Ye Olde Video Shoppe (May it RIP). The young owner gave me strange looks when I came to pick up the finished copy. I shrugged and paid.

He was one of the last few people to view that movie. I brought it home and stuffed it away. It hasn't been viewed in nearly a decade.

When Susan waved the black box about and motioned us down to the TV room, why was I reluctant, hesitant, disinclined? Why was I afraid?

I didn't analyze my gut response at the time, or attempt to articulate it, even to myself; I just felt extremely uncomfortable. During the film, I couldn't stop talking. I kept trying to explain and explain and preface events and explain some more.

This sitting is my first opportunity to reflect. Here, alone at the keyboard, perhaps I can coax out what was bothering me.

Let's see. Maybe it was because I thought I'd look stupid. No. That's not it. Of course, I would look stupid. It is an amateur film made without talents or skills using my Mom's Bell and Howell crank camera. It is herky-jerky, faded, and disjointed.

I think my emotions flamed on because this movie saved my life. I know that's part of the reason. On the surface, it's just a silly film called "The End" about the end of the world, full of earthquakes, fires, and panicked behavior. People watch it. They laugh. They shake their heads. They give me strange looks. I smile back.

However, I'm watching the director's cut. I'm seeing beneath the action, and remembering how this film carried me through a difficult and dangerous time in my life -- my teenage years.

I grew up with Vietnam and the Beatles and the hippies and the dope and the love-ins and all that jazz. At first it was a wild and crazy movement full of philosophy and morality. Then the war ended. After that, at least in my small mountain hamlet, the movement became mostly about taking drugs. I only knew two guys who were shot in

Vietnam, and they both survived. By age 18 I knew four people who had died from or because of drugs.

I saw it as the end of the world. My childhood was collapsing around me. Every day my friends would converge in town and then diverge to their separate indulgences. I was not a prude, but I didn't find the car crashes and the over-doses healthy or intellectually stimulating.

Instead, I borrowed my mother's movie camera and decided to chronicle the era. I wanted to capture all my friends forever-young on film. I began a movie about my town that took a year to complete and cost me over $500.

As a consequence of making this film, all my spare time was spent locked away in my studio apartment with projectors, splicing equipment, audio tapes, stop watches, and mountains of film canisters. Outside, my friends were dropping like flies. I lost a total of 12 acquaintances -- dead -- I could name them today -- before I escaped to college. Several of them are in my movie.

When I watched this film with my friends the other night, while they were laughing at some kid bouncing off of walls in a make-believe earthquake, I was thinking, that boy's dead. He bled to death. Another friend drives by in his car with a healthy grin. He's a vegetable now, brain damaged from a motorcycle accident. The buildings have burned down. The stores have closed.

I filmed it as a comedy, a hoot for my pals. For a while it was. Now it's much more than that, to me. It is a monument to lost friends. A testament to an era. It's back on the shelf. I don't think I can watch it again for a long, long time.