The Giant Metal Space Octopus And Other Tales of Madness

by Paul Idol

Have you ever had a really bad case of food poisoning?  That lasted nine days?  That struck right before you were going to make a movie?  I doubt it, but just to make sure there’s absolutely no room for debate, I’m talking nine days of super-heated chocolate milk squirting out your ass at ultrasonic speeds every sixty seconds on the second.  I’m talking nine days of getting no sleep at all (unless you count losing consciousness from severe dehydration) and nine days of trying desperately to get through the 36-hours-a-day job of preproduction while you look (and feel!) more and more like one of the prune-faced corpses from Island of Terror or Tobe Hooper’s overlooked masterpiece Lifeforce with every passing minute[1].  Trust me, it’s no fun, especially when you have a grand total of two weeks to get everything done because you’ve foolishly entered some kind of insane Movie Madness competition.

So why am I thinking about entering the competition again this year?  Because I’m crazy!  Ask my girlfriend.  She’ll tell you[2].

You need to be crazy to make a movie in two weeks.  That’s just 336 hours from the moment you’re assigned a subject and genre to the deadline for submitting a completed, edited, scored, mastered, color-corrected, and polished masterpiece[3].  If you’re stupid and careless enough to sleep, make that 335 hours.  Not easy.  In that time you’ve got to write a screenplay (10-20 hours, give or take, or 1-2 if you plagiarize liberally), audition, cast and rehearse actors (6-60 hours), secure locations (3-400 hours), build sets, acquire props, design costumes and makeup, find new locations when your original ones fall through because your location manager never actually had them in the first place (9 million hours plus a lot of screaming and hair-pulling), and of course shoot and edit your movie (about 12 minutes, because after spending too much time on everything else, that’s all you have left).  So you can see it’s a bit of a challenge, especially when you factor in the Diarrhea of Death – and I haven’t even gotten to some of the biggest problems we had last year.

Unfortunately, one of those problems was me.  Yes, gentle reader[4], yours truly, the writer-director half of Overconfident Wannabe Productions.  You see, I have an unfortunate predilection for getting consumed by grand visions regardless of their practicality[5], and when we were assigned an action movie about a group of people who decide to take a stand after being picked on for too long, I had one of my most grandiose and impossible visions ever.  The two-week limit and my tiny budget notwithstanding, I decided to make a monster movie from the monsters’ POV, in which they’d finally fight back against their human oppressors.  We were going to have a dancing mummy, a cheerful witch, a cowardly vampire, a foul-mouthed ghost, a depressed werewolf, an unscrupulous real estate developer who didn’t want no stinkin’ monsters depressing his property values… it was going to be great. 

What I failed to properly account for (or rather, what I dismissed out of hand despite my long-suffering producer-girlfriend’s valiant efforts to knock some sense into my head) is that trying to make that movie in two weeks with a few thousand bucks is exactly like trying to produce the entire Matrix trilogy in a single afternoon with the recycling deposits from a couple bags of soda cans providing the entire budget[6].  If this were going to be an advice column (which, thank the good lord, it’s not) I’d have exactly two words for you: THINK SMALL!!!  Make a movie about a guy taking a nap!  And just to make extra sure nothing goes wrong, make it a short nap and just shoot one take. 

Sadly, my Heaven’s Gate-sized imagination and liquefied intestines weren’t the end of our problems.  In fact, they were barely the beginning. 

Our unit production manager, who was doubling as our location manager because of the difficulty of finding suckers willing to spend day after day trudging through the greater metropolitan area in the middle of a heat wave scouting for and securing potential locations for no money and with no advance notice, taught us the vital lesson that it’s absolutely necessary to conduct extensive Secret Service-style background checks on all prospective crew members even on the lowest-budget film.  You might think I’m exaggerating[7], but no, the police began calling me shortly after production wrapped, trying to track him down.  I’m just speculating based on the limited information they let slip, but it sounds like he used his position as a Visual Basic programmer to embezzle large sums of money from his primary employer and then skipped town when he smelled the heat.  And this was the guy I trusted to rent film equipment for the shoot with my credit card!  Of course, I could be way off base here.  That might be a very, very unfair speculation.  Maybe he was actually in trouble for running a white slavery and child prostitution ring out of his living room.

No, no, it must’ve been the embezzling thing.  Did I mention that this guy rented an obscenely over-priced truck for the production[8], and that his associate crashed said truck into the balcony of his apartment building one night?  That happy little accident hit the production (which is to say, me) with a $1500 deductible, and when I tried to get the associate to pay for it, all he had to say was, “But I didn’t do it on purpose!”.  Friends, my producer-girlfriend[9] watches Judge Judy, and every single day, fifty to a hundred pathetic wankers try to weasel out of paying for vehicle damage with that exact excuse.  It never works. 

People who’ve read this far tell me I sound bitter[10], but instead of putting constructive criticism to good use, I’m going to continue in this vein and recount a few more humorous anecdotes about the production of our monster movie before I get to the life-affirming Hallmark card crap that my editors tell me is what people really want[11]. 

You know how diarrhea (and chronic dehydration and acute malnutrition) can depress your immune system if it goes on long enough?  And you know how not sleeping for a few weeks can have the same effect[12]?  Well, I didn’t, but I got a vivid demonstration of those two principles when the actor playing the vampire showed up on the first day of shooting with a bad case of bronchitis.  Now, ordinarily I just don’t get sick.  Ever.  Except for a slightly elevated susceptibility to food poisoning (and, OK, except for AIDS, cancer, Lyme disease, bacterial vaginosis, and hypochondria[13]) I’m normally like that guy Bruce Willis played in Unbreakable when it comes to disease and illness, but if you actually saw our finished monster movie, you might have noticed there was only one person in the whole stack of corpses the monsters piled up after killing all their human oppressors who actually looked like a real corpse.  That (as if you even need me to tell you) was me.  In fact, I strained credibility rather badly because I didn’t look freshly killed, I looked like I’d been dead for at least a few months[14].

All told, I think I spent about five days during that production in a feverish delirium screaming that a giant metal space octopus was trying to kill me[15], not to mention losing several gallons of precious bodily fluids and three-quarters of my life expectancy.  Later, actors complained that when I tried to direct them, I mainly just grunted, groaned and then threw up on their shoes.  Not the best strategy for building the emotional intensity of a scene, huh?  Not the best way to make a movie, period – or in our case, three movies.

Yes, you read that right: three movies.

Remember that part earlier where I mentioned locations falling through[16]?  Without an actual real estate development or even some Ed Wood-style stock footage of one, and too sick to actually form coherent thoughts or communicate with anything higher up the food chain than a dung beetle, I had to give up on the first movie halfway through production.  Finishing it in the time allotted simply wasn’t possible.

I quickly wrote a second, smaller screenplay with some of the same characters (that took another 5-10 hours if you’re counting) but since I was still spending most of my time running from the octopus, I didn’t manage to break down the new script, draw complete storyboards or devise a shooting plan, much less come up with a workable production schedule, so midway through shooting that second film just three days before the Movie Madness deadline, production fell apart again.  We would have needed to finish shooting the next morning, but the fantastically talented special effects makeup artist we’d lucked into finding, Tate Steinsiek, had to be in New Jersey that night to start cleaning and painting a house owned by a very litigious and violence-prone Christian fundamentalist ex-Marine.  You see, that Christian fellow had recently rented out his house to Tate as the location for a very bloody virgin sacrifice scene, and now he was pissed about the mess[17].

As a last-ditch effort to get through to the second round of the competition, we dragged all our equipment (and our bitterly protesting and much-abused cast) over to Central Park and did some improv for awhile.  The next day, I wrote a whole new story to stitch together the improv work and some scraps of the first two movies in between bouts of space octopus paranoia and panic attacks caused by the way the editor’s equipment kept crashing due to the humidity.  (Did I mention we were in the middle of a heat wave?  And that it was raining heavily?  And that the windows in the editor’s office couldn’t be closed?  And that her equipment was extremely sensitive to humidity?  It’s the little which make production so rewarding.)  The editor’s engineer had to dash over several times with heat lamps and hair dryers to coax the workstation into booting again[18], and right up until the end we were afraid that either he was going to melt the CPU or the blasted machine would finally short out for good and eat the whole project.

The amazing thing is that despite all that (and a lot more I haven’t told you[19]), we came in runner-up in our heat.  Many tears were shed over our failure to advance to the second round, and a few of my thinner-skinned teammates seriously contemplated committing ritual seppuku, but hey, imagine how much more disappointed we would have been if everything had gone smoothly and we still lost! 

So why am I neck deep in preproduction on another movie even as I take time I don’t have to write this article, and why am I seriously contemplating another run at Movie Madness?  There are many reasons.  Because I’m crazy, sure[20], and also because I had the fantastic good fortune to meet and work with some truly amazing people last time around (in addition to Tate, I’d like to thank Chris Becker, an awe-inspiringly talented composer, and Agata Oleksiak, who’s some kind of demented costume design genius[21]), but mainly it all comes down to one thing.  You never feel more alive than when you’re barfing and crapping your guts out, shriveling into a desiccated little monkey corpse, spending money you don’t have like water that you should actually be drinking but can’t keep down anyway, fighting with schedules and locations and permits and insurance and rental contracts and defective equipment and rip-off artists, not to mention trying to keep ahead of a homicidal alien octopus – all because you’re pursuing the glorious dream of making a movie and seeing the whole thing knit together into something far, far greater than the sum of its parts.  There’s nothing else like it.