Our Movie Can't remember where this one came out. By now everyone’s heard about how our movie came to be made, but like all the very best stories (“Pinocchio,” for example) it deserves retelling. As you know, it was a cold evening, the children were barricaded in their rooms and the snow was falling and we said, “Hey, let’s, you know, let’s watch a video.” And so we went out and we got ourselves a video and we were watching it and we looked at each other and said, “Hell, we could do this.” And then we said, “Hell, let’s do it, let’s make one of these here movies ourselves.” It was one of those so-called epiphanies you read about, we just said, “Make a movie” and before you knew it we’d decided to go the distance. So we bought the equipment. Cameras, film (later there was this great “movie moment” when we were about to start filming, and we were like, “Duh! Film!,” and Carlos had to run to the grocery to pick up a few cans—I’ll never forget the way the smiles slowly crept over the stars’ faces as they realized our mistake), you know, equipment. And we said “Now what?” and we said “Gotta write a script!” and so we went and wrote a script. It might have taken one man a week but we divided the labor and got it done in a day and a half. We said “Needs a title!” and Etienne said “How about The Masterful Imaginary Worlds of Doctor Spikes-Magellan?” which was pretty good, but not good enough. And so Sôren suggested Images of Clarabelle in a Sullen Mist, which we liked, except it didn’t jive with the script. Batya almost nailed it with Film: we liked Film, I mean, it was perfect, in its way, you can see how it fits. But in the end we went with Carlos’s suggestion, which you might not know at first was Like Acid Rain Upon A Paper Cottage On Hokkaido, the Northernmost Island of Japan until we whittled it down to Fatal Intuition. So now we needed actors. We were going to do it ourselves but realized we couldn’t talk on the telephone while acting, not without major script revisions. So we called up some celebrities. You’d be surprised how many of them were in the phone book. We called them up and said “Wait, don’t hang up, listen to this!” and then real fast we read them a few lines from the script (it was the scene at night, by the highway, where the red light is issuing from the picnic basket, that speech of Lars’s that begins Would that life’s nutshell be crack’d…), and they were like, “My God, what was that?” All of them said the same thing. “Hey, who is this? Hello?” We faxed them the whole script and within a few hours we had our cast. Like I said, it was all pretty easy. The whole thing was shot right quick. We didn’t know how to work the equipment and had to read the instruction manuals while all the stars were waiting around, but Sôren made a sort of game of it by having everyone read from the manuals “dramatically,” and all had a blast while learning something in the process, which is a good method for almost anything, when you think about it. And then we shot the picture (we learned to call our movie “ the picture,” it made us sound like that guy, the old Hollywood director, I can’t remember his name). The stars were terrific, they really rose to the occasion. We had to shoot the sex scene—not the sexual abuse scene, thank God, the healthy-adult-sex scene—something like ten times, you know, manually putting all the parts where they belonged (we wore latex gloves) but other than that it all ran smoothly, and the food, which we got from Tung’s Chinese over at West Hill Shopping Plaza, was terrific. Well, when that was done we got the film developed and sat down and edited it together with a few pairs of scissors and some tape. That part was tough, we had to find some left-handed scissors for Batya, and even after that it nearly took us all night—would you believe we had to order a pizza at three in the morning!—but when we were done we knew we had something special. Carlos wrote some soundtrack music on his guitar and Etienne did his trademark yodel, and Batya wrote the credits on a series of bar napkins—a wonderful flourish, I think—and we went down to the copy shop and had some copies made. In the morning (we slept maybe two hours, and to be honest we’re still trying to catch up) we started calling up theaters, and we said “Show our movie?” And they said sure but we’d have to bring it over ourselves, so we got on our bikes and distributed the picture that way. Even though we were tired, it was really fun. I think I even shed a few of those “extra pounds,” though I think I would have preferred a couple caplets of diet medication, thank you very much! A lot has been said about our acceptance speech, but I think people missed the point, which was—well, let posterity sort it out. Basically what we said was: Man, that visual organism, has embraced the seer/seen dialectic only from an orthographic standpoint, and not in the more hermetic, hermeneutic manner to which the mind-camera-eye (as opposed to the compound, or “insectile” machine-eye) is accustomed. As the last century’s filmic paradigm obliterated the notion of the crypto-visual “not-seen,” similarly, our own chronoknadel (or “time-noodle”) has enrobed, even strangled, the future’s claim upon cerebello-gonadal “constricted” temporal space. What, then, is our role in the engenderment of and elaboration upon a so-called “light-sight-space-place” into which the fluid of our consciousness (and, even, yet, our conscienceness) may be poured? I love you, Mom! I love you, Mom! I love you, Mom! Which might seem a little opaque on the page, if you’re the kind of person resistant to simple, eloquent ideas. But let me tell you, the crowd there tonight knew exactly what we meant, and cried so hard they nearly gagged. Of course everyone wants to know what we’ll do next, having sort of exhausted the “film” form, and the answer I think is that we all go home, let the children out of their rooms, and continue in the field we began our careers in, which is small appliance repair. There is so much we haven’t done, and so little time for life, in all its fullness, to bloom, as Lars memorably says in our movie, “like a nutria all splayed for dissection.” We plan, then, to splay the nutria of life, to “devour its pulsing innards” as Lars puts it in the picture, and we plan to do it with gusto. c2001 by J. Robert Lennon.