| The Kidnapping |
| Every so often as an independent filmmaker there comes a time when you must make the decision to sacrifice good judgement and common decency for some ass-kicking footage. You know, the kind of footage that turns a crappy movie in to a work of cult art. The problem lies with whether or not the reprecussions for your actions are worth facing in order to get the footage. Somehow, through no apparant fault of my own, I somehow managed to turn my friends into filmmakers like myself. I had shot a couple short films in the past year with the help of my friend Wonderful (named after the word he uses more than any other), and the rest of the people in our group started to take interest. Our style of filmmaking was, I guess you could call it, unorthodox. Instead of developing a script, getting a budget, making a schedule, etc. we went on the random-acts-of-footage approach. Our concept development usually went like this: "Hey you know what would be cool. (states idea)" "Dude let's film it!" Together Wonderful, Steamy, Pecos Bill, Shaft, and I started Sarcastaman Entertainment (well technically I started it all by myself, but now there were more members than just me). Our first attempt at a movie was The Day of Stupidity. Basically we just went around for a while doing stupid and pointless things then splicing them together and calling it a movie. The whole thing was basically just something designed to make anyone who watched it go "WTF?!". We had things like rolling down hills in barrels, driving down our main street with a 40 foot string of balloons attached to our truck, spinning around in dryers, dragging Shaft behind us in a moving vehicle, etc. It was all pretty stupid and relatively harmless. But for the end of the movie we planned a big finale. We decided to stage a kidnapping. Basically we were going to pretend to kidnap Shaft near a busy area. The whole thing was supposed to freak people out AT FIRST. People were supposed to see it and go "Holy Crap!" but then realize that it was just a bunch of stupid high schoolers filming something and just forget about it. Well, let's just say things didn't quite go as planned. We stripped down Shaft to his boxers and tied him up with bungee cords. We then stuck him in Steamy's trunk while the rest of us hopped into Pecos's truck. We drove downtown and when we reached the designated intersection Steamy popped his trunk and Shaft jumped out and started hopping away. Tugboat (Steamy's brother) grabbed Shaft and threw him in the back of the truck where I was filming. I thought the whole thing looked ridiculously fake, and we even tried to make people see that this wasn't real, but apparantly that didn't work. I found out later that the total number of 911 calls made about our prank was 12. Nothing would have really happened to us but one person decided to follow us and bring the cops to our rendevous point. Four squad cars showed us. The sergeant got up in our faces and screamed at us, my camera (I was using a borrowed one from the school at the time) was confiscated, and there were numerous threats made about putting us in jail. To give you a better idea of how scared shitless I was keep in mind that this all happened one week before graduation and we might not have been able to walk had Wonderful's mom not convinced the cops that we were good kids. The cops decided to let us go and we had to give a formal apology to the Fayetteville Police Department. We had decided to sacrifice good judgement to get good footage. Aparantly if we had just called the police ahead of time and told them what we would be doing we wouldn't have gotten in any trouble. But, hey, what do you expect from a bunch of kids making a movie called The Day of Stupidity? |