Skeletons in My Closet: I Made A Terrible Student Film

March 28, 2008 by Lord Jason  Send to a Friend

Everyone’s favorite new Friday column continues to mine all the bad decisions Jason made during his wonder years. So, after Milli Vanilli, Judy Blume and porn dabbling we bring you the young man and his first college movie

Year: 1999
Age: 22
Item: Film: Abracadabra!

College is a wondrous time for all people. It is a halcyon time of learning, drinking, and learning how to drink. I attended Penn State, a school where every student must quickly master the art of attending classes drunk, high or, in most cases, both. This was especially true for film classes in which all you were required to do was sit in a large auditorium and watch Die Hard*.

*No joke. We actually got to watch Die Hard for a high level film criticism class I was in. The professor tried to parallel the themes in Die Hard to communism and class warfare. To be fair, he did this for every film he showed us.

The summer before my freshman year, I travelled to State College, PA in order to take placement tests and sign up for classes. I was going in with almost a full semester of credits I earned in High School, all them in math and computer science, and when the advisor took a look at my transcript, along with my SAT scores, this is how the conversation went:

Advisor: Hmmm, nice transcript.
Me: Thanks, I guess.
Advisor: I assume with these scores and credits that you’ll want to major in something like Computer Science or Engineering, right?
Me: No! I like watching movies, so I want to be a Film Major!
Advisor: So you don’t ever want a decent paying job?
Me: That’s right! I want to have to pay off my student loans until I’m 40!
Advisor: Well, if that’s what you want, you’ve made an excellent choice.
Me: I’m going to go smoke weed and watch Kung-Fu movies now!
Advisor: Don’t rush it, son. There will be plenty of time for that during the semester.

So I embarked on my journey as a Film Student. I took many classes that involved sitting in a gigantic theater with 1500 of my closest friends and watching Goodfellas. The professors were required to give you exams, god knows why, so we were give multiple choice tests that asked you really tough things like who directed Citizen Kane. I quickly figured out that I didn’t ever have to attend this class, all I had to do was rent the movies, watch them in my dorm room, and show up for the exams. The local video store was helpful enough to have a section containing all the Film 101 movies. It was right next to Wendy’s and a head shop, so I frequently killed three birds with one stone on my excursions into town.

Being the smart, stoned person I was, I didn’t realize that smoking weed all the time and not going to class would have a detrimental effect on my grades.
Who knew?
I also didn’t realize that they only accepted 40 people every Junior year into the film program, and it was based on your GPA. When the time came around, I didn’t make the cut and I was distraught. I wasn’t going to be a film major anymore. I was going to have to take Television Production. I was plagued with nightmares of endless hours of editing video of state fairs and Country Jambaroos. I don’t know about you, but a lifetime of searching through B-Roll for the perfect shot of someone pinning a blue ribbon on a pig was not my idea of a good time.
Luckily, though, that didn’t happen.
Someone dropped out of the film program before it started, and I got a call one day from the dean asking me if I wanted in. Hell yeah I wanted in. It was like someone saying the local Emmy you just won wasn’t really an Emmy, it was, SURPRISE! An Oscar. Sweeter than Yoo-Hoo, indeed.
So I joined the hallowed ranks of the film students. My schedule was full of production and theory classes, and I was happier than a pig in slop.
Unfortunately, i quickly found out that I didn’t really enjoy making films.
I mean, I liked watching them, I liked editing them, and I especially enjoyed writing them. But I absolutely hated the process of production. Every shoot was the same: nothing worked right, we forgot important things(like film or lights), and the hours were endless. In other words, it was like an elderly Alzheimer’s stricken couple trying to get laid. Not pretty, to say the least.
But, I plowed through. There wasn’t really any way I was going to change my major at this point in the game, so I made movies. And it was all pretentious film school crap: Experimental clap-trap about how religion was ruled by money, the obligatory “I am a psycho” movie, and a wonderful film about two guys driving around in a car trying to pick up chicks. The mind blowing title of that film was Two Guys In A Car. Uniformly terrible, but each had its moments. The one thing I did love, however, was writing, and I excelled in my screenplay class.
And my screenplay was one of the ones chosen to be made into a senior film.
Not every screenplay got made, as you had to pitch your idea to the entire group and actually get other people interested in making your film with you. The greatest problem, I felt, is that everyone was trying to make an Important Film. There was one kid who had the balls, god bless him, to make a movie about a child molester getting released from prison and trying to come to grips with his problem. My idea for a great pitch was to go up in front of the class and tell them pretty much the same thing I just wrote here. I believe it went something like this:

Me: If you want to make a movie that’s fun, make this one with me. If not, work on someone else’s “Important” project.

This didn’t win me many friends in the class, as I basically said that all the other films were pretentious and frankly ridiculous. Somehow, three people wanted to work with me. And my film was going to get made. This was to the chagrin of some other students whose films weren’t going to get made. In fact, one person quit school and went home in protest. The fact that my stupid movie was getting produced probably didn’t help.
And that film? Abracadabra! (with an exclamation point no less)
My professor said write what you know, and I usually followed his advice. Then again, I was watching A LOT of John Waters movies and still smoking a ton of herbage. So what did the movie wind up being about? Things I know really well: Magicians, Pimps, Whores and Trailer Parks.
And here it is, with limited commercial interruption: Abracadabra! Un Film de Jason Griffenhagen

Abracadabra!

Yeah, it’s pretty sucky, ain’t it?
I had a healthy enough ego to do nearly EVERYTHING in the film. I wrote, directed, did the music and played BOTH the leads, poorly, no less. Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy I certainly ain’t. The acting is painful, and the production values were half assed. Actually, they were quarter-assed, which was how my professor described my effort in making the film. The producer of the film left halfway through the year, and everything went to shit.
Oh well, every film can’t be Citizen Kane.
Every film can’t even be White Chicks.
But at least I can say I was in a movie where I wore a mustache and had a gold tooth. Can Orsen Welles say that?
No, he can’t. But he’s dead. He can’t say much of anything.

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