Brightest Young Things

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When I was a senior in high school, I made a short film called “Creep and Deception.” It was about a kid named Bobby (all my protagonists were named Bobby) who robs people’s houses to pay for college. Things go south when a man catches the young thief in the act and keeps him tied up in a closet for three days. After the man finally removes a strip of duct tape from Bobby’s mouth, the two sort of become friends. At one point, Bobby explains his termination from a legitimate job:

I worked at Petco. I was running salamander races in the parking lot. One of them got ran over. Whatever...

At the University of Miami, I made a handful of other gems involving characters named Bobby, including one about a frustrated medical student who strangles his girlfriend with a stethoscope just because she’s obnoxious.

By my senior year, my enthusiasm was gone. While my classmates made power moves and peppered acronyms—WB, NBC, ICM—into conversation, I was already thinking about grad school.

Still, a month after commencement, I found myself in Los Angeles living in an apartment I couldn’t afford with a guy who Naired his chest. I landed an internship with Interloper Films, the documentary production company responsible for the 2004 flick DiG!, a portrait of broken genius starring the Brian Jonestown Massacre. The movie won the documentary Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and Interloper was hoping to carry that momentum into their next project.

That project chronicled the rise and fall of Josh Harris, a dotcom billionaire who launched the first online television network, pseudo.com. His innovations in Internet video made him a fortune, and he became a generous patron to the New York art scene. To celebrate the millennium, Harris decided to throw the biggest party he’d ever thrown in the form of an underground social experiment he called Quiet: We Live in Public. Guests lived in small pods equipped with video cameras. Anyone could watch anyone do anything at anytime. Extravagant dishes were served at every meal, and artists-of-the-moment set up shop in one of several exhibition spaces. Director Ondi Timoner and a small crew were there to capture everything. The party lasted several days into the new year, so this meant hours and hours of footage.

My job was to log huge chunks of that footage and store it in a stack of hard drives. The work was tedious, and part of the time I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Because real employees occupied the office’s two editing bays during the day, my shift ran from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m. At first, it wasn’t too bad. I was part of a real movie, right? And Driving home just before dawn, I was able to zip down Sunset Blvd. at 50 mph, a feat that’s damn near impossible at any other time of the day. A paid editing assistant named Jed showed me the ropes—how to read the labels on the tapes, what buttons to push—but I still had trouble catching on. But Jed was patient—the way a guy who listens to old-timey country music and wears the same white t-shirt every day should be patient. Once I finally figured everything out, I had trouble staying awake.

I lived for a few moments of beauty each night. While watching people shower in plastic domes and piss in front of a crowd became the norm, I soaked up the antics of characters like D.C.-native Michael Portney, best known for convulsing around the stage with Bob Dylan at the 1998 Grammy Awards with the phrase “Soy Bomb” smeared across his chest. My favorite artist, known to the world as Mangina, constructed a series of wonderfully-detailed prosthetic pussies that he strapped to himself with thin pieces of material. He was also missing a leg.

There was enough reality show drama to sketch a few engrossing storylines, but the egos of the performers and segments involving semi-automatic weapons and orgasm contests were enough to keep my attention between stretches of ho-hum chatter.

A few weeks in, I got in a fight with the story editor and quit. It was a lesson in not burning bridges, but it was also a fitting climax to a story I didn’t want to be a part of, at least at that time. I bummed around L.A. for a few more months before loading up my ’93 Buick LaSabre and heading home to Kansas City.  I went to Syracuse for grad school and became a writer, but I still think about those lonely nights I sat hunched over a computer at the corner of Sunset and Gower. Maybe I shouldn’t have fucked that up.

Nearly three years later, We Live in Public is finally reaching audiences. It won the another Grand Jury Prize for Timoner and Co. at Sundance in January, and it made its New York premiere earlier this month. I still don’t know whether I’m actually listed in the credits. I doubt it. But Jed probably is.