My Film Debut

That’s right. Yours truly starred in a movie. An experimental movie to boot. A six minute experimental movie. And it’s going to show in a film festival, more specifically, the Tidal Wave Film Festival.

It’s about a man who becomes so obsessed with videopoems that he loses his job, his daughter and his sanity. Not surprisingly, I played the latter stages of the movie more convincingly than the former. Whatever the hell that means.

And get this…my daughter Cassie (who appears as Cassie in my novel The War Bug) is in the movie as well. In fact, the director Denise DeMoura tells me that Cass steals the show. I’m not surprised. She has cleaner, whiter teeth than everybody else.

It all started last year, when my buddy Beth Ashton (soon to be a lead character with Cassie in the sequel to The War Bug) called up and said: “Hey Biff, I have tickets for two to all the movies in the Tidal Wave Film Festival. I asked all the good looking guys, the semi good looking guys, the not so good looking guys, the not-even-on-a-desert-island good looking guys, and those other guys that nobody even thinks about. They were all washing their hair for five days. That leaves you.”

So I was Beth’s date for five days.

Not that Beth really couldn’t find a date. She’s beautiful. She’s entertaining. But she’s a computer geek who knows things that intimidate most men. She’s the network teckie for three radio stations.

And she’s my buddy. So don’t think a single negative thought about her or I’ll come out of this screen at you.

And you don’t want that.

So, off we went to a bunch of really cool indie films. Five days worth. We saw movies like Red Rover (wrote a movie review of this that you can read at www.cinemasense.com/Reviews/RedRover.htm), documentaries, animated movies, shorts movies, and…and…and videopoems.

We picked videopoems because the write-up seemed so Bohemian and artsy. We immediately put down the Victoria Secret catalogue and paid more attention to the videopoem write-up, which stated: “Come to this venue and you will be forever endowed with artistic aptitude, Bohemianism, and people will like you.”

Who could resist?

We went to the videopoem venue. It was a blast. But that’s another story. The short and long of this is…after each of the venues at the Tidal Wave Film Festival there’s a get-together at a local bar for performers, directors, and others in the movies to be present to rub elbows with the viewers. Beth and I went to the Blue Door and were the only two (with a brief appearance of an elderly lady who seemed to have ended up in the wrong place but stuck around long enough to chug a few glasses of wine – about two minutes – before floating out the window to some other party) who showed up. We had three videopoets at the table...at our mercy.

We plied them with questions about important videopoem shit like: “what’s the weather like in New York this time of year” and “what do you do when you have athlete’s foot?” Important shit.

But it ended with one of the videopoets, Denise DeMoura, asking if she could interview me about my reactions to the videopoems for a national radio show thingy. Apparently, the interview went well on air but, like most of the happy things in my life, I missed it. But the interview went over so well that Denise asked it I would be interested in appearing in a short film she had in mind. I asked if my daughter, the aspiring actress in the family could be in it, and Denise said: “OK. But you are not allowed of eclipse her.” Not knowing what “eclipse” means, I said: “OK. Eh?” (Being Canadian and all, you know, eh? Go BO SOX…break the curse!)

So, comes along March. Denise comes to New Brunswick after spending the Winter at her home in the Bahamas where she complained about the heat. Complained about the heat. Hmm. Complained about the heat. In January and February. Oh yeah, experimental films. We’re talking that kinda people.

Complained about heat in January and February. Eh?

So, Cassie and I, and a friend of mine Duane Dunfield (who’s place Denise and the camera lady Angela stayed at) got together for two days of eating junk food pastries and pizza and tampered-with chicken bacon, drinking wine, and…oh yeah…filming.

OK, sounds cool, eh? (Notice that patriotic Canadian accent?)

But jeez. I tripped over a railing on a loading ramp and gashed my leg. I bled. Denise, my daughter and Angela laughed. Yes, they laughed straight-faced as I bled. I banged my head into senselessness in a scene in which I tried to broach a metal gate. I made new enemies at the Farmer’s Market as I winked at people (to let them know that something neat was going on…like, let’s see…they were being filmed by the woman over to the right for an experimental film) who looked at me strangely and immediately went home and deleted me from their email address books. I turned my back for a few seconds and Duane drank half the beer I was allowed to drink (my autocratic daughter having placed me on a diet) for the sake of the film.

Half a beer, when I hadn’t had one in, like, several days.

But, in the end, the film was filmed and I survived. The original 15 minutes of film that was to go into the Festival was eventually cut to 6 minutes and went from the Comedy classification to Experimental.

And Duane owes me half a beer.

Wanna know more? Check out: http://www.tidalwavefilmfest.ca/films/nbshorts1.html