Cory Frye: So how do you feel you've grown as a writer?
Alan: [laughs] Backwards?
Jackson: That's a technical question. Decline. Decline that one!
Alan: More big words. [laughter]
Jackson: You know what? That's pretty much the only thing, too.
Carrie: Yeah. Proper English.
Alan: Now, I give them the script, and they're like "I don't know
what this means, I'm not saying it!"
Juston: Well he just, he makes up the script, and we just kind
of...
Alan: Slaughter it? [laughter]
Juston: Yeah.
Jackson: Yeah, we make it at least decent.
Karyn: Yeah, "Memorize this." "Okay".
Alan: "Memorize this. Here, it's forty pages long."
Juston: Well lately, the times that we've had, we only have about
five minutes to review the, the scripts, and some of the lines
are pretty long, and, uh, you have to, uh, kind of make 'em up
Jackson: Yeah, that's the fun of it, actually.
Karyn: Most of it's made up.
Jackson: Yeah, we just improvise the lines and pretend we know
what we're doing.
Alan: Like the... That second episode that we showed you?
Carrie: Yeah?
Alan: The first few scenes, where Jason's going "Yup yup", and I
pretend to punch him... [laughter] Those were all actually the
outtakes from that scene. We didn't like, well, I didn't like
the way the ones we actually taped turned out, so I just stuck a
bunch of the bloopers together. Like, I'm really about to punch
him in that one. [laughter]
Cory Frye: What is this fascination with Vanilla Ice? [laughter]
Everybody points at Jason.
Karyn: Ask Jason! Right there.
Jackson: That's Jason.
Jason: It annoys people, so....
Karyn: He's good at annoying people... and writing on
microwaves...
Alan: and other things. [laughs]
Jason: Who would know permanent meant that it wouldn't come off?
[laughter]
Cory Frye: So, as you were shooting all of these earlier movies,
did you guys just have a basic outline saying, you know, "We'll
do this, this, this and this"
Alan: Well, we just wrote a script, then -
Jackson: No, we had an idea -
Jason: Actually, he just brings a box of props and we keep doing
stuff until we use them all once [laughter].
Juston: Sometimes we'll think of, like, a special effect or
something like that, and we'll think "Oh, that'll be cool!" Then
we'll try and work it in, or what have you.
Alan: Ground beef.
Juston: What's that?
Alan: Ground beef, fake blood, severed hand.
Jackson: Yeah? Is that what you guys used? I wasn't around for
that one.
Alan: Ground beef, cotton, fake blood.
Jason: You wondered why we had that barbecue right after the
filming?
Alan: Yeah, when you're finished, eat the props!
Juston: Some of them don't work, but, oh well.
Jackson: That one!
Juston: Yeah! [laughs]
Alan: That one we showed you with all the fire. (points at
Juston) That was him. He's the "demolitions expert", I guess.
Cory Frye: Was that the house?
Alan: The house? Yeah, well I guess that, too.
Juston: (Points at Alan) That was his.
Alan: That was mine.
Juston: We were supposed to have a dummy that blew up, but, the,
uh, the bomb didn't work, so, just, uh, ummm, what did we do?
Jackson: Lit it on fire! [laughs]
Alan: (to Juston) First, you built the bomb, second...
Jason: ...then he just, like, kept trying to light this -
gunpowder, with, like, a lighter. [laughter] And the dummy was
made out of his blue jeans and my cotton shirt, and, well, the
cotton shirt was flammable, and so was the wig that was on top of
the dummy, but he went running away with his pants, that were,
like, smoldering.
Alan: They were filled with snow...
Jason: Yeah.
Alan: couldn't possibly have caught on fire.
Juston: We try to make them look funny, too. There was one,
where it was Jackson getting hit by the truck. We, uh, well, I
tried to put chocolate pudding down by his waist, so when he got
hit by the truck, it would....
Karyn: splatter. [laughter] But it didn't work.
Juston: It didn't turn out. We made a mess of the car, but...
Jackson: Thankfully for my sanity, it didn't work.
Juston: I wouldn't advise it.
Alan: All those effects... It's like, about halfway through the
writing the script for the first movie, we realized "We can't
possibly make this look, like, real, and good. Let's make it a
comedy!" [laughter] "A parody, that'll work!"
Carrie: So, it's supposed to look like that!
Alan: "So, even if it is cheesy, we can say we, um, planned it
that way!"
Jackson: Hence, you have all the videos. [laughter]
Alan: I have to make a serious movie now.
The group is shocked and surprised.
Carrie: What?!
Jackson: Oh my God... Better not have us as actors!
Alan: No, just me. Jason's in it too, but... (Points at camera)
Charles is in it.
Jackson: A serious video. Oh my gosh, I'd hate to see what that
looks like.
Jason: It would give us the opportunity to put Vanilla Ice in it.
Carrie: [laughing] Vanilla Ice?
Jason: You haven't seen that one?
Carrie: No.
Jason: It's where he was running away from, who was it? Suge Ray
or whoever. "He's gonna kill me, I gotta get rid of my songs!"
Jason and Carrie keep talking, but a crying baby drowns out
their conversation.
Cory Frye: So when you watch all of your old videos now, what do
you think?
Karyn: We just laugh, 'cause they're so stupid.
Jason: We just laugh at it - it keeps up out of therapy that way.
Alan: Yeah.
Juston: There's a lot of stuff that's not actually on the tapes.
Karyn: Yeah, like how many times it took to actually make that
stupid scene.[laughs]
Alan: Which stupid scene?
Jackson: All of them. [laughs]
Juston: Especially in Hamlet.
Karyn: What was that one? "We have apprehended him, sir."
Jackson laughs.
Alan: Yeah. It was seventeen takes on that one. Actually, the
longest we've done? Seventy. Seventy takes on one scene.
Carrie: What was that?
Cory Frye: How much videotape did that take up?
Alan: It took about an hour, and it was like a... half a minute
long scene.
Jason: But it was like ten o'clock at night, and everyone was all
tired. [IT WAS ACTUALLY AROUND NOON.]
Carrie: Which one was it?
Alan: It was that one in Hamlet, where, like -
Karyn: Remember, the one where Jackson kept saying "We have
apprehended him, sir." Was it that one?
Alan & Jackson: No.
Karyn: Which one was it?
Jackson: I know which one he's talking about.
Alan: It's the one with Andrea, dancing around and trying to do
all that rap, all that rap music that she had no idea what she
was saying, and she kept screwing up her lines.
Carrie: Oh, that's right! [laughs]
Jessica crawls away, after the camera again.
Jennifer: Baby, where are you going? [laughs] Cm'ere...
Karyn: Your baby is so cute.
Jackson: That was funny. Oh, the one that I remember is where
Jason kept screwing around. He'd come in and run into the wall
or whatever.
Juston: Was that because I was behind there doing that -
Jackson & Karyn: Yes!! [laughs]
Alan: That's the one where Karyn starts crying, then she runs out
of the room and starts beating him up.
Karyn: Then I scream.
Alan: Karyn and Dan are, like screaming at them.
Juston: "Quit it!"
Karyn: That's not what I said.
Juston: Oh. Well, close...
Cory Frye: So, what are your most fond memories of this
association?
Carrie: The stuff that's off-camera.
Jackson: You mean now that we've all matured? [laughs]
Karyn: Have we?
Jackson: No.
Alan: Not all of us.
Jennifer: Oh, I know! I never got to, I never got to tell you,
that was pretty cool what you did with the beeper, by the way.
[laughter]
Jackson: That was so mean!
Jennifer: I just saw that.
Jackson: That was so mean! I'm never gonna forgive you for that!
Alan: You can talk about that one, Juston.
Jennifer: That was my favorite [laughs].
Karyn: Well, we were over, when we were doing....
Juston: I'm kind of the prankster.
Karyn: ...those scenes, like, looking back? Um, just like, when
we did those. Last year?
Alan: Five Years and Counting.
Karyn: Yeah. That was when she was almost due.
Jennifer: Mmm-hmmm.
Karyn: And he had his beeper, to go off, you know, if she went
into labor, and we had a beeper at our house, too.
Jackson: Which nobody told me about, of course.
Karyn: [laughing] So we set it off!
Jackson: In the middle of filming!
Karyn: He's like, "Oh my God!"
Cory Frye: Set your beeper off?
Karyn: Set our beeper off so that he would think that it was his.
[laughs]
Jackson: I jumped up, I'm freaking out, "Oh my God! Oh my God!
It's not working! It's not working!" [laughter] I go over and get
the phone, try calling. Of course she's not there, so I'm even
more freaked out. [laughter] I mean, I was totally going insane.
And then, I would have, I would've left in the middle of
everything, and went...
Karyn: Then you went and -
Jackson: But, then he showed me he had a beeper, and, I killed
him, of course. He was resurrected.
Carrie: I definitely like goofing off, the best part. When we
were doing that, 1984 -
Jackson: Andrea's house?
Alan: No, the big watergun fight.
Carrie: Yeah, the watergun fights, those were so much fun. Just,
running around, being...
Alan: Getting all of our equipment locked in a room that we don't
have keys to.
Jackson: That was fun for everybody else except me, of course.
Alan: Climbing up in the ceiling...
Juston: It was fun watching you.
Alan: Yeah. Breathing asbestos. I had taken the hinges off the
door, of course, so when he opened the door it fell on
me.[laughter]
Jackson: He could have told me he was doin' that before I went up and climbed through the attic and through the wall's insulation,
and punched out the side of the wall, and dropped three stories
to get the stupid camera...
Alan: Well, you could have climbed up a little way and gone
through the access door instead of going through the wall.
Jackson: There was like, dead stuff back there.
Juston: Where?
Jackson: Crabtree.
Juston: Dead stuff?
Jackson: Yeah. In the attic.
Alan: The ghost of Crabtree School who makes the bell ring?
Juston: Corn-Babies?
Jackson: Yeah. Corn-Babies are bad.
Alan: There's no bell in that school, but.. you can hear a bell.
[laughter] Comin' from somewhere. Some people live in there now.
(shrugs) We lost our first studio that way - somebody bought it.
Jackson: For like, a hundred bucks.
Alan: We weren't supposed to be there. It was condemned.
Jackson: That was a really nice place, I liked it there.
Alan: Had its own basketball court.
Cory Frye: Where was this?
Jackson: Crabtree elementary school.
Cory Frye: Oh.
Jackson: It's probably not there anymore.
Jason: Well, they tore the whole face off, then they tore
all the insides out, and they're making it into a house.
Jackson: They did?
Jason nods.
Jackson: The funny thing was, that thing was, like, closed for -
Cory Frye: They're doing that with a lot of old schools now.
They're turning them into homes.
Jackson: What's with the... Why did everything work in there,
anyway? I thought it was supposed to be closed for, like, years.
Electricity worked, lights worked, water worked, everything
worked. I mean, that was a homeless person's dream. [laughter]
Juston: Jason and I both went to that school when we were
younger.
long pause...
Jackson: Huh?
Juston: Jason and I both went to that school when we were
younger.
Alan: Yeah.. I didn't meet Juston until... seventh grade? eighth
grade?
Cory Frye: How long did you actually use the school?
Alan: Three years - three movies. We used it for Gatsby, 1984,
and Hamlet. Three movies? Yeah.
Juston: The sound was really bad in there.
Alan: Especially when somebody's hooked up, like, a
malfunctioning microphone and set it on this metal table, and
it's making all this feedback that everyone didn't know was there
until we were done.
Jason: It was sound effects.
Jackson: Sound effects, yeah.
Alan: Yeah. Planes flying by in the middle of Denmark, in the
1400's. [laughter] On a basketball court. (shrugs)
Juston: The best part about it is goofing off. Um... Alan
doesn't like it as much, 'cause he wants to get stuff done,
but... It's basically just goofing off... and then watching it
later, what we've done, and laughing at it.
Jackson: We don't really watch the movie.
Karyn: The bloopers are the best.
Jackson: Yeah. We don't watch the movie. "Okay, Alan, you've
got your movie, let's, let's watch the bloopers now" [laughter]
Juston: Well, it made the grade.
Alan: It's like an hour and a half of me yelling at people to
shut up.
Karyn: We always got A's!
Alan: Yeah. That's the important thing, I guess.
Jason: The most important thing is that we didn't have to work
for our grades.
Alan: Well, you didn't.
Carrie: [laughing] Don't tell that to Mrs. Burt! (pause) I liked
in one of the movies, you did that checklist you were going down
through at the end.
Alan: The good movies checklist?
Carrie: "Do we have the music video? Nope! Gotta go back and do
the music video"
Alan: The gory swordfight, lots of random beatings, fire, fake
blood...
Cory Frye: Is all of this on the checklist you made?
Alan: Yeah.
Jackson: Except we filmed the fighting scene in the middle of the
night with headlights from a car. That didn't work. Got hacked
up, but... for nothing.
Alan: We didn't get... We weren't even using real swords.
Jackson: Yes we were, when we did that first scene?
Juston: Machetes.
Jackson: Machetes, not swords, but...
Alan: Really?
Jackson: When me and you did it, yeah!
Alan: I guess we did.
Cory Frye: What movie was that?
Alan: Oh, 1984. We were going to do this big, epic, fight scene
at the end of the movie, just for no apparent reason. Didn't
work out too well, so I just threw some claymation in there.
Worked out okay.
Jason: Then there was the time, we were filming Hamlet at West
Albany, I had my pickup sitting there with all the props, which
were like, machetes and severed hands and stuff. It was sitting
in the parking lot, and a couple people in our group stole my
truck, and went driving down the streets of downtown Albany with
machetes and bloody hands bouncing around in the back of my
truck. [laughter] I tried to jump on it, but I only held on for
a couple of blocks, then I fell off.
Jackson: Yeah, we stole Alan's car a few times. [laughs] "I'll be
right back, Alan. I promise!" [laughter]
Alan: Yeah, that's always fun. It's like when someone told us
"Um, we're going out to get some food." "Okay, you gonna bring
some back?" "Yeah." Like, four hours later, they come back...
Karyn: We had pizza, didn't we?
Alan: You had pizza when you left, you didn't bring any back for
us! [laughter]
Karyn: Oh.
Jackson: "Oh yeah." [laughs]
Juston: What was the reason behind that?
Karyn: I don't remember.
Alan: Um, you just made something up.
Jackson: That was personal, I was told.
Jackson turns to see Karyn glaring at him, to which he
points and laughs.
Juston: We were joking.
Jackson: We were just teasing you guys while you were gone... Had
lots of fun. (smirks at her). Threw darts in the ceiling, had
them fall on us. [laughs]
Juston: Well, what else can we tell him?
Jackson: Ummmm...
Juston: What's the future?
Alan: What's the future? Let's see...
Cory Frye: I need more quotable things.
Jackson: Quotable things...
Alan: Future... future...
Jason says something under his breath which makes Carrie
laugh.
Alan: Well, this isn't really quotable, but...
Cory Frye: Is there a future after college?
Alan: Oh, after college...
Jason: I doubt it. Oh, you mean about the films... [laughter]
Cory Frye: Yeah, I'm living proof that there's no future after
college.
Alan: After... For us? Well, we've... we've sort of gone away
before once and come back, so... After high school we sort of
disappeared for a while.
Carrie: I'd like to, 'cause, I don't know, I have a lot of fun
with these guys, because they... can get really insane, and
that's fun. And a lot of people at school, at my school are..
terribly boring. (sighs woefully)
Jason: We're the only friends that she has that she can actually
see.
Carrie: That's true. Yeah. [laughs]
Cory Frye: All the other ones have a restraining order?
Carrie: [laughs] Yes. I stalk them.
Karyn: They're invisible.
Jackson: There's restraining orders against her...
Alan: ...stalking her invisible friends. [laughter]
Carrie: Yes!
Alan: But, maybe, you know, video equipment prices will go down,
and we'll be able to afford something by the time we get out.
Jennifer: I think if Alan has anything to do with it, I think
there will be. [laughs]
Jackson: I don't know, we've got cameras now.
Alan: We've got these things - these little, VHS, broken-off
viewfinder, held together with duct tape and superglue cameras.
Jackson: Ah, but they work.
Alan: Barely.
Juston: He's been able to edit stuff, and actually go over it,
get things so they look a lot better.
Jackson: Yeah, maybe if we actually planned on one, and actually
committed to it, we might have something that looked good!
Jennifer: People have family reunions, you could have video
reunions!
Alan: Anniversary shows - next week!
Jackson: (old man voice, points to Jessica) Back when I was your
age! [laughter].
Carrie: Really.
Alan: Back when I was your age, we didn't even have an editor!
We just put it in the camera and put it together that way!
Jennifer: (to Jessica) Those are the stories they're going to
tell you when you're older, huh? She'll go "A video camera,
what's a video camera?" When she's older. They'll have these
tiny little pocket ones.
Juston: Well, what did you do? You had a camera, and a tv. You
played it on a VCR, and...
Jackson: monitors two VCRs hooked together.
Jessica nearly falls face first onto the concrete floor, but
Jackson catches her.
Jennifer: Ooh! Good save!
Jackson: I don't know. I think we should do more with
claymation.
Alan: Claymation? Well, that's 'cause I'm the only one who has to
do anything!
Jackson: Hey, now. I helped you with the bugs and Rambo and all
that stuff. I even made Rambo!
Meanwhile, while Jackson talks, Jessica falls again and
Karyn catches her.
Jason: Nice save, Jackson. I have to compliment you on that
save. It was really good.
Jackson: What, Rambo?
Jason: No, that other stuff.
Jackson: Well, I'm getting better at it.
Jason: You are?
Jackson: Yeah, well it's because of her (points at Jessica) and
her (points at Jennifer)
Jennifer: What?
Jason: Oh, they cost too much?
Jackson: Well, yeah. Probably.
Jennifer laughs. Sort of. Another pause.
Jackson: It comes with growing younger.
Cory Frye: So is this something that you might want to carry on
into your normal life?
Alan: Depends on which one of us you ask.
Jennifer: I don't think any of these people are normal.
Alan: Continue to -
Jackson: Oh, I like how she can verify any of these people -
Jennifer: Hey, I'm not a part of this! [laughter]
Jackson: "None of these other people are normal!"
Jennifer: I went to Lebanon. They all went somewhere else, so...
Jackson: See? That right there qualifies her as not normal.
Just because she went to Lebanon.
Alan: Yeah, it's something in the water.
Jennifer: Yeah, but you guys all went to the same school.
Jackson: You can quote that, by the way. [laughter]
Carrie: Lebanon is boring.
Alan: I guess we're a shining example of the product turned out
by South Albany High School, right? [laughter]
Jennifer: Exactly!
Jackson: Hey, now.
Alan: Oh, this is going to be on tv, isn't it?
On to page 3...
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