I had a great time at the Vintage Computer Festival. My photographs of the event are here. You don’t know old-school until you’re playing a copy of Spacewar on a vintage PDP-1.. against the creator of Spacewar. Meeting Steven Wozniak again was also great.

Actually, there’s so many great memories, I’ll have to go into them over time. Needless to say, it was a wonderful way to spend a weekend.

Talking with Count Nibble at the festival, I suddenly was struck with how I was dragging my feet on another project… REALLY dragging my feet.

Spike Lee has The Messenger. Terry Gilliam has La Mancha. And I have Blessed are the Filmmakers.

At Emerson College, you had to propose your final film for it to get accepted by the faculty and be given a semester to make it, for credit. Only some students were accepted. I was not accepted. So, I went ahead and shot it anyway. I’m like that.

Of course, without it being part of credit and having not much funding, I shot it on video, with a somewhat large cast and some portions shot on 16mm film. I was the director, but my producer, Scott Rosann, was also a critical driving force. (Scott looks like this these days). I also had a director of cinematography who was fantastic, but I have forgotten his name (I hope the credits show his name).

14 years ago, I made this film, and it is so rich with ironies it sounds like I’m making it up.

If I had to come up with the genre, I would say it’s a supernatural comedy. It tells the story of a film student, Andrew, who has not graduated from film school because he hasn’t finished his final project. And he hasn’t finished his final project because he hates it. Told by a school committee that it couldn’t have a happy ending, he filmed the couple in it breaking up at the end, but he can’t bear to edit it that way. In fact, while he sits at his editing bench trying to cut the film and finish it, he gets into arguments with his characters about what they should be doing.

And they argue back.

In fact, he ends up talking to a few other student films, whose characters respond with why they were made and what their directors wanted.

Meanwhile, he is assaulted on all sides by his friends, who want him to finish the film, and from the school, that expects him to finish it.

So many of my friends are in it, I’m sure it’ll be a shock seeing them all, between 20 and 23, walking around with smiles and happiness, nearly a decade and a half ago.

Is it good? I actually don’t know. The reason I didn’t finish the film was simply money; it cost so much to edit video, that I couldn’t afford the hourly costs. Well, obviously now I can. So let’s get that thing done.

I’m either going to love it or hate it. But I am going to finish it. And I am going to release it. For free.

I believe it’ll come in under 20 minutes, so hopefully this won’t be a killer to put together. And maybe, with the BBS Documentary under my belt, it’ll come out better than it would have so long ago.

Here’s hoping.

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