So part of this is let you know of the PLATO 50th Anniversary Celebration at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. It’s June 2-3rd. If you have the ability to get out there to it and you have the slightest interest in computer history, you will want to go to this. It all happened a long time ago and a lot of the people speaking won’t be around for the next time attention is paid to PLATO. And it’s free.

If you don’t know what PLATO is, it’s worth checking that out as well, it did a lot of cool stuff and there’s a lot of documentation about it.

In fact, I think that’s most of what’s relevant for people.

But I also wanted to address that Brian Dear, the co-organizer of this event related to PLATO and a historian specializing in PLATO, is a jerk.  A twerp, a knob, a dweeb.

Oh, you can bet we have a history. I could write this big long jib-jabbery thing that would show up every time someone looked up his name, but that’s not the point. Maybe you’d agree with my assessment, maybe not. I’d whip out a few hilarious metaphors and recount, line by line, the thousand injuries of Brian Dear and his venturing upon insult. But all you’d have on the takeaway is “man, that was some crazy-ass takedown action there”.

No, what I want you to understand is that this event, this PLATO 50th Anniversary, which Dear has been spearheading and co-organizing since forever, is objectively good, objectively important. It is a fantastic thing that this is happening.

PLATO was, in a back-of-napkin description, a networked collection of computers allowing students to collaborate and communicate via software.  A lot of real interesting stuff happened online, as it always does, and there were things PLATO did that didn’t grab on in a general sense for years and decades afterwards.  It was a closed system, and it was only available to a small subset of people, and it made available to people a number of technologieis that were even more restricted in the past. There’s arguments that PLATO helped inspire Lotus Notes (and Content Management Systems) as well as first person shooters. There were some damned smart folks doing some damned cool things and a lot of it has been documented.

At the PLATO 50th anniversary event, many of the movers and shakers of PLATO will be in attendance and giving presentation. PLATO’s been recognized over the years, but this being the 50th anniversary and all, a lot of people will be on various stages and various technology will be shown that hasn’t been done on this scale before.  Also, it’s held at the Computer History Museum, folks who I have seen really get their act in shape and do amazing stuff - I got to play Space War on vintage hardware against Slug Russell, for crying out loud!

Here’s some promotional material: PLATO @ 50 Conference

Too many times in my research and historical work, and reading how things went down in the past, I’ve seen where personal dislike has caused great chances to be missed. Not attending an event because someone you don’t like might be there. Refusing to work with a technology because one of its most vocal proponents is a fuck. Working with a technology because one of its most vocal opponents is a fuck.  I find locations where I wonder why someone critical to the subject didn’t get involved with another group of people, and it comes down to personal irritation and political infighting. I realize that’s always going to be the case with situations like close collaboration and partnership; so be it. But then it expands outward, with people refusing to attend something en masse because one pillowbiter is associated with something that 100+ folks are organizing, and then we’re just talking needless loss and destruction of opportunity.

Now, I’m not going, but because of scheduling, not any other reason. I really wish I could go, and I intend to get any videos and audio from the conference that I can. But if you’re local, please go to this thing. It’s big stuff.

Oh, and sure, you could walk up to Brian Dear and ask why I think he’s a twerp, a knob, a dweeb. But lay off – I’m sure he’ll be busy with all the little things associated with an event like this and he should have his 48 hours in the sun.

I’ll devote more space and time to PLATO in future entries, but for now, please make plans.  Tell your friends. If computer history matters to you, there’s going to be a lot to learn and see at this event.

Just wanted to mention that the BBS Documentary IMDB Entry now has another 100 names added to it. Man, did I interview a lot of people.

Only a few people appear in my film as well as others, so I added a metric ton of entirely new people to their database, and that takes a while.

For some of them, being in the IMDB was a really big deal, and so I’m glad I could get around to adding everyone in the newest swing. I think we’re down to about 10 who aren’t in there, mostly because I’m not sure if they want hacker names or regular names, etc.

Yeah, short entry, but I wanted you to know.

Next, the GET LAMP entry.  That should be easier.  Maybe.

The Information Cube, the new home of the TEXTFILES.COM Archives and a direct result of the Sabbatical funding I received last year, is coming along nicely.

I learned a lot about what crates and storage boxes work and do not work, I can say that – I’ve found which collapse under their own weight, which ones hold out pretty well, and even ones that are really awesome but cost way too much for what they do. I also realized I have enough stuff that if I’m not careful with how I pile things into the cube, I can fill the cube. That looks like this:

And that doesn’t look good at all, to anybody.

Anyway, a bunch of shifting around later, I have found the best crates for my needs:

Specifically, the ones on the left. They’re $11 apiece, hold a pile of stuff, and stack very well. The ones on the right, in the back behind the yellow lids, hold about 20-30% more stuff, but cost $50 apiece. Good if I have a large, fragile set of equipment that will need transport, but way too much money for what they provide. They’re fuckin’ strong, though; they could probably withstand a sledgehammer for a while until help arrives.

Right now, I’m simply packing the crates with like-themed stuff that I don’t mind disappearing for a few months, specifically magazines and journals:

Later, I will make sure that all of one kind of magazine/journal is in a crate, and have them labelled on the outside so they’re easier to find on request.

Using these crates (the yellow-tops) means a ton of the older smaller crates are temporarily unneeded. They’re piled outside the library right now, including all the ones that have snapped, broken, or exploded:

Something like 30+ crates are currently redundant within there, with many more to come.

Currently, it is once again possible to walk the whole inside of the Cube:

As you can see, there’s still a lot more work to do, and I think that middle aisle is going to widen out as I fix up more of the crates and replace smaller ones with the large yellow ones.

In the past few months, I’ve been doing all sorts of work related to GET LAMP and the moving of items into this cube and the occasional weblog entry about bad computer movies and running a demoparty and all the rest.  The Cube work is going to result in a treasure trove of posted online information, scans and writing across the latter half of this year. Tons. In an ideal world, the GET LAMP sales will help fund living expenses while I do nothing but go through this stuff and present and speak. Fingers crossed.

In the background, in a few specialized corners of the internet, a number of individuals have implied that I have hoodwinked people with the sabbatical money and have nothing to show for it.

These individuals can fuck right off.

One last detail: The Cube has an official dog. His name is Buddy.

Be sure to clear any visits with me beforehand, or you will have to deal with Buddy. Buddy will mess your shit up. Look at those eyes. THOSE ARE THE EYES OF A KILLER.

That is all.

Just worked a little on one of those “in the attic” projects – adding interviewees to the cast list for the BBS Documentary IMDB Entry.

If you’ve never worked with IMDB’s interface for adding or correcting details, it’s very weird to say the least.  And if you’re working in the world of Wikis and think that’s the way everything should be done, then the pace of this system will seem glacial – changes made may not show up for weeks. Normally, though, the whole point of the UI, which is to prevent you from doubling people or missing basic facts, works very well. You want to declare the filming location of a movie, add it, and then wait and your change goes in.

But with BBS Documentary, and the 205 interviewees, adding them in huge bulky groups was really harrowing. I added something like 85 when I first put together the IMDB entry, just a pile of names from the list, and then let it sit. Over time, a lot showed up. I fixed up a few name entries, added trivia, linked to stuff, but then kind of left it. Over the years, I did some minor adjustments, but people who were in it would ask about getting into the list. An IMDB entry’s a big deal, in some cases!

So finally, I added another 100 or so names. The list is much, much more accurate, and they’ve added everyone. And they fixed this minor bug where I typed “Himself” instead of “Herself” for a female interviewee, and it stuck for years. Fixed as well.

I’ll see when I have time to track down the rest. But for now, that cast list is looking pretty huge.  Man, I interviewed a lot of people!

People, it’s time.

Actually, it was time probably 5 years ago, but better late than never. If you believe Clay Shirky, we can just keep burning energy nearly forever in terms of collaboration energy, but let us not waste too much more than we have, can we? It’s like how bananas used to taste different and then we broke bananas and had to get new bananas to replace them.

As an information activist, I like it when stuff “happens” that brings into sharp focus a bunch of issues at once. It can get hella dreary explaining countless levels of intra-specific concepts that eventually deploy a meager payload of only relative interest to the masses. But one good clusterfuck, well, that’s worth a week of seminars.

We just had that happen with Wikipedia. This is a very simple introduction to what happened, but it’s a still a fuckload of a lot of work to read all that. So, I’ll summarize thusly:

Fox News decided they were going to do a story on how much porn and adult material is on Wikipedia, in the form of images. As part of this, they started contacting Wikimedia/Wikipedia donors, specifically the big-ticket ones instead of the peons. This scared the fuck out of Jimbo Wales, so he started deleting hundreds and hundreds of images, any that might possibly cause any raised eyebrows anywhere in the western world. By the time people caught onto it, he’d done an enormous amount of deletion, and after a lot of infighting and debating, a percentage of the images are back, some are calling Jimbo a hero, and some admins are resigning in protest. Meanwhile, Fox News was able to release a story instead claiming victory for helping to purge Wikipedia of adult material.

So, listen. We could point out the problem is Jimbo Wales, and yes, he’s kind of a problem, in the way that your crazy perv uncle is a problem – you can’t predict him, he’s sometimes a lot of laughs but other times he’s creepy as all get-out. We could point out a problem in how the masses of admins and Wikipedia users reacted to this, with their endless discussions and finger-pointing and votes and whatever other bureaucratic bullshit they like to burrow into. We could even take the idea that Wikipedia itself is to blame, with the editing and the unrealistic goals and the claims to be censorship-free and all that.

But that’s not the problem. The problem is a different one, and it’s a problem we solved a long, long time ago.

Wikipedia is fucking centralized.

It’s on a bunch of servers that serve code to each other, most definitely. It has shared resources and it goes out to a couple datacenters and it’s got some level of redundancy, so it’s not on one server. That’s not what’s meant by centralized. I mean that one entity controls it, one entity has fiat, that entity makes decisions and the decisions lead to policy, actual policy, like policy in the code and the construction and the implementation of right and wrong, and it’s all centralized. That’s why one vandal, Jimbo, was able to do so much damage, so quickly. That’s why it took dozens, maybe hundreds to undo it. That’s a problem. It’s not a good thing.

Now, in the way that all entities that centrally control the domain will tell you the domain being centralized is awesome, I’m sure the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia’s actual rulers will tell you this is good, that it means that Wikipedia is protected and it will live on, and those delicious, delicious donors will be able to do a one-stop-shop and give their dollars to a place and give Wikipedia a building and everything is great. That is what controlling entities do. It’s not evil, it’s not bad – it’s just their nature. It’s like getting mad at a dog that bites you – the dog bites things, and you dipped your hand in meat sauce 2 minutes ago. Don’t get angry at the dog – either stop dipping your hand in meat sauce, or don’t go near the dog for some time after you dip your hand in meat sauce.

If every Jeep Cherokee stopped working for 15 minutes at the same time all over the country and it turned out it was because a server crashed in Texas, we’d be concerned, right? We’d start asking some questions.  When Boston’s single-point-of-waterpipe broke and the city had no clean water for a couple days, people started talking about redundancy. You know, once you have a pretty clear indication that something is wrong, you start to talk about solutions.

So let’s talk about solutions.

We’re lucky – the Wikipedia “problem” I’m talking about was solved years ago. It was called Usenet.

Usenet was a major solution to a problem it didn’t even know it had. It was founded in the beginning era of the general Internet, the network of networks where things were going on in all directions and there were almost no guarantees and almost no idea what it was going to all be about. All that was known was it had potential and could be really cool and really powerful. So Usenet went through a number of iterations and a bunch of fights and a whole lot of events, and guess what – it got shit done.

Now, let’s give a moment for people to say Usenet didn’t work, or that it’s caked with spam and bullshit, and it’s broken and a terrible model to base Wikipedia on, since Wikipedia works.

Bullllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllshit. Bullshit on all levels.

Usenet worked fine. It had a bunch of security issues because it assumed if you were big-cheese enough to run a Usenet node you were probably mature and sane enough not to do crazy insane things, an assumption that became less valid as more people showed up to the party and the barriers to entry dropped like pants at said party. And without a doubt, a lot of Usenet got overrun with spam, but a lot of Usenet had functionality to deal with spam, including on both the reader and the server side. It was a known problem. Also, it was an attention crash issue – once people left servers running without maintenance, spam increased, just like entries on Wikipedia increase in spam and problems when they lose the attention of folks. Stuff can sit on Wikipedia for days, months, years – until it’s fixed. Compared to the situation that Wikipedia has a single point of failure in terms of presentation and control, Usenet’s functionality concerns and issues are a rounding error. Usenet worked fine. Usenet works fine. It’s not the big hot thing – but the servers go up, and they stay up.

Critically, Usenet was decentralized. Different Usenet servers gave changes to each other – they provided articles to each other, some sections had moderation, others did not. The protocol was designed to assume there would be dozens, hundreds of places around the internet, some of them accessing only a few times a day or week – and the changes would go to them as resources permitted. As a result, some servers had a wide range of postings, and a long retention rate – others could barely keep up and not using them for a few days meant you missed stuff. People wrote indexing and archiving utilities to cleave off what was needed and let a person seeking information find it. Backups happened, that years later resulted in us having decades-old saves of Usenet articles. Seriously, this is good stuff. We learned a lot.

With Wikipedia, we forgot it all.

Now, not to say that it’s all Wikipedia’s fault – webservers worked in this “one server gives out the info, oops, that one server is gone” way as well. FTP servers, also, worked in this way. To one way of thinking, Wikipedia was just following the trend, the dominant paradigm.

But in both the cases of FTP and webservers, mirroring mitigated this situation by having ways for various FTP servers or various webservers check on their “masters” and do changes accordingly. If the “master” disappeared or was overrun, the mirrors were right there to save shit. And again, mirrors were not just down for repairs. Censorship, shutdowns, fights, politics…. all of these disasters were reduced in scope with Usenet, with mirroring.

Wikipedia forgot that little bit, that not all disasters are code-based, not all downtimes are hardware based.

I therefore propose DistriWiki, a set of protocols and MediaWiki extensions that push out compressed snapshot differences of the Wikipedia software and which allow mirror MediaWikis to receive these changes and make decisions based on them.

Imagine a world where this happens.

Imagine a world where the main Wikipedia would issue a deletion out to servers around the world, and some would follow it, and some would not? A set of rules on the mirrors, like “do not automatically delete any article that is more than 100 days old” or “do not delete this subset of articles under any condition”.

Imagine a world where these little Wikipedia mirrors have their own subsets of Wikipedia space that are different than Wikipedia, where other thoughts other than the grey goo consensus of Wikipedia rules the day; where a separate “article space” exists there, which can be shared on other Wikipedias at will – demoscene space, muppet space, all the crap that Wikia offers in a commercial setting, except now being done by various vendors and non-profits, and not reliant on a single point of political failure?

Imagine these Wiki variants existing:

• PuritanWiki: Nothing with anything adult-oriented ends up being covered – people can send their kids to browse it related to education and whatever other nanny-tistic approaches they want to and not be worried that their children will ever discover other people have genitals or how they can protect themselves from pregnancy any other way but never having sex, and they’ll never figure out who Hugh Hefner is.
• ScienceWiki: Perfect for people trying to find out about scientific information without having every single link end up somewhere between Deep Space Nine and Red Dwarf.
• FandomWiki: Every single last piece of every last pop culture world lives and breathes and may be the stupidest thing you can imagine, but people who want this are in heaven. Wikipedia may have long ago deleted every reference to every fake element in your favorite sci-fi show, but it lives on in this space.

Please don’t tell me this is technically impossible. Go back to school. It is not just technically feasible, it’s nearly trivial. There’s been so much advancement in compression, difference tracking, and network protocol hub-dubbery that this is the kind of project that could be done in beta by CS students as a final project. It would have scale and bugtracking issues, but it would work.  Don’t even tell me that in a world that people can use GMail as a filesystem or jam with people in realtime or use processing over the web or any of a thousand other miracles we see every week, we can’t handle this. We can. The hurdles are political and mindset-related. Wikimedia isn’t going to want this – it’s more work and lessens control for their non-profit, without realizing that with collaborative networking comes competitive quality, and they merely have to maintain being the best to stay ahead and validate the millions.  Jimbo Wales will be against it, because Jimbo is in it for Jimbo and something that takes control out from under Jimbo is not going to serve Jimbo. And Jimbo doesn’t like that. But these are minor hurdles in many ways, too.

If this had been in place, Jimbo doing this deletion binge would have been a minor setback – the mirrors would have retained or not retained the pictures and information, and the choices made by someone in the heat of fear for his little PR outlook would have been ignored or followed – but you know which servers I’d have wanted to be on.  As further information fads infect Wikipedia (“oh my god, we need to delete everything about gay people or the United Arab Emirates will stop donating money”) , this decentralized, mirroring, robust and variant ecosystem of interconnected Wikis would resist them, like the diseases they are.

Look up the history. Or don’t, and trust me.

Decentralize Wikipedia.

Now.

So, I recently got a slight hair reduction:

I mention this for two reasons:

• A lot of people have only known me in the past 5 years or less, and have never known a time where I didn’t have some level of hair or goatee.
• I don’t want to be refused entry for the time being when I’m supposed to be on the appearance schedule somewhere.

As for what’s going on… well, I noticed my hair was getting unruly and maintenance was getting problematic, along with what choices I was making for my next hair or beard style. So time to start from scratch, enjoy a clean face for a while, make plans for the next “look”, or just enjoy this one. Apparently I look a tad younger, too.

Anyway, just so you know.

On the bright side, I didn’t stick with this in-process version, which was universally derided as classic porn-loving van driver:

Hey, so my cat was in People Magazine this week.

I am not sure I have anything too helpful to add to that.

Stuff happens for a reason; that’s what I was again reminded of after a 40 minute conversation with Gary Troy, director of Computer Beach Party.

When we last left this story, I’d seen a terrible film at the Found Footage Festival. Since I’m the Computer History Guy, I wanted to get the story behind it. In a few hours, I was talking to crew members, and tracking actors down. And then I was provided the director’s cell-phone number, and he generously granted an interview with me, and filled me in about the movie.

It probably helps to have seen the film to get a context on the kinds of questions I asked and what his answers were, but history is history, and if some poor soul watches the film cold with no warning, in the mega-multi future when Lion’s Gate’s entire film library is available online as part of a $6.99/month package deal in 2020, maybe my writings will be buried somewhere in the online networks and they’ll understand, finally understand, and then go back to eating their McDomino’s KFCburger on their flying Segway.

So, Gary Troy and Computer Beach Party.

I’m going to just discuss what we talked about, giving Gary’s side and opinion about the work from our conversation.. (For brevity, I’ll call him “Gary”, because “Mr. Troy” doesn’t come across as how cool and friendly he was.) I’m working from notes and from memory, so I apologize ahead of time if I slightly mis-state or bunch things up; but here’s what went on.

The plan had always been for Computer Beach Party to be a legitimate film. The idea that Gary had for this film was a guy or guys living on the beach and hiring a nerd to hack into a computer dating service, filling the beach with beautiful girls and guys and having a wicked good time, when their beach is threatened by the mayor finding there might be gold on the beach and trying to kick everyone out so he could dig for the gold. Through their awesome computer skills and other tricks, our heroes successfully drive out the mayor and the beach is saved.

Obviously, to anyone who saw the final work, it didn’t work out. Gary was wistful about this, understandably. He was surprised, for example, that I actually watched it completely. Or that others have been watching it and deriving entertainment from the result.

The writer was a hire by Gary to fill out the story and the screenwriting, flown down to Galveston to work onset.  It didn’t work out; Gary feels the writer “fell on his face” and couldn’t keep up with the pressure of so much to do so quickly.  The performances and shooting days, now in motion and with a $125k budget (Gary’s figure), were improvised, choppy.

Scenes were not filmed that needed to be, shots didn’t work out. Gary mentioned one sequence where the heroes have put a jet engine into their car to win a race. In the original vision, this is what you’d have seen – they’d do this amazing work of installing a jet engine into a car in stealth and then do a huge bet against winning and then activate the jet engine with the computer. In the final cut, however, we just see the main character whip out a computer in his glove box and, for all purposes, turn the engine into a jet engine, and then win. It almost seems cheating, like he’s trying to put one over to win. Gary mentioned how they put smoke grenades in the car’s tailpipe and elsewhere to make it look like it was a jet shooting smoke, but “it turns out smoke grenades don’t make that much smoke” in that situation, and the shot wasn’t very convincing. (I didn’t ask, but it appears takes were rather limited.)

In the final work, the car doesn’t really go fast and the shot doesn’t look very good. Additional shots are in the movie of people turning REALLY FAST to show how fast the car was going by:

These actually work against the effect – they make the car seem slower. And of course we don’t see any people along the beach in the behind-the-wheel shots, so the more astute (or vaguely astute) viewers are unconvinced and the whole thing just doesn’t work. And that’s just setting aside the whole “no explanation for the car/jet engine” issue.

Gary has positive feelings for the production – he enjoyed the time with his crew and hanging out there. But he did point out one issue about shooting in Texas – a ban on nudity or softcore filming. Absolutely illegal, subject to arrest. This brings up this shot, of two people making out in a car:

Gary gave me two points of trivia. First, the shot is stolen, that is, it’s shot very quickly out at a time when nobody’s around, so they aren’t arrested. Technically, a crime was committed. Second, these are crew members. He’s the Gaffer, she’s the script girl (continuity person, in today’s parlance).

Gary’s hope was to have a lot more sexiness and a lot more fun raciness (think, say, Animal House), but as Galveston and Texas weren’t the places to be shooting such things, the movie found itself a heck of a lot tamer than expected.

I asked how many parties were filmed for Computer Beach Party. Every weekend, he said. Many of the people in the shots are crew members. He said they had a great time, and laughed at my mentioning the production manager’s characterization of the movie as a great party that they shot a film for in their spare time.

So, I asked about the talking dog.

“What talking dog?”

Gary takes credit for the producing, directing, and editing, as he last saw it.  But when the distributor bought it, they chopped it up and handed it off to another set of folks who had their way with it, as I had suspected.  Things like the talking dog, the weird voices on some of the actors, a lot of other strange situations, were all the work of the second crew from Vestron who packaged it up for video release. The film never saw a theatrical run – it was definitely purchased in the open market, but it was immediately put onto video.

And why would Vestron buy it?

Gary told me the leading lady, who was his girlfriend, broke up with him and dated the head of Vestron.

As a result, her film debut was bought up and a legendary film was saved from disappearance and 25 years later, singes the hearts and eyes of a new generation.  I mean, isn’t life fantastic?

Gary still has a HI-8 video master of the film, but all the rest of it, negatives, positives, all associated materials, are in the film library of Lion’s Gate, who bought up Vestron’s library (and the library of a bunch of other studios).  He hasn’t really watched it, although he did remember basically everything I referred to. Occasionally, a few things were something he hadn’t known were added, like this title card intended to fix a plot hole:

So there we go. Computer Beach Party was meant to be so much more, a fun sex romp with computers thrown in and a fun hit gracing drive-ins and theaters throughout the country. Like a lot of dreams, it didn’t happen. Unlike a lot of dreams, it sort of happened and was converted to digital form, and ended up out in the world anyway.

Gary Troy was kind to give me 40 minutes to discuss a long-ago movie, one I thought might be a painful memory, what with losing the girl and the movie being god-awful. But no, he said it wasn’t painful for him, it was a lot of fun memories, a lot of fun times, and a few great parties.

And then he had to go.

He was in the middle of casting for a new movie.

I like to think that when people funded my sabbatical, this was the sort of thing they wanted.

During ROFLcon, there was a showing at the local movie theater of a rather rare, rather bizarre little computer film.  I’d have thought I’d seen most films with computers in them.  Or, at least, heard of them. Not so with this little gem; a film called Computer Beach Party, released in 1987.  Presented by the Found Footage Festival, the audience was subjected to this horrible computer-and-sex romp as well as being highly entertained by the commentary, skits, trivia, and all-around show by the members of the FFF.  I’ve internally debated about the use of a commercial product in a commercial tour, and all I can say is that they cut the movie up into sections, have enormous amounts of additional material they add to the showing, conduct audience prizes, and constantly add MST3K-quality commentary throughout. (This isn’t entirely surprising when you find out one of the cast worked on MST3K, and they’ve also worked for The Onion and Late Night With David Letterman.) All taken into consideration, it really is a whole new show with the movie mixed into a goulash.

But the moral debate aside, something about this movie just fascinated me.  As a person with film production experience, as well as computer history experience, I was in a rather odd position to take the movie into more of a full context than most. I know how south things can go with a film production, and I also can appreciate using computers in a film in the mid 1980s and the unique approaches everyone was taking back then.

That said, I must make clear: this movie is awful.  Not just awful like “missed the mark” awful, or awful like “didn’t feel very well made” awful. I mean that it’s functionally broken, full of inconsistencies, utilizes a plot that wouldn’t have worked even if filmed to perfection, and wastes your time. It actually wastes your time. The fact it has computers in it, for me, meant that there were periods of dim interest, like finding out the person who kidnapped and is beating you went to the same college as you did. Interesting, yet besides the point. It is absolutely terrible. Don’t see it, unless you’re attending the aforementioned Found Footage Festival, at which point you will have a great time, because you will be watching a show that’s funny and well-done, which contains this awful thing at the core of it to power the we’re-all-in-this-together feeling with other members of the audience.

The plot is not particularly challenging or hard to recount, although it sounds as stupid as it was. In Galveston, Texas, two sail-buggy buddies who love to use the local beach for racing discover that the mayor wants to close the beach and chase everyone out so he can dig for long-lost treasure. Serving as the mayor’s muscle are two incompetent henchmen, one of whom is dating the mayor’s daughter.  Our heroes utilize computer technology, friends, and lots of partying to best these enemies and, in the case of one of them, win the heart of the mayor’s daughter. Along the way, there’s partying, random sex, and dancing.

There’s a sub-plot involving the local sheriff being waylaid by a taunting chicken car, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves – the film starts to sound like it’s competent.

It’s not – the scenes don’t always end predictably, there are missing sequences (as in, there are sequences they really should have added but never filmed, so they do their best to get by), and an awful lot of the movie seems like it was shot in a single take.

Two things make this movie stand out: the dubbing and the computers.

In the case of the dubbing, this movie’s sound construction is absolutely beyond belief. People are dubbed with new voices all the time, in some cases being delivered by voice actors who are intentionally sounding cartoonish. Sometimes the dubbing of the voices doesn’t sync with the video. In one case, they dub the sound of a dog, and make the dog talk. That’s pretty crazy, and it’s absolutely jarring. Any time you might start to watch the film for being a film, the dubbing comes back to ruin it for you. Much of it sounds, literally, like people are screwing around with the footage by recording hammy voices over them. Not exactly the best cinematic experience.

And then there’s the computers. Throughout this film, computers are used to forward the plot – but in weird surreal ways that don’t make logical or dramatic sense. In the beginning, they want to have a party, so they utilize the computer to get together a party. If you flip through the footage (and I have, more than I should have), you can see the computer is sort of doing an instant message or groupware invitation system so that you indicate how many people you want to attend and what type, but it’s instantaneous and hugely illogical (you can request the sex and age of your attendees). It’s not even explained how they do this, or where they get this ability or access – they just do it. In fact, almost none of the characters have a backstory, so they’re completely flat – they’re just words delivered by meat.

Computers are everywhere in this movie, hence “Computer Beach Party”.

Seriously, computers are everywhere in this flick. They’re in the background while the main couple get to know each other. They provide horoscopes, they link to that mysterious party database I mentioned, and they affect the performance of vehicles. Yes, that’s right, there’s a sequence where a computer in a glove compartment makes a car go faster.

No, I don’t get it either. The Found Footage guys indicate that the writer seems to consider the computer a “magic black box”, filling plot holes or logic jumps by just being a computer. This is the sort of thing that can work in a fantasy setting; the movie Weird Science comes to mind, and that John Hughes film is considered a sort of classic, or at least a fun touchstone. Not so here. They’re just stuck in everywhere, and are sort of meaningless.  Also, if you sit back and consider the film’s plot (and I do not suggest this), then you realize all they do with the computer is cheat. They use it to win races, for example, races that have no particular bearing on the main plot. They just win the race, either making a car run faster or, in one case, making a windpower-based vehicle (a sail buggy) move better. With a computer.

An awful lot of the film has appearances by a band called “Panther”. All told, they contribute a couple dozen songs to this film. And they look, for all that, like a perfect 80s hair metal band:

They regard the camera directly, as do a lot of other people during the party scenes.  The party scenes appear to have all been shot at once, because the lighting and performances are similar. But there I go, trying to apply cinematic rigor in analysis to this film. What a waste!

When the film was over, a few of us die-hard folks wanted to know more, anything, everything, about how this film came to be. How did the organizers find it? How was this thing ever paid for? Where did it come from? What were they trying to accomplish with this thing? The festival guys said they’d only seen two tapes of this movie in 15 years of going through piles of VHS discards. They said they’d reached the lead actress, and she’d become a fitness and exercise guru, and wanted money for an interview. They said they’d never found out who owned it now, who the other people were, or the story behind this movie.

I said that, given the movie’s content, I could find out everything one would want to know about the film in a week.

I was wrong.

It took 2 hours.

Before I tell you absolutely everything about this movie, let me say that Annalee Newitz reviewed this movie for Wired, it has an IMDB entry, and I’m not the first person to write long ranty speculation about the film.  So while a lot of what I’m about to say may be new to the Internet at large and I may (shudder) become the go-to weblog entry about this film and the reasons behind it, there are plenty of people who have discussed this film and thrown around images and speculation and insights and all the other wonders of online writing.  I’m coming very late to the computer beach party on this one, but I hope I brought some good pizza for you.

Research is what I do.  Cold calling is also what I do. I did both.

The initial thought I had on this movie was it must have functioned as a drug laundering scam.  Do production on a film, make it cost too much, lose the money in the right amount of ways, token release it, and then consider the money properly dispensed.  I was being unkind – all indications are that this film was an honest attempt to do an actual movie, with real actors and a real plot, with the usual nods to low-budget filmmaking and a gratuitous amount of nudity and crude humor to get to the summer audience.

The director, editor and writer of Computer Beach Party, Gary Troy, is pretty easy to find.  Here’s his resume page, including his official headshot:

Just a glance over his resume page shows some of the ways one can have a full life as an entertainer without it all appearing on IMDB.  Band player, news editor, casting director… you name it, Gary’s been a part of it.

Obviously, though, we care about the films, and the theme when you look at the films directed by Gary is that they tend to be low budget and they tend to be pretty, well, schlocky. His directing debut (as far as IMDB goes) is wonder called Teenage Bride, whose description reads “Buxom nudist mistress Marie wants her lover to hire a private detective to tape the lover’s wife with the lover’s college dropout stepbrother. But while the men’s secretaries seduce them, Marie seduces the stepbrother by herself.” This is not high art, here.  Well, maybe to be fair, let me give you another promotional blurb of this film, from a different source:

“Young Cyndee Summers is married to a beefy old loser, so she gets her kicks with her hubby’s younger step brother, Dennis. It turns out that everyone is making whoopie! Even Cyndee’s boring husband is bopping her best friend, and his personal secretary, just to name a few. And Dennis, a horny little bugger himself, starts having hot, steamy affairs with all of Cyndee’s friends and foes. A genuinely erotic movie that will tease you and keep your hand over your remote control to press the slo-mo button over and over again.”

…oh well.

I began doing research on the names in the credits list of the movie. In case you’re wondering, the credits list looks like this:

A good place to start, it turned out, was the ADR/Re-Recording director, who would have been responsible for the crazy dubbing and top-flight craziness in the soundscape of the film. He was listed as “Rusty Smith”, who I nailed as R. Russell Smith. A top-flight ADR guy, he’s done work for so many films it’s ludicrous, not to mention his work with television series such as The Simpsons, Deadwood, Big Love, Northern Exposure, and The Practice. In other words, Rusty is the friggin’ man when it comes to sound work. The movie was shot, according to other sources, around 1985, but was released on video in 1987/1988, via Vestron Video. This indicates to me that the movie drops into Rusty’s lap at the beginning of his career, when he’s having a certain amount of good time with playing around with stuff. (Like everyone else I tracked down, I submitted this auspicious credit to Rusty’s IMDB entry.)

It’s not hard to speculate that the movie, in whatever shape it was in, was handed over to Vestron, who then utilized Rusty’s studio to clean things up.  The process of doing this was wild and wooly enough that the ADR guys felt no gumption or guilt about giving people odd voices, or in one case imitating a dog talking. The seven (seven!) “re-recording artists” in the credits also point to quite a bit of post-production work. How much Gary Troy was involved in this, is not currently clear.

So, in my opinion, there’s two groups involved here: the primary, production-on-the-ground film crew, and then the secondary, post-production crew. While it’s easy to point fingers in one direction or another, credit must be given to both crews – the primary created a somewhat incomplete film, and the secondary really screwed around to have fun fixing up the resulting film. Between them, what could have been merely dull becomes a sort of bizzaro-world movie experience. But incomprehensible to normal moviegoers.

To be honest, I’m much more interested in the process that led to the film than the process that resulted in crazy-0verdubs and weird editing. I want to know what got this Computer Beach Party started.

I tracked down the creator of the computer graphics in the film, Larry Fly, who is now a website developer. Here’s his answers to the questions I asked him about the project and his part in it:

“I hope that if you are documenting this that it pertains to how “not” to do a movie.  I don’t think is was done very well nor did it go anywhere to my knowledge. I was contacted via a friend of someone who knew the Production company – I believe it was Southwest Motion Pictures. I was writing graphics applications for the IBM PC at the time. The movie was shot in 1983-84 timeframe. Galveston, Texas. I did only the computer graphics (on screen), no movie titles or post production stuff. I did these screens and graphics based on drawings given to me by the production team – at their specific direction.  They shot the graphics directly off the computer screen. By the way, I was supposed to get paid for this but never received any money.  A terrible learning experience for me. I used a computer they provided – I believe it was a IBM XT, 256kb, 10mb HD, with 4 Color (CGA) graphics, Joystick for drawing (Mouse did not exist).  I wrote Pascal and IBM Basic programs to accomplish drawing the graphics, performing animations, and screen transitions and overlays, etc. I did get a VHS copy of the movie from an online source about five years ago.  I do not recall it being shown in a theater anywhere. I thought I read somewhere it went to video only.”

The crew of the festival indicated they had already contacted the female lead, Stacey Nemour – and it’s not that hard to find her. After all, she’s a black belt in Karate and has an entire website for promotion and videos.  The crew said they’d tried to talk to her but she wanted to be paid to be interviewed. She did indicate that production was about two weeks and the script was mostly improvised. They decided not to pay for the interview.

I decided that being the second internet moron facility to contact Ms. Nemour would be a bit much and needlessly harassing, so I have not contacted her.

Update: Stacey Nemour has shown up to indicate that in fact she was asked to attend a midnight screening of the movie, and do a Q&A, not simply answer questions over the phone. Sorry to imply any other situation – this is how it was described at the show.

I did, however, track down the male lead, specifically the computer programming nerd. In the movie, he’s called Hank Amico, but a little investigation reveals his real name to be Hank Amigo. He’s now a drama teacher in Woodland Hills, California. I’ve left a message for him, but haven’t talked to him yet. Here’s what he looks like these days:

I was able to find citations in Google Books to Computer Beach Party, especially pre-production press by Gary Troy, in which he promises he will be creating a “high-tech teen romp”. Again, an indication the film was meant to go somewhere. A production company was set up, was doing the work, hired actors, and so on.

My last big breakthrough came by looking up the production manager for the movie, Sanford Hampton.  Mr. Hampton has had a long and varied career, and through some luck and rustling around, I got his cell phone number.

Do you know how strange it is to call someone who has had a nice career, and essentially ask him, out of the blue and over the phone, what he remembers about a terrible sex and computer comedy from 25 years ago?

He was unbelievably kind, all things considered. And amazingly, he could recall details about the production off the top of his head. His memory told him the budget for this film was about $100,000.  Production was about three weeks. He believes the lead actress was dating the director. And the band, “Panther”, was headed up by the actresses’ brother.

(I have found Roger Nemour’s Myspace page, which includes photos from Computer Beach Party. Nemour calls it a “shitty film”. His career seems to have been long and varied and full of many good works as well.)

Hampton recalls it as “a great party that allowed us to make a film on the side”. He said he’d never known the film actually got released in any form, and my phone call was the first he’d heard of it since he’d wrapped production. He had nothing but great things to say about Gary Troy, and that he was a wonderful and warm guy.  No specific memories of hard times or unpleasantness came up on initial looking back. He also thought Galveston was a great place to spend time in.

That the final work had missing scenes, problematic sound, and a really ludicrous plot was ancillary to the experience for Hampton. I don’t know how the movie was for others involved in the production, of course, but in all, it sounds like a film that got made and just didn’t quite have all the chips together when it was finished. I’ve seen movies like these before – they just don’t tend to have computers play such a big part.

Finally, the ownership question. Vestron Video, who bought out the movie and put it on VHS and in video stores, itself went out of business and had its film library purchased by Lion’s Gate Entertainment. Lion’s Gate, without a question, renewed the copyright on this film in 2005, along with the copyright of over 3,400 movies it had acquired from 20-30 now-defunct film companies. For what it’s worth, Computer Beach Party had its copyright renewed in the same document (V3521 D236-256 P1-116) as The Blair Witch Project, Pi, and Candyman 3: Day of the Dead. Nothing specific or personal, in other words… just a perfunctory legal move done by a company protecting its acquired library of works, at least one of which is really really awful and has a talking dog.

So now we know the story of Computer Beach Party, or at least, as much as the average person could ever want to know for the rest of their lives. For everyone who gave me contributions for my sabbatical, I’ll bet the dividends are just blowing you away, aren’t they?

So why “Part One”? Well, I have a few calls/e-mails out to a number of other parties associated with this film, and if what they bring me warrants another entry, I’ll do it. Otherwise, like many low-budget films, I’ll leave the entry at Part One, with a sequel never forthcoming, and anyone looking over Part One knowing exactly why.

Update: And now, Part Two.

It’s my own unfair bias, but my preferential talks for ROFLcon center around history. Usually, it’s me up on stage with those guys. Sometimes, though, it’s not, and in one other case during the event, there was a pretty amazing panel that took place that I wanted to highlight. There were plenty of other great panels and I highly suggest checking out the writeups on them about ROFLcon’s site, but history is my thing, and man was this presentation about history.

I’d write a huge biographical sketch of Tom Jennings here, if it wasn’t for the fact that I already wrote one a few years ago for IMDB, so let me paste that here:

Tom Jennings is a technological jack-of-all-trades, whose work is both in learning and making computer history. His name is most associated with Fidonet, the ad-hoc volunteer-run computer network of bulletin board systems that at its peak numbered in the tens of thousands around the world. However, his influence spans well before and after his work with the Fido BBS and its network. From the 1970s on, his career was involved in various programming, from Ocean Research Equipment and Bose to Phoenix Software Associates, maker of early PC Compatible BIOS chips (where he was the first employee). Other jobs have included work for Apple Computer, Wired Magazine (where he was their first webmaster) and The Little Garden, a ground-breaking Internet Service Provider that provided resell-able internet access far in advance of most companies that would do so.

But it is Fidonet that brought Tom Jennings fame (if not fortune), as his work on a Bulletin Board program for microcomputers in early 1980s took a technologically revolutionary turn with the addition of a networking component, called Fidonet. With the assistance of Ken Kaplan, Ben Baker, Thom Henderson, Tony Clark, and many others, Jennings designed and re-designed the Fidonet network so that messages could be passed between distant computers for relatively inexpensive telephone charges. The “mail hour” between Fido BBSes was early in the morning until the volume of messages required the ability to pass data at all times of the day. Jennings constantly rewrote his software throughout the 1980s to accommodate improvements in protocols and specifications, and the “fidonet protocols” were implemented in many other Bulletin Board Software packages to interact with the growing network.

By 1994, Fidonet had reached about 40,000 nodes all volunteer-run, when the availability of the Internet began to eat away at its numbers, until only a few thousand remained within a couple of years. Fidonet is still in use in solid numbers in countries where broadband or even Internet access is still limited, but has faded from the United States, where it began.

Jennings himself stayed in the fray of Fidonet’s operation and maintenance for roughly a decade, but his interests soon drifted into other fields; he founded a skateboarders’ rights group called Shred of Dignity, and was co-editor (with Deke Motif Nihilson) of a queer punk skater zine called HOMOCORE, which ran for seven issues. He also began taking an interest in recounting computer history far before the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s, tracing back advances in computing science of the 1930s and 1940s, where his writings and works have primarily focused in the past decade. He speaks on a variety of historical and technological subjects on a regular basis.

Tom was one of my favorite interviews for the BBS Documentary. He knew his stuff, was passionate about talking about it, and had strong feelings about why he made certain choices over others, which contrasted nicely with his contemporaries I also interviewed.  It was a great time all around, and I think the Fidonet episode is fantastic because of him.  So much to work with!

But it wasn’t my idea to bring Tom into ROFLcon – that was the work of Kevin Driscoll, who had been interacting with Jennings out in LA and was inspired to ask him to be on the panel. And by panel, I mean interview setup.

Kevin asked all the right questions. Again, I hope they get the audio/video up soon – it’s worth it just to see Tom focused into a Q&A and covering pretty much all of his major touchstones. The ROFLcon tracks were split into four at this point, and the other tracks had some mighty tempting stuff going on, so it was a smaller audience than I thought it deserved. Tom almost never comes to this area (he was born here, didn’t enjoy it at all) so it was a pretty rare event all around.

People might not know it, but there’s a very nice collection Tom gave me during the time we did the BBS Documentary interview. I call it the Tom Jennings Collection.  There’s some pretty great stuff in there, if you dig around.  Start with “Controversy”. The filenames are Tom’s.

I bumped into Tom at the pre-show drinkup and a couple times during the event. It was, as it’s always been meeting him, far too little time.