A Project from the Past

I recently got my hands on a DVD of a teleplay I wrote and produced back in 1994. Shot and edited on VHS and featuring a group of actors from my old Northwest Portland neighborhood, this low-budget (essentially no-budget) drama was based on a William Faulkner short story called "Artist at Home."

If you're not familiar with Faulkner's story you ought to read it. One of the writer's best, it concerns a dying poet, an urbanite who is a bit of a leech and a marginally successful writer, who wanders out of the city to visit an old friend who is himself a famous, highly successful novelist.

The novelist has a new wife who has recently experienced the "visitor syndrome" and is quite upset that her husband has invited yet another down-and-out "artist" to their pristine countryside home for a visit. While visiting, the poet seduces the wife, fights with the author about that fact, reveals he is dying, and patches things up enough to bring out a final book of poems with the famous writer's assistance.

A pretty basic story, but my God, it was Faulkner, which means it is beyond great.

The film had many of the problems usually associated with homemade, no-budget projects from the VHS era. Digital video cameras had yet to hit the mass market in 1994, and I used a couple of VHS decks to finish the final edit.

You get what you pay for in a project of this scope, but I'll say this, the acting was fine. The audio was poor to okay, the lighting was poor to passable, and the editing, which I was solely responsible for, was atrocious.

I'd forgotten how bad it really was. It could and should have been so much better. Looking back, I'd volunteer that I blew a great opportunity.

People were nice not to mention it for years and years, except my shooter on the project who repeatedly said, "Man, the editing was horrible!"

How right he was.

But Lo! In this new-tech age I've been leased a second chance. Though I'm not in possession of the original VHS footage, I've been able to take liberties with the DVD, downloading it to Movie Maker and assembling something like a new version of the program.

I'm working on it as I teach myself some of the tricks of Microsoft's Movie Maker tools, so it's progressing rather slowly, but I think I can turn this old sows ear into a silk purse, or at least improve it.

I've retitled the film from it's original "What Time Is Left," to simply "The Visitor."

A sad yet interesting fact--three of the cast members on this project are now dead. Two of them died far too young, the third, the actor who played the dying poet in the film, lived to be considerably older than the protagonist in the movie.

I'll let you know how things transpire. Maybe I'll place the new edit on YouTube in the future.


TS