The Visitor is Online

After an hour of tense WTFs this morning, CD was able to capture my Movie Maker video file and prepare it for its online destination at the University of North Carolina, where his archive is stored.

Deemer has a short part in this video, which is how we determined it would fit into his archive.


Thanks Deemer!

Here is the blurb I wrote for the site:


On Making a Small Movie


Back in the late-eighties I read a short story that blew me away. Man, I thought, this would make an interesting movie. Too bad I don't have the money to make a movie.

The short story was "Artist at Home," one of my favorites by William Faulkner.

A few years later I was sitting with a group of neighborhood friends in a Northwest Portland watering hole and we started to fantasize.

I'd already written a full-length screenplay adaptation of the story, I informed the group. We could likely pull it off if I shortened it up and minimized everything, including the sets. Make it real simple, just tell the story without all the pop and heat and money a real film requires. Might look like a stage play more than anything. Worth a try.

I asked for volunteers for my no-budget project, cajoled, and promised the moon.

My friends stepped up, I borrowed some inexpensive video gear, and we shot the thing on VHS over two weekends. We had fun and a lot of laughs and even a few of the artistic differences that seem to creep into any kind of project, large or small.

Pizza and beer smoothed the situation over and I had a bunch of raw footage to edit.

I did it, tussling with a host of tech problems that threatened to overwhelm me. I passed out copies to the performers, thanked them, attended a viewing party (actually I fled, because I didn't like the video) and thought, well, I learned something through all of this. It's not as easy as it looks!

Seventeen years later, the project fell into my lap again thanks to the attentiveness of one of the actors in the production. He sent me a DVD of the video, which I looked at with wariness (I'd lost my VHS copy years ago).

There is a little goodness here and there in this thing, I realized. I sensed I could make the original better, given the new tools available to home moviemakers these days.

In mid-July I dug into the video and came up with a new edit a week later, a vast improvement over the original.

I'd like to offer special thanks to K.C. and Charles for pushing for this finale. It makes sense that it has come full circle.

Please enjoy "The Visitor," a story about love, friendship and creativity, a few ideas Faulkner knew a great deal about.

Certainly all three of those things went into making it.

Watch The Visitor here.


TS