Author's note: To the people who left comments asking me to write more: sorry for making you wait nearly eleven years. This story isn't really a sequel to Poker With The Teachers, although it does contain a couple of the same characters. It's just set in the same universe a few years after that story. It's a wee bit longer than my other stories, rather a lot longer than I had intended, and it takes a little while to wind up, so grab a coffee. Maybe a pot of coffee. On second thought, there's a couple places where - if I've done my job right - coffee would be coming out of your nose and spraying all over your keyboard. Ok, so, coffee at own risk.
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It was that camera. That was the trigger.
He got it for Christmas from his dad. It wasn't the best digital video camera on the market, or the newest model, or the best resolution, but Gary Sullivan loved that camera. He was 12 that year. He plugged it into his computer and put together a stop-motion video with his Lego set, and the whole video was all of fourteen seconds long. He was hooked. From the first time he saw his completed fourteen-second movie of a little yellow smiling man having a car accident, he knew that he wanted to make movies. He was one of the lucky ones who finds his ideal career while still a child.
And he was good at it. Really good. He spent the rest of sixth grade, every waking minute outside of school, filming everything. He'd see ants on the sidewalk, and he'd bring the camera in really close and zoom in as far as he could, following a constantly-changing group of ants as they moved a ... something. "What was that, a chunk of ... Holy crap, they've got a dead bee!"
He'd film for hours, and then watch and edit stuff together on his computer until his mom yelled at him to do his homework. After homework and supper were out of the way, back to filming or editing together video.
The years went by, and he studied everything he could online about making movies. Composition. Lighting. Editing. Practical effects. He watched videos of directors talking about their movies. He heard George Lucas talking about film school, and Steven Spielberg talking about film school, and Kevin Smith talking about dropping out of film school. Lots of Kevin Smith - does Silent Bob ever shut up?
And he kept making movies. Not crappy little YouTube videos, but movies, documentaries or fiction with plot and dialogue and characters. And over the years he picked up a bunch of free software for video and sound editing. He could do green screen chroma-key, and made a film about his friends being chased by dinosaurs and getting saved by a wizard. He even found software that let him change an actor's voice, and spent a weekend recording himself and playing it back as Darth Vader.
Sure, they were all short films, most in the two to three minute range. His friends and big brother Doug would find themselves frequently getting roped in to helping Gary by saying a few lines or building a set or donning a wig and facing away from the camera while another buddy said a few lines, fake Shemping.
His next door neighbour Sophie, whom Gary had known since they were five, would often write scripts for him. She had a knack for putting words to paper, and a sly wit. Her scripts would frequently require several takes of each scene, due to the actors (and director) breaking down laughing halfway through. Sometimes he thought she'd write the scripts just to mess with his buddies' heads by making them say things they'd never say in real life.
By the time Gary was eighteen and in twelfth grade, it was obvious to everyone who knew him that Gary was going to be a Hollywood director, and a great one at that. His little movies were getting longer and longer, a few of them had already had over a million hits on YouTube, and the quality was getting better and better.
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The movie was awful. Laughably awful. They were fourteen years old and in sex-ed class, watching a movie that was at least forty years out of date. Gary's buddy Alan looked at him from the next desk and said, "please, promise me you will never, ever make a movie this bad."
In the desk on the other side of Gary was Trevor Mitchell, another of his close friends. He laughed. "If Gary made a sex-ed movie it would have a hard-R rating."
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For some reason, that Thursday night four years later Gary was hearing Trevor's words in his head. Sex-ed movie, hard R rating. Sex-ed movie. Hard R rating. It was actually distracting. Gary figured watching some mindless Got Talent videos on YouTube would distract him from the distraction.
He watched one clip after another. Alice Fredenham. Landau Eugene Murphy junior. Darcy Oake, Paul Potts, Smoothini, on and on and on. His mind wandered as he watched an old clip from Britain's Got Talent, a bunch of dancers in silhouette. As they moved, they formed shapes with their shadows and told a story.
Bolt upright, Gary's eyes popped wide. Sex-ed movie. Hard R rating. Silhouette! I need a story.
Gary turned on his phone and called Sophie.
"Hey Spud."
"Hey Pickle. What's up?"
"Nothing. Supposed to be studying stupid math. You?"
"Chemistry. That bitch Wu gave us five pages of gravimetric stoichiometry."
"Sounds painful. Wanna take a break?"
"Hell yes. Tree Fort, five minutes."
"Ok." He hung up and opened his desk drawer, pulled out his baggie of weed and rolled a joint. A few minutes later he was climbing the tree in Sophie's back yard, pulling himself up into the treehouse her dad had made for her ten years earlier. She was already there waiting for him, smiling. The treehouse had been plenty big when they were eight years old, but now there was only room for the two of them to sit cross-legged beside the trap door with their knees touching and their backs to the walls. Even at only five foot nine, while sitting Gary's head nearly touched the ceiling. He sparked the joint and passed it to her. The only other lights were yellow streetlights poking through the cracks between the boards of the west wall, and some light from Sophie's house through the balcony door of the treehouse. They had both grown too big for the balcony door years ago.
He exhaled a cloud. "So, I'm working on this movie..."
She laughed and pushed up her glasses. "Lemme guess. You need a script."
"Yeah. I got this idea that'll blow your mind. I just need a story to go along with it."
She passed the joint back to him and exhaled. This tasted like the same stuff he brought over on her 18th birthday party, Kush. Nice.
They spent the next fifteen minutes passing the joint back and forth while Gary explained what he wanted to do: a sex-ed video that didn't suck, that was actually interesting and even hot, with the twist of doing the whole thing in silhouette.
Within about fifteen seconds Gary knew Sophie was on board. She was already googling story ideas on her phone and asking him questions. Her Google-Fu was strong; within five minutes she had found an old German play that they could adapt for Gary's movie. They talked about how they were going to adapt this century-old play to the 21st century and how it could be filmed.
"Ten scenes. Five actors, five actresses. You realize that this is going to end up being a feature-length movie, right Gary? You think you can finance that?"
"Well, the silhouette will make a lot of things cheap. Props, makeup, costumes, hair... only their shadows are important. I won't need to rent much equipment, mostly the screen and lights, and I'll need a studio... I think I need to see the script before I figure out the budget and logistics."
"Fair enough. Look, I gotta get back and finish that Chemistry homework." He gave her ass a smack as she started to climb down. "Asshole," she laughed, and then she was gone back into her house. He stayed in the treehouse for another five minutes, starting to see in his mind what the movie would look like, thinking about who to cast in each role. Then he went back down the tree, hopped the fence, and back into his house.
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Nearly a week went by. Typical stuff: school, hanging out with Alan and Trevor, filming some crows as they chased some gulls away from a dumpster. More school, filming some guys framing a house, some school, filming some rabbits, more school, editing a mini-documentary on crows. Wednesday night he was unwinding, playing Assassin's Creed for the nth time, and his phone rang: Sophie.
He answered. "Hey Spud."
"Hey Pickle. I have a script for you."
