The after party is in a side room at the Crown Pointe hotel in Mundelein. I order a rum and coke and something non-alcoholic for the lady and we sit, helping ourselves to some pretzels. Jake Jarvi, brother of the wild haired girl, and writer of our small blurb in the program sits at the table next to us as we speak to Juliet about the audience's response to White Out.
“Richard Propes came up to me to specifically rave about Michelle's performance,” I tell Juliet as Michelle finds her drink suddenly very interesting. She begins to blush.
“Stoppit!” she tells me again. I turn to Jake.
“Jake, will you tell her that she's a great actress?”
He looks at Michelle, looks at me, looks at Michelle. Then realization dawns, Michelle's hair is shorter, but she's still...
“You're the girl! You played Hannah!” he says and quickly moves his drink over to our table.
“Yeah, I did,” the blush creeps.
“You were awesome!”
“See!” I say.
Michelle kicks me under the table so I change the subject. We talk filmmaking for a while, then we're joined by Italian filmmaker Davide Sibaldi (who incidentally will win best feature for his film L'Estate D'
Inverno [see fig. y] in about another sixteen hours or so) also joins us, and thrills Michelle by distracting more attention from her acting prowess by asking “When is your birthday?” After she tells him, he tells her a long and involved story about how she puts up defenses and shouldn't be worried and some such other thing that I don't quite hear because Jake and I are deciding our Desert Island Stephen King books (mine is The Stand, his is Dolores Claiborne.
[Writer's Note: Gotta jump in again here with a note from the future, WAY future in fact. I'm writing this mere days before the article is going live. Jake, reading an earlier draft of my article has this to say about my comment there: "Sir, you have wounded me deeply, by misquoting me. Now anyone that reads your article is going to think Dolores Claibourne is my desert island Stephen King book. When in reality, it's probably Tommyknockers. And I don't say that without shame." So, because I've wounded my new friend, here is my paranthetical addendum talking about the ravages of drink that caused me to misquote. There was drink, it did ravage, but as promised, I must comment that, by far, my favorite author Mr. King was out of his mind when he wrote Tommyknockers and put together a storyline so preposterous that I refused to finish it once the townsfolk created a fake clock face on the clocktower...or something...I'm not really sure what the hell was going on there. Now back to the story, but since I've been in this bracketed note so long you must've forgotten I was talking about Davide, the Italian interested in birthdays. You remember, let's go back.]
But then he asks me for my birthday and I tell him, and now it's suddenly more interesting than it was when it seemed like a pickup line. “You surround yourself with people who will help you do what you need to do.”
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fig. y |
Seems like a fair assessment, so I nod. “But you have a hard time letting go of pieces of the project to the people around you.” Also fair, a little more direct and specific and...right. He continues a bit more about my filmmaking methodology without apparently having seen my film. “And you got this all from my birthday?” “Yes.” He smiles and folds his hands on the table. “What are you talking about?" he asks. We mention that we've spoken at length about Stephen King and slasher films. “You know what makes the slasher film great?” “No.” “It is because this girl. The victim. She is the killer.” I scoff at the idea at first, but then he provides details. What he means is you have a girl and her friends. The girl is a prude and disapproves of her friends' promiscuity, drug use, etc. The killers have the same disapproval, so the killer is just a manifestation of the survivor girl's natural conclusion.
Maybe it's the three rum and coke's I've had, but this is making a lot of sense. Jake and I are nodding like stoners who were just told that an atom in your fingernail could be a whole other universe. Michelle is intently listening as well, though I expect that this is more indicative of Davide's rugged Italian good looks and thick accent, but we're all riveted.
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fig. z |
As the party winds down, the conversation turns to Joss Whedon, Buffy, Firefly, and Angel. Michelle is once again uninterested, especially when we spend a good 5-10 minutes discussing how seminal Samantha Mathis' tit shot was in Pump Up the Volume (see fig. z) and how it's matted differently on DVD so you actually see less.. Jake shows me the trailer for a slasher film he made, then for a romantic comedy. I promise him a copy of White Out with all the fixins in exchange for his film. We call it a night.
