Return of The Glove

Hi everybody.  I've been doing a lot of thinking lately.  About the movie and other stuff.  And I've finally decided that I can't turn my back on Surgery in the Dark.  Allow me to explain why I started to hate it in the first place and why I now accept its existence.

First of all, let me be the first (and so far only) member of the crew or cast to admit that the movie was horrendously made.  There was no sense of organization whatsoever, we filmed it on a shoestring budget (hence the shitty camera and tapes we had to use), we wasted all of the tapes very early on (along with the rest of money, little as there was), and I had no access to the editing software during the first 90% of the shooting, which made it very difficult to realize that we had fucked up asses upon loads of shots, either by filming them wrong or neglecting to film them entirely.  I could also extend that last point to say that it was our lack of a real studio in general that hurt the production the most.  Steve can talk all he wants about "Itchiban Film" but I'm sorry Steve, it doesn't fucking exist.

But you know what, I retract that last statement.  Having a real studio wouldn't have saved the production.  The real problem was the god damned cast and the god damned crew.  Let's take my cinematographer for instance.  You would not believe how many fucking shots that dipshot fucked up.  Like holy shit.  It's unbelievable.  Why, oh jesus god WHY did I fucking trust Eric with the camera?!  Sometimes he claimed he had filmed something but when I looked back at the footage, there would be an inexplicable gap there.  Jesus christ, Eric.  He would fuck up seemingly unfuckupable shots of which we had only done one take.  This pretty much made the movie impossible to edit.  We had no tapes left and my cast were very unwilling to come back for reshoots, so I was stuck with a movie that lacked continuity or appeared to jump from one random shot to another.  But it wasn't only Eric's fault (though I do blame him the most).  The rest of my cast were, as I implied earlier, reluctant to film anything more than once.  But mostly Joe.  And by that I mean he NEVER SHOWED UP TO FILM.  I mean fuck, who signs up for a movie that they fucking know they don't have time to make?!?!  Fuck off Joe.  Fuck off and die.

But of course, I wasn't exactly the best director ever.  I had little idea of what I wanted to do every day, and I ended up just winging everything and forgetting to do stuff and unwittingly changing things from the script.  Most of my time on set was spent fucking around and yelling at Eric for sucking.  So even though Finn and I were the only people that actually gave a shit about the movie, we still pretty much just fucked around and didn't actually pay much attention or care to the shit we did on set.  We talked as much during shooting as the rest of them, and sometimes Finn actually gave more consideration to the movie than I did when it seemed like we were fucking some shit up.  And fuck knows we fucked up a lot of shit.

But I tried, oh I tried, to save the movie.  I slaved over trying to fix Surgery in the Dark via editing.  There were many sleepless nights spent trying to painstakingly remove the sounds of people's voices from shots, struggling to create some sort of semblance of continuity, and straight up pulling shit out of my ass just to salvage an at least passable product.  Not to mention I was rushing the hell out of it in a feeble attempt to get the movie out "on time".  I succeeded in "releasing" it "on time" but in doing so, I failed the movie.  All the test audiences said it was a piece of rushed shit, and they were right.  So I went back into the "studio" to re-edit it.  This took a few months.  But before I ever finished re-editing, I quit due to all of the reasons listed above.  The movie was a complete failure and a colossal waste of everything.

But then one night, I had this dream.  In this dream, I was a little kid playing in the woods by my house.  This was something I had done many times as a child.  I would climb the tree we nailed boards to in effort to make a "staircase", sit in our failed treehouse, and poke sticks into the dirt.  Those were good times.  But then it started raining in my dream.  This turned all of the dirt into some muddy shit.  I was like "Fuckin' mud all over the place!! This is bullshit!!"  When it finally stopped raining though, I noticed something.  I had aged since the rain began.  I was no longer a dirty boy.  I was a muddy man.  And it was time to go back.  After all, who wants to be muddy?  I had to go back and change clothes and shit.  But for some reason, a strange premonition came over me.  I couldn't go back.  I had to stay, muddy or not.  It was my defiant statement.  I couldn't go back.  Not then.  Too much had happened since I went into those woods as a boy.

Then I woke up.  The first thing I did upon waking was boot up Adobe Premiere.  I took a good look at my movie and I decided I had to finish it.  It took me no more than a week to get the re-edited copy finished and sent to Steve, who had been working on the DVD.  But you know something, guys?  I don't think Steve actually gave two damns which version of the movie he would have to put on the DVD.  I'm beginning to think Steve only wants to make a god damned profit.  That's the only explanation I can think of for his having defended the original cut of the movie.  So congrats, Steve, you're not as cool as I thought.

At the end of the day, this is what Surgery in the Dark really boils down to:  The movie I conceived and wrote was brilliant, the movie I directed was atrocious, and the movie I edited was fantastic.  Just don't be too critical of the production values.  Try to look beneath the surface and see it for what it really is, not as the money-draining pile of fail sauce it also kind of is.

It's better to have gloved and lost than never to have gloved at all.