As If It Were Your Own

Arriving in Northern California in early 1993, I wanted to make a first feature film on super8. Easier said than done. I had a series of vignettes that seemed related, aspects of my own story as a sound artist and radio programmer, and i began shooting film and collecting footage I'd previously shot along with some educational film footage. At first the material was called "The Plagiarist", after the radio show I'd hosted in Maine, but i gradually changed the name to "As If It Were Your Own", another Maine title I had used in a New Music America festival exhibit. I hired Alan Mukhamal to blow the super8 film up to 16mm and showed some of the rushes at Total Mobile Home, the basement cinema at friends David Sherman and Rebecca Barten's house. David, Rebecca and I coined the term "microcinema" together to describe their little theater. We did a lot of things together including a re-make of Guy Debord's anti-film "Hurlements in Favor of deSade". They have since moved to Bisbee, Arizona where they presented an underground film festival for a few years. They also helped make "As If", playing on-camera parts and advising me. Caspar Stracke, a young German super8 filmmaker I met through the Almanac, visited and helped build sets for "As If", acted as cameraman and acted on-camera, man. Mark Gergis, Oakland musician and s8 filmer, also appears in the footage. I acquired a Steenbeck 16mm editing flatbed from a convoy of Steenbecks imported from the BBC by some clever San Francisco filmmakers and sold into the community. Also acquired a Westrex 16mm fullcoat mag recorder (16mm audiotape) when Palmer Films, a revered SF film sound company went out of business. I edited and edited. Then Y2K arrived and I fled the Bay Area for Mendocino County. This film material got shelved. I am just beginning to apply the digital razor to old VHS copies of the material, to give some life to the lost project. I think the desire to work in long form may have been a huge stumbling block. The need to be grandiose, do something big. I could easily have broken the material down into a series of short films, which could be shown in any series of permutations, in fact I considered this but never switched over or finished any 1 short film. Clearly this material refused to be my own, but we'll see who has the last laugh. And don't bury the film with me.