I recently reconnected with a childhood friend of mine. We had grown up together, spent hundreds upon hundreds of afternoons and weekends at each other’s house. The love that I had for him then, when I was still below the age of ten and taking every friendship for granted, was something I’ve quite enjoyed rediscovering. Spending time at his house has also jarred me a bit, because it is a foreign place strongly tied to my memory, my past, in a way that my home is not.
My own house has, in a strange sense, matured with me. Meaning, just as we never really notice ourselves grow, I’ve never once got a sense of nostalgia in my own house because I’ve never missed it. The back porch is still the same, its wood still feels the same to my touch, the living room welcomes me today in the same way it did in my younger years. But reentering my friend’s house – now that was strange. The rooms were small, depressingly so. His finished basement, a central location for many of our adventures and memories together, has shrunk drastically. I used to be able to bound across from wall to wall and get out breath – but now the walls have all gotten into a great hurry to contract upon themselves, to the point where I can cross the carpet in a few short steps. I’m not a large man by any stretch of the imagination, and so I’m forced to assume that I was just an incredibly small boy. Which I was.
This friend and I have also undertaken in our reunion an important project, one that will possibly echo across our entire lives. And now I must make a dramatic introduction.
Once upon a time, there was a small knot of close friends, all of them between the ages of 14 and 16, who shared a love of filmmaking. No matter that the films they made were crudely fashioned and unable to match the glory and beauty of their ambition; they were nonetheless natural-born storytellers who found true joy in making movies. And so they decided one day to do it right. Two of them, the writers in the group (myself and one other) cobbled together a script about fallen angels seeking redemption and battling each other in a fantasy world plagued by wars and wizards. Turns out the two writers ended up playing the fallen angels, which may or may not have been the plan all along.
To make a very long story short, this ambitious film project, entitled “The Fallen”, became the very center of our lives. We devoted an entire summer and the better part of a school year (2004-2005) to principle photography, which was never completed. Fight scenes were meticulously choreographed, costumes carefully designed, and dialogue scenes rehearsed to the point where we could easily have put the whole thing on as a dramatic stage production and made out okay.
This aforementioned friend I’ve reconnected with, who was the director of photography on “The Fallen” and a true master behind the camera (manipulating angles, organizing scene blocking) and also a consummate professional at editing and special effects, rediscovered all 8 full tapes of “Fallen” footage, and he and I have since embarked on a long, hard crusade to search out and edit all the finished takes and scenes, string them together in some sort of order, add in all intended special effects, and produce a finished product for everyone who was involved in that magical endeavor. Since we filmed out of order, the final film will make absolutely no sense. Entire story arcs and key scenes are missing, but there’s really nothing we can do about it.
Reviewing all the old footage, I am struck by the amount of maturing we were forced to do in order to make headway on this movie. I’m sure it probably taught us something about budgeting our finances, committing ourselves to an idea, and maybe being responsible. But also, it was just a true joy to be apart of, and a true joy to watch it all these years later. I watch my fifteen-year-old self spouting out epic lines (no doubt heartily influenced by Tolkien’s work), attempting to smolder in front of the camera and not break character, and I must say it’s strange. I wonder if I were to sit the 2004 version of Brendan down and have a long chat, probably over coffee and donuts, some pretty interesting differences would arise between us. For instance, I was sporting a long and shaggy hairdo, wearing hemp necklaces, and listening to a lot of Zeppelin and Aerosmith at that point. A significant discussion/argument could flow out of that point alone. But I digress.
If you’re interested in seeing “The Fallen” once we’ve finished our mission, let me know.
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