sketches of nothing by a complete nobody

BUMDOG THE FILMMAKER: THE BEGINNING AND THE END

THE BEGINNING: Posted on MySpace on 18th Feb 2006

I live in downtown LA, Just east of skid row section of downtown known as “The Pits”. It’s a section where the warehouses and work factories of a bygone era were transformed into Lofts by painters willing to brave the intense smog, noise, congestion, crack, violence and homeless Mecca that was to lay just outside the door of their cheap, yet spacious high beamed, hardwood floored studios.

If you lived downtown you more then likely a social security/welfare case, homeless, Schizophrenic, Alcoholic, a crackhead, crack dealer, heroin addict, transvestite hustler, just-out-on-parole or jumped parole and hiding out, a gangster who got kicked out of their own gang, an artist or some other form of fated non-entity. Im always amazed at the amount of people I meet who have been ALL the above.

Where I stay is just east of this downward swirling cesspool (that I love). Its almost all warehouses, which means its almost all lofts, unlike a few blocks west where $5000 a month condo are surrounded by three or four $220 a month welfare hotels (“Please to met you, Im your neighbor from just across the street. I thought Id bring over some homemade crumb cake, and wanted to ask you if you wanted to pay me $20 to watch over your Mercedes now, or would you like to have it broken into later?”). Although the rents are starting to go up astronomically, tts still cheap enough (and there are a few hotels about) that most of the people who still live here are struggling artists: either doing something creative for a living, want to do something creative for a living, have pretensions of creativity, or syphichons who leach off of all the former.

A couple of years ago I was living in the Fairfax district of LA, when I got into a fight with some shit talking punk. I socked him in the jaw and started strangling him. Then I did something stupid. As I strangling him I got the idea in my head to pick him up in the air like a rat. I started picking up. I had him up off his toes then it happened. My knee (which was already tricked out from an old injury) went out from under me. It didn’t hurt but I couldn’t stand on it anymore. I was trying to figure out what was happening to me, at the same time I was still trying to strangle the little bitch in my hands. Eventually he pulled away from me, and as I couldn’t follow him, he scampered off. But now I had to figure out what had happened to me.

I made it over to a friend’s house and he took me to the hospital. Diagnosis: Torn ligaments in the knee. Beautiful. After a few days at his house he said I couldn’t stay and where did I want to go? I said I always wanted to live downtown. He dropped me off on First and Vignes.

From here I had more then a few interesting adventures, which Im going to have to get back to at a later time.

One of the strange things for me about living downtown is that I don’t really know any other homeless people here, even though I’m homeless. I know allot of them by face and name, but I don’t really know them. Almost everyone I know live in these big ass lofts, some people are quite influential. The reason for this is downtown homeless are all about drugs. That’s why they are downtown. They’ve given up on everything except chasing whatever it is that elevates the oppressive misery of their everyday lives. Everything else has failed them: Hard work, positive thinking, faith in a loving (or vengeful) God. Or they simply lack the training and experiences to make it work for them. They maybe all together, but they all live in their own painfully separate worlds. Their only interaction with the outside world is to accrue that which sustains that netherworld: The easy company of alcohol, the indescribable warmth of heroin, the two dollar paradise of the first hit of crack (But only the first hit. They spend the rest of their lives chasing that first hit). And they are all very parochial about it too. The heroin addicts don’t associate with the crack heads. Crackheads don’t deal with the winos. Winos don’t etc.

I don’t do drugs. Don’t drink. Don’t even smoke cigarettes. Because of that there is no reason for them to know me. No purpose. I may sleep right next to them, but Im in another world as far their everyday mission is concerned. So the people I know aren’t homeless. They often live in big nice lofts (although they still may be drug addicts themselves). Creative types.

Many of them make movies. Excuse me, only a very few of them are in the movie business in any way, shape, or form. Most of them want to make movies. Id see them in their five by five hotel rooms, with their little digital cameras shooting something for a few minutes, then editing it on iMovie into these little music videos, that they repeat like a mantra, will eventually bring them fame and fortune. Most of them inhabited a fantasy world none too different from the people who slept in their door ways. Its just that instead of crack rock, it was rays of hope that kept them getting from day to day.

Rays of hope made possible by this new technology. In fact that’s what sprung me. Watching them put together these pointless little movies, documentaries, and music videos together right in front of my eyes with such ease fascinated me. “Anyone can do this shit Bumdog. Hell if you had a computer you could do it! Hahaha! Can you imagine that?” they kept saying to me. “Yeah thated be funny.” I mused.

So Im walking around downtown just trying to figure out some way to waste my time, when I started seeing that I could in fact make a 3 minute music video culled from just the images around me here in downtown, and it wouldn’t cost me anything except someone to shoot it and somewhere to edit on. I decided to do it. I didn’t think it would accomplish anything; it would just give me something to do. I also thought of another music video I could do that would be 13 minutes long, and all I would need is someone with a digital camera and iMovie to edit it on. Then it occurred to me that if I somehow made them fit together; somehow write it so that one segued way into the next, that would make it 16 minute. Then I wouldn’t just have two music videos. I would have a “Short Film”. Cool.

From there I started adding things on here and there. Scenes and shots that met the criteria of not costing anything, just a camera and iMovie. I added in a couple of my short stories (“The Jewish Mother and Black Bum” and “Job and Punishment”), and a few more cheap to shoot personal experiences, and when I was all done I had 107-minute movie worked out in my mind, that would cost me nothing. Well not nothing. I mean just to walk around in this world cost money. So theorized I would need at least $500 just for miscellaneous.

BUT A MOVIE!!! I always wanted to do a movie, but I thought the only way Id ever get a chance to make one is if I met some billionaire on the street, Id tell him I liked to direct movies, and he would give me a couple of million dollars just for kicks. That’s how much in the realm of possibility me ever making a movie was to me. But now I had figure out the means of doing it all by myself, while Im jobless, homeless, loveless, and living in one of the lowest pits of humanity in the country.

I was proud and confident (two rare emotions on my part) as I started to formulate a plan of assured success..

TO BE CONTINUED?

BUMDOG THE FILMMAKER: THE END OF NOVEMBER 2007

What can I say?… “I am finished”?…. “Here it is”?…. But what else? Should I brag and compare its creation to giving birth? The years to took me to create it to the “Odyssey”? Beg your forgiveness for its flaws and shortcomings? Plead with all my excuses for all the visible failures that set my teeth on edge when I see them myself, and rack me with guilt when I think of anyone who has to sit through them?

Eventually it’s all out of my hands. It is what it is. From the day I had an idea of making a short music video of just me doing what I was doing (waking up in the morning and walking around downtown), till I finished what became a two and half hour feature film, three years almost exactly to the day had past. Easily three of the most grinding years of my life.

While artistically the film fell far short of my goals (for reasons far too numerous to get into here), the one goal I had from the beginning I achieve… I did it. I proved it could be done. A homeless bum just made a feature length movie. And I did it with far fewer resources at my disposal then 99% of the people reading this. Which means if I can do it, then you have no excuses. That’s what I accomplished. Someone (maybe not you but someone) has to say, “Hell, if fuckin Bumdog can do it, I can do it too.”

The exceptions will be those who say, “Well I don’t have the time that Bumdog has, because of my job, kids, or drug addiction.” You’ll notice those same people use that excuse not just for say, not making a movie, but for EVERYTHING else they get called to account for.

Im not saying it was anywhere near easy. If someone had told me it was gonna be as difficult as it was, would I do it all over again? The thing is I wouldn’t have believed anyone who told me it was gonna be this difficult. Even knowing what I know now, I STILL don’t believe it.

But I realized you can spend the rest of your life looking at, envying, or trying to meet people with the money, resources, connections or talent that you believe you cant do without, in order to do those projects you’ve always wanted to do. Or muster all that you have at hand, and do it yourself. In the end instead of a fresco on the ceiling of a chapel, it may be just long involved stick drawing in the sand. Instead of the great American best selling novel, it can come out as some unreadable blog in cyberspace. But when it was done, I knew I could say that that is at least ONE thing (out of maybe a thousand things I wanted to do in life) that I didn’t leave undone.

Of course no one likes failure. As an artist, sensitivity (an often the massive ego needed to buffet such sensitivity) wants to create something beyond reproach and the reach of those always ready and sharpened knifes of criticism. In this I came up short as well. In putting this film out as is, I am putting myself at the mercy every non-entity who will jump at the chance to justify their existence by sarcastically minimizing in a few sentences what’s taken me years to create (while during those same years they were busy doing….what?).

Winners inspire winners. Well I’m not a winner, I’m a loser (no, no it ok). And as such I’m inspired by other losers. Not the George Lucas or Cecil B. Demilles, but the Mark Borchardts and Ed Woods who failed horrible, but in the end had something they could call their own. Its stories like theirs that I gather my courage from. Winners inspire imitation. Failure inspire will power.

For all those of you who know me, who may never see me again, when you remember me years from now, remember that this is what I wanted to be remembered for. That I created something of inspiration. The merits of my film will not be what Ive done, but what it will inspire someone else to do. Where I fell, is where someone else will start. They may not get there either, but wherever they end, will be farther along for the next person to begin.

Heres my part of it

Always Your Friend,
Bumdog