I have to start this article with a little flashback: During the Spring of 1985, I was in my Junior year of college. I was taking the Advanced Television Production class. While most of the other students produced news segments, I attempted to do entertainment.
The same semester, I was taking the Advanced Directing class in the Theatre Department. Chud was taking the class with me and he was interested in doing an experimental acting project and capturing it on video. We decided to team up. I would use the project for my television class and he would use it for his directing class.
It was titled, "Cannibalistic Instincts of Mice in Isolation." It was about a student who shoots a "video diary" in which he talks to the camera. He describes an experiment on mice that leads to them cannibalizing each other. He then decides to try the experiment with people to see if they surrender to the same end. While carrying a video camera, he tricks four female students into going into the theatre basement for a scavenger hunt during Spring Break and traps himself inside with them. They go through the supposed stages of death without ever succumbing to eating each other. After two days, they're rescued and nothing bad happens to the student who trapped them. (Yes, we were poor storytellers and completely naive about how this would have played out in the real world. But we were mostly concerned with the acting experiment, which we were very satisfied with. If we'd had more time to think about it, we would have made sure that student paid major consequences.)
Cid played one of the students. (I've made passing reference to two of the other female students, but never gave them names.) We spent six hours in the basement shooting footage, most of it improvised. Chud and I edited everything down to a 40-minute program, which was pretty much unheard of for a student video project at ENMU. We both earned A's in our classes.
So, you're probably wondering why I'm not sharing that project on YouTube. Well, as I've mentioned before, ENMU was a horrible school for learning how to produce entertainment when I went there. There was no one there to tell me to get the participants to sign releases so I could share my projects without having to hunt them down years later and get their permission.
However, an opportunity arose in 1999 in which I would be able to have a public viewing of the project. A friend of mine from the music scene named Goad was setting up a small experimental video festival at a gallery in Downtown San Diego. He was looking for submissions. I thought about my project, which I had converted to VHS in college. I used the VHS editing equipment at my workplace and edited in new titles so that my name would be displayed as "Fayd" instead of my real name. I also put a copyright statement at the end and entered the year as 1985.
Goad added my project to the lineup. This was scheduled to take place on the same night that several musician friends decided to perform a series of impromptu guerrilla acoustic experimental music demonstrations around the Downtown area. These friends included Abed, Hird, Ferd, Marrad, Leaz and a few others. Abed had an experimental video he wanted to submit that was comprised of mostly still images he had shot with home video equipment. He thought he would be able to have everyone come in and play live music to accompany the video during the festival. Goad gave us an approximate schedule for when our projects would be played.
I told Chud about the festival. He considered coming down from Burbank for it, but I told him it probably wasn't going to be a lot of people there to see it. He decided he didn't need to be there.
The night of the festival, I took Abed to the meeting place for the musicians Downtown. It was a few blocks from the gallery. Most of them were already there setting up their instruments, which primarily consisted of percussion. He told me to tell Goad he wasn't certain if he could get them to agree to play during his video, so he shouldn't worry about him showing up. Before I left, Abed told the others about the festival and some of them said they wanted to come in and watch my project. I was pretty excited about that. I told them what time mine was scheduled.
Goad started the festival. It was a lot of videos featuring people who obviously edited from VCR to VCR using the pause buttons and no time-base corrector. They were all crude, but entertaining to watch. I could at least be proud that mine was properly edited. There were about 40 people in the gallery watching.
Then came the time for "Instincts" (as I commonly referred to it) to start. I introduced it to let everyone know that I had produced it in 1985, YEARS before "MTV's The Real World" and "The Blair Witch Project." I felt like I was ahead of my time in college and just lacked the resources to change the face of television back then. All of a sudden, there was this loud racket right outside the gallery. The musicians had decided that this was the next random location for a demonstration! I was flabbergasted! I mean, I didn't really have a problem with them not coming in and watching the video like they said they would. I halfway expected them to flake on that. But they were out here cannibalizing my work! And I couldn't do anything about it! I knew that if I tried to get them to move somewhere else, they would have retaliated by playing even louder!
Because of the noise, the crowd of 40 people suddenly dwindled down to six. At one point, Leaz came into the gallery. I thought she was going to stay and watch, but she went back outside after about a minute. And then, as soon as my video finished, they stopped making noise and went to another location Downtown. Goad was also mad that happened because he wasn't able to get the audience back for the rest of the festival, which still had about three hours left to go.
I was furious! I felt like I was a deliberate target of sabotage. Yes, I'm certain they didn't plan it that way, but I wondered if any of them, including Abed, had any respect for me as an artist. It felt like college all over again.
A few days later, Abed was talking about how the local musicians and artists needed to support each other. I asked him why he didn't think of that the night of the video festival when everyone was outside wrecking my presentation. He didn't realize until then how much he and the others hurt me with what I perceived as disrespect. And they also hurt Goad. Abed said they didn't realize they were being that loud.
There was an odd aftermath to this incident the very next day. I'll get to that tomorrow.
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