Found Footage: Stuff I Found That I Need to Share

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THIS IS A BOOK AND I DON’T SLEEP (2016)

Hello, _______________, my dear friend. Welcome to my second book. My name is Cam Smith, and I am a World traveling spoken-word poet from Porterville, California, a small town between Fresno and Bakersfield. We are the town that may have grown some of the oranges you’ve enjoyed throughout your lifetime. This book, like most of my life, is full of rejection. That’s a joke, we like to have fun here.

This book is collection of pieces of literature I have written that were rejected by publishers, distributors or production companies. Being in the entertainment industry means facing rejection every step of the way. Sometimes an idea is a hit, and sometimes it is a flop, but every idea deserves to be heard, in my opinion, so I put together all of the ideas I had that were passed on by people in the industry. Why? Because I am proud of these pieces, they are all part of who I am in one way or another, and I wanted to share them with the people who support me and check out my work.

The issue I have in life is that I hate to sleep. I am so hyper focused on writing that I often forget to be a human being. This is problematic for more reason than one: being exhausted can often lead to terrible ideas, and then those terrible ideas get written. I have two writing partners who contribute to most of my work, and they both live in an exhausted state of waiting for whatever my current spiral is to end so we can get back on track and write something good.

I have seen a lot of crazy stuff in my twenty-three years, and it has inspired some bizarre pieces of literature. Being a touring musician, I have seen a lot of the world. I am also a serial eavesdropper and cannot help but mentally engage with anyone around me. This book has stories, essays, interviews, and scripts that I have written, mostly inspired by my real life events or stories I have heard through the years.

At the risk of sounding like I am bragging, I do want to first update you on the projects I made that did not get passed on. Here is the quick list, to show you just how unqualified I truly am to even get one yes. In 2011, I self-released an audio CD of spoken-word poetry that has since sold over fifteen thousand copies. In 2014-2016, I have released one album a year with my band, Hotel Books via InVogue Records, a fun record label from Findlay, Ohio. In 2015, I released a book of poems and short stories called Most Nights, I Wish It Was You. I was told this book has sold over seven thousand copies (that sounds like a lot, but it’s not a lot in the book world, according to a fellow author named Tag, who I randomly met at a Starbucks in San Antonio, Texas). Tag was a tool.

In early 2016, a pilot I co-wrote for a comedy television show was put into development by an independent film production company in Los Angeles, California. During this time, I was also a contributing joke writer for a pilot being written by a couple famous standup comedians in North Hollywood. Their pilot was apparently picked up by a network, but most of my material did not make it into the final script.

During 2016, my writing partner and I also ghost wrote a horror film for an independent film company, and I also shot an indie horror film that is currently being edited. As of July 2016, a quarter-hour psychological thriller series I developed is expected to enter production in the fall. There will be an official press release soon (we’re getting more legit as we go).

In 2015, I had a very short lived column for a hard music magazine called Not Quite There where I wrote about being a struggling musician who hasn’t ‘made it’ in the industry. In 2012, I self-published a zine called Found Out I’m Not So Bored that contained shrinky-dink cutouts of me and a tear-away page that makes an origami crane. I made one hundred copies of the publication, and gave them all away at a concert in San Diego, California one day. I have also been a contributing writer for various music magazines, but nothing too big.

I do not say all of this to brag, but rather to show that though I have had some success getting work out to the world, I am still a very small fish in a very big pond. This book was not compiled out of spite or anger toward having ideas rejected, but rather as a way to showcase some ideas that I thought would never be shared.

This book could have easily been called ‘Look Everyone, Cam Needs More Attention’ or ‘He Will Try to Spin Anything into Entertainment,’ because that is how I truly feel most of the time, but I do pray this book means something to you, and maybe it says something you needed to hear. I hope you enjoy the journey. Tag, if you’re reading this, you’re a tool.

AN EXTENDED INTRODUCTION (2014)

An Extended Introduction was a blog idea I had for an online magazine. The idea was to write a monthly blog that introduced different ‘obsessions’ in my life. The first was my obsession to write. I wanted the series to be autobiographical and just share the pertinent details, expanding and compressing the information as needed. I wrote the first one, pitched it to the online magazine I had been negotiating with, and they threw it away. Like with most of my work, the main complaint was that it was too long. I never pitched this to a second outlet, I instead found a different premise that worked for that particular publication. This is the first and only entry that actually got made, unedited and untouched since the initial email I sent. This is a heavy story that ebbs and flows with humorous and serious moments. Some heavy issues are handled lightly, so please ready cautiously.

AN EXTENDED INTRODUCTION

Part One:

My Obsession with Writing

TL;DR This is the story of how I fell in love with old comedies, became a video journalist in high school, and then spent three days in a mental hospital.

I’ve grown up in love with television and film. From the first memories I have as a human, I can remember loving television and film, and I have always been fascinated with writing screenplays. As a kid, I loved storytelling, I loved the impact of comedic timing, and I loved improvisational comedy. My first real love of scripted work began when I was in elementary school, and I discovered National Lampoon and other eighties comedy films. I remember being a young child and knowing every word to movies like Vacation, Animal House, The Naked Gun, Dragnet, Ghostbusters, and Fletch.

These comedy films meant everything to me as a child. I would invite friends over, we would spend hours watching these films, and then recite the most memorable lines back to each other. At most family parties, I would tell the jokes from these movies to my cousins. I remember one Christmas my mom bought me a few Mel Brooks movies, and my Uncle Mike and Uncle Eddie (her brothers) both said they wanted to watch them with me.

At the time, I was very young and fell in love with Blazing Saddles, History of the World Part 1, Young Frankenstein, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Looking back, I can see that these movies were incredibly offensive for a youngster, but I was too young to pick up on the vulgar humor, and my uncles both did a good job to distract me during the extremely crude parts.

One day, I asked my dad how all of the actors in these movies got to be so funny, and he told me that a lot of them got their start on a television show called Saturday Night Live. This was when I was in the fourth grade, before the days of YouTube, Hulu and Netflix, so watching Saturday Night Live was not so simple. One day, after school, I was at my dad’s office and I found a few SNL shooting scripts online. I remember reading these scripts by myself and just dying of laughter. The bit that, looking back, I can say was the start of me wanting to be a writer, was the Bassomatic. The bit opened with Dan Ackroyd holding a dead fish in his hand and saying How many times has this happened to you? You’re have a bass, you’re trying to find an exciting new way to prepare it for dinner. That line killed me. The premise was so absurd. I remember thinking to myself ‘How many people really have this problem?’

The Bassomatic sketch, which ended up being an advertisement for what was essentially just a blender that turned a whole bass into a drink, was so simple, yet so hilarious to me. I remember explaining the sketch to my dad and him telling me that he remembered seeing it on television.

The sketch was an advertisement for a blender, that was it. Dan Ackroyd had a fish in his hand and tried to prepare it with a blender, and the studio audience was laughing as hard as ever. I could not believe how simple yet perfect the sketch had been to me. I think this sketch was one of the first times when I thought, ‘I could do this.’

I felt like I had found this whole new world with Saturday Night Live. It was like this alternate universe where people would go to learn how to be funny, and then they would excel into making some of the greatest films, television shows, and stand-up sets of all time. Whether it be Eddie Murphey, Adam Sandler, Dan Ackroyd, Phil Hartman, George Carlin, Steve Martin, or even Paul Simon, so many players and hosts had graced Studio 8H and showcased some of the most iconic lines and characters in television history.

I remember one day in elementary school, telling my dad that I wanted to someday make movies like Fletch and Trading Places, and he said he thought that I would be very good at it. That summer, we went to Hawaii on vacation to visit my mom’s side of the family, and during that vacation, my dad and I shot a comedic film about the trip. I don’t remember most of the jokes in this home film, but I remember one of my favorites being at the Honolulu Aquarium, where I say the line, We have tons of rays here; sun rays, stingrays, Ray Romano. Another one of my favorite jokes was that we had a bit where I was standing in front of some clothes and said We’re here waiting for the girls while they’re shopping. We then filmed me in front of about fifteen other locations saying still waiting and cut that throughout the video.

When my family and I got home from Hawaii, my dad and I went to an electronics store and bought beginner video editing software. This was the first time I had ever truly cut and edited a video. I remember importing the DV tapes from my camcorder onto the computer. The stakes were so high in the days of physical tapes. Water damage meant a tape was ruined for good.

After that whole experience, my dad told me that I could use the camcorder whenever I wanted. From then on, most Sundays after church, for possibly a couple years, I would invite friends over to shoot short little comedy sketches. My friends and I would also shoot dcTalk inspired rap-rock hybrid songs and shoot comedic music videos for them.

I spent my summers in junior high trying to make short films and comedy sketches as much as I could. It was the summer of seventh grade when everything changed. My family was on the road heading to a vacation destination, and I was in the backseat of our family Suburban watching a movie on a portable DVD player. Prior to leaving, we had gone to Costco and my parents told me I could pick out any two movies to take on the trip. For whatever reason, I had picked Top Gun, and my dad told me that if I was going to watch Top Gun, I needed to watch Hot Shots as well, which was a Charlie Sheen fronted parody of Top Gun.

After purchasing Top Gun, we went off to Walmart and found a copy of Hot Shots. I watched the two movies back to back on this portable DVD player, and I was mesmerized. I could not believe how amazing these two films were to me. I had seen tons of parody sketches on Saturday Night Live and SCTV, but I had never seen a parody movie before in my life.

After finishing the second film, which was Hot Shots, I took off my portable headphones and told my dad that I wanted to make parody films. He then told me that there was a way to parody the tropes and stereotypes of film without actually having to parody an entire film. He referenced The Naked Gun as being a loose parody of procedurals on television.

Now here is the turning point I mentioned earlier. I may have oversold this moment in time, but I am not editing it out, because there are still moments when I look back at this time and still cannot believe the impact it had on me. He asked one simple question that changed the course of my life forever. The question was this, Cam, have you seen Airplane? My answer was no, so he said we could stop at a Walmart at the next stopping point and pick it up.

Once we bought the film, I put it into my portable DVD player, and it might have been the best hour and twenty-eight minutes of my life. I could not believe how many jokes were jam-packed into that movie. Not just lines either, but physical jokes, and even using the sets as jokes. I was floored.

From The Naked Gun, to Saturday Night Live, to all the films and stand-up specials the Saturday Night Live played subsequently made, now to Airplane, I had more inspiration to create comedy than I had friends, and in the words of Anchorman Ron Burgundy, and in no way is that depressing.

High school came about and I had already made hours of videos with my friends. My freshman years of high school was rough for me, but I had one outlet for writing films that kept me sane. My English teacher often offered extra credit assignments that involved either writing an essay or making a short film based off of a prompt he assigned. These short video projects were always a blast. These assignments included, A Day in the Life of Cam Smith, Makers of the World (a film in which I explain a fictional version of how I think the world was created) and my personal favorite, A Modern Retelling of Pyramus and Thisbe: A Love Found through a Chink in the Fence.

The story behind my Pyramus and Thisbe video is one that I do not believe I have told to too many people, but it is one that truly shaped me in a lot of ways. The actual Pyramus and Thisbe story is as old as time. It’s basically the story that inspired Romeo and Juliet. It’s about two star struck lovers who want to be together, but their families forbid it. Thisbe fakes her own death by drinking a potion that puts her to sleep, which leads Pyramus to suicide to be with her. When she awakes from her sleep, she finds him dead, so she kills herself as well. It might be the other way around actually. I do not know or care, and I am not looking it up. This is my book so we will play by my rules.

In my version, again titled, A Modern Retelling of Pyramus and Thisbe: A Love Found Through a Chink in the Fence, I wanted to also offer social commentary, like Dan Ackroyd and company dealt with classism in Trading Places, or how Bill Murray and company dealt with the monotony of life in Groundhog Day. The issue I wanted to target with this retelling was the emphasis of racial stereotypes. In the original English version of Pyramus and Thisbe, the character Pyramus, who was a boy, was looking through a hole in the city wall, which is where he spotted Thisbe, the woman of whom he fell in love. In the original English version of the story, the word ‘hole’ is expressed through the word ‘chink’ which apparently used to be a term for ‘hole’ but is now a derogatory term for a Chinese person. Being someone who is part Chinese, I wanted to make this film have some fun with language to show how words can have different meanings through time.

In my modern retelling, the character Pyramus says, Hey, look at that chink! The camera then cut to the character Thisbe, who was played by my Chinese-American sister. At the time, I thought this was a quick, physical joke similar to that of The Naked Gun or Airplane, but I soon found out that it held more power than that.

The rest of the film had even more jokes poking fun at my Asian-American heritage, such as a line where the Asian version of Thisbe says I’m half German and half cook. At the end of the film, when the Thisbe character commits suicide, I had the Pyramus character say, Another Chinese female who wasn’t given a fair shot. I knew these jokes were offensive, and I knew that if someone did not know the filmmaker was Asian American, they could easily think it’s stirring up racism rather than responding to racism, but it was a silly school assignment and I knew the teacher would love it if I put my own spin on it.

When the time came to turn the video in, I could not wait to get a response from my teacher. I took a DVD of the first cut of the film into him first thing in the morning and then left to go to my first period class. During our first break in the day, I had yet to go into his class, so I decided to check in and see if he had watched the video yet.

When I went in, he said he had seen it and he wanted to sit me down. I remember word for word what he said next, This video is amazing, and it’s intelligent, and I love it, but I need you to take out some of the lines that deal with race and turn in a new version. I told him I would do so and asked for my DVD back. He said he wanted to keep it because though he could not allow me to turn in something that dealt with those issues, he wanted to hold on to it to show others.

I cut a new version of the film, a version that better told the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and that version was played for my class, who loved it, but did not laugh once, because all of the jokes were missing. I did not care too much, I mean, I got the extra credit points and that was my main concern.

I went on with my life and did not think too much about the assignment, until one day when I was stopped