Ash Fetish
April 24th, 2008
Back in 1998 (10 years ago!!) Mike Heany, Andrea Seabrook, her crazy Mexican boyfriend and I made this short film called Character. It had been a while since we’d done any filming, and I wanted to try and make something where we shot it all in one day. I whipped up a script, we met up and shot it, and over the next few weeks I edited it at the place in Arlington where I was working at the time.
Unfortunately, due to a technical (and boring) screwup that can be translated as "Josh didn’t know what he was doing", at the end of it all, the cut that I had made would have to be put together all over again, eye-matching every shot in its 11 minutes. In other words, a major pain-in-the-ass hassle.
Such a pain-in-the-ass, in fact, that it has taken me 10 years and some downtime at work to get it done.
The sad part of all this, of course, is that the star of the film and one of my best friends ever, Mike Heany, tragically committed suicide in 2004. It’s given this whole project a kind of bitter-sweetness to it. But to be honest, it’s been more sweet than bitter. I have been laughing so much at how we’re cracking each other up during the filming, and just seeing all the fun we’re having, seeing how seriously Mike is taking the acting, seeing what a dynamic person he really was.
When you read the obituaries of famous artists, people are always saying how lucky we are that we can still experience that person through their art; from working on this film I am finding myself feeling the same thing about Mike. I’m so glad we have a fairly extensive number of short films that we made together, so I can still hang out with him from time to time.
At some point (maybe by next Dec?) I’m hoping to make a DVD of all the films Mike and I made together, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll post Character soon as well, but in the meantime, there was one great bit in the raw footage where Mike is trying so hard to get this line right that I almost felt like it was its own 3-minute short film. Admittedly, it’s a tough line. Please enjoy…
"I’m Not Going To Make Any Friends When I Wake Up As Ass-Fetish Samson"
UPDATE – there might be problems with the video…I’m going to tweak some settings and see if it helps…it’s working fine for me at work, but very stuttery at home…
UPDATE 2 – I think I’ve sorted the video issues…lemme know if its not playing well for you…
whoa. i had no idea about mike. shit.
i didn’t know him well (obviously) but the few times i met him, he was a standup guy. this is sad news to me.
[…] it's been secretly hard for me to get into the swing of things because this was something that Mike and I always did together, and with him gone, it's kind of a tough reminder. It's been 6 years […]