Professor Theresa Mack – just Terry, she insisted – entered our first class of the semester 10 minutes late, holding her stained USC coffee mug with three fingers wrapped in Band-Aids.
In her early forties, Terry was a tiny woman with an intense, wounded stare. Her hair unwashed, her tiny frame hidden by oversized wrinkled Oxford shirts, baggy ripped jeans, ratty Chucks. She didn't just look jangly, she also jangled when she paced the classroom, her keyring on a plastic coil around her wrist, a length of bike chain securing her wallet to her belt.
Terry was unknowable, a closed door, at least to me. I'd tried. I knew about the documentaries she'd made in the eighties, the ones that got her tenured at the University of Miami's film school. Armed with genuinely-curious questions about working "out there" in the filmmaking world, I visited her during office hours. Her door was open but it felt like an intrusion: one-word answers, non-specific advice, the please-just-go-away beam of her unblinking stare. I left in less than six minutes.
We'd all studied with Terry last semester. Each of us wrote, shot, and edited our own three-minute short – analog, 16mm stock, spliced on flatbed editing bays – which meant we were returning after winter break as seasoned auteur writer-directors ready to rock this semester's track. Terry had given us very serious homework to prepare over the break: write a 5 to 10-minute screenplay to be turned in today.
Out of a class of 16, four scripts would be selected. If your script was chosen, you got to direct your film. Students whose scripts were not selected would assist another director's project.
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My script was based on a friendship-ending conversation I had with a woman who I believed "friend-zoned" me after we "almost got together" in what I was convinced would've been my first "serious adult relationship," all quotes included for sarcasm and barf-inducing eye-rolls. At age 20, I was a fat, angry, broke, Taco Bell-filled child with no game or confidence who rejected all responsibility for my own shortcomings. Always easier to blame than to change.
I treated this young woman badly, broke the friendship, and then like a navel-gazing cunt, I wrote a screenplay about it. That's what I turned in to Terry.
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My classmates and I had to stew all weekend before finding out if Terry had chosen our script, if our films would get made. I was sure – certain! – my heart-felt, true-to-life Richard Linklater-influenced-unrequited-slacker-romance script would be one of them.
When Terry toddled into class Monday, sipping silently from her coffee mug, the room was on pins and needles. A stack of all our scripts in her hands, her eyes darted around the room at our validation-starved faces:
TERRY: Okay let's do this. [pointing to each winner] Patrick, Vanesa, Kelsey, and Lawrence. Congratulations, you're all directing.
My heart sank. Died. Caught fire and blackened in my ribcage. Could she not see what I had poured into my script?
TERRY: Directors, stand up and state your titles and loglines. After that, those of you not chosen, go sit with the director you want to work with.
PATRICK: Yeah, mine's called THE BEST DEFENSE. It's about an ex-FBI agent who coaches high school football, trying to win the championship game before his past catches up with him.
VANESA: Yes, my film is called MERCADO. It's about how my nearly-blind abuelita takes the bus to the market every day and the, like, challenges she faces.
KELSEY: My title is TYPE, WRITER! with a comma and an exclamation point. It's about a screenwriter with writer's block who makes a deal with the Devil to get famous.
LAWRENCE: Mine's this, like, Tarantino-esque action movie about a hitman who rips off the other guys on his job and they all come after him for the loot. [chuckles] Oh yeah, the title's DIE MOTHERFUCKER in, like, all caps.
Everybody applauded the directors. Classroom chairs screeched across tile as they got up to join the crew of the project they liked best.
Everybody but me. I walked straight over to Terry.
ME: Uh, Terry? I'm a little... shocked that my script wasn't selected. I thought it was... I was really proud of it.
Terry locked eyes with me, took a deep breath before she spoke.
TERRY: Nope. No way are we shooting your script.
Electric eels wiggled and sizzled all over my threatened ego, coating it in the slime of old doubts and shame.
ME: But– Can you tell me w-why not?
TERRY [eyes searching the room]: Because I found it disgusting. Entitled. Important to no one but you. [nods her chin] Ah. Crews have formed! Looks like you're working on DIE MOTHERFUCKER.
I looked up at the classroom. Lawrence gave me a tiny wave to come join his crew.
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MONTAGE:
- Four film students dressed in black suits, white shirts, thin black ties, dark sunglasses, walking toward the camera in slo-mo.
- SUPER: The DIE MOTHERFUCKER Crew
- Tight on a wiry Filipino young man with shaved head and a ripped black Godflesh tee, glinting silver hoops in both ears. He lights his Marlboro with the blazing heat of his artistic vision.
- SUPER: Lawrence, Writer/Director
- Tight on a long-haired brunette in a cut-off jeans and a Grateful Dead tie-dye silkscreened all over with rainbow dancing bears. Smiles into camera, wasted.
- SUPER: Natalie "Nat", Sound
- Tight on a petite girl with bright green hair, black overalls and nailpolish, striped stockings, combat boots. Looks away from camera, bored.
- SUPER: Jackie, Director of Photography
- Tight on aforementioned fat Jewish boy in 70s polyester thrift shop shirt, picked-at goatee, hair to his shoulders. His sulky face moons at camera like “Nobody understands how talented I am.”
- SUPER: Dan, Locations, Art Direction, & Special Effects
SMASH TO:
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The crew left the Motion Pictures Department to spend the rest of class outside on the lawn, brainstorming with spiral-bound notebooks and cigarettes and a cheeky pin-thin joint. Together, we read the script aloud.
It wasn't Tarantino-ish, nor clever enough to be an homage. It was like a single chase scene plucked out of a direct-to-video Tarantino knockoff where all the sarcastic characters get killed before anything makes you can about them:
LAWRENCE: Yeah, that was my intention all along. I don't wanna tell the whole story here. It's a taste, a featurette. I wanna take this bitch to festivals, fuckin' win, and fund the feature!
NAT [mind blown]: Soooooo smart!
The script referred repeatedly to a "Magic Bag" – a black leather satchel containing the never-revealed MacGuffin in a rip-off of Alex Cox's Repo Man – stolen by the protagonist Davey during the heist. I wondered aloud what hired hitmen were ripping off; if you call it a "heist" film, shouldn't they be robbers instead?
Our Writer/Director lit a cigarette and waved away my suggestion:
LAWRENCE: Naw bro, they're hitmen. That's the movie. Period.
I closed my eyes, imagining a parallel universe where we were sitting around planning the shoot for my masterpiece of a script.
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We met regularly for weeks, months. I helped storyboard with Jackie, got pushy about inserting my own ideas into the script (rejected by Lawrence), handled equipment rentals with Nat.
Then I made the laziest, most passive-aggressive Location Manager move possible: I offered my own studio apartment near campus in Coral Gables as the short's single location: the climactic chase/showdown of DIE MOTHERFUCKER's entirely off-screen, saved-for-the-inevitable-feature heist.
I'd worked with gunshot squibs – little timed explosives with blood packs – on my last film. There were still Karo syrup stains on the hood of my Toyota Cecilia from it. But this script had like, a True Romance-level of gunshots to plan, gear up, and test.
Overwhelmed by this, I spent most of my time on the special effects and didn't start clearing my studio apartment of my posters, photos, and toys until 8 pm the night before.
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Then suddenly it was Shoot Day.
The crew arrived at my place at dawn. Nat brought coffees and a box of donuts. Jackie brought weed. Lawrence brought a carton of cigarettes.
The scene as scripted was:
- Protagonist DAVEY has stashed the Magic Bag at his sister's apartment. Why did he take this extra step instead of just leaving town? Lawrence says it all gets explained in the full feature film.
- When Davey enters his sister's kitchen to fetch the Magic Bag stashed under the sink, the hitmen storm in.
- Davey grabs the Magic Bag, dives out the window, sprints across the backyard, blasting two of his fellow hitmen on the way out.
- The other hitmen climb outside and chase him until–
- Everyone dies in a mass shootout in the sister's backyard.
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Here's what got shot:
Davey (played by a blonde drama major named Parrish) enters his sister's apartment, gun drawn, turning every corner to check if he's alone. Was he planning on shooting his sister if she was home? Note: the replica "hero gun" was chrome-plated and looked amazing glinting in Florida sun coming through my studio's blinds.
The apartment empty, Magic Bag retrieved, Davey exhales relief through clenched teeth. He wipes his sweaty brow with that shiny pistol. The door handle quietly jiggles, clicks.
Davey makes a leap for the window (Parish hides outside below the window, waiting for the crew).
The door explodes inwards as SIX HITMEN (never named in script) rush in, check apartment, follow Davey out the window.
We cut and the crew moves outside to shoot Davey exiting the window first, running out of frame, followed by the six hitmen.
Running into the backyard, Davey turns around, points his gun, and fires wildly. My squibs burst. The two actors still climbing through the window spasm and drop "dead," rag-dolled and bleeding down my window frame. Looks fucking great. We wait for Lawrence to yell "Cut!" but instead we hear:
MALE COP VOICE: Freeze! FUCKING FREEZE!
FEMALE COP VOICE: Drop the weapons and GET DOWN on the ground!
Uniformed Coral Gables police officers wearing bulletproof vests surround us from all sides of my apartment building, their guns drawn, their eyes wild with adrenaline, testosterone, TV shows.
Actors’ hands open, replica guns drop into browning crabgrass. Nat and I slowly let go of our film equipment.
MALE COP: Down on the FUCKING GROUND, hands behind your FUCKING HEADS!
Actors and crew kneel in controlled movements. But Jackie, green hair catching the sunlight that turns her into an incandescent star, is still holding the fragile rented 16mm Bolex camera.
FEMALE COP: Miss! Drop the camera and GET DOWN!
JACKIE [beyond terrified]: I... I will! I can't just drop it!
Two officers flank her as she slowly bends her knees towards the ground. This moment stretches out like rubber, silent except for the running chika-chika-chika of the Bolex eating the rest of our film stock.
MALE COP: Okay NOBODY FUCKING MOVE!
The moment the Bolex hit in the grass, the cops jam a knee into the small of Jackie's back, knocking her down face-first. She lands with a grunt. We watch, angry, until we catch knees in our backs too. The crabgrass comes up fast to meet my face, itchy and prickling and full of tiny biting fleas. My exposed eye looks up at the silhouette of a policeman standing in front of the blazing sun, the muzzle of his pistol pressed hard against the side of my temple.
COP ABOVE ME [whispering]: J-Jesus Christ...
Then I feel it: his pistol, his hands, they're shaking. He's hyperventilating. A glittering crystal of sweat slides off his chin and splats onto my temple, runs into the corner of my eye, stinging.
Our director is face-down with a boot on his neck, his hands gripping, squeezing his own skull like it wants juice it:
LAWRENCE: Please please wait! It's a MOVIE! We're making a movie! We're fuh-film students at U of M!
The cop takes her pistol off the back of his skull:
FEMALE COP: Film students?! [nervous chuckle] I… y’all scared the shit out of me!
MALE COP: Fuck, bro... [sucks his teeth] You kids... you have NO IDEA how close you just came to dying just now.
COP ABOVE ME [hisses]: You're so, so stupid! Another half a second and I would've pulled the trigger!
FEMALE COP: Okay. Everybody up. I wanna explain ab–
A musical voice, from off in the distance: past the backyard and rising above the next block, an abuelita is waving at the police from her third-story patio:
ABUELITA: ¡Yoo hoooooo, agentes! ¡Muchas gracias!
FEMALE COP: She's the one who called 9/11; she reported– oh, Jesus–
MALE COP: She reported gunshots. Seven armed individuals, two dead– what the fuck were you thinking?
LAWRENCE: We're making a short movie, guerilla style.
MALE COP: Okay cool, bro, but this is what filming permits are for! Y'all are lucky to be alive right now.
COP NO LONGER ABOVE ME: So like, what's your movie called…?
A look passes like a relay flag from one crew member to the next, ending as Jackie delivers it to our leader, our Writer/Director:
LAWRENCE: It's called, uh... DIE MOTHERFUCKER.
And we lost it: crew, actors, police, all our face-down, pants-shitting fear of stupid death and accidental murder exploded very much alive cackling laughter.
As that passed, the officers bummed cigarettes off Lawrence, who after all showed up with a whole carton. After a silent moment of all of us smoking in silence:
LAWRENCE: Oh. I still got a featurette to shoot.
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With one cop staying behind for safety, we reshot the whole thing, minus my squib setup. All wardrobe in the reshoot was already shot-up and bloodied before the shootout began. It didn't make any sense.
ME [helpfully]: What if you just... explain that in the feature?
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Four weeks later, after late edits editing sound and picture as a group, DIE MOTHERFUCKER screened alongside our classmatees' other three shorts in the campus theater. After each one, Terry got up and talked about what she liked, what didn't work, how to improve it, what she hated.
She took DIE MOTHERFUCKER – Lawrence's baby – and wiped her whole ass with it. She made an example of his to deliver an impassioned, rallying lesson: to find your own voice, or your work will suck.
And somewhere down deep in my soul's mold-furry depths, at the core of the laziest, most passive-aggressive Location Manager, a tiny, mean voice alone in the dark guffawed, cackled, and felt validated.
