The wind was heavy, it was too cold for a tee-shirt and I was scared my nipples were going to show up in the shot. It’s not a normal concern for me, but Ross has a damn nice camera, and he assured us this was being filmed in HD. Every detail, every blemish, would show up on the projection screen in his basement when we were finished, from the discontinuities in my hairstyle to my potentially cold nipples. Cinema!
Teen Bachelor Productions was founded in 2004 by five high school friends with a dream of making movies: Ross Putman, twin brothers Chris and Ted Morrin, Jim Ballas and John Rowan. The original dream was only to make one movie, a never-realized comedy called Teen Bachelor Detectives, which was the basis for their production company’s increasingly inaccurate name—none are teens anymore.
Though a bachelor when TBP was founded, I was not an original Teen Bachelor, and didn’t hook up with them until after they made their first short, Session—“a poker game with gags,” according to Chris, although I doubt many people who weren’t there would find it funny. I co-starred with Ross in the next one, a 10-minute film about Scrabble called Muzjiks shot in the Morrins’ basement over Christmas break during our freshman year of college, and then with Ted in its remake Muzjiks Redux the following Christmas. It was my first experience making a movie just for the hell of it.
Tell your friends you spend your free time making movies and they’re not going to take you seriously. It sounds goofy, like you’re pretending to be important. And we felt important for the couple of days it took to make those 10 minutes of film, dropping industry terms like foley (sound effects) and using a homemade rail system Ross’s dad put together to slide the camera. We even managed to pull off a half-decent stretch shot, zooming in as the camera pulls away—giving the impression that the room is expanding around the subject. “Real” directors use math and computers to time the effect correctly. We used John Rowan’s hand-eye coordination.
Muzjiks turned out well and even got a few laughs out of people who weren’t there making it. I used it shamelessly to hit on girls at school. But to say I thoroughly enjoyed the experience would be a lie; I loved the final product, but sometimes found myself bored on set. I had never thought about how painstaking making a decent movie would be, with all the repositioning of the camera and reshooting of scenes even if they went well, just to get a different angle. When it was finished I still found myself dubbing every line.
The thing about cinema, though, is that you fall strangely in love with the hard work. You start to passionately argue the minutiae because, like any piece of art, the beauty is in the details, and a well-made film is laden with them, even if it’s only the product of a bunch of high school friends. It was enough to draw me back for the remake.
After Redux I was forced into a sabbatical (I stayed in Georgetown last summer), and TBP came out with three more shorts without my meager-at-best help. In fact, Ross’s editing muscle, and the rest of his film-making system, was becoming pretty formidable. The rest of us, which had expanded to a circle eight or so guys, made the movies for the fun and creative aspects, but Ross had that kind of artistic passion that pushed him to discipline himself, spend hours at his computer editing, work up his knowledge-base, and acquire the finer tools of the trade, which now include a 10-foot crane for smooth, sweeping shots.
With Ross’s eyes now set on film grad school, and his portfolio in need of a centerpiece, I came home for Christmas and leaped on the chance to take part in his newest project. Yet to be titled and eventually to be YouTubed, it follows the day of two guys discussing stereotypical cinematic techniques as they go on around them, to the chagrin of my on-screen counterpart. That’s why I found myself in the park with just a tee-shirt on, worried about my nipples, as the temperature pushed down into the 40’s, pretending to be incredulous as my friend made a series of ridiculous basketball shots because the camera cut to a close-up as the ball approached the rim. For this one we even talked a cashier at a local coffee shop into letting us film in the store briefly, which made us feel more legit than we probably deserved.
At this point, Ross’s film-making capabilities are outgrowing my crappy acting talent. The edited scenes he finished before we went our separate ways again were visually excellent, and we were able to take some thinly-veiled shots at Armageddon director Michael Bay along the way. While filmmaking is likely not in my future, it could be for more than one of the Teen Bachelors, depending on the breaks. I hope so, because there’s something not entirely vindicating about making film after film without a larger audience—not that it ever stopped us.
