Working Within My Limitations: “Who Shot the President”

As I’ve aged, I find it harder to make movies. I don’t have the energy that I had when I was younger. I won’t let that stop me.

In this post, I want to take a look at one of my first movies, “Who Shot the President,” and consider how I worked with my limitations back then..

This post includes spoilers, so you may want to watch it before you read the rest of the post, you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSTEhH0d4E . The film runs about 3 minutes.

I made two versions of this movie. The first in 1994 on Super 8, and a second in 2004 on 16mm.

Inspiration

While I completed the first version of “Who Shot the President” back in 1994, the idea came to me a few years earlier. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I watched several documentaries about the assassination of John Kennedy. Then in 1991 I saw the movie JFK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK_(film)

To begin with, I was open to the possibility that there was a conspiracy. But I am also something of a skeptic in general, so I was apt to question what people said. The more I learned about the assassination, the less likely I felt that there was a conspiracy.

This was before I really got serious about making movies. But I began to think about making a parody movie of the conspiracy documentaries that I had watched.

Generating Ideas

Over the next few years, I came up a quite a few ideas for my parody movie. At the time I thought of this as a feature length live action movie.

One idea was to have a character do a blow up of a reflection in a piece of chrome on one of the cars to reveal the shooter. Who would be someone who obviously couldn’t be the shooter.

Another idea I had was an “interview” with one of the co-conspirators to expose the plan. I had several different ideas as to what the interview would expose.

Realization

It was during this period that I began to get serious about making movies. I made one movie on Super 8 (“Weekend in Calgary” https://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/filmlist/weekend-in-calgary) which was screened at the first $100 Film Festival.

I started to look for an idea for another movie, and I went back to my assassination conspiracy theory parody movie idea. At this point I had managed to make a 3-minute film on Super 8. The ideas I had for my parody movie were far beyond what my skills and finances could accomplish.

The realization made me discouraged and, so, I gave up on the idea.

Reconsideration

Later, though, I went back to the idea. I knew I had the skills and money to do a 3-minute movie on Super 8. Could I develop one of the ideas I had come up with into a movie of that scale?

My first question was to ask myself, what do I want to say with this movie? I didn’t want to just have a joke. It had to have a bigger meaning.

The answer was that I felt that so many of the conspiracy theories used circular reasoning. For example: If there was no proof of a conspiracy, that was proof that there was a cover up. Since there was a cover up, that proved that there was a conspiracy.

Recognizing Opportunity

My observation that conspiracy theories follow circular reasoning fit with one of the ideas I had for the interview with the co-conspirator. The interview would follow the pattern of the old Abbot and Costello “Who’s on First” routine, where the conversation plays off misunderstandings and goes around in circles.

I didn’t feel up to the technical challenge of doing an interview, so I came up with a different approach to the visuals for the movie. I would use a series of stills related to the assassination. As the interview progressed the individual shots would get shorter. I would select these images so that at the end of the film they would create the impression that the screen was spinning in a circle.

The spinning effect worked well on the Super 8 version of the movie, but when I redid the movie on 16mm, the effect wasn’t as effective.

Later, when I watched Chris Marker’s movie “La Jetée” I was struck that he used a similar approach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU99W-ZrIHQ

Making the Movie

Some years ago, I wrote another blog post about making “Who Shot the President.” So, if you want more details on how I made the movie, you can read about them here: https://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/how-to-make-a-film-for-the-hundred-dollar-film-festival-part-3/

Of particular note, when I did the first version, I used a tripod and placed the stills on the floor. This resulted in my doing about 2,000 deep knee bends while shooting the movie. I don’t think I could do that now.

Lessons Learned

The movie was a success from my point of view, and I got a lot of positive feed back from people. I also got physical threats from people who found it upsetting.

However, what I learned from making the movie the way I did was that it was possible to rethink an idea to fit both the goals you want to achieve with a movie and the limitations of your own abilities. In the end, I believe the film I made was better than what I would have made if I had the wherewithal to make the feature I originally conceived.

Another lesson is the importance of having a clear idea what you want to say with your movie. In this case, knowing what I wanted to say helped me focus on those aspects of the movie that carried that message and in a way that I could actually achieve.

I’ve thought of this approach as similar to poetry. The structure of a poem constrains how a poet can express themselves. It is those constraints that encourage creativity.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog