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Clouds move across the sky with the eerie quickness of a fever dream. Traffic lights on serpentine freeways blaze in red and white ribbons. Crowds of people move through the streets as blurs like spirits in the heart of the city. A giant moon rises behind a glass high rise. Philip Glass music mesmerizes.
This is exactly how Thom Stitt remembers the months following graduation from Film School late in 2005. He's pretty sure his account is accurate.
Film School passed with nary an opportune moment for a followup episode to The Library Chronicles. The creators of the show, Thom Stitt, Marshall Langohr, and Stephen Pickering made their own film school movies, and they graduated, and off on separate ways they went. Marshall Langohr took a hop-and-a-skip back home to Seattle, only a 3 hour bus ride away. Stephen Pickering took a flight home to his fiancee in Wisconsin, having proposed earlier in the school year. And Thom Stitt lingered in Vancouver, an American now unwanted by the businesses of Canada.
As the disparate pieces of this dreadful puzzle scattered in the bleak winds of the Pacific Northwest, something previously inanimate stirred. Deep underground, in places forgotten, a wooden door sat stale and cobwebb'd. Beyond its threshold: A dusty shelf tells a tragic tale: The first episode of The Library Chronicles, untouched, barely-seen, and of course, ending on a cliffhanger. Some faint galvanic force within it had awakened, and so it lay, patient, waiting for the perfect chance to strike.
"8 Films. 8 Days. 800 Dollars." It's called "The Crazy 8s". An annual film competition based in Vancouver, it has a reputation as one of Canada's "premiere short film events". Only 8 pitches are accepted, and they are put into production for an 8 day schedule after about a month of prep. The timing was right. Nobody needed to dust off The Library Chronicles - It had shown up on its own, eerily at the foot of the bed late one night, staring deep into Stitt's eyes when he stirred from slumber for a nightly urination. It was clear what needed to be done.
The Crazy 8s seemed simple enough - You apply and pay the $50 application fee, and if you're one of the first 50 or so applicants, you are scheduled in at some time during a weekend for a 5-minute pitch in some boardroom at Lion's Gate Studios. The 3-man team had made The Library Chronicles, an 11-minute movie, in a matter of hours with no money. 8 days and $800 would be a luxury in Library Chronicles-land. The stage was set.
With Pickering out of the picture (almost certainly enjoying the perks of married life in warm interiors during a cold March in 2006), Stitt and Langohr were left to devise a way to reformat the Chronicles into something that could be pitched fresh. They couldn't continue the story, as a sequel to an existing idea would never win in a pitch session. So they devised a prequel of sorts - and essentially a re-telling of the first episode in a new fashion (and minus Pickering). "Bureaucratic Prologue" was the working title, and together they hammered out a simple, 10-page script very similar to the first episode. It would tell the tale of Scooter the Chimneysweep's very first discovery of the underground Library. One-sheets were made (poster designs), and they decided to plan for the pitch proper.
"So, how are we going to pitch this?"
"I don't know, I think we can just talk about it."
"Right, but we can't be talking over each other... Who's going to talk first?"
"Doesn't matter to me."
"I'll talk first, and then I'll throw it to you whenever. We'll wing it."
It was Goddamn fool proof.
Nerves are startling things. Their electric fingers have a way of reaching into the bowels and causing altercations that tend to melt solids and stir the juices of the stomach. And so was the trip to Lions Gate Studios. Langohr and Stitt were joined by their friend and film school brother-in-arms Nathan Drillot, who was eager to be in on the pitch to "suss out the scene", as he himself had gotten a later slot to pitch his own movie "Ninja: The Musical" (copyright Nathan Drillot 2005). After the chilling events that followed, he would promptly refund his much-coveted $50 appointment.
The boardroom was located on the Lions Gate lot, made up to be an old-fashioned town in miniature. A line of strange people wound around a fake street block and up a flight of stairs. People in costume bustled with enormous props. People practiced their pitches. The group even ran into an old friend - an actor, Keith Humphrey, had starred in Stitt's film school movie. He was with an entourage of associates clearly ready to take on the pitch upstairs in spectacular fashion. Stitt, Langohr, and Drillot had a binder amongst them. Amidst the brightly-colored bustle of the environs, a moth had taken up shelter between the one-sheet and the blank pages beneath it.
A camera crew upstairs was recording every moment of the Crazy 8s excitement. Blushing filmmakers quivering with nerves stuttered their post-pitch impressions to the camera crew. Staff pointed people to, others fro. Stitt and Langohr were on deck. The far door opened, and a number of cartoonish scientists in white lab coats and holding beakers and test tubes emerged, sighing their reliefs and yammering like Peanuts-parents to the camera. The time had come.
The pitch room is arranged as follows: An enormous arrangement of tables occupies the left half of the room, the farthest wall of which houses the camera crew. Along every side of this table is some massive delegation of judges, some smiling pleasantly, others appearing dour and bitter and likely harboring unnatural grudges. The tables before them are littered with papers and folders and giant plates of crackers and cheese cubes. On the right, a good distance from the tables, a line is taped to the floor. Alongside the line are large hoops on pedestals. They kindly ask the pitchers to stand on the line and perform their 5 minutes. Extra points are awarded for jumping through the hoops provided and for singing songs that make the dour-faced judges giggle.
Outside, clouds move across the sky with the eerie quickness of a fever dream.
Something is said to a camera afterward.
"How'd the pitch go?" Keith asked downstairs, nervous for his own pitch in a few minutes' time.
"We have to go reflect and agonize" came the answer.
The little moth found its way out of the binder and flitted its tiny wings toward greener pastures - These ones had clearly all dried up.
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Nathan Drillot, Thom Stitt, and Marshall Langohr:
Fish in a fucking barrel.
(Image captured from Official Crazy8s video) |
IN THE NEXT INSTALLMENT:
Stitt and Langohr learn what pride tastes like going down. And Stephen Pickering once again joins his old companions on the battlefields of filmmaking - and is subsequently murdered in brutal fashion. |
