Woody Cavenaugh

Saturday Carolina Theater hosted the screenings of 36+ Greensboro 48 Hour Film Project entries. The films were split into three evenly sized groups and each of these films has a chance at winning the prestegious "Audience Award" in their group voted on by the folks who were there watching the films. Of these all but ten are eligable for judging on various categories by the judges which include: Best Directing, Best Script, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Acting, Best Use of Character, Best Use of Prop, Best Use of Line, Best Music, Best Sound Design, Best Effects. Those eligable for these awards all vie for the covetted "Best Overall". The winner of Best Overall is sent on to represent Greensboro at the higher levels.

Before I start the reviews I thought I would share a story that has to qualify as a Frequently Asked Question to me personally as I do my thing filmatically. "Why oh why does yours truly always end up dead in Ike Quigley flicks?" Its a good question, and an interesting story with lots of history so I thought I would lay this piece of local film legend and lore (in my own mind anyway) out for you.

The year was 1999, Ike Quigley who had been running a very successful film program out of Randolph Community College wanted to do an experiment. He wanted to see if he could make a 30 minute film casted and crewed entirely from amatures. The cast could have experience but he wanted to use his friends for crew and besides himself, only Sara (my lovely fem fatal) had any clue about making a movie. If successful, then one could create a film company as a start up and get to make movies (which is fun) while being with your friends all the time (which is also fun). Kevin Smith was already doing this with his Jersey crowd, and Ike wanted to see how it would work for us. Thus The Violin was born. Crewed by amatures, filmed in a micro mini budget, this 30 minute short is what would now be your average first year's 48 Hour Film Project entry's first cut. You know, you have to have only seven minutes of film, but you wrote a 45 minute script and on your first pass you managed to cut it down to 30 minutes. Yeah. That's pretty much what we created. But it proved that it could be done, and everyone involved had a hellova good time. In this film we had various scenes that required extras and we got those from the crew. So in one scene I was cast complete with lines (I played an ass, no suprise there), and in several others you saw me in different outfits walking one way or the other. Fun stuff. Anyway we all had a great time, and the shoot was generally jovial with plenty of good natured ribbing between takes. On some occasion Ike said something and my reply was "It's OK Ike, I'd still die for you." I can't remember what it was but it was funny as hell at the time. Since then, on every shoot that Ike directs, if I'm on the crew, I'm a dead man. In The Curse, I was shot twice in the chest. On the unfinished zombie picture, I was ripped appart by zombies no less than four times. I had a small role, a slightly larger role, and a bunch of background extra parts. (Having long hair made stuff like that possible.) In The Gift, I was shot once in the chest, and now in Gone To Ground, I was stabbed to death. Good times. Ike was actually teasing me the other night that he wants to to stretch me as a corpse into dying in new ways like hanging or drowning. He'd like to see me grow as an actor.

Now some of you who may have seen more of my work might remember that I wasn't killed in Purely Platinum. The reason was because in Purely Platinum my lovely wife Sara was directing, and Ike was a judge. We've always secretly believed that we would have done better in the first year of the 48 (at least with Judge Ike) if Sara had found some way to kill me in the film. The truth is I suspect Sara has cause to fantisize about killing me about once a week and there is no satisfaction from killing me in film. No matter how messed up I am made in a movie when the scene is cut and we move on to the next scene, I always get up and go shower. That's got to be disappointing.

Now for the reviews. Since the first year of the 48 Hour Film Project in Greensboro I have dutifully watched the films and gave a very honest one idiots opinion of the films. I would typically start the entry in some sort of "Character" that reflected my role in our film or the genre of the film. So when we did spy last year, I wrapped my reviews in a bunch of shitch about cleverly trying to sabatogue other folks films, but under it all, the reviews were my humble and unasked for opinions about what I thought about the works of the other crews. Every one of them are filled to the brim with talented folks, and honestly we have enough folks in this town that we could cast and crew an entire feature film, possibly twice over. Greensboro, in case you didn't know has a simply huge independant film crowd here. So here's my blog, one guy, who's one idiot, with one opinion, and I'm writing about folks I honestly like, so I'm pulling my punches a bit. If I didn't get it, I admitted I didn't get it, but I wasn't an ass about it. It was as though I had delcared open war on the local film crowd by performing in a donkey show in front of the court house while dressed like princess leah in the Return of the Jedi slave girl outfit. My hits jumped sky high and I got flamed six ways to Sunday by the nicest bunch of people one could ever hope to know. It was as though this one blogger's humble opinion included nazi's and each of their individual mothers. I learned a valuable lesson though. I learned that everyone involved with film only wants to hear how great they are. They don't want to hear about what they can do better. My theory on this is that they know each and every little thing they have ever done wrong in their whole lives but don't actually realize what they have done right on film. Low self esteme is a disease affecting many Americans. So if I were to take the high road, I would go down the list in order from my program and write a few sentences about what was done right and well on each and every film. But I'm not going to do that.