CineFile Video

This is a little mash-up of drug use in the movies and on TV — the commonalities, clichés and a few genuinely beautiful moments. Per Hadrian’s request, here are a few words about how I did it. The process involved weeks of watching (or really, scanning through at 8x) over 50 movies, noting down the significant moments of drug use and drug-related dialogue, capturing the footage by hooking up my DVD and VHS players to my mini-DV camcorder (which meant figuring out how to break macrovision [i.e. copy protection] — not hard if you have the right player), importing the footage into Final Cut Pro and editing like a maniac for a week.

I do have a few regrets.

1) Shortly after I finished this pieces, I saw a European-region DVD of Emir Kusturica’s Life Is A Miracle, which features a scene of a gangster snorting a gargantuan rail of coke along train tracks. It would have been amazing to intercut that with the Modern Problems, D.O.A. and Heavy Metal footage.

2) I could have easily turned this into a 30-minute piece, but I was trying to keep it under (or at least close to) five minutes. There was so much great material I couldn’t use: Panic in Needle Park, Sarah: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic, Party Monster, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and most especially Chris Rock in New Jack City.

3) I really, really, really wanted to end the mash-up with a clip from that touchstone of Reagan-era anti-drug propaganda, the Just Say No commercial where Dad angrily asks his kid how he got hold of drugs and the kids screams, “From you alright! I learned it from watching you!” I thought it would be a cinch to find, but I could not get my hands on this ad. If anyone has a dub of it (even a really cruddy one), please let me know. I am dying to re-edit the film’s conclusion.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 1:52 pm and is filed under New Arrivals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.