Austin FilmWorks Fall Classes ... and a Bonus Story

I received a very nice email from local filmmaker/instructor Steve Mims last week, letting me know about his upcoming filmmaking classes at Austin FilmWorks and also complimenting Slackerwood. He introduced himself briefly, as though we hadn't met before.

I stopped and laughed aloud, because I am actually in one of Steve Mims' movies. He didn't make the connection ... admittedly, I was using a different first name at the time. And it was a very small role, thankfully for all of us.

My friend Tom Chamberlain was a producer on this film called One Eye Peeled ... this would have been around 2001, maybe? I can't recall the year. He asked me if I wanted to audition for a minor role that he thought was perfect for me. He gave me the relevant section of the script, at which point I found out I was "perfect" to play a character listed as Frumpy Housewife. I auditioned anyway -- it was a two-line role -- and got one night's work on the film.

One Eye Peeled was a series of comedy sketches strung together by a loose narrative, kind of like Kentucky Fried Movie. The sketch I was in was about Death holding a book signing for his autobiography. It was shot in BookPeople. I hadn't ever worked as an actor on a film before, except for a long cold night in grad school when I ran around in a Jimmy Carter mask for a brief appearance in someone's thesis film. (Or was it Richard Nixon? My memory sucks sometimes.)

When the time came to rehearse and shoot the scene, I had no problems with the lines, but I had a hell of a time trying to hit my marks exactly. Two steps here, stop there, step slightly left there, right on that chalk mark. The director -- Steve Mims -- was also operating the camera. He wanted to shoot the scene in a single take, and was using tight close-ups, so we couldn't stray off our marks by a fraction of an inch. Mims is well-known for getting what he needs in very few takes. So naturally, Frumpy Housewife messed up the first take by stepping off her marks slightly. The second take was just right because Mims had given me such a look that I was scared into accuracy. It was a good reinforcement in the lesson that I did the right thing by not pursuing an acting career, although I looked fine in the various cuts of the film that I saw later.

Despite my tale of fear, I have met Steve Mims a few times over the years -- he guest-lectured a couple of times during my one semester in film production at UT, and showed us his charming short doc The One Arm Dove Hunt -- and he is not a scary guy (unless you are a clumsy novice actor). Several friends of mine, like the aforementioned Tom Chamberlain, have taken the Austin FilmWorks classes and found them invaluable. The latest filmmaking classes -- Production One and Production Two -- start in October and run through December, when the classes' finished films screen at Arbor Great Hills.

As for One Eye Peeled, I'm not sure what happened to it ... I assume that like many films, it never found a distributor. The huge cast included Tom and a bunch of his friends; Pamela Ribon, then known for her online journal Squishy and now a successful novelist and TV comedy writer; and according to a Google search I just ran, local filmmaker and Austin Film Festival programmer John Merriman. Perhaps someday it'll surface and you can see me in a tentlike housedress, in my one big-screen appearance.