MY SECOND FINISHED SHORT FILM!

I believe last year I wrote that, after my short film Keeping it P.C. was released, that my next project, The Good Old Days was coming out later that summer. A year and a half later, and it's finally available on YouTube, and can be seen right HERE! There was more than our fair share of production problems. We could not, for the life of us, us being director/editor/actor Aaron Haynes and producer/actor Emilio Kalogiannis and myself, the writer/actor (we're a very small team) find someone to fit the role of Jaquizz, one of the six characters in our film. It's not like we're holding auditions and were finicky...we were begging people to come fill the roles of this essential character, and finally, a few months ago, during those last few precious days of summer before we all started college, we got Alex Manhertz, who added a great deal of character to the small but pivotal role of Jaquizz.

The idea of this film came from watching an episode of "Leave it to Beaver" in my 11th grade history class. Our teacher (I had the class with Aaron) was showing us how family life in the 1950s was being portrayed on television. Your patriarchal father, with the dutiful wife and rascal kids, who got into a wacky situation, and in the end it was all resolved with a neat little ribbon and a good message for the youngsters watching at home. That fascinated the pants off of me. I'd grown up watching some "Beaver," mostly "Andy Griffith" and "Brady Bunch" from that era, but I never looked at the content like we did in History with a critical lens. Immediately while watching the show a thought hit me: what if Ward Cleaver (the father) was somehow flung into the future? How would he adapt? What would he say? How would his family react? What would he think of our society now?

My mind went racing, and I quickly jotted down a few pages of script before consulting Aaron that day what the names of the characters should be. I knew I wanted my character to be named Bill, a strong, generic name of any decade. Alluding to the show of the 50s, I knew the wife had to be Lucy, and an additional nod to that show with her son being Ritchie. As I looked on IMDb just moments ago to get the name of the dad from "Leave it to Beaver," I realized the character's real name was Theodore Cleaver. That's a fantastic coincidence, considering Aaron and I just pulled Aaron's character's name out of thin air: Teddy.

So the family was complete. But I didn't just want to have Bill reacting to his changed family, I wanted him to interact with a character or two from our time. His of-the-era reaction to any non-white person lead me to create Jaquizz, the modern day friend of Bill's family in the future. But who else would he talk to on his journey? That would be McCarthy, a nod to Joseph McCarthy, who we also studied in History, notorious for his prosecution of those he considered "Communists," and his ever growing "blacklist" that had the names of those people. I had a friend named Morgan Silver in Spanish class that year, who is your typical Virginian fellow. I wanted to make a caricature of Morgan and have him personify what kids nowadays refer to as "'Merican pride."

Read on to see what roles the characters function in the film:


A brief run-down of the six characters you'll see in the film:

• Bill- your everyday, prototypical, sitcom-like man of the 50s. Self-referential satire is what I wanted to go with for TGOD, and Bill is a very broad stroke, a culmination of those characters and what I imagine their ignorance of today's culture would look and sound like.
• Lucy- I hate weak female characters, so that's why even though Lucy is a typical housewife of the era in the past, her modern incarnation is motherly, concerned, sarcastic, and an altogether well-rounded 21st century woman.
• Ritchie- his modern self represents the tendency for teenagers nowadays to be glued to their phones. 
• Teddy- the more disrespectful of the two brothers in the present, Teddy is the A-plus student of Bill and Lucy in the 50s.
• Jaquizz- Bill's modern neighbor whose disbelief and capacity to break the fourth wall constantly makes him an important part of the ensemble.
• McCarthy- the symbol of American ignorance, and a reminder to the viewer that even though things aren't as dated as they were in the 50s, there are definitely parallels I was trying to draw between our past and present prejudices that are sadly similar.

I hope you'll all enjoy this film, which I wrote several months before P.C., but the latter was a lot faster to shoot, where this is 20 minutes of what I consider some of the best work from our little team! It was a very long shoot, with a lot of takes and a lot of laughs, and I'm extremely proud of the finished product. Expect a new short film next summer, I'm in the very early stages of writing it now, called Waves. It's a total 180 from what we've been doing, a very dramatic, mockumentary-sort of film in the vain of Magnolia.