Tomorrow!
I'd be the guy at your side, before you yelled "Action!", who'd be saying the same thing my best collaborator of my store's TV commercials was always telling me:
"Stand up straight! Up on the balls of your feet! Smile! Have a good time!"
And we'd have a hell of a lot of fun. I shot a commercial which, to show the passage of time, I got three haircuts over two hours and had four costume changes. I went from a hippie through a skin-head punk rocker and ended up a respectable businessman. In another, a spoof of horror films, the director and I stole multiple camera angles from
Psycho. As the star, I had a nude shower scene in that one, and just like Hitchcock, we poured chocolate syrup down the drain as fake blood (it was a black and white ad). Another, a sendup of 1950s/60s Japanese Godzilla movies, we blew things up all afternoon at the TV studio* and had the dialog dubbed in so that it purposely didn't match the actors moving lips. That ad won best small market ad in my state that year.
Mini-dramas or comedies in 29 seconds, I'd write scripts that showed change and growth in my characters, along with mentioning the store's name 4 times, ending with the tag line used in every ad, and had two or three products on sale. They were great fun to shoot and the best part of my job by far. And I did them for cheap. My production budget was usually $200. The Godzilla ad maybe cost $600 to shoot.
I have a "damsel in distress" script in mind that would get a straight guy fucking in his very first appearance on the futon. It's also a perfect setup for sequels.
Martin Scorsese, eat your heart out.
*I didn't know this trick until that day. Take an old style house fuse, one that you screw in. Cut out the cellophane. Screw the fuse into a porcelain light socket. Wire the socket to an electrical plug or, if you want to set off multiple explosions, use the studio standard f/x trick of a nail board. Fill the fuse with black powder. Put this under a hole in the platform of your diorama of miniatures (ours was $10 spent on toy tanks, missile launchers, cardboard houses and of course our hero monster, Distortan). When you plug in the light socket, it's a dead short. The fuse will blow, igniting the gun powder. That light socket/fuse combination becomes a mortar and the toy tank that's sitting over the hole in the diorama's floor it is now history.
If I'd know this trick as a kid, I'd blown up tons of stuff. My parents were very lucky I didn't.
I giggled for a few minutes, but I was afraid the "real" video would be more painful to watch than funny. So for now, I have decided not to watch it.
