Why I worked on “Evil Pizza” for my daughter…
My daughter has been grabbing my mobile phone of the moment for as long as she has had the motor coordination skills to do so. Eventually she found the camera and got into making extremely short motion pictures. Everything my children do are evaluated against the family lines from which they descend—so the use of cameras has significance because my father had a darkroom in his garage in Inglewood and my mother has “an eye” as well.
Eventually, my daughter made a short called “Evil Pizza” that I had to respond to. As parents, the assumption here is that we can represent what the child will eventually characterize as “the world”—so, as parents, we should try to avoid the situation where the child takes action and the “the world” does not respond. So I decided to take action.
My daughter has a completely unexpected relationship with YouTube. She is currently watching “mermaid movies” made by other girls (who have access to swimming pools, Lycra and mono flippers). At the time of her shooting principal photography on “Evil Pizza,” she clearly just wanted to be “on” YouTube. “Evil Pizza” was, to me, her big break.
So let’s look at this situation from the impoverished and cynical point of view: it would not be “good” for my daughter to find her lifelong love for motion-picture making without any direct assistance from her parents. It would really suck to find out as an adult movie maker that your Dad did motion graphics for a show on HBO and is an Image-award-nominated sound designer yet did not a do damn thing for you when you picked up a camera. What would be even more poignant, is to realize that you shot “Evil Pizza” in the commissary of a frickin’ movie studio yet your Dad is so caught up in his dismal world of W2-labor-camp-cubicles and traffic jams he was unable to lift a finger.
So I “repackaged” Evil Pizza with a trailer-like intro and I added some credits at the end. I also edited my daughter’s footage to a final cut she approved (glamorously darling) and added a soundtrack, using effects from my rather extensive (but largely unused) Sony library. I haven’t worked on a motion picture in years so it was great to get back in shape. Now here are some notable, behind-the-scenes bits:
- My youngest son wanted to be in the show but his mother asked me years ago not to use images of ‘her child’ in public—so I honored this request by only using audio of my son.
- My mother’s favorite “Italian brand” was Chef Boy-Ar-Dee—so this was one way of getting my mother in the show.
- In the credits, I deliberately spelled my daughter’s name different ways (which can be interpreted as cruelty in some Oprah-book-club social circles)—this was my way of involving my daughter’s maternal grandmother in the show (“Wha?”—it’s a long story that’s several thousand years in the making).
- The home movies used in “Evil Pizza” came from my archive (not from my daughter’s mother) so it rather surprised me that my daughter forgot that we used to live together—so this show was a way for my daughter to get in touch with “old” memories.