My kids are moving into summer mode.  Simon started his internship at ChiZine Publications (http://chizinepub.com/) this week and he actually worked late tonight.  Scared the heck out me when he was two hours past when we expected but I am pleased with his work ethic.  Evan is at a 30 hour fast at school right now — you can tell it’s near year end at Lakeshore Collegiate because he has to hustle to get his volunteer hours in before the semester’s over.

A few years back I wrote a story called “(Coping with) Norm Deviation” about some teenagers who spent most of the summer of 1972 trying to make a science fiction movie with Super 8 cameras.  (You can read the story in the Tesseracts Eleven anthology -http://www.edgewebsite.com/books/tess11/t11-catalog.html )   The story was pretty autobiographical and in some ways it was a lot like having a summer job — we put in long hours on the project and actually demanded quite a bit from ourselves.  We just didn’t get paid for it.  We did receive ocassional Parental Arts Support Grants to cover the costs of film and developing — for which I am still very grateful

Norm Deviation!  Was my vision of an anti-utopian future Saskatoon.  It reflected my bitter-ish world view at the time and I figured it was the most affordable sort of SF movie we could make.

 
  
My friend Kit had a much stronger cinematic sense and he kept challenging me with ideas for special effects like giant plastic buildings and spinning flying saucers descending from space.  I worked all of that into the script but although we shot some really promising reels (with home-made sound-synch) , we never finished it.  Just ran out of time and money.  No shame there — happened to Orson Welles, Stanely Kubrick and Terry Gilliam.  I certainly didn’t run out of energy — while we were working on Norm Deviation (!!!) I was also writing an adaptation of 1984.  It would probably be hideously embarrassing to read it now, I still wish the draft hadn’t gone missing.  I do recall that I put in as many cinematic gimmicks that I could into the first 10 minutes — and also thinking that Donald Sutherland was the only choice for Winston Smith.  (Although Peter Cushing, Edmond O’Brien and John Hurt were all pretty good in that role.)

My big inspiration for our summer movie project was bumping into Kit outside the Paramount Theatre for the matinee showing of Silent Running. 

 
It still holds up as a wonderful but seriously flawed film and I think years ahead of its time.  Back in June 1972, it was a threshold experience for me.  I really wasn’t quite the same person after I saw Silent Running.  Movies were no longer a passive experience; I knew they could show us and tell us things that were important (at least important to me).  Not only that, I wanted to know how they did that and most importantly…perhaps in some way I could do that.

As you may have noticed I did not become the next Stanley Kubrick (or even Richard Fleischer) but trying to make that silly movie and write those scripts did start me on a journey that has taken me to some truly amazing places.  And I’m thankful for that too.

If you haven’t seen Silent Running, I recommend it.  It has some truly fantastic pre-CGI special effects and a great original score.  Here’s some samples:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOkiJUawiWM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1qFUxPKWN8&feature=relmfu