Transcripts

It was bad enough that we had forty-seven audio cassette recordings of the 1960s TV show Mission: Impossible!

in multiple shoe boxes in my sister’s closet; we also had the entire Monkees’ movie Head recorded as well.

We rented Head often. There was only one video rental place in town that had it; it was over on Polk Street, and our mom would have to make a special trip to go in and get it because it was the kind of video rental place that kids weren’t allowed in. We always had to call first to see if they had it, even though it was never checked out. The man on the phone would sound confused: The adult movie or the other one?

On nights when we watched Head, we would usually get two hot fudge sundaes from Double Rainbow on 24th Street. These were quart-sized, overflowing tubs of ice cream, chocolate sauce, and whipped cream. I was in ninth grade, and I could have been out with friends or perhaps even on a date, but since I didn’t date and my friends were all at home watching things like Monty Python episodes and Spaceballs, I didn’t see anything wrong with spending my Friday night watching Head. I’m not sure what my sister’s excuse was, since she seemingly actually had a social life in sixth grade. Still, there we were, not only watching Head but stopping the VHS player every thirty seconds to write down the dialogue, verbatim, into our notebook. We were going to make a movie ourselves; we were going to recreate Head, complete with costume changes and memorized dialogue, to perform for our parents in the living room.

We did this kind of thing quite a bit. We transcribed several Monty Python episodes, memorized them, and performed them for our parents. We had transcribed, to date, forty-seven episodes of Mission: Impossible! and memorized many of those. These we did not perform for our parents, though, but for ourselves, usually in my sister’s room, with a makeshift bar for 1960s style martinis and fake cigarettes. I suppose on some level we knew they would disapprove of us pretending to drink and smoke.

Head was finally fully transcribed. After writing it down by hand, we used our mom’s electronic typewriter to transcribe it a second time. Then, we put it in our scene book, and added a page listing the cast (just me and my sister), the costume changes, and the props needed.

If you’re not familiar with The Monkees’ movie Head, it’s a spin-off of The Beatles’ movie Help!, a psychedelic, stream-of-conciousness, experimental-style film. It’s really awful. There are about, oh, thirty different scenes, all completely unrelated to one another, almost like a big dream. Aside from the Monkees, there are twenty or so different cast members in various roles that have one or two lines each: people like Frank Zappa, Jack Nicholson – people relevant in film and music at the time. It kind of worked as a film, much in the way that an Andy Warhol film might come across to an audience. As a string of scenes performed by two young kids in their living room – not so much. We were focused on how much we loved The Monkees when we transcribed the movie, and thought that our audience would be just as thrilled to hear all the dialogue, expertly intoned by us, just like the Monkees had said them.

We were wrong. With so many characters and scenes all played by us, the original standard-length movie became hours long and it was thoroughly confusing to anyone watching. We didn’t worry about this. We had a plastic garbage bag for every costume in every scene placed along our hallway wall, and we’d change as quickly as possible and come out to do the next scene, sometimes saying, So, now I’m a man in a factory who is giving the Monkees a tour. For the musical parts (yes, there were musical parts), we had a single cassette tape for each song we had meticulously recorded by putting our big tape recorder up to the TV. To this muffled recording, we would come out and lip-sync.

Our parents sat in chairs in the living room and watched this, or did their best to pretend they were engaged. After about half an hour, our mom got up.

Girls, I have GOT to get dinner started and I’m not sure when this is going to end.

I didn’t even get to sing Daddy’s Song!My sister was very disappointed, as this was her starring moment as Davy Jones in an energetic song-and-dance number with a striped cane.

My dad took the opportunity to stand up as well, saying something about work. We moaned, but it was no use. They were thoroughly bored and there was no convincing them that seeing the rest of the performance would be worth it.

…

The following year, we transcribed all of the movie The Untouchables with our new favorite movie star: Kevin Costner. It was 1990 and we had discovered home video recording equipment.

In our house, we did not have a TV until I was nine years old and then, it was only a tiny black and white eight inch screen. So needless to say, we didn’t know that video recording equipment even existed and we spent a few years transcribing lengthy performances that no one cared to see but ourselves.

One day we saw a sign at the local video rental place that advertised a video recorder for rent. It wasn’t cheap, but finally our mom agreed to let us rent it for the weekend.

In preparation, we had transcribed all of The Untouchables, edited our script down to the key scenes, and got costumes and sets all ready in the house.

The video recorder was monstrous. It was heavy, much like a professional film camera, and we had to rest it on our shoulders. We taped scene after scene without looking back until we were all done. The results were disappointing. Our scenes were nothing like the original movie, which somehow in our imagination we thought we might actually recreate. I played Kevin Costner and Andy Garcia as the two cops; my sister played Sean Connery as the renegade cop, as well as Robert DeNiro as Al Capone.

In our version, Sean Connery had a long blond ponytail when he accidentally turned to the side in several scenes, as well as painted red fingernails. Kevin Costner had gold hoop earrings which he had forgotten to take off before filming as well as a small bun at the nape of his neck. Andy Garcia also had a profile ponytail and Al Capone had yellow dishwashing gloves on instead of tough-guy 1930s black leather gloves. Al Capone also had a man’s bathrobe instead of a suit, and also, a ponytail.

In the opening scene, the camera zoomed in on Capone getting a shave, but the frame zoomed in past his face, so that all you saw was his forehead in the foreground. You also saw some plants and a messy bookshelf in a pretty modern and odd looking barbershop. You also saw and heard a parrot squawking during an intense scene on the bridge with Sean Connery. During the preparation for battle speech that Costner gives, you saw a middle-aged man in the far corner of the room typing on a 1988 Apple computer; and, during an intense scene where Capone comes down the stairs to attack the reporters and says You come here and say this in front of my son?! he turns to point to his son but there is no one there with him.

On the plus side, Kevin Costner’s monotone inflection was perfect; Al Capone displayed flawless Italian mafioso rage, and the scene with Andy Garcia showing his bad boy tough side actually caused injury to warrant an evening visit to the emergency room. The credits, which were filmed directly off the TV screen, were also perfect, if you ignore the parrot again in the background and the obvious infringement on copyright.

We showed this debut film to our parents and I can’t remember their reaction. I do know, though, that they stayed to watch the whole thing. It may have been just unintentionally funny enough, perhaps.