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.

It was 1989.

We rented Head often. There was only one video rental place in San Francisco 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 where kids weren’t allowed.

That movie, again? she would say.

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 have to ask each time: The adult movie or the other one?

On nights when we watched Head, we would usually get hot fudge sundaes from Double Rainbow on 24th Street to fully indulge, but this particular night there were no sundaes. I was in ninth grade and my sister was in sixth. I could have been out with friends or perhaps even on a date, but since dating wasn’t a subject yet, and my friends were all at home watching things like Monty Python episodes or writing in their journals, there didn’t seem to be anything unusual about spending my Friday night watching Head (again) with my younger sister.

This time, watching Head meant we had work to do. We had our tape recorder up against the TV speaker recording the audio, and every five seconds I would press the big bulky ‘pause’ button so we could write down the dialogue, verbatim, into our big, spiral notebook. We had decided to take on the biggest performance of our lives. 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, just us, in that old Victorian house on Noe Street—the house that I remember discovering had the exact same floor plan of the house in Psycho.

In years past, we had transcribed several Monty Python episodes, memorized them, and performed them for our parents, complete with the varying British accents. We had transcribed, to date, forty-seven episodes of the TV show Mission: Impossible! and memorized many of those. These we did not perform for our parents, though. These we rehearsed just for ourselves, usually in my sister’s room, with a makeshift 1960s style bar for martinis and fake cigarettes.

After Head was finally fully transcribed, written down by hand, word for word, we used our mom’s electronic typewriter to transcribe it a second time, neatly, (professionally), onto crisp, white paper. Then, we put it into the plastic binder we called our scene book, and added a page at the front of the script listing the cast (just us playing the myriad of characters), the costume changes, and the props we would need.

If you’re not familiar with The Monkees’ movie Head, it’s a spin-off of The Beatles’ movie Help!, a psychedelic, stream of consciousness, experimental-style film that became a cult classic.

It’s really, really bad.

There are about, I recall, thirty different scenes, all completely unrelated to one another, almost like a big dream. Aside from the four 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. And as one of those weird 60s films, sure, it worked. But, as a string of scenes performed by two kids in their living room without the specifics of studio, set, and costume—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 themselves had delivered the lines.

We were wrong.

With so many characters and scenes all played by us, the original standard-length movie became several hours long and it was thoroughly confusing to anyone watching. We weren’t thinking about this at all, however. We had a highly organized system of plastic garbage bags for every costume in every scene placed along the long hallway wall, and we’d change as quickly as possible and come out to do the next scene, sometimes cluing in our audience with, So, now I’m a man in a factory who is giving the Monkees a tour, but then Davy gets sidetracked and lost in a black box. For the musical parts (oh yes, there were musical parts), we had a single cassette tape for each song we had specifically recorded by putting our big tape recorder up to the TV. To these muffled recordings, we would come out and lip-sync for each musical number.

Our parents, the reluctant audience, sat in chairs in the living room and watched this, and did their best to pretend they were interested in any of it. 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, she said, tapping her rigidly-extended fingers alongside her thighs, something she did when she was uncomfortable, antsy, or irritated.

My sister protested that she didn’t even get to sing Daddy’s Song yet, her starring moment as Davy Jones in an energetic song-and-dance number with a striped cane.

Yes, just stay for Daddy’s Song, it’s the best part, we said, offering to just skip through the scene where Frank Zappa talks to the cow and the surreal Vietnam war combat sequence.

After the scratchy cassette played Davy Jones’ song and my sister jumped around flinging the cane we had painted in stripes just for this shining moment, our dad took the opportunity to say something about work and needing to call some people back.

With our audience chairs empty, we took stock of how many costume changes and props were out in the hallway awaiting their time. We were now faced with the task of cleaning up before dinner was ready, as our mother had instructed on her way to the kitchen.

Well, at least I got to do Daddy’s Song, my sister said.

*

The following year we transcribed all of the movie The Untouchables with Kevin Costner. It was 1990 and we had discovered that there was home video recording equipment.

We had seen a sign at the local video rental place that advertised a home video recorder for rent. It wasn’t cheap, but our mom finally agreed to let us rent it for the weekend. Just this once, she said. She knew how our ideas for projects went.

In preparation, we had spent hours transcribing all of The Untouchables, edited our script down to the key scenes (likely having learned from Head), and got costumes and sets, as usual, all ready in the house.

The video recorder was monstrous. It was heavy, and we had to rest it on our shoulders and record directly onto a VHS cassette tape. We recorded scene after scene without looking back until we were all done, and the results were not entirely as we had hoped. Our scenes were nothing like the original movie, which somehow in our mind’s eye we thought we might actually recreate. I played Elliott Ness and George Stone (the rookie cop), played by Kevin Costner and Andy Garcia, respectively, in the Hollywood movie. I had perfected Kevin Costner’s flat tone and unique syllabic punctuation and felt confident I could channel Andy Garcia’s young-tough-guy-with-a-sensitive-side performance. My sister, the more comfortably dramatic of the two of us, had the role of Sean Connery as Jim Malone, the renegade Irish cop, as well as Robert De Niro as Al Capone. She also had a cameo scene playing Frank Nitti, the gangster character in the all white suit who gets pushed off the building—a dramatic scene made quite undramatic by our poorly executed recording abilities allowing the viewer to see Frank walking back after ‘falling’ out of screen in order to press stop on the video recorder.

In our remake, Sean Connery had a long blond ponytail when he accidentally turned to the side in several emotionally intense scenes, as well as painted red fingernails that flash onto screen during his outbursts. 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 the neck that he thought was well hidden. Andy Garcia also had a profile ponytail and earrings and Robert De Niro had yellow dishwashing gloves on instead of leather gloves. De Niro also had a man’s bathrobe on instead of a suit, and the apparent 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 and eyebrow in the foreground. You also saw some house plants and a messy bookshelf in a pretty modern and odd looking barbershop. You also saw and heard a pet bird squawking during an intense scene on the bridge with Jim Malone. During the preparation for battle speech that Ness 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 since the other actor was busy operating the camera at the base of the staircase.

On the plus side, Kevin Costner’s monotone inflection was indeed perfect; Sean Connery’s Irish accent was impeccable; De Niro’s flawless Italian mafioso fury was visceral, and the clipboard-slamming scene with Andy Garcia was dramatic enough to cause injury and warrant a visit to the emergency room on Jackson Street to resolve a subungual hematoma. The credits, which were filmed directly off the TV screen playing the original movie in order to look official and capture Ennio Morricone’s score, were also perfect—that is, if you ignore the reflection of the California sun through the Levolor blinds, the pet bird again in the background, and the obvious infringement on copyright.

Despite its obvious failings, it was something we felt proud of: our talent captured on screen! We gave it the title, unironically, on the label of the VHS tape: The Untouchables: Director’s Cut and convinced our parents to sit through its screening at a time when they wouldn’t have to make calls or start dinner, they promised. This time, they stayed put to watch the whole thing and laughed a lot even though it wasn’t a comedy.

But it was, as my mom had warned, the only time we were ever allowed to rent a home video recorder.