Out of Print and Unavailable – Page 33

Cannonball’s Party (2010)

This was an interesting one – in 2010, I was talking with a friend of mine at school had recently immigrated to the US with his family from Pakistan, and he was still really adjusting to life in NYC of all places.

When he found out I was also a filmmaker, he got really interested in the idea of making a movie together, and we settled on the idea of making a series of short sketches.

We came up with the idea to name it after my song “Cannonball’s Party”, because he was kind of fascinated with my dog Cannonball – in most parts of the world, domesticated dogs don’t live indoors or have the kinds of relationships they do with humans in a country like the US or the UK – so for someone who’s spent their whole life without meeting that kind of dog, this can be pretty jarring.

the out of print cassette How to Draw a New Face (2010) features the song “Cannonball’s Party”, which also served as the theme song for both episodes of the series of the same name

He came up with most of the ideas and wrote a lot of the screenplay, and I handled most of the cinematography, direction, and editing, with the two of us as co-stars. A lot of it ended up being improvised on the spot.

The first episode took place in my apartment in Brooklyn, and primarily consisted of me trying to show him how to speak in falsetto/head voice, and then trying to teach him how to play bass. A lot of our real life friendship at the time consisted of him bragging to me about his musical talents, and then revealing to me that he actually didn’t know how to play an instrument or do anything musical – so this became an in-joke between us that we figured out how to work in to Cannonball’s Party.

It worked surprisingly well – a bunch of people at our high school “got it” and thought the whole thing was genuinely hilarious.

So we did another episode – this one took place at a souvenir shop in Manhattan run by some of his uncles.

I think part of his reason for deciding to do the episode there was that his uncles wanted to publicize their shop by having it featured in our video – as soon as we got there, his uncles were really enthusiastic about getting on camera and wanted me to film basically every item they were selling there. A lot of this episode ended up being various improvised bits with his uncles, and me giving a kind of impromptu concert in their souvenir shop. After we wrapped filming that day, they invited me to do an official concert there sometime.

We only did those two episodes of Cannonball’s Party – we were both getting busier with other projects, and overall, it seemed like those two episodes were all we really wanted to do with that one.

People at our school really seemed to enjoy the lovably oddball nature of it, and we had a good time making this series. Unfortunately, I don’t have any physical copies of either episode, and both hard drives they were on were destroyed simultaneously in a power outage, along with a bunch of my work from that era.

I haven’t heard from the guy I made these with in quite some time, because he disappeared from social media around the time we graduated high school – so I’m not sure if he still has these either. I haven’t been in touch with anyone else I can think of who might have the files. Maybe they’ll turn up again one day?

the original Cannonball Statman, for whom this series and its theme song were named

from Out of Print and Unavailable Filmography (as Jesse Statman)
8PM in New York City (2011)
Band Forever: Live @ Perch Cafe (2011)
Cannonball’s Party (2010)
A Place That Doesn’t Exist (2009)
Exhibits 1-7 (2009)

(or, go to the beginning for the full list of out-of-print and unavailable projects)