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Out of Print and Unavailable
Road to Fame Season 1 (2005-’06)
So while I was at the summer camp in the summer of 2005 where I made the third and final Baseball Effect, I met a guy from my neighborhood in Brooklyn who was also an aspiring musician and filmmaker around the same age as me.
We quickly became friends, and came up with the idea to collaborate on something together. Since he was a drummer, we initially thought it’d be a good idea to start a rock and roll band with another guitarist he knew from our neighborhood – we had a few practices as a trio, before breaking up the band – the other guitarist turned out to be such a difficult person to work with that being around him in that band seemed to have sent us into a kind of altered state that we needed to express artistically just how awful we felt being in a band with him.
This is saying a lot, since it’s not like either of us was a particularly easy person to be around at the time – we were both incredibly difficult, I’d say.
As I’ve spoken about before – I went through a whole phase around that time in my life, where I would lash out at people and was sometimes pretty harmful, sometimes even hateful – it was a time when I was experiencing some very extreme psychiatric abuse and therapy abuse, which was partly what led me to engage in some strange and destructive behavior that was seen as especially unusual considering how young I was.
Thankfully, I snapped out of this in my mid teens, and figured out ways of navigating the world that didn’t involve harming myself or others.
But this was when I was 11, soon to turn 12 – and I was not an easy person to be around. Nor was my new friend who was playing drums in our now-disbanded power trio – he was one of the most arrogant people I’ve ever collaborated with on a project, and we spent a great deal of time clashing over various decisions because he insisted on claiming nearly everything I was doing was objectively wrong in some way.
The other guitarist was on a whole other level, though.
This guitarist had to be the most misogynistic person I’ve ever met – which is saying a lot, because I’ve known some incredibly misogynistic people. But this was the kind of guy who, if he opened his mouth at any point in time, in any setting, more often than not was going to say something about how much he hated women and how much he wanted to spend time with them just so he could fuck as many of them as possible and abuse them in various ways, which he went into a surprising amount of detail about.
Most of our band practices were so short that we didn’t even finish playing a whole song – he would abruptly shut things down so we could go get pizza, where he told us about his fantasies of what we would do when we were famous – two of his favorites were that we’d erect statues of us peeing, and we’d do “fundraiser concerts” for various causes and then secretly keep all the money for ourselves.
It was the worst band I’ve ever been in, and my new friend and I were both so happy to get out of that shit.
Coming right out of that environment and into something completely different, we decided to make a short film series together called Road to Fame – since he’d seen a screening of the 3rd Baseball Effect at our summer camp a few months prior, we were both familiar with that story, and we decided to do something very different that still drew from that basic idea: I’m running a Newsletter that’s intended as an in-joke between me and my friends, and it turns into something very different with much broader implications.
For Road to Fame, since neither of us were in a great mood after that horrible experience with the short-lived band, we decided to do something much darker than The Baseball Effect.
Rather than tell the ultimately feel-good story of a group of lovable oddballs trying and failing to succeed under capitalism, Road to Fame turned out to be a sci-fi/horror series, where me and Beth actually just want to run our Newsletter for our small group of friends, when suddenly we’re made aware of a series of paranormal events happening in our area that involve a former friend who mysteriously disappeared – we decide to start publishing investigative reporting about these paranormal events, which leads to greater interest in our Newsletter, but it also puts us in a lot of danger – throughout the series, we have to do battle with various malevolent spiritual energies and their mutated henchmen who are kind of terrifying – the main one is able to teleport into our home and shoot lightning out of his hands.
There were a lot of twists and turns in this series, and I don’t even remember half of what happened. I remember there was a whole part of it where, since Beth had a foot injury in real life and was on crutches for a bit, we came up with the idea that the evil entity we’re fighting against uses its powers to give her a seemingly incurable terminal illness that leaves her to unable to walk. There were also a lot of long, drawn-out physical fights in various places between me and the main mutant guy.
The theme of being mutated is something I explored more of later on – it’s especially a big part of my short film The Manual Polar Goes For A Ride (2010) and my album Shriekofafreak! (2015) – to me, it’s a theme that really resonates because of how much I felt like a human experiment, with the bizarre psychiatric abuse and therapy abuse I dealt with for so much of my childhood and teenage years.
In fact, my age group was the first to be put on certain drugs that had never been tested on kids, and I was put on one of those drugs (Risperidone) for a few years, starting at the age of 10.
Despite numerous lawsuits as a result of its horrible side effects on children, Risperidone is still being prescribed to children today – so while we could technically say we were experimented on, and that it was seriously immoral and harmful, it seems to have been such a badly organized “experiment” that the field as a whole never really bothered to check the results or make what would appear to be straightforward, common sense adjustments – otherwise they wouldn’t still be prescribing these drugs to children.
So “experiment” seems like the wrong way to put it.
But more broadly, I can relate to the trauma of human experimentation as a Jew – plenty of this went on in the camps during the Holocaust, where some of my ancestors were killed – a lot of those experiments then laid the foundations for what the USA and its allies have been doing to vulnerable populations ever since.
And beyond the horrors of human experimentation, the USA itself is often referred to as “the American experiment”, because – like all Western countries, to some extent – it’s more of an experiment in various ideas about how to organize a society than it is a place for people to actually live. And given the realities of how our world economy is largely structured around the exploitation of the resource rich Global South and its workforce, controlled by and for the benefit of these Western “experiments in society”, the whole world can feel like an “experiment” sometimes. Which isn’t how it should be, but it’s how it is.
Even more broadly, it’s relatable because, unfortunately, early adolescence always feels like being a human experiment, to some extent – and that’s what we are going through when we made Road to Fame – so that was just something that was on our minds.
Overall, we weren’t very happy with how Road to Fame came out – we liked the story, and it was a fun and interesting experience working with a new collaborator on this project, but we were still working out a lot of the kinks of working together in this new collaboration and in this new way.
After this, we made plenty of other short films together as part of the BOTL Radio series, which turned out a lot better than this, because we really came to better understand each other’s creative languages and mentalities. We did a new version of Road to Fame as part of BOTL Radio Season 2 in 2007, which we were a lot happier with because we all really “clicked” when we were making that one.
We released both the 2005-’06 version and the 2007 version of Road to Fame online, and there were some occasional screenings of it at house parties and small gatherings around then – but we took it all down in 2008 along with the rest of the old Band Of The Land Films YouTube channel – at that point, we were just tired of all this and wanted to go in different directions with our work. I think some people might still have the files for some of the episodes, but I don’t, and it’s not something I’m interested in reissuing.
from Out of Print and Unavailable Filmography (with Band Of The Land Films)
BOTL Lite Season 1 (2007-’08)
BOTL Total Season 1 (2007-’08)
BOTL Radio Seasons 1-3 (2005-’07)
Road to Fame Season 1 (2005-’06)
The Baseball Effect* (2005)
The Baseball Effect* (2005)
Skits and The Baseball Effect (2004)
(or, go to the beginning for the full list of out-of-print and unavailable projects)
* In total, we made 3 different short films called The Baseball Effect. 2 of them were made in the year 2005, but they are not the same movie – they just happen to have the same exact title and were made and released in the same exact year.