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Skits and The Baseball Effect* (2004)
Around the time we were finishing our first short film, The Scarf, me and Beth were really excited about the idea of making another movie. We made a series of dozens of short comedy sketches called Skits around this time that we never released, for the most part – a lot of them were about our goofy misadventures as a band, and I think we were loosely inspired by the sense of humor in some of the Beatles movies for these.
A lot of our sketches were specifically about what we did that wasn’t music – part of the idea of The Band Of The Land was we weren’t just a band that made music, but we were doing these other creative projects – we were especially interested in projects around food, because of how we often came up with different ideas for snacks during band practice that turned into a kind of signature style.
As a play on how our recipes were popular but also extremely easy to make, we did a number of Band Of The Land Cooking Hour sketches where one of us shows the audience how to use a microwave or how to turn on a stove (sometimes not being able to figure it out ourselves) – in one of them, Beth simply shows the audience a packet of chewing gum.
Around that time, I would occasionally set up a stand outside the building where we lived in Brooklyn to sell items like the “King Doughnut” (a doughnut with strawberries and whipped cream in it) and “Red Lemonade” (lemonade with strawberries and raspberries) – we had a whole selection of recipes we made with doughnuts that often combined fresh fruit, candies, and sometimes even ice cream. A lot of our recipes played on the theme of combining many different ingredients that aren’t generally known for being put in the same dish.
On my birthdays around this time, my mom would often come to my school with her own version of our “King Doughnut” recipe, which turned out to be a bit too popular, and there was more demand than supply – as was the case with my doughnut and lemonade stand.
So we wanted to spread the word about our recipes to show people how to make them at home, but we didn’t have enough for a proper recipe book – the solution, we figured, was to put the recipes in the pages of The Band Of The Land Newsletter, which was our home printed vehicle for spreading the word about our band and what we were doing.
Our newsletter was also more of a play on the concept of a band that needs to tell the world about everything they’re doing all the time – social media wasn’t a big deal at the time, but we were clued into some of the weirdness of Internet culture, so we may have been anticipating a future where the stereotype about bands is that we’re always updating people about our daily lives on social media. We made very few copies of most of the issues and never released any online, because the idea was always that it was more of an in-joke.
But it was also something people really liked, because it had a heartwarming silliness to it – in addition to our song lyrics and snack recipes, we got friends of ours to write movie reviews for the Newsletter under ridiculous pseudonyms, and we put in entire full-page articles about everyday happenings like “Jesse went to a musical instruments store in another part of Brooklyn to look at guitars this month” or “Interview: Beth is recovering from a foot injury”.
So, taking off from that concept, I came up with an idea for our next big filmmaking project: The Baseball Effect.
The whole plot of The Baseball Effect is that, for some reason, I get really tired of The Band Of The Land Newsletter being this fun in-joke of ours, and I want to turn it into something really serious and profitable – so I create an entire scandal to draw attention to the Newsletter, by using it as a vehicle to spread completely untrue stories about our band, mostly about us being the managers of a successful baseball team. This does end up attracting a lot of different kinds of attention to our Newsletter, but none of it ends up being profitable – at the end of the day, we’re just really lovably goofy characters and we don’t know how to run a profitable business under capitalism.
So The Baseball Effect was really my first serious attempt at that more lighthearted, absurd, funny style of social commentary that I went on to do more of with projects like BOTL Radio and Unhappy Holidays – it’s something I haven’t explored that much of lately, but I did a lot of it as a kid and teenager, and it’s something I might do more of in the future.
The style of filmmaking was similar to The Scarf and other projects we did at the time, which fans of these projects have sometimes compared to the French New Wave – since these were partly improvised and partly scripted, filmed with essentially no budget, very little time, little to no crew, and a relatively small cast of mostly amateur actors, and then edited together in a more non-linear, stream-of-consciousness way.
We did have more actors on this one than on The Scarf, because it was a lot easier to find people who could play the parts in a comedy like The Baseball Effect than in a project like The Scarf where we had a very specific vision of how the characters would be, and they exist in more of a dream realm than in everyday reality – The Baseball Effect takes place in something much closer to the real world, and a bunch of my neighbors in Brooklyn who had no prior acting experience ended up acting in both the 2004 version of The Baseball Effect and the first of the two 2005 versions – it was similarly easy to direct the actors in the final version, which we also finished in 2005.
The story of how we finished the first Baseball Effect is kind of confusing and self-contradictory, a bit like how we started it – the first day of filming took place while we were still working on The Scarf, and was completely unplanned – we were having band practice one day, and I just randomly came up with the idea for a scene where Beth races across my apartment to try and stop our printer from printing an issue of The Band Of The Land Newsletter that she suspects to contain falsehoods, and then we get into an argument about it.
This ended up being the opening scene in the first Baseball Effect, and I only really came up with the idea for the whole movie after several other similarly spontaneous filming days that seemed more like individual segments for our Skits series than scenes that would be sequenced together as part of one movie.
Once I’d come up with the idea for the whole movie, I kept that idea in my head, and over the course of that year or so, I intentionally filmed various scenes with the same characters that I could see fitting into The Baseball Effect, but still also working as individual Skits if not.
By the end of 2004, I had enough footage like this to make a 15-20 minute short film called The Baseball Effect that told the story I was trying to tell, in that stream-of-consciousness, non-linear way that worked really well to tell the story of The Scarf – and I’d also finished editing this 15-20 minute short film, The Baseball Effect, by the end of 2004.
But because I was already really focused on making the second version of it by then, which had different characters and more elaborate storylines that I was really interested in and putting most of my energy into, I don’t remember if I did very much with The Baseball Effect in terms of screening or a physical release – I definitely never released it online, and I don’t have the files for it anymore.
I’m pretty sure I screened some of the scenes from it, especially the opening scene with me and Beth where she yells “stop the presses!” and tries to stop the printer from printing the Newsletter, alongside the scenes from The Scarf that I occasionally screened at house parties and for smaller gatherings of friends around 2004-’05.
In general, all 3 Baseball Effects are movies that hardly anyone ever saw, but they played a significant role in my development as an artist – especially in how I collaborate with other people – because they were the first times I did something that was still a serious project, but the idea was open and relatable enough to be able to involve a lot of different kinds of people, instead of something like The Scarf where we had a very specific vision.
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.