Chorus, Isolate, Confirm

In the spring of 1996 I was getting ready to graduate from high school. I had a light class load, with the only non-elective on my schedule being AP English with Mr. White. Despite the time I could have theoretically devoted to that class, however, by mid-way through the school year I had convinced Mr. White that I was a slacker.

The problem was that my writing, which was strong, only counted for about half my grade, and was at odds with my tendency to perform poorly on tests (because the tests were consistently on the subject of literature I didn't find enjoyable). That, combined with my sense of humor (which always seemed to be causing the teacher inconvenience rather than amusement), created a haze of mistrust between Mr. White and me, at least in my perception. But in the second half of the academic year, an opportunity to convince Mr. White that I actually wanted to pass his class presented itself.

The final work in our lengthy Shakespeare unit was The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Mr. White gave us an assignment. Near as I can remember, the requirements were:

It had to be a presentation of some kind (he might have actually told us we had to make a video project...I don't know if teachers were allowed to assign things like that technically, but at any rate, every project submitted in my class was a video)
It had to be at least ten minutes in length
It had to be related in some way to Hamlet

Students formed groups to tackle the project. My group teamed me up with my close friend Ben, and Brandi and Emily, who were both dating other friends of mine.

I knew that being grouped with Ben would be an advantage for our project. He was the one among us who showed filmmaker tendencies. He understood cinematography, was versed in film as a culture and had already developed a filmmaking style visibly influenced by Lloyd Kaufman (appropriately, Ben would go on to intern at Troma after university). So we set out to make our own abridged, modern-setting version of Hamlet with Ben writing the screenplay, directing the action and doing most of the camerawork.

The cast fell into place quickly: I was Hamlet (knowing full well that I was a poor actor but ready to "ham" it up all the same, if you'll pardon the expression). Brandi was Ophelia and showed a zany side I had never seen while portraying her descent into madness. And Emily played straight-man to the rest of us clowns in her depiction of Gertrude. We knew that Ben needed to appear on screen in order to get credit for the project, so he played both R (Rosencrantz) and G (Guildenstern), who never appeared on screen simultaneously. But that left us with a bunch of roles we couldn't cover with just our team of four, so we enlisted help, not just from outside our group, but from outside our own graduating class. Alumni cameos, if you like.

We asked our mutual friends Kennan, Jeff, another Ben (we'll call him Ben R.) and Matt, all of whom had already finished high school but would be recognized by anyone who saw our movie, to complete the cast. Kennan played the father-son duo of Polonius and Laertes (again, they never appeared on screen together), Jeff filled in as the gravedigger, Ben R. was Horatio. And Matt, the best actor among us, stole the show as Claudius as well as the ghost. Matt's performance easily garnered the biggest laughs from anyone who saw our movie. He was brilliant.

To adapt the story for a modern setting, we did away with the "kingdom" scenario and reimagined Kronborg Castle as a pizza business, which Hamlet, an ambitious heir who had been experimenting with a "new" triangular cutting technique (as opposed to grid-wise square cutting) was to inherit until his treacherous uncle Claudius swooped in. We would replace the daggers and swords with handguns and pizza cutters, and the title character's Elizabethan frilled shirts with a moody black-sportcoat-over-black-turtleneck combo that made me look like a goth college professor. Romeo + Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes would come out later, in the fall of the same year. But unlike Romeo + Juliet, our production mixed famous lines from the original with modern parlance, often making for strange interactions.

If this all sounds awfully involved, it was. It took several days to shoot. It's difficult for teenagers to take something seriously, and this was made evident by the countless takes that had to be done to get a scene on camera without a catastrophic character break or uncontrolled laughter. In particular, I remember what felt like dozens of takes of the scene where Laertes discovers Ophelia drowned in about four inches of water in a bathtub. What should have been serious was made farcical by Kennan's inability to say the line, "Oh no, this is madness! Revenge is paramount!" without laughing.

("Revenge is paramount" was a recurring line in the movie, spoken by multiple characters. I always imagined trailers and posters for our movie with the tagline, "This summer, revenge is paramount.")

The project needed to be ten minutes or more in length, but Mr. White hadn't given us a limit, so we ended up making a 35-minute rendition of the story. And I saw an opportunity to "redeem" myself in the eyes of Mr. White by going the extra mile and writing an original musical score for the movie we made.

I had been making music (mostly laughably bad dance tracks) on the household Macintosh LC II for several years leading up to this, but had never attempted music for video before. For inspiration I drew from Dan Forden's music for the Mortal Kombat series, Metroid, Super Metroid and Drew Neumann's music for the Æon Flux animated series. The resulting themes were appropriately melodramatic for Hamlet, but far too serious-sounding in contrast to the absurdity happening on the screen: actors' accents fluctuating at random, Polonius's cotton-ball mustache falling off, R and G finishing each other's sentences.

At the time, we faced a number of technological barriers to this endeavor. For the shooting itself, we were limited to using Ben's handheld Video8 recorder and its built-in microphone. For the music, all I had was my father's Performer sequencing software and a Roland Sound Canvas SC-55. And worst of all was the "post-production" process I used to get the music and a few sound effects onto the final copy:

After receiving all the scenes on VHS from Ben, I had to dub the tape with a line-in mic connected so that the copy would have the original audio, plus the mic audio on it. I pointed the mic at the speakers of a boombox playing the music cues and a couple of sound effects (which I had to sync to the action in real time, starting over from the beginning of the movie when I made a mistake). By the time the finished product came out, it had lost quality from being copied twice (once from Video8 to VHS, and again from one VHS to another for the sound). The final dub also had opening and ending titles that I made by pointing a camcorder on a tripod at a computer monitor.

But ultimately, we succeeded. Mr. White dedicated most of a class period to showing our 35-minute video, which received applause at the end. As class ended and the end title music faded, the music for the morning announcements started on the school's loudspeakers – again, it was the end title theme from Hamlet (because I, who was in charge of the audio for the morning announcements that year, had used the Hamlet music during recording the previous afternoon). It was a media blitz event! And we all got A's.

Mr. White would go on to show our video, as an example of a job a little too well done, for years after my friends and I graduated. In fact, my younger brother, who attended Mr. White's class thirteen years later, told me that even his class watched our Hamlet video. Ben, Brandi, Emily and I were legends at our high school.

This week I converted most of the music from the movie from audio cassette to digital form and put it up on my music YouTube channel. Three short tracks, each one less than a minute long, are missing. I also don't have a good recording of the shorter version of the end titles music that was used in the movie, but I've included a longer version here. The music's not great, but it takes me back to the time when I wrote it and reminds me of what an effort the whole project was. Check the video description for details about what happens in each scene.