A cheerful voice answered the phone. “Long Island University. Media department. This is Mike speaking.”
“Hey, Mike,” I greeted in my business voice.* “I have this movie I want to put on cable access TV.”
His voice became cold and critical. “Are you a student here?”
“A student where?”
“At LIU.”
Of course, LIU. I felt stupid.
“Well, no, but I am a student. High school.” I had learned to always mention that I was a student. Milk it for what it was worth.
“Uh-huh.” Mike sounded like he was writing something down. “What’s your movie about?”
“It’s about this killer turtle that eats people. I’ve seen other movies on cable access, and it’s on the same, you know, level.”
“Well, come down to the studio on Monday, and we’ll have a viewing, okay?” A disclosure of directions followed. I wrote them on the back of my hand in green marker.
Attack of the Killer Turtle is a thirteen-minute film about life, love, and preteen girls getting eaten by a giant rabid reptile. I had filmed it over the summer with my cousin Sam. We were both fifteen and visiting our grandmothers in Massachusetts. We were bored. Sam had a video camera and a pet turtle.
We assembled some friends and shot the film in three days. Budget: zero dollars. For months afterward, Turtle lay dormant in one of my drawers. I showed it to my immediate family and friends but never hoped it would achieve greatness—not until I started watching Brooklyn Cable Access Television.
BCAT has three main types of programming: simulcasts of college radio stations, leftist political rantings, and fanatical religious shows. I got addicted very fast. After school, I’d slump on the couch and watch The Fine Arts Show (a showcase for Navajo artifacts), followed by Penelope Pitstop’s* radio hour.
Being a diligent, community-minded youth, I decided to see if I could get Attack of the Killer Turtle on BCAT. The closed-circuit LIU station seemed like a good place to start. So the Monday after talking to Mike, I stuffed my VHS tape in my ratty coat and headed to the university, convincing James to come along.
James, a tall guy with glasses, has been my friend for a while. I envy him; he’s one of those naturally cool, quiet people with built-in mystique. If you say, “Hey man, how’s it going?” he’ll wait five seconds before answering, “Fine.” If you start a conversation that doesn’t interest him, he’ll be silent for a half hour. Plus he has a trench coat. Whenever we’re together, he’s the chill guy hovering in the background; I’m the manic nut talking a mile a minute.
James and I caught a number sixty-seven bus and sat in the back among the roaches. We discussed (well, mostly I discussed and James nodded) how roaches get on buses. Do they migrate at bus terminals? Enter via grungy passengers?
The sixty-seven stopped at Atlantic Avenue. We trudged past Kennedy Fried Chicken* to Long Island University. College kids were everywhere, with their slick hair, glitter makeup, and nose rings—as if I didn’t see enough bodywork in high school.
James and I walked to the information desk. “Hi, I’m looking for Mike in the media department,” I announced.
“Well,” said the wrinkled, androgynous attendant, “it’s near the library.”
“Where’s that?”
The attendant sighed and shuffled papers while it directed me. “Go left, then right down the stairs, then across the courtyard, then up the elevator, then ask somebody.”
Yeah, okay. James and I quickly got lost in the maze of LIU. By trial and error, we reached the school library and questioned the librarian. “Oh, media department? In the basement.” We took the elevator and entered what appeared to be a lounge: circular table, women drinking coffee, a Mac Classic on top of a file cabinet. Sitting at the coffee table was a man with very small feet, a shrunken bald head, and a puffy blue jacket. A football was the first thing that came to mind.
“Mike?”
“Yes.” He shook my hand sharply.
“We’re here to show you the movie,” I reminded him. “Remember? I’m Ned, and this is my friend James. He, uh, helped with editing,” I lied.
“Let’s go see it,” said Mike. He led us into an oversized closet full of VCRs, monitors, and strange black boxes. I handed him Attack of the Killer Turtle; he slipped it into a VCR and hit play. Unexpectedly, I filled with pride as the blank monitor flushed with color. James mumbled, Beavis-like, “This is gonna be cool.”
The film opens with a slow pan of the Atlantic Ocean. A cassette recording of the Violent Femmes’* “Color Me Once” provides eerie ambiance. The camera zooms into the waves and—cut—focuses on a gargantuan turtle.
Now, offscreen, the turtle was a four-inch-long reptile that swam around in a grungy aquarium all day.** But when we shot the scene, we zoomed in on the turtle, shook the camera around, and played “x.y.u.” from Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness***—which added up to a fairly fierce-looking beast. I glanced at Mike. He looked impressed. Cut—two girls in swimsuits on a dock. Inspired dialogue:
“What a beautiful day for a swim.”
“Yeah. I have a funny feeling about this, though.”
“Why? We go swimming every day.”
“I just have a … premonition.”
Nevertheless, they get in the water.
The next scene was complex to shoot. We sprinkled some turtle food in the aquarium, so the reptile would swim to the surface and nibble. We cut to the girls, screaming and flailing their arms in the water. If you squinted real hard and remembered that a bunch of bored teens were in charge, it looked like the turtle was eating the girls.
Cut—the police department (the interior of Sam’s grandmother’s house). Sam takes a phone call from Inspector Barzoni (me), detailing the horrific deaths of two adolescent girls at the hands of a crazed aquatic reptile.
“I’ll come meet you at the docks,” he says with action-movie attitude.
Cut—he jumps in a car. This scene was the most fun to film and the most stultifyingly boring to watch. We thought it would be cool to have fifteen-year-old Sam drive his grandmother’s car at thirty-five miles per hour on a deserted Massachusetts road. But the scene was shot from the backseat by Sam’s eleven-year-old brother, and it lasted almost five dialogue-free minutes.
“This part’s too long,” Mike said.
I looked over at James. He looked worried. I made the execution gesture with my finger and neck.
The film goes downhill from there. Inspector Barzoni discovers that the only way to kill the turtle is to stab it in the eyeballs with a kitchen knife, which leads to the stunning climax: Sam and I swimming around in the Atlantic Ocean, slashing at the water with rusty knives, yelling, “Die, turtle!” The turtle dies.* The tape ends.
“Well.” Mike turned to us with the adult-giving-bad-news-to-kids expression. “It’s good. I mean, I like what you boys are doing. But we need the original footage. We need to edit. Add sound and music. Make this look like a real movie.”
“That hurts,” James mouthed.
Mike handed me the cassette. “We can’t edit this VHS tape,” he said. “What we need is the original footage, y’know? Direct from the camera?”
“Well, maybe I can get the originals,” I answered halfheartedly. There was no way I was getting the originals. I’d lost them months ago.
“The important thing,” Mike said, “is that you keep in touch.”
“Okay.” I smiled, pretending to be reassured. It was Mike’s job to reassure and my job to smile. Despite the pleasantries, I knew full well what had just happened. I had been rejected by LIU. There was no chance I was getting my movie on cable access—the medium that features women in purple robes ululating at all hours of the night.
As we walked out of the place, James and I decided Attack of the Killer Turtle was simply too groundbreaking for cable access. What we needed to do was get it on the independent film circuit. But first things first. What we really needed to do was eat some Kennedy Fried Chicken.*
*I have a great business voice. In every band I’ve played in, I’ve been the guy who makes all the phone calls because of my business voice.
*I don’t know why Penelope didn’t become a national sensation. She was a rock DJ with a super-sexy voice who talked about which celebrities got her hot. All the callers were male.
*Right. Kennedy Fried Chicken. For some reason, Brooklyn is full of imitation KFCs: Kennedy FC, Kansas FC—dumpy places that capitalize on the wholesome name of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
*A dirty folky rock band. I once saw the lead singer running through an airport, just like any other idiot trying to catch a plane.
**Sam actually loved the turtle very much and kept it well fed, but he never named it. It didn’t need land like any other reptile I’ve ever seen; it just spent all day swimming around in its aquarium.
***A big, long rock album, the last one to be popular before hip-hop took over.
*Let’s clear this up, before the animal-rights people hear about it. We did not stab the turtle in the eyes. We jumped into Massachusetts Bay and slashed at the water with kitchen knives. The turtle’s presence and subsequent death were sort of assumed. The only animal harmed during filming was me—I cut my foot open on a barnacle.
*Guess what? The movie was found and is available at www.nedvizzini.com/fun/#turtle.