Section: LIFE & LEISURE Page: C1

Saturday, August 12, 1995

COLONIE TEEN'S FILM PRODUCES A COMEDY OF ERRORS

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AMY BIANCOLLI Staff writer 

So, you're directing this movie, right? You're 15 years old. You've learned about filmmaking from books in the library and specials on television, and you wrote the script and scraped up $6,000 to produce it. Your uncle is co-starring with you, and some pals of his, and some pals of yours. A few members of your crew are, like, 12 years old. And you are not entirely sure what you're doing.

But, hey, you do it anyway. The movie gets made it takes two years and a lot of junk food, but it gets made and when it's finally done, you, the auteur, the artiste, the one-man studio, take a look at your creation and realize that it's . . . ummmm . . . well . . .

``I had some problems. I had some really big problems,'' said Joe Glickman of Colonie, the filmmaker in question, now 17 and an older, wiser fellow.

What kind of problems? There were troubles with the camera (it whirred), the sound equipment (it was cheap), the film (it cost too much), the video transfer (it was grainy), the weather (it changed), the shooting (it dragged on), the continuity (it wavered) and the catfish (it bit someone). The catfish will be discussed later.

Glickman's intended movie, titled ``Back in Time,'' was a time-travel comedy inspired by Robert Zemeckis' and Steven Spielberg's ``Back to the Future'' films.

Like the Spielberg originals, Glickman's version featured a young man (Glickman) and a goofy scientist (Glickman's uncle, Dave Brocca) zipping across the centuries in a souped-up car (a Mazda, not a DeLorean).

The finished work is something different. Ironically titled ``I Wish I Could Go Back in Time . . . How To Not Make a Movie,'' the film is a parody of the parody, a documentary that gives a step-by-step account of every disaster that befell the initial production. It is narrated by Glickman with disarming self-mockery as he outlines every last error he made as a green kid.

The green kid himself appears in often hilarious shots from the original footage, which is woven into the final film with behind-the-scenes shots of production, documentary-style interviews of cast and crew and stern admonitions from Glickman on how to avoid catastrophes.

It is a small film, about 35 minutes long, rough around the edges, shot in video (except for the original film footage) and charming in its self-effacement. It is also, at times, howlingly funny.

One particularly wacky excerpt shows Glickman's character and Brocca's sitting in a diner and discussing their travails when a waitress walks up and asks for their order. The sound was initially so garbled in several scenes that Glickman later had to dub large chunks of dialogue; unfortunately, the actress who played the waitress was not available for dubbing, so someone else a man wound up reading her lines in a squeaky falsetto. The result sounds eerily like a Japanese disaster flick.

Another shot illustrates the trouble Glickman had keeping to a schedule.

Filming began in summer and was intended to end in summer, but production went on and on and on, well into the dead of winter.

Because the film was set in the warm months, Glickman and company had no choice but to shoot a number of outdoor scenes in short-sleeve shirts.

This would have been little more than an annoyance (albeit a big one) had a blizzard not started to blow in the middle of filming. Hence the shot of Glickman and his uncle, clad in summer clothes, as snow blows dramatically across the screen.

A lot of the humor is, in fact, at Brocca's expense: Glickman's uncle took a beating in this film. He was plunked in a bathtub and doused in water, asked to fall 30 feet from the top of a tree (he didn't) and told to handle a fish the previously mentioned catfish that took a chomp at his hand.

``It was supposed to be a comedy,'' Brocca grumbles good-naturedly on camera, ``but it turned out to be more like a horror film, if you ask me.''

Glickman is pleased with his documentary and relieved that the whole thing is over with. He'll be submitting it to festivals, he said, and plans to send copies to Spielberg and Zemeckis, to whom the film is dedicated.

He'll try to sell it at local stores along with a music video set to the Guess Who's ``No Time.'' (In the meantime, anyone who would like to buy a copy for $10 should phone Glickman at 573-6728.)

He hopes to make another movie a drama this time but has no intention of going on to film studies. An extremely independent young man, he has always done things his own way; he has been home-schooled since ninth grade, for instance, and will be getting his G.E.D. in a matter of months. He wants to be on his own.

``I want to do something really original,'' said Glickman, who has abandoned an earlier effort to create a spoof of ``Seinfeld.'' ``I want to do something totally different from what I've done before.''

And what about ``Back in Time''? Would he do it again? ``No,'' he said. ``And I'm very quick to say that. I would do something different. In a way that's a tough question, because I've learned a lot from it. It's cost me a lot of heartache, a lot of money, and a lot of time. But if I hadn't done this, I wouldn't be who I am now.''

 

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