Author: Senlin Means

The sky is dark, wrapped around the UVA Chapel, and the wind feels fit to bring down trees. Well below the deep brown, barrel-vaulted ceiling, Sarah White and the Pearls (www.myspace.com/sarahwhitepearls) are setting up to play a gig. It’s a Sunday night in November. The show was scheduled for 8pm, but that’s about when Sarah and two other bands (from out of state) begin getting ready. No one else is here. Sarah gets rid of the drum stool and pulls up two wooden thrones for Matthew Clark, the drummer, and Jeff Grosfeld, who plays bass, to sit in. Behind her a long row of votive candles flickers under a huge stained glass Jesus. The band plays a sound check that echoes inside the mostly empty room. Where she is, in the knave of the chapel usually reserved for the preacher, the music sounds perfect. The room is a stunning, if odd, setting for a rock show. Her great-grandpa was a minister, and it occurs to Sarah that she feels at home in a church. She’s wearing a black dress tonight because she wanted to dress up a bit, this being a chapel. She stands in her lucky Italian boots that she almost always wears when she performs, and stares out at the sea of hard pews on the wine-dark carpet, and then up at the stained glass windows above the arched, double doors. Counting members of other bands, there are maybe 18 people in the audience. The promotion was left up to the event organizers, and her usual Teahouse and Atomic Burrito regulars must not have heard about the show because they are absent.

Nine years ago, Sarah White opened for her childhood idols Hall & Oates at the Filmore in San Francisco. Almost immediately afterward, she backed off from her musical career to attend graduate school. With her third CD just released, she reflects on the zig-zaggy career. "I’ve always been doing this," she declares. "It’s just that now it’s working."

It’s always something.

Breathe deep.

She can’t hear what the music will sound like out there, but as she steps up to the microphone and opens her mouth to sing, Sarah White is certain that it will be heavenly.

Nine years earlier, Sarah stood onstage in front of almost 70 times as many people, at a sold-out show at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. She was wearing a black miniskirt, a black sweater, and her favorite black boots, alone with an acoustic guitar and her steely calm. She was the opening act for Hall & Oates. Five days before, sitting at the law firm where she worked at the time, she hadn’t been so calm when the call came saying that Bill Graham Presents needed an opener for the upcoming Hall & Oates concert. Did she want to do it? “Hold on a minute,” she said. She walked into the bathroom and fought the urge to throw up. 

The age of reason

“Joyful poignancy” is how Sarah White describes the emotions in her music, now in Charlottesville a few days after the chapel concert sitting slightly hunched over opposite me in a booth, sipping Diet Coke through a straw and picking at a basket of fries with fingernails polished a sparkly purplish brown. Sarah is possessed of a lot of raw talent, and throughout her life there have been people, like her family, friends and fellow musicians, who have recognized that talent, and helped further it along. Yet she herself has at times seemed to have no clue what to do with it. “Everything before now,” she says, as she prepares to release her third album in nine years—prepares for what seems to me like a third attempt at a career in music—“Everything before now is the zig-zaggy lines of figuring out what works, of living.”

I sip acidic coffee while she tries to explain what from the outside looks like a hesitant and broken path. “I’ve always been doing this,” she says, eyelids slung low and gaze steady. She hasn’t stopped playing music since she was 16, she tells me, except for three years when she was in love. “I’ve always been doing this,” she declares, “it’s just that now it’s working.”

White practices with The Pearls (Matthew Clark on drums and Jeff Grosfeld on bass). How does she classify her music? "Well, I write songs and then I play them, and that’s what they sound like."

The tattoo nestled in the crook of her left arm is a redwing blackbird. When she was 3 years old, her family moved from Warrenton to Sink’s Grove, West Virginia, where they lived until Sarah was 12, on the 110-acre Redwing Farm, at the foot of Flat Mountain. She grew up surrounded by music; listening to the songs her father wrote, her mother’s Janis Joplin records, and the bluegrass and country played by local musicians like Tex McGuire, who played with Bob Wills in the ’30s and ’40s.  Her father had no formal musical training, but still he taught Sarah her first chords on his guitar and instilled in her a love of old time and bluegrass music. “Put a drum behind old time and you get punk,” Sarah is fond of saying.

Sarah won’t tell me how old she is. I ask her the first time we sit down to talk, and the second time, and in several e-mails. She plays coy. “I have had people ask me how old I am before they listen to my music,” she says, “I’m like ‘fuck off.’”

“Right,” I respond. “So, how old are you?”

In an e-mail she tells me that she was raised to never ask people their religion (I asked her that), how much money they made (forgot to ask that) and how old they were. “I’m trying to figure out why it’s relevant,” she says. I explain that people will want to know. That knowing someone’s age changes how you think about what they’ve done. It tells you where they are in their life. Plus, I don’t want people to think I just forgot to ask. “You are so FRICKIN reasonable!!!!” she writes back.

“Now I feel creepy that I’m being weird about it.”

“It’s really not a big deal,” I say, even though I really want to know and it’s becoming a big deal.

“Sliding into middle age,” she says, her sunglasses pushed up on top of her dyed red hair, rattling the ice cubes around with her straw. “It’s kind of depressing.”

Sarah smile

One day, when Sarah was 5 or 6 (no one can remember precisely) her parents came home and found her and her sister sobbing in a big yellow chair, listening to a Dolly Parton album. The album was 1973’s My Tennessee Mountain Home, Dolly’s much-loved set of songs about leaving the place where she was born. The album begins with Dolly reading the letter she wrote to her parents when she first left Sevierville, Tennessee, and its themes of home and homesickness struck a chord with the young Sarah. She still has that record. In 1995 Sarah got her redwing blackbird tattoo in Seattle, and it’s a permanent reminder of where her music comes from.

Sarah’s family moved to Charlottesville in 1983. At Tandem she played music with classmate Steve Ingham, writing poems that became songs and playing a guitar she got when she turned 16. After high school came UVA and a degree in English and creative writing and, after that, a job at Miller’s, where she learned to make damn fine apple pie (it’s all about the crust). Thus began what she thinks of as The Age of Discovery. After playing at Eastern Standard and Fellini’s with what seemed like every musician in Charlottesville, she went electric with the rock band Miracle Penny. But when Miracle Penny broke up, she found herself with a seemingly useless degree and no clear idea of what she wanted to do with her life. Her best friend was living in San Francisco, so she grabbed her guitar and went, too.

In her house in Belmont, Sarah keeps a Sony tape player loaded and ready so that when inspiration strikes all she has to do is press Record and sing. Many nights find her sitting by the wood stove playing into the tape deck, bits of lyrics, melodies and songs. Sometimes fully formed songs come to her in her dreams, and then she has to jump out of bed and get them down on tape. The house is full of tapes—100, 150—some half-started, others full. They are meticulously labeled, with songs she wants to return to circled, and tiny notes about what she liked written in the margins. She listens to them on her Walkman as she walks to and from her job at ExploreLearning, and sometimes she listens to them at work, trying to sort out the various scraps and sounds. Sometimes she writes songs as she walks.

In 1997, Sarah White’s first album was released. All My Skies Are Blue is made up of songs recorded on a handheld tape recorder and a four-track in the two years before she moved to San Francisco. All of the music of her childhood and teenage years is buried in the rough, lo-fi murk of the album. There’s an intimacy and loneliness in listening to what amounts to a musical diary—the sound of the Record button being pressed, the hiss of tape and one person playing multiple instruments on the sometimes spontaneous songs. She prefers this kind of homemade music, how private it is and how real. The first five songs are loud and fast and mostly electric, but after that the album slows down and becomes acoustic, sounding at times as though she was playing in her bedroom at 3am after drinking a bottle of NyQuil. The last words on the album are “I am crying” before it cuts off abruptly into silence. Sarah sent the songs to then Charlottesville-based indie label Jagjaguwar (www.jagjaguwar.com), and it became the label’s third release. Less than two weeks after the album came out, she was onstage at the Fillmore opening for Hall & Oates.

When she was a child in West Virginia, Sarah and her good friend Tami would have died for Hall & Oates. Their mothers drove them three hours over three mountains (Potts, Peter’s and Catawba) to Roanoke to see their first concert: Darryl Hall and John Oates at the Roanoke Civic Center, opening for Electric Light Orchestra. The girls had every album and the t-shirts and saw Hall & Oates again in 1981 when they headlined the Private Eyes tour. Fifteen years later, it is Tami who is living in San Francisco and working for Bill Graham Presents, the promotion company that books the Fillmore. “Sadie, sit down,” Tami says over the phone. “Do you want to open for Hall & Oates?”

Coming full circle, Sarah told that story of her childhood love for Hall & Oates to the crowd at the Fillmore. John Oates watched her set, as did some old friends from West Virginia, who just happened to be in town. She could see their eyes and their faces beaming up at her from the front row as she played. When she finished her set and had walked backstage, an earthquake shook the whole building. It was one of those weird experiences when it feels like the surface of Earth is sliding, drifting back and forth as if bobbing in water. Walking down the street after the show and the earthquake, someone yelled, “Hey, there’s Sarah White!” Sarah and Tami laughed about that for weeks. Sarah didn’t play in public again for three years.
   
Bringin’ it all back home

A recurring theme when I talk to Sarah about her musical career is that she’s never been terribly sure that she had one. “I’ve always had a job,” she tells me, “so I’ve never been the kind of person or the kind of musician that’s been like ‘O.K., let me go sleep in my car and tour around and go play everywhere for 30 days and 30 nights.’” She’s always been “a nine-to-fiver,” always had bills to pay and rent to worry about. “You know, sometimes life just happens and I just ended up working.”

“No one is conditioned for coming undone, but it’s fine…” Sarah sings in “Acres For Us.” Your 20s can be a sloppy time. You’re not yet sure just what it is you’re capable of. You don’t know who you are. Sarah felt as if she were stabbing at the wind, trying to figure it all out during that decade. She kept playing music, but only for herself. A fear of not making rent as well as a serious romance kept her from committing to her music fully. She worked at a private detective agency, writing up reports on fraudulent insurance claims, a job she found sleazy and disturbing. Music, however, was still all around her. The Age of Discovery continued, as she saw countless great acts play live. She met indie rock goddess Cat Power, who stayed at her house and played with her cat, Jimmy, who could fetch like a dog. She went backstage at the Fillmore to meet Johnny Cash, feeling, as she shook the tall man’s hand, that she was meant to be there.

The romance ended and Sarah had an epiphany. She was done with California. She wanted to return to the East. She applied to grad schools, for creative writing, for history, for pastry making, anything to get out of where she was. In one of the perfect accidental twists that seem to guide her life, it was just at that moment that she heard from the record label again.

“I didn’t think that you would ever own me,” she sings, her voice filled with an aching hardness. The songs incubated in San Francisco, songs never meant to be played for anyone, became her second album, Bluebird, released in 2000. “There’s a thousand ways a girl can fall,” she sings, as if she’d tried every one. The album got good reviews in alternative publications like the New York Press, where Paul Lukas wrote “the arrangements are so spare that they almost sound naked—there’s never a wasted note…[Sarah White sings] as if she’s not quite looking you in the eyes.” And it did well in Europe (No. 1 in Belgium?!?). Other people, it seemed, could see her talent better than she could. “Now you’ve got to tour,” they said. “You’ve got to make t-shirts, you’ve got to get your numbers up, you’ve got to play this venue.” But she didn’t know what she should do. The record came out and she entered the graduate program in American Studies at UVA.

“Now the fall has come,” she sings in “Trees Fall Down,” “you might see the sun, if you fall just right.” On September 11, 2001, clutching a master’s degree but no job, Sarah dealt with the sadness she felt after the terrorist attacks by holing up in her room trying to learn every Carter Family song (she stayed in there for about a month). Although she didn’t master them all, something about the traditional, gut-wrenching country music of the Carter Family resonated with her. In the hours after 9/11, as the world tied up the New York phone lines, the song “No Telephone In Heaven” about a child trying to call his dead mother seemed especially poignant. She still plays that song today.

While in graduate school she took a trip to the Carter Family’s ancestral home, a trip that echoed the themes of the Dolly Parton album that had brought her to tears as a child. “All of a sudden after going to school,” she says to me, “you can’t really go back to being where you didn’t know what you know now.” The trip was a symbolic search for her roots, both geographically and musically. The physical place where she grew up is important to her. She likes to own it, she tells me, to feel like, as she drives away from Charlottesville back towards Sink’s Grove, that the mountains belong to her.

Listen without prejudice

What started as a one-off show for a WTJU benefit in 2003 became Sarah White and The Pearls. Reunited with old friends Steve Ingham (who would later move to Italy) and Jeff Grosfeld, Sarah felt by 2004 that the band was a serious thing. That year they met Eli Simon, who offered to record some songs at his studio. They recorded and self-released an EP, You’re It, but by the time the EP came out, more songs had piled up. The band saved up money and went into the studio with Esmont producer Roderick Coles to work on a full-length album.

It’s not discernible immediately, but it turns out Sarah White is a perfectionist.

The basic tracks were laid down in three days. For a year after that, Sarah worked on the vocals, the arrangements and finding extra musicians to play pedal steel, fiddle and cornet. The songs started out as music Sarah had heard in her head and often laid down as four-track recordings before they were brought to the band. There were setbacks and hold-ups in true Sarah White fashion.

It’s always something.

Things take time.

But as much as she sweated over how long it took to get it right, there is nothing on the album now that she doesn’t like. It’s not discernible immediately, but Sarah White is a perfectionist.

White Light, the first full-length album by Sarah White and the Pearls was officially released on Antenna Farm Records (www.antennafarmrecords.com) last month (she will play a CD release party later this month in the gallery space at Starr Hill). The album is more confident and fully formed than Sarah’s previous albums. It is the sound of a songwriter stepping assuredly into her talents—with a band. It’s an album both spare and powerful, effortlessly and organically combining the forcefulness of rock and the soul of country. At the sonic center of the album is Sarah’s voice, the newly mature, edge-of-tears, catch-in-the-throat, flat-out heartbreaking voice.

Sarah’s house has brown wood floors and brown wood walls and is filled with antiques, odd knick-knacks, paintings  and old photos. On a small set of shelves, she has a collection of fossils, arrowheads and a dog bone she found in Pompeii. At her kitchen table we discuss the problem of classification. Sarah does not have an answer to the question “What kind of music do you play?”

“Well,” she sometimes replies, “ I write songs and then I play them, and that’s what they sound like.”

It would be better, she feels, if she could just avoid the genre problem altogether. From the outside, the labels are pretty easy to apply. Singer-songwriter. Alt-country chanteuse. These are not inaccurate. But from the inside, they sound out of tune and slightly discordant. Sarah’s music (as I believe is the case with most talented artists) is defined by everything in her life that has led up to now—all of the tears, weird coincidences and homeward journeys that have laid themselves down to pave her road. For at least 20 years, and maybe more, her life has been defined by music, and her music defined by life.

At the table, as I sip wine and she drinks Diet Coke, Sarah challenges me to come up with a good label to apply to Sarah White and the Pearls. I begin to offer an academic exegesis on the meaning of “alternative country,” but it falls flat. I joke and tell her that I’ll just call her “emo,” but to her credit she doesn’t know what that means. Finally I say nothing. When people ask her what her music sounds like, the best answer Sarah can give is “Come see it. You’ll probably like it.”

Cut back to the University Chapel as Sarah White steps up to the microphone to sing, her face half in the dark and half in the light, eyes almost closed in the almost empty stone building.

“I’m fully committed to this right now,” she tells me in a conversation weeks later. “I’ve got, like, 20 other songs that I haven’t recorded that are ready to go…I don’t know if it’s the stars right now or whatever, but when it rains it pours and when it’s happening don’t fight it.”

The band plays the finger-pointing, rock ‘n’ roll challenge of “Fightin’ Words,” and as Sarah stares out over the pews at the girl twirling circles by the door of the chapel, she wonders where all of the music lovers are. What can they be doing tonight?

“It’s a fine line,” she convinces herself, “like do I want to say it’s the only thing I want in my life, because if I don’t get it, if I…I don’t want to jump off a cliff.”

Sometimes fully formed songs come to White in her dreams. She jumps out of bed to get them on tape. At this point she lives with about 150 tapes of musical ideas.

Small crowds don’t bother her; Sarah’s used to it. She’s used to cigarette smoke crawling into her throat from the bar, and drunken buffoons talking loudly behind her. She’s used to waiting around all night to collect the money, used to playing for cheese fries at 2 in the morning. But tonight, at the chapel, she feels sorry that more people aren’t here, because the show seems to be one of those special ones.

“I think [my music] comes from somewhere else and I think if you’re an open source, or an open channel, or whatever…”

“You’re a conduit.”

“Yeah, but I could be a conduit for shit.”

The sound fills the huge, sacred space, the taut snare drum and the menacing beauty of the guitar bouncing clear and loud off of the wooden beams. The air is filled with the soft shadows and buttery light of the candles. Sarah White wishes more people were here. But from where she’s standing, does it really matter? The music sounds like heaven.

A hirsute man sits in plain view on the toilet, straining. His wild pawing at the walls is accompanied by the sort of explosive sounds that go over big at a fourth grade lunch table. But this man is on a date, giving the sad-eyed woman on the other side of the door a horrific earful. Before the scene is over, the man, looking like somebody’s idea of a cartoon trucker, has availed himself of hand towels in lieu of toilet paper. Exiting the bathroom, he delivers his bon mot, “You might need a shop vac in there.” This, for those who don’t know him, is Larry the Cable Guy and he’s coming to the John near you. The country’s reigning comic, whose humor has nothing to do with installing cable but whose success has everything to do with TV, will play the JPJ on Thursday, November 16th.

The scene is from Larry The Cable Guy: Health Inspector, the oddly titled movie that was released earlier this year. With its tiny box office earning ($16 million, according to published reports) it is one of his few failures. Larry is the nation’s No. 1 touring comedian; he’s on the road in support of his second comedy album, The Right To Bare Arms, which recently debuted at No. 7 and has since followed his first record in being certified gold. The first two Blue Collar Comedy Tour movies, starring Larry and his pals Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall and Ron White, are the two highest rated movies Comedy Central has ever shown. Forget “South Park,” Dave Chappelle, or Jon Stewart. America seems to love Larry.

Perhaps you have never heard of Daniel Lawrence Whitney? But you have undoubtedly heard his chewing tobacco-flecked catch phrase, “Git-R-Done” or seen it on a beer cozy or a thong. Whitney, who makes his “hey boy, wut chew lookin ayut” accent a centerpiece of his flatulent humor, is 43, and he first started work on his “Southern” accent 27 years ago when he moved from Nebraska to West Palm Beach, Florida: “I’ve always been a dialect chameleon, so I started speaking with a thick accent,” he writes in his book Git-R-Done. And apparently it suits his brand of equal-opportunity-offensive humor. “I feel more comfortable in a Southern dialect,” he says.

But back in the day, when he was still billed as Dan Whitney, it was more leisure suit than blue collar that informed his comedy. A video clip from the ’80s has him under a “Comedy from the Caribbean” banner wearing a poofy green silk shirt; pleated, taper leg khakis; and blazing white sneakers (the only hint of Southern-ness his curly mullet). A stint on a morning radio station show as a “cable installer” spawned Larry The Cable Guy in the early ’90s just as the country elected a white trash president from Arkansas. But it would take the ascendancy of a C student with regular guy credentials as fake as Whitney’s accent for Larry the Cable Guy to become a big star.

A modern L’il Abner, Larry walks on stage with a kind of stupefied shuffle, like a big, slow child. Stomach extended, one hand in his pocket, he’s wearing a sleeveless flannel shirt and camouflage hat adorned with a fishhook. “You buhleev thayut?” he asks his audience repeatedly in his exaggerated redneck drawl. And there are surely plenty among us who regard the modern world with Larry-like bewilderment.

Larry The Cable Guy, who neither installs cable TV nor mentions it in his stand-up movies or book, nonetheless brands himself as a “Blue Collar” comedian who speaks for “honest, hardworking Americans”—those who are hard at work presumably at things other than Larry’s stock-in-trade, namely fishing, cleansing his bowels and pondering his genitalia.
Larry describes his phrase “Git-R-Done” as “talkin’ about a blue collar work ethic and nothing more.” His constant use of the term “blue collar” in a time when there are fewer blue collar jobs in America then ever before, is almost anachronistic. It may not explain why people find Larry funny, but it does a lot to explain why so many people keep tuning in. Just as Larry The Cable Guy probably can’t program a VCR, let alone get you Showtime, so “blue collar” no longer says much about a person’s job. Blue collar is a set of beliefs.

Larry speaks to the group that laments the loss of something they think of as American values, but which might more accurately be called the rise of multiculturalism. In Sunday Money, his book on NASCAR, Jeff MacGregor writes that in dire times like these NASCAR is “a retreat into an oversimplified, antihistorical past in a fairytale world that never existed.” Larry’s comedy operates the same way, speaking to people afraid that their jobs will be sent overseas, and that English will disappear along with them. Just as the slick urbanism of the New South has made it hard to define a “real” Southerner these days, so have many Americans been forced to redefine what the New America might be. As the world changes they seek stability and an identity. Larry offers them a ready, and entertaining, model.

Like almost all modern standup, Larry’s comedy parrots and dilutes a recognizable set of political leanings. To Larry everyday common sense is being turned upside down by “evil commie libs and politically correct uptight crybabies.” Put a suit on him and Larry could be Bill O’Reilly. Larry is “first and foremost an American.” He likes country music, four-wheelin’ and bird huntin’. He loves John Wayne, Ted Nugent, and “all branches of the military and the NRA.” Ronald Reagan is his hero. Larry believes that evolution is a (probably incorrect) theory, and that global warming is a lie spread by “enviroqueers.” He writes that NASCAR is “the last truly American thing that political correctness hasn’t damaged too much.”

But this is comedy, not politics, so Larry doesn’t have to burden the NASCAR dads with too much detail. The finer points of Syria’s endorsement of Al-Qaeda or the American government’s failure to avert terrorist cells in this country are best subsumed in a statement like this one, widely quoted by his critics: “The Republicans had a Muslim give the opening prayer at there (sic) convention! What the hell’s going on around here! Is Muslim now the official religion of the United States!…First these peckerheads fly planes into towers and now theys (sic) prayin’ before conventions!…Ya wanna pray to Allah then drag yer flea infested ass over to where they pray to Allah at!”

This brand of humor brings with it some internecine warfare within the world of comics. Granted, disputes among comics rank next to TomKat’s baby in terms of overall insignificance. It’s not exactly Murrow vs. McCarthy, but David Cross, whose currency is a kind of vague hyper-intellectual social criticism associated with the Left, took on Larry in a Rolling Stone interview last year. “He’s in the right place at the right time for that gee-shucks, proud-to-be-a-redneck,
I’m-just-a-straight-shooter-multimillionaire-in-cutoff-flannel-selling-ring-tones act. That’s where we are as a nation now. We’re in a stage of vague American values and anti-intellectual pride,” Cross said.

Larry fired back, “America’s sick of payin’ good money for a comedy show that only earns one laugh every 12 minutes because the comedian onstage is too busy demonstratin’ how much smarter he is than his audience.”

But Larry’s audience is not restricted to working Joes and Southern hayseeds. It is much more likely that Larry’s audience is made up of white-collar family guys—smart guys—who live in the suburbs of Atlanta or Charlotte and work for large multinational corporations. For most Larry fans, their blue collars and red necks are things of the past, if they ever really existed. They live in the New South, the new, post-9/11 America, and the new, flatter, smaller, world, and they feel like they don’t really fit. Life, they think, is supposed to be simpler. Life used to be simpler. Larry offers them that simplicity, and a “real” identity. Larry is their Alter Id.

Everything Larry says sounds familiar. It sounds a lot like another fake Southerner, a good old boy from Crawford, Texas, who was born in Connecticut. A regular guy whose father was head of the CIA, vice president for eight years, and president for  another four. All of this sounds exactly like the nostalgia for a simpler, hard-working America that has allowed real blue collar Americans to vote themselves into poverty. “Git-R-Done” sounds a lot like “Mission Accomplished.” In his book, Larry talks about that phrase and its use among soldiers in Iraq. “Our soldiers have sent me all sorts of pictures showin’ ‘Git-R-Done!’ plastered on tanks, jeeps, Humvees, helicopters, and the titties of Iraqi whores. That’s Awesome! …They’re saying ‘We’re Americans and we’re comin’ to kick your dictator’s ass so you can have some sense of freedom.’” This sounds frighteningly similar to America’s current policy on the war.

To be fair, Larry is not an overtly political comedian (although he does devote 29 pages of his book to a chapter called “Politics”). His stage act is largely devoid of any serious messages. As he says in his book, “My fans come out to laugh over nonsensical bullshit and have a good time. Comedians don’t have to make deep political points or talk over anyone’s head.”

But today people are looking to comedians to make political points. At the start of his shows, Larry is introduced as “The man who should be president of the United States.” It is a sentiment that is mirrored on many websites about another popular Comedy Central regular. Red state or blue, Larry The Cable Guy or Jon Stewart: Comedy is the new battleground for politics, and in these complicated times both our president and our Cable Guy are peddling simplicity.

Larry the Cable Guy performs at John Paul Jones Arena Thursday, November 16 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $42.75. 888-JPJ-TIXS.

For more information, go to:

www.larrythecableguy.com

Culbreth Theatre, UVA Grounds. Sunday October 30, 2005. 4pm.

8,640 hours, 30 minutes to go.

Shea Sizemore, Paul Metzger, and Kim Bonner are taking in the applause. The filmmaking team has just won the Mentor Award for the 2005 Adrenaline Film Project for their short movie, Small Loss. The prize, given by the project’s directors, rewards the team that overcomes the largest odds and still makes a great film. Every team in this movie-making contest faces at least one major challenge: to complete a movie, start to finish, in only 72 hours. Some teams confront other issues. Shea’s team had arrived in Charlottesville from Radford knowing nothing about the area. They stayed at a rundown hotel far from everything. Fifty-four hours into the contest, Paul, scouting actors to play drunkards, had found two perfect and actually drunk guys. Coaxing them to be in the movie, he had joined them for a beer on no sleep and an empty stomach, with predictable results: Though the drunks were struggling to chase him (as the scene called for), it was Paul who ended up puking.

“We didn’t know what to even expect,” Shea says, exactly one year later.
But that was then. Going into the third annual AFP, which took place this year from October 26 to October 29 in tandem with the Virginia Film Festival, Shea & co. knew exactly what to do—and how to do it.

Wednesday October 26, 2006.

Sponsored this year by Volvo, the Adrenaline Film Project returned for the third time as part of the Virginia Film Festival. Ten teams of three people each again have 72 hours to write, film and edit a five-minute movie. At the screening of all the AFP movies at the end of the weekend, the teams will compete for three prizes: Jury, Audience and Mentor.

The AFP was born in 2004. That year the film festival’s theme was “Speed.” Jeff Wadlow, a Charlottesville native and filmmaker who is on the festival’s Board of Directors, had idly suggested a filmmaking event designed to compress movie-making into a very limited time, a kind of mobile film workshop cum extreme marathon. Audiences routinely pack the auditorium for the Sunday showings; it’s a bona fide crowd-pleaser.

So, Shea, 23, and Paul, 26, are back this year. Their 22-year-old friend, Tim Grant, joins them for the first time from Asheville, North Carolina. Tim is their ringer and they know they have a good chance to win this year. Shea and Paul say Tim’s a genius behind the camera.
Though it’s a competition, at heart the AFP is a collaboration among Wadlow, his writing and producing partner Beau Bauman, and the teams. It’s also a collaboration between the teams and the capricious heart of fortune. Oh yes, and time. Always time. During the course of the event, Jeff and Beau will join each team at several key points: a story pitch, a script pitch, an on-set meeting, and an edit room meeting.  They will approve and disapprove, suggest and correct, clarify and shape.

And they will set up obstacles. Shea and Paul’s previous films lean towards thrillers. They profess a taste for horror and sci-fi. So Jeff and Beau will make them work in the love story genre this time. But Shea and Paul do not seem to be bothered by this (they are also remarkably unbothered by having a reporter with them nearly at all times and a photographer much of the time, too). Jeff and Beau give all the teams the same line of dialogue and prop they must use in their movies, whatever the genre. The line: “I want to believe it.” The prop: a jar of Miracle Whip.

Alderman Library. Wednesday, October 26. 7:30pm.

72 hours to go.

Shea’s team has until 10pm to come up with a story, which they then must pitch to Jeff and Beau. Settled into the library’s coffee shop, the team seems calm and relaxed. There is no evidence of adrenaline.

They talk, brainstorm, tell random stories. They wonder should they do a straight love story, or a love story with a twist, like a zombie love story. They decide on a twist. Their ace in the hole is a Radford-area actor named Adam Frazier who, Shea jokes, is a “short, pudgy guy who looks like George Lucas and believes Star Wars is real.” So much for ringing endorsements.

Shea asks if they want to use the horses. Horses? Apparently they have a friend in Charlottesville who uses Clydesdales in some kind of logging operation, and he said they could use them. I am impressed. These guys are definitely prepared.

Ideas are getting thrown around. Love, fantasy. A guy, Adam, loves a girl, fantasizes about winning her. “I got it,” Tim says, “reverse it.” The guy would have no confidence. Even in his dreams, he’s a loser. He sees this girl, falls in love with her, and blows it even in his fantasies.

The story needs a setting. Coffee shop? Alleyway? It’s calling for rain over the next couple of days when the team will be shooting. Will all the fantasies be in the same location? Shea wants him to get out of the setting and move, with the fantasies occurring as he walks home. Each fantasy will mimic a different genre: Kung Fu, film noir, logging (Logging? Gotta use those Clydesdales, apparently.) O.K., so. The guy, Adam, is in the coffee shop. Sees the girl, the love of his life. First fantasy: She’s attacked and he defends her. Rips his shirt off. Leaves coffee shop, sees loggers. Second fantasy: He’s a logger, riding Clydesdales, impressing the girl. Next fantasy: film noir, complete with cigarettes and trenchcoats. Back to reality, and he’s still in the coffee shop. Fantasy within fantasy. “Let’s pitch it,” Shea says. Pitch it? What about the Miracle Whip?

Tim concludes that a coffee shop will be too hard to manage. “We’ve got 20 Clydesdales and a chainsaw, and we can’t even nail down a coffee shop?” Shea asks. O.K., grocery store in that case. Late night. The girl is the cashier. The three of them love it. High fives. I can’t believe they’re confident enough to pitch it.

Meeting Room, 1st floor, Newcomb Hall. 8:45pm.

70 hours, 45 minutes to go.

Time to pitch. Shea, Tim, and Paul meet with Jeff and Beau. Jeff: “What do you guys got?” Shea gives the pitch, the story suddenly cohering out of the confusion of the brainstorming session. Jeff loves it. He’s excited, making suggestions and pointing out problems. It takes him two minutes to clarify their vision (“Yeah! Yeah! But what about…?”) with infectious enthusiasm. Turns out that’s a good way to describe Jeff overall, with his perfectly floppy hair and his Dudley Dooright hero’s jaw; he’s a kind of enthusiasm disease. There’s just one sour note: Jeff and Beau say the grocery store locale is difficult to get and a little clichéd. But no matter, the story is a go. Time to write the script.

Room 223, Cavalier Inn. 11:15pm.

68 hours, 15 minutes to go.

Back to the hotel to make calls to prospective actors and start writing. The team arrange themselves on the two twin beds, Shea sitting at the head of one bed, typing the script on the computer on his lap, with Paul on his side across the foot of the bed. Tim lies on his stomach on the other bed writing the shot list into a black notebook. Tedium and typing are punctuated by jokes, the quoting of favorite films (Aliens, Anchorman) and ideas for dialogue. Even through the room’s washed-out tackiness, their tightness as a creative unit is coming through. Shea leads by way of being energetic. With his baseball cap cocked slightly sideways, he is quietly charismatic, speaking half in words and half in sound effects. Paul, with a surfer dude aspect, is a kind of co-jokster/voice of reason, although, I use “reason” somewhat hesitantly. Where Shea is sarcastic and mischievous, Paul possesses an open affability. Friends since middle school, at times they seem as familiar as brothers. Tim, the newcomer is tall and thin, with a neatly trimmed beard. He tells me that he was home schooled, which might explain his quiet studiousness.

Working title: Adam’s Day Out. It goes like this: Adam, lonely and large, stands in line at the grocery store and falls in love with the cashier. In front of him are three people, a thug, a Bogie wannabe and a “British guy.” As each man advances, he triggers a fantasy in which Adam tries and fails to win the girl. Adam, rejected even in his dreams, exits the store, but leaves behind one item, which the cashier/dream girl runs out to him. Adam, not at all chagrined by this small exchange, is buoyed, and takes it as a sign of her love.

This is how Shea describes the first fantasy, a Kung Fu fight scene in which the thug tries to rob the cashier but instead is beaten senseless by Adam: “…some sort of martial arts display…” he punches the air wildly, “…Tcha! Tcha! Tcha! Pssshhhtttt!…we can do some like popping wrists…Criiiicckk!…Craaack! Aaahhhh! Puuuchkk! Kuuusch!…” All three punch the air, breaking and twisting fake limbs “…Hwuung! Waaaahhh! Aaahhh!…” Paul stands, starts kicking. “…breaks the thug’s arm…the chest buster…Adam leans back and screams at the heavens…his shirt tears itself off from behind!”
Cut! Brilliant! Now this is filmmaking!

Room 223, Cavalier Inn. Thursday, 1:51am.

65 hours, 39 minutes to go.

It all hinges on Adam who is on the phone with Shea and begins to balk when he hears about the shirt-ripping scene. Tim takes over. “He says he’s doing it for you,” Tim reports. Adam is in, though the shirt-ripping scene hangs in the balance. “We’ll see what happens,” Shea says. “Just don’t laugh or poke at him.” Back to one of the laptops. Tim and Shea will work on the British fantasy scene. The team has come prepared with a lot of costly equipment, about $18,000 worth of digital cameras, laptops, a boom mike, a homemade dolly and a tripod. Accordingly, the modest hotel room is packed full and hard to maneuver around.

The night passes slowly with long stretches of silence as Shea types, Tim writes and Paul thinks. More jokes, movie quotes and ideas break it up along with a fair amount of flatulence and discussion thereof, owing to the burritos eaten for dinner. This, however, proves productive, as a fart becomes a key element in the film. In the British fantasy, Adam’s gas will keep him from winning the girl.

Room 223, Cavalier Inn. 2:52am.

64 hours, 38 minutes to go.

“Hey, where are we going to put that line of dialogue?” Paul asks. Nobody answers.

Room 223, Cavalier Inn. 3:30am.

64 hours to go.

Paul is dozing. Shea is typing (always typing). Tim and I talk. When Shea finishes he reads the script again. The tentative title is now Passing in the Night, a reference to Adam and the dream girl, as well as the all-important fart. They fret about transitions and discuss how long each bit will be. Within a half hour the first draft of the script is done. Total writing time: four hours, 45 minutes. “They’re going to rip us a new one,” Shea says, anticipating the meeting with Jeff and Beau. What about the grocery store, I ask them, will it be hard to get one in which to film? Shea: “No.” Paul: “I hope not.” Tim, thinking first for a minute: “Yes.”
The Clydesdales, much to my disappointment, are out. So far no one has mentioned Miracle Whip. 

Satellite Ballroom. 10am.

57 hours, 30 minutes to go.

The teams meet with Jeff and Beau to pitch them the script, a necessary step before moving on to shooting. Shea’s team commandeers some leather banquettes and round faux wood tables in a corner. Bagels and coffee are procured, and the team waits their turn. Thoughts turn to shooting. Adam, the chubby actor, has written on his blog about being in the movie. He seems willing now to go topless. Paul arranges for Adam to ride up with Meredith Garrison, the 20-year-old Radford actress who will portray the cashier/dream girl. Paul also calls a musician friend and tells him what they need in the way of soundtrack music.
Last night Jeff and Beau had voiced serious reservations about the grocery store location. Two previous AFP films have been set in grocery stores. Getting permission to film in one is difficult. Jeff and Beau instructed the team to think of something else. What will Jeff and Beau think when they read a grocery store script this morning? Shea is unconcerned: “We’re not doing what anyone has ever done in grocery store. We’re taking it to the next level.”

Satellite Ballroom. 11:09am.

56 hours, 21 minutes to go.

Jeff sits down. He was e-mailed the script last night. His first comment: “Grocery store? I thought we weren’t going to do it?” The guys look at each other. They look at Jeff. They want the grocery store. “All right. You’ve been warned. It’s hard to get. Epically hard.”
Jeff likes the script, but he wants to see clear lines between what is real and what isn’t. He also cautions them on the length of the Kung Fu scene. He suggests a few changes, and leaves with a metaphysical question about the British fantasy. If Adam farts in the fantasy, does he also fart in real life? Time to rewrite. “You’re a cocky, bearded, British guy living in America with a house in Casanova,” Shea says to Tim, “What would you say?”
Casanova?

Shea continues work on the script, which is really coming together. “I’m missing classes right now,” he says. “Are you going to graduate?” Paul asks.

Satellite Ballroom. 12:05pm.

54 hours, 25 minutes to go.

Beau joins them. His first question: “You got the supermarket?” Shea assures him that they’re going to get one as soon as they’re done here. Beau, less excited than Jeff, finds similar problems in the same places: the transitions between fantasy scenes. After 20 minutes of discussion and advice, Beau seems satisfied. “You’ll be in great shape,” he says, “assuming you get the supermarket.”

Satellite Ballroom. 12:22 pm.

54 hours, 8 minutes to go.

The grocery store now looms as a huge obstacle. Paul scouts two convenience stores on the Corner. The words “fight scene” earn him an immediate and harsh “no” at one. A second, seemingly more accommodating store, doesn’t suit Shea, who still really wants a big grocery store.

Harris Teeter, Barracks Road Shopping Center. 1:11pm.

53 hours, 19 minutes to go.

Paul and Shea approach a store manager for permission to film there. He gives an instant “no”: “You’d have to get permission from the corporate office.” They return to Satellite. Paul calls other grocery stores. It’s a “no” every time.

Satellite Ballroom. 2pm.

52 hours, 30 minutes to go.

Beau returns and re-reads the script. Four teams remain in the room. The others have already left to start shooting. Beau still has some problems with the transitions. Jeff joins them. “You guys are still here?” Paul asks which grocery stores the previous AFP films used. Jeff says Foods Of All Nations and Integral Yoga, but Foods will definitely say “no.” Paul calls IY. He gets a “maybe.”

Integral Yoga. 2:18pm

52 hours, 12 minutes to go.

“It’s good, it’s really good,” Beau had advised. “I would just get out of here.” Green light! GO! They drive to IY. The store closes at 8. Can they film after it closes? At first the manager says “no.” Paul offers to pay an employee to stay late. The manager says she’ll ask around and takes Paul’s number.

Room 223. Cavalier Inn. 3:10pm.

51 hours, 20 minutes to go.

Time to regroup. Everyone is tired, almost comatose. They stretch out on the two beds. The exhausted silence lasts for about 30 seconds. Then Shea is on his computer listening to the music, Tim is making a list of shots and supplies, and Paul is on the phone to Adam to make sure he arrives by 8pm.

Integral Yoga, 4pm.

50 hours, 30 minutes to go.

While Tim and Shea buy props, Paul returns to IY. An employee named Joyce tells us that another employee named Lauren, who remains mysteriously off in another room, is willing to stay after hours with us, but she wants $200. Paul offers $150, Joyce leaves with the counter offer. Lauren refuses. Paul is standing there uncertain of what to do. I am exhausted. I’ve slept three hours in the last 34, and we’re still on Day Two. Until now I have stayed on the sidelines, but I am starting to feel like a part of this thing. “Paul,” I say, “there’s four of us counting me. That’s only $50 each.” Paul agrees to $200.

Room 223, Cavalier Inn. 5:20pm.

49 hours, 10 minutes to go.

I break down. I am stretched thin. Caffeine is singing in my nerves. I feel on the verge of tears. I have told Paul to drop me off at the hotel room. He goes to join the others getting props, and I walk to a nearby gas station. I buy a six-pack of beer. It helps, but the beer may not be enough.

Room 223, Cavalier Inn. 6:35 pm.

47 hours, 55 minutes to go.

Everyone returns, props in hand. Twenty minutes later, the actors, Adam and Meredith, arrive. Time to head to the set. Departure is delayed by Shea’s dad calling to remind Shea that it’s his sister’s birthday and he should call her. Having done this, and with actors that have just driven two-and-a-half hours and haven’t seen the script, they are ready to start shooting. Got a script? Got the cameras? Got Miracle Whip? Go.

Integral Yoga, 9:04 pm.

45 hours, 26 minutes to go.

All of the IY employees were gone by 8:45, but set-up drags on, and so do the early shots. The plan: Get all of the grocery store filming done by midnight, and then film the noir scene. It’s getting easier to have faith in these guys, because on the set, their talent really starts to manifest itself. Especially where Tim is concerned. Behind the camera he is all confidence, making quick decisions as to camera position, actor movement and how the scene should look. Although Tim is primary cameraman, they all take turns at everything, switching between acting, filming and directing with Swiss precision. Occasionally they huddle together to discuss a scene, and almost always, as Tim films, either Paul, Shea, or both, look over his shoulder. They constantly turn to each other for approval and second opinions, although the answer is usually complete agreement. Throughout the entire 72 hours that I will spend with them, I will see exactly zero fights or arguments, and no sign whatsoever of tension. I find this hard to comprehend.

Integral Yoga. 11:30 pm.

43 hours to go.

Shea, playing the thug, pulls out his father’s Ruger .45 Blackhawk, along the barrel of which is inscribed, “Made in the 200th year of American Liberty.” Many takes into the robbery scene, and he is improvising, screaming wildly and walking on the backs of other actors. He points the gun at me as I scribble away in a corner. He points the gun at Adam’s head and ad libs: “One, two, your head’s a canoe; three, four, hit the floor!” It’s a great, silly line, and though we all rap it the rest of the night, it will end up on the cutting room floor.
Paul is pushing a shirtless Adam down the aisle in a shopping cart as he leans on Shea for balance, simulating a flying kick. He glides majestically, like a float in the Kung Fu nerd parade.

Finally, the shot we’ve all been waiting for. A black t-shirt is carefully cut down the middle and scotch taped back together. Adam screams at the heavens and throws his arms back as his shirt is ripped away from behind. It is beautiful to behold. Adam is rather robust, and his pale, hairy stomach gets a lot of screen time. It is an understatement to say that he is a real sport.

Integral Yoga. Friday, 1:10am.

41 hours, 20 minutes to go.

The interior grocery store scenes are done. Though they make up only about a third of the film, they were by far the most ambitious and technically demanding. Finishing them is a huge relief. It’s amazing how in making a film, so many diverse elements—the cast and crew, the script and the set, the director and the cameraman—cohere, sometimes in the face of incredible odds. Filmmaking is often about strange accidents and beautiful coincidences. Talent getting it on with Luck.

The guys are planning on filming the noir scene next, but I’ve hit the wall. I’m beat, miracle whipped. I head home and sleep, but they go on and film until 5:30am, getting the noir scene shot in an alley on the Corner while drunken UVA students in Halloween costumes look on.

The Rotunda, UVA Grounds. 4pm.

38 hours, 30 minutes to go.

After sleeping most of the morning and then discussing the day’s shooting in the lobby for two hours, Shea, Paul and Tim finally get going. We are standing in a light but steady rain to shoot the British fantasy. Although the scene had to be re-written to deal with the rain, the team, characteristically, is unfazed. A big part of the AFP is dealing with the logistical nightmares that inevitably crop up when creating a movie from scratch in 72 hours. In the previous two years, teams have had to cope with cars getting towed and team members quitting and taking all of the footage away with them. When I talked to him before the competition began, Jeff Wadlow told me, “If everything is going right, then something is wrong.” Shea’s team is moving through the making of what is turning out to be a highly ambitious film—even without the Clydesdales—and nothing is going wrong. It’s not that everything is going right for Shea’s team, it’s just that they know that they are going to make this movie. They are making this movie, I realize, less because they want to win awards, and more because they themselves really want to watch it.

Jeff arrives to watch us shoot. I say “us” because I have been roped into taking a small role. AFP is about using what you have, and they need extras. Jeff watches as Tim’s lanky frame bends over the camera, water dripping from his beard. Paul stands above him holding a crappy little umbrella. A white fog of breath halos all of our heads in the cold air. Jeff watches four or five takes, pronounces it “solid work” and leaves. Shea is amazed that he said so little, but there’s no time to dwell on it. The scene takes two and a half hours to complete. It is getting dark. Everyone is soaked. Meredith’s hands are red from the cold and heading to white. Shea has his arms zipped into his jacket, which has failed to adequately keep the rain out. As we walk back to the cars Tim, face wet, camera cradled under the tiny umbrella, turns to me and says, “It’s all starting to come together now.” He pauses. “I hope.”

Barracks Road Shopping Center. 11:49pm.

30 hours, 41 minutes to go.

Shooting begins on the final scene. We had watched the first bits of footage as we ate dinner back in the hotel room, and everyone is feeling good about the high quality of the camera work and the acting. From where I’m sitting, Adam and Meredith are nailing their scenes. Meredith is studying drama in college, but Adam is a real find. He had never acted before until he hooked up with Shea for his last film. Both of them are subtle and natural, hitting everything with no rehearsal and needing little direction.

This is the last scene between Adam and his dream girl, and it takes place outside the door of the grocery store. Since no one wanted to pony up another $200, an allnight copy joint is subbing for IY. For complicated reasons apparently involving Dave Chappelle, the team is not allowed to reveal the name of the place, and so the camera angles are dictated in part by the need to obscure the numerous logos.

Further complicating matters, an extremely loud street sweeper is driving aimlessly around the parking lot, despite the fact that it is still raining. Shooting in between the sweeper’s rounds is proving to be frustrating, and so Tim flags the guy down and asks him if there’s anyway he can stop for a while. The guy says he is about to stop, and thankfully, he does.
The Miracle Whip is ready for its close-up. It is left out of the bag of groceries. The cashier runs after our hero to return it, bringing them together at last.

Room 223, Cavalier Inn.

Saturday, 1:21am. 29 hours, 9 minutes to go.

Shooting has wrapped, but there is no real celebration. Editing is about to commence. Meredith has failed to inform her mother of her whereabouts, and there are several panicked messages on her phone. At 2am, she calls home to put Mom’s mind at ease.
Before editing can begin, all of the footage must be loaded into the computer and logged. While this long, slow process proceeds, everybody lies down on the beds. Tired silence hangs like low fog.

Room 223, Cavalier Inn. 5:18am.

14 hours, 12 minutes to go.

One-hundred and eighty minutes of tape must now be reduced to five. Shea, Paul and Tim sit in front of the brand new, 24" iMac that Apple has donated for editing. Joking ceases. “Close first, then mid, then pan.” “This is a good tease here, right before the lips.” “I say put more on the front of it.” They sit close together, heads even closer, faces illuminated by the light of the screen. Behind them on the beds, Adam and Meredith have fallen sleep. “Oh man,” Tim says moving into profile as he turns toward the other two, “I’m seeing it big time.”

Room 223, Cavalier Inn. 7:45am.

11 hours, 45 minutes to go.

I have been dozing on and off for a while now. Adam will later describe how whenever one of the guys got excited about something, my hand would shoot up from the floor, reaching zombie-like for my glasses, and, notebook in hand, I would stumble over to the computer to see the progress. So tired. Nightmare Exhaustion Film Project! Maybe the makers of Aderol can sponsor next year.

Shea, Paul and Tim have been rotating out of the main chair, tag-teaming the editing duties. “I’m energized,” Tim says. “Yeah,” agrees Paul, “I’m wide awake.” The sun begins to seep into the darkened room. “I’m not tired,” Shea says, “but things are getting blurry.”

Room 223, Cavalier Inn. 12:23pm.

7 hours, 7 minutes to go.

Jeff arrives for his editing room visit and brings a special guest, Tom Shadyac. Tom directed Ace Ventura, Patch Adams and Bruce Almighty, among other huge Hollywood movies, and he recently finished Evan Almighty, the blockbuster comedy filmed in Albemarle County. He’s a special guest of the Virginia Film Festival, and apparently a buddy of Jeff’s. Tom’s wiry frame and long hair are silhouetted in the doorway. He looks at the room. There is almost no floor space amid the jumble of pizza boxes, coffee cups, soda bottles, camera cases, computers and clothes. What little room that exists is taken up by two large chairs and a blow up mattress. “Wow,” Tom says, clearly impressed, “I went to film school and I never saw anything like this.”

Jeff and Tom watch the rough edit. Eight of us crowd around the computer screen. The movie plays. Jeff and Tom are laughing. “Nice guys, good job,” Jeff says when it’s done. “Oh, fucking great,” says Tom, “good stuff, good stuff. That schlub cat, is he here?” He turns to Adam and gives him a fist pound. Adam is nearly blushing. These guys were raised on Jim Carrey, and to have a modern comedy master like Tom Shadyac in their hotel room laughing at their movie—well, it is almost too much for them to handle.

Jeff and Tom go through it shot by shot. “There’s gold moments all over here,” Tom says, “cut to the gold.” Jeff agrees, urging them to tighten it up and cut anything that isn’t perfect or absolutely necessary. “You rewrite in the editing room,” Tom tells them. “Nobody believes me until I bring a billion-dollar director,” Jeff laments. “And that’s with a B, motherfucker!” says Tom.

Jeff grabs the mouse and begins to make cuts, quick and easy, as if he were ripping pages out of a notebook. “Capra used to say, ‘One second of dead time on the screen is an eternity,’” Tom tells them, “always cut dead time.” From Frank Capra to Tom Shadyac, to Shea, Paul and Tim: Film is a collaboration.

The lesson over, Tom and Jeff prepare to leave. Tom turns his grizzled face to look at Shea. Hair pulled back in a partial ponytail, and showing signs of gray, he puts his hand on Shea’s shoulder. “Thirty-six hours straight you’ve been up, man. Thirty-six hours straight. I can feel it.”

A stunned silence follows their departure. “We just gained a lifetime worth of knowledge,” Paul breathes.

Room 223, Cavalier Inn. 1:14pm.

6 hours, 16 minutes to go.

The visit from Tom and Jeff has given them a new sense of energy and urgency. Shea, Paul and Tim cut scenes they had labored hours to shoot. They are seeing the film in a way they couldn’t before. They slice it up with a razor, recklessly and with a feverish glee. “Don’t be precious about anything,” Tom had said. “Everything has to fight to be in the movie.” The scenes fight, but they are no match for the young filmmakers now. They are moving at manic speed, switching places after a few minutes, talking fast, typing faster.

I step outside for the first time in 12 hours. The sunlight, the golden, swaying leaves, the crisp air; it all washes over me as if I were diving into a lake. I jog around the parking lot and stretch. The normal world has continued to function sans adrenaline, sans Kung Fu, sans billion-dollar directors. The Volvo Adrenaline Film Project, when viewed with a high and wide gliding overhead crane shot, is about a lack of time. It’s about 72 hours to write, shoot and edit a film. “That’s impossible,” you’d think, “It’s not enough time.” But when you look at it in a shaky, hand-held, whites-of-their-eyes close up, the AFP is about an epic abundance of time. It’s 72 hours of writing, shooting and editing a film. It’s 72 hours of typing and thinking, of take and retake and discussion of angles. It’s 72 hours of cutting and pasting and trying to cover the hole in the scene where you forgot to get that reaction shot. It’s three days and three nights, sometimes literally, spent poring over the details, the minutes and the seconds. It’s an eternity passing at the speed of light. It is your Hollywood career in three days.

Room 223, Cavalier Inn. 3:45pm.

3 hours, 45 minutes to go.

It took six hours to put together the seven-and-a-half minute rough edit, and one hour to chop it down to five minutes. “Even if we don’t win,” says Tim, “just the fact that the Ace Ventura writer and director laughed at our movie…” “We’re winners already,” finishes Paul.

Room 223, Cavalier Inn. 5:55pm.

1 hour, 5 minutes to go.

Done. We watch the finished movie, now officially titled Checkout. It’s brilliant. It’s funny. It’s a true love story, albeit one with Kung Fu and Miracle Whip. But sadly, no Clydesdales.

Room 223, Cavalier Inn. 7:30 pm.

0 hours to go.

And it’s over. No cheers. No clinking glasses. I go home. They go to sleep.

Newcomb Theater, UVA Grounds.

Sunday October 29, 4pm.

Paul, Tim, Shea and Shea’s parents, Rick and Paula Sizemore, sit near the back of the theater with a full house of the Adrenaline faithful. Shea’s team nabs the runner-up spot for the Audience Award. Same for the Jury Award. There had been numerous technical difficulties with the projector. My heart was pounding and my hands were shaking when Checkout was played. Shea, Paul and Tim love the winning movie, Taste of Evil. “I had no idea the magnitude of this thing coming in,” Tim, the first-timer, tells me. “Going through the mentor process has been a blast. Even though we didn’t win…” he laughs.

For Shea, Paul and Tim the adrenaline has leaked away. The long drive home passes, one hopes, slowly and safely. Back to classes, work and a more careful kind of filmmaking. But my project, the Adrenaline Journalism Project, continues, as I must now write about these frantic three days in roughly 20 hours. I must recall the images and sounds that I have captured with a much poorer camera. Reflections in a darkened hotel room. The soundtrack to our collective 72-hour adventure. Paul joking to Adam, “While you were asleep you became an Academy Award-winning actor!” Tom Shadyac turning to me after I make an editing suggestion and saying, “You’re invested now.” And this line of technical poetry from Tim: “We’ll probably do a little speed envelope on that last one.” The thousands of little gestures that make up a single second of film. Shea, referencing how in the movie Big Fish time is made to stop, asks, “Can we stop time, Tim?” Later, when I wonder how he decided to take part in the Adrenaline Film Project for a second year, Shea tells me, “It wasn’t a matter of a decision, it was a matter of time.” Time. Always time.

Newcomb Theater, 5:16pm.

8,630 hours, and 30 minutes to go until the Fourth Annual Adrenaline Film Project.

For more information, go to:

www.speakingtothedead.com

www.sheaofthedead.blogspot.com

www.towerofb.com

www.vafilm.com

A lot of people from Charlottesville like to think of themselves as Hollywood types, but Jeff Wadlow, son of the late State Senator Emily Couric and Charlottesville High School graduate (Class of 1994), really is one. In 2002, he won the Chrysler Million Dollar Film Competition, garnering $1 million for his first Hollywood feature, Cry_Wolf. These days he’s working on an action/crime feature, Hail to the Thief, with his writing and producing partner Beau Bauman. But despite this golden start to his career, Wadlow maintains his local ties, returning each year to the Virginia Film Festival with Bauman to direct the Adrenaline Film Project. The intense, guerilla filmmaking weekend, which was born of an offhand comment he made three years ago, is close to his heart, being fundamentally collaborative. Wadlow does not subscribe to the auteur school of filmmaking. I reached him in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago in advance of the Adrenaline project. He was there to attend the annual meeting of the National College of Gastroenterologists, where the keynote lecture was named in memory of his mother.—J.T.B.

C-VILLE: Why was Cry_Wolf, your first major movie, a teen slasher film?
Jeff Wadlow: Because I had 1 million dollars and I wanted to make a big commercial film. If you want to make a big commercial film for not a lot of money, you don’t have a lot of choices.

What are the key elements of short film?
The key to making a good short film is making sure your running time is merited by your story. Usually people make a short film that is too long for their story. There’s a big difference between a story that should be five minutes and a story that should be 15 minutes.

How did the Adrenaline Film Project start?
I’m on the board of the Virginia Film Festival and the year “Speed” was the theme I said it would be kind of fun to do a short filmmaking thing. I had this idea to make it unique. Instead of just making it a contest where you’re just sort of challenging people to do the best they can, given the circumstance, you actually get involved in the making of the film. I actually consider myself a part of each team’s team. It’s not about the academic distance that teachers create between them and their students, where they want the student sometimes to fail to learn their lesson. To me, at the end of the day this isn’t about the teams, this is about the screening. This is about the audience enjoying the screening. And the filmmakers seeing an audience enjoy their work, because as a struggling filmmaker so often you spend all this time and all this energy and you forget that it’s about showing your work to an audience.

It’s almost like sport, and that seems odd in the context of art.
Well, you know, there’s a lot of different definitions of art. I believe that filmmaking is collaborative art. It’s art often created under unique circumstances that ultimately influence the art much more than what your creative spark may have been.

Do you see any similarities between AFP and something like “Project Runway” or “America’s Top Model”?
Those are very different in that ultimately those are about making a good TV show, and so they’ll do things to intentionally play up a dramatic situation, where I’m interested in creating drama. It is surprising to me how good films can be that are made fast.

Did you have the same philosophy for your film Manual Labor, another movie made for a fast film competition?
Yeah. And what happens is the more times you’re put into a position where you have to produce, the better you get at producing. It gets to a quote that I heard once from Arthur Miller. Someone asked him, “What’s the key to writing a Pulitzer-winning play?” and he said, “Write a lot of plays. One of them will win the Pulitzer.” I honestly don’t care if these teams ever watch their Adrenaline films again. The important thing is that they did it, they got it done, they screened it in front of an audience, they saw what the audience thought of it, they saw what works, they saw what didn’t work, now they need to go make something else.