GREG
Yeah! That too. Well, except the lighting in reality TV is always really unnatural, and here, they really can’t bring a lot of artificial lights into the jungle. Actually, they might not have anything besides reflectors.
RACHEL
What are reflectors?
GREG
gnawing beef
Mmmrflectors urmmff . . . hang on, this scene is awesome.
RACHEL
You should try making some movies.
MOM
from doorway
He does! He just doesn’t let anyone see them.
GREG
MOM WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING
MOM
Oh honey. Did you not offer Rachel anything to eat?
GREG
JESUS MOM
RACHEL
I’m not hungry!
GREG
infuriated
Mom. Jesus Christ. You can’t just spy on us from the doorway. And you def
MOM
I was just walking past and I heard Rach
GREG
initely can’t just tell people about, um,
RACHEL
It’s
MOM
Greg, you’re being a little silly abou
GREG
s stuff that you know is really priv
AGUIRRE
When I wish for the birds to fall from the trees, then shall the birds fall from the trees.
MOM
ou work so hard on these movies with Earl and then y
RACHEL
It’s OK, I don’t need to see them.
GREG
See? Did you hear that?
MOM
just keep them to yourselves like you don’t wan
GREG
Did you—Mom. Did you hear what Rachel said.
MOM
She’s just being nice. Greg, you have some juice on your chin.
GREG
Will you please just get out of here.
MOM exits, smiling wryly, like she just did something clever and wasn’t in fact a HORRIBLE MOTHER. Meanwhile, Greg is back to eating beef tips, because when he is stressed out he eats compulsively.
RACHEL
Here, let’s rewind it. I think we missed an important part.
GREG
Yeah, it’s like the best part.
RACHEL
after a lengthy silence
If your movies are secret, I won’t tell anyone. You can trust me.
GREG
frustrated
It’s not that they’re secret, it’s just that they’re not good enough for people to see. Once we do a really good one, we’ll let people see it.
RACHEL
That makes sense.
GREG
What?
RACHEL
I understand.
GREG
Oh.
They look into each other’s eyes.
If this were a touching romantic story, in this moment some STRANGE NEW FEELING would wash over Greg—a sense of being understood, in a basic way that he almost never is understood. Then, Greg and Rachel would make out like lovesick badgers.
However, this is not a touching romantic story. There is no NEW FEELING that washes over Greg. There is no BADGER MAKE-OUT SESSION.
Instead, Greg sort of shifts uncomfortably and breaks eye contact.
RACHEL
Can I get you a napkin or something?
GREG
No no I’ll get it.
The first film Earl and I remade was Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Obviously. It couldn’t have been any other one. We were eleven, and we had seen it approximately thirty times, to the point where we had memorized all of the subtitles and even some of the dialogue in German. We sometimes repeated it in class, when the teacher asked us questions. Earl especially did this a lot, if he didn’t know the answer.
INT. MRS. WOZNIEWSKI’S FIFTH GRADE CLASS — DAY
MRS. WOZNIEWSKI
Earl, can you name some layers of the earth?
EARL’s eyes bug out. He breathes hard through his nose.
MRS. WOZNIEWSKI
Let’s start with the one on the inside. What’s another word for—
EARL
Ich bin der große Verräter. [subtitle: I am the great traitor.]
MRS. WOZNIEWSKI
Hmmm.
EARL
Die Erde über die ich gehe sieht mich und bebt. [subtitle: The earth I walk upon sees me and trembles.]
MRS. WOZNIEWSKI
Earl, do you want to tell us what that means?
EARL
glowering at classmates
grrrrrhh
MRS. WOZNIEWSKI
Earl.
EARL
standing up, pointing to MRS. WOZNIEWSKI, addressing class
Der Mann ist einen Kopf größer als ich. DAS KANN SICH ÄNDERN. [subtitle: That man is a head taller than me. THAT CAN CHANGE.]
MRS. WOZNIEWSKI
Earl, please go sit in the hall.
And then one day Dad bought a video camera and some editing software for his computer. It was to videotape his lectures or something. We didn’t know the specifics; we knew only that the specifics were boring. We knew also that this technology had come into our lives for a reason: We had to re-create every single shot in Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
We figured it would take about an afternoon. Instead, it took three months, and when I say “it,” I mean, “re-creating the first ten minutes and then giving up.” Like Werner Herzog in the South American jungle, we faced almost unimaginable setbacks and difficulties. We kept taping over our own footage, or not hitting record, or running out of camera battery. We didn’t really know how the lighting or sound was supposed to work. Some of the cast members—mostly Gretchen—proved incapable of delivering their lines properly, or staying in character, or not picking their nose. Also, we usually had a cast of just three people, or two if someone needed to hold the camera. The location we used was Frick Park, and joggers and dog walkers kept entering the shot, and then they would make things even worse by trying to start a conversation.
Q: Are you guys shooting a movie?
A: No. We’re opening a mid-priced Italian restaurant.
Q: Huh?
A: Yes of course we’re shooting a movie.
Q: What’s the movie about?
A: It’s a documentary about human stupidity.
Q: Can I be in your movie?
A: We’d be stupid not to put you in it.
Moreover, props and costumes were impossible to replicate. Earl wore a pot on his head, and it looked ridiculous. Nothing we had looked like cannons, or swords. Mom said we weren’t allowed to bring furniture from the house to the park, and then when we did, we had Suspended Camera Privileges for a week.
Also, our process was dumb as all hell. We’d get to the forest and then completely forget what shot we were working on, or if we remembered it, we couldn’t remember the lines, and how the camera moved, and where the characters started and where they ended; we’d struggle for a while to shoot something that we thought was correct, without success. Finally, we’d go back to the house to try to write down what we were supposed to do, but then we’d end up having lunch or watching a movie or something; at the end of the day we’d try to get everything on the computer, but there was always some footage missing, and the scenes that survived looked like crap—bad lighting, inaudible dialogue, shaky camerawork.
So we did this for months, eventually realized how slow we were working, and gave up after creating ten minutes of footage.
Then Mom and Dad insisted on watching what we had done.
It was a nightmare. For ten minutes, Earl and I watched with horror as, on the screen, we wandered around waving cardboard tubes and Super Soakers, mumbling in fake German, ignoring cheerful joggers and families and senior citizens with beagles. We had already known it was bad, but somehow, with Mom and Dad there watching, it seemed ten times worse. We became aware of new ways in wh
ich it was crappy: how there wasn’t really a plot, for example, and how we forgot to put in music, and how you couldn’t see anything half the time and Gretchen pretty much just stared at the camera like a house pet and Earl obviously hadn’t memorized his lines and I always always always had this stupid expression on my face like I had just had a lobotomy. And the worst part was, Mom and Dad were pretending to like it. They kept telling us how impressive it was, how well we had acted in it, how they couldn’t believe we had made something so good. They were literally oohing and ahhing at the stupid garbage on the screen.
Basically, they were dealing with us as though we were toddlers. I wanted to murder myself. Earl did, too. Instead, we just sat there and didn’t say anything.
Afterward we retreated to my room, utterly bummed out.
INT. MY ROOM — DAY
EARL
Damn. That sucked.
GREG
We suck.
EARL
I fuckin suck worse than you do.
GREG
attempting to match the casualness with which eleven-year-old Earl can say words like “fuck”
Uh, shit.
EARL
Fuck.
DAD
offscreen, through the door
Guys, dinner’s in ten minutes.
after we do not reply
Guys? That was really pretty amazing. Mom and I are very impressed. You both should be really proud of yourselves.
a shorter pause
You guys all right? Can I come in there?
EARL
immediately
Hell no.
GREG
We’re OK, Dad.
EARL
If he come in here and talk about that stupid movie, I’ma kick myself in the head.
DAD
OK then!
Footsteps indicate that DAD has left.
GREG
That sucked so bad.
EARL
I’ma get that tape and burn it.
GREG
still having trouble swearing convincingly
Yeah, uh, fuck. Shit.
GREG and EARL are silent. CLOSE-UP of Earl. Earl is realizing something.
EARL
Werner Herzog can lick my ass-cheek.
GREG
What?
EARL
Man, fuck Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Werner Herzog can stick his face all up in my butthole.
GREG
uncertainly
OK.
EARL
We gotta make our own movie.
gaining momentum
We can’t try to make someone else’s movie. We’re gonna make our own movie.
now excited
We’re gonna make a movie called The Wrath of God II.
GREG
Earl, the Wrath of God II.
EARL
HELL YEAH.
In our creative partnership, Earl has always had the best ideas, and Earl, the Wrath of God II was one of his best. It never would have occurred to me, even though it wasn’t that complicated or crazy of an idea: Basically, it was to remake Aguirre again, but this time, to change all the parts that we couldn’t do, or even just the parts that we didn’t feel like doing. If there was a scene we didn’t like, in our version, it was gone. A character we couldn’t recreate: sayonara. A jungle that we couldn’t reproduce: converted into a living room, or the inside of a car. The best ideas are always the simplest.
So Earl, the Wrath of God II ended up being about a crazy guy named Earl and his search for the city of Earl Dorado in a normal family house in Pittsburgh. We shot it on location in the Gaines residence in Point Breeze, and we ad-libbed a lot of the dialogue, and Cat Stevens made some awesome cameos, and we set the whole thing to a funk CD Dad had lying around, and it took another month or two. At the end of it, we burned it to a DVD and had a secret viewing of the movie in the TV room.
It sucked. But it didn’t suck nearly as bad as our first film.
Our careers were born.
So by October things were weird. I had a person, at school, that I was being especially nice to and spending time with and stuff. Could we use the word “friend”? I guess. Rachel was my friend. You should know that writing that sentence didn’t feel good. It just didn’t. Having friends is how your life gets fucked up.
Anyway, I couldn’t keep ignoring her in school when we were spending all this time together outside of school, so all of a sudden, in school, I was seen having a friend. I was seen by everyone talking to Rachel before and after class, and often this resulted in her laughing kind of loud, and that got people’s attention. And when it was time to work in groups, we were almost always in the same group. And people notice stuff like that.
So probably some people thought we were boyfriend and girlfriend, and perhaps even having sex. And how can you fight that impression without seeming like a dick? You can’t go around making remarks like, “There’s certainly nothing going on between me and Rachel! Especially nothing sexual. I don’t even know what her genital area looks like, or if it’s in a different place than normal or something.”
At the very least, people thought we were casually dating. And here’s the thing: Most people, especially girls, seemed to get fired up about that. I have a theory about that, and the theory is depressing.
Theory: People always get fired up when an unattractive girl and an unattractive dude are dating each other.
No one came out and said anything to this effect, but I feel like it’s probably true. When girls see two Unattractives dating, they think, “Hey! Love is possible even for unattractive people. They have to love different things about each other than their physical appearances. That’s so sweet.” Meanwhile, dudes see it and think, “That is one less guy I have to compete with for the most succulent boobs in the Boob Competition that is high school.”
And, inevitably, spending time with Rachel meant being at least partially absorbed by her group, Upper-Middle-Class Senior Jewish Girl Sub-Clique 2a: Rachel Kushner, Naomi Shapiro, and Anna Tuchman. Naomi Shapiro had this loud, blustering, sarcastic persona that she used at all times, and Anna Tuchman was OK but invariably clutching a paperback with a title like The Meridian Sword or Cleavage of Destiny or something. A few times before school, I was roped into spending time with these girls. Their conversations were tough to be part of for a sustained period of time.
INT. BENSON HALLWAY — MORNING
ANNA
Ugggh. I don’t want to go to English today.
NAOMI
MR. CUBALY IS SUCH A PERV.
Giggling from RACHEL and ANNA.
NAOMI
pretending not to understand the giggling
WHAT?! HE’S ALWAYS TRYING TO LOOK DOWN MY SHIRT.
More giggling. GREG is also politely trying to giggle and failing.
NAOMI
IT’S LIKE: TAKE A PICTURE, MR. CUBALY, IT’LL LAST LONGER.
ANNA
pretending to be horrified
Naomi-i-i-i-i-i!!
All of a sudden everyone is looking at Greg to see what he thinks of all this.
GREG
deciding that the safest option is simply to summarize what has been said thus far
Uh . . . Takin’ a picture of some boobs. Cubaly style.
NAOMI
UGGGGGH. BOYS ARE SUCH PERVERTS. GREG, CAN YOU THINK ABOUT JUST ONE THING OTHER THAN SEX.
ENTIRE HALLWAY’S WORTH OF STUDENTS
Greg, we are all making a note of your playful bantering friendship with this loud obnoxious person.
So yeah, my hard-earned social invisibility definitely was taking something of a hit. I even made the mistake one afternoon of agreeing to have lunch with Rachel and her friends in the cafeteria, a place I hadn’t set foot in for years.
The cafeteria is chaos. First of all, it’s in a perpetual state of low-level food fight. It’s rarely violent enough for the security guards to get involved, but at any given time, someone is attempting t
o whip a piece of food or condiment at someone else from close range, and half of the time they miss and hit someone else in a different part of the cafeteria. So it’s like one of the more chill battles of World War II.
Second of all, the food every single day is pizza and Tater Tots. Sometimes to mix things up they put little gray poop-like nuggets of sausage on the pizza, but that’s as much variation as there is. Also, a lot of food ends up on the cafeteria floor, and both pizza and Tater Tots get very slippery when stepped on. There’s also a lot of dried Pepsi down there, which is sticky and therefore easy to walk on but somehow even more disgusting.
Finally, the cafeteria is extremely crowded, meaning if you accidentally slip on a slick of pizza cheese and mashed-up Tater Tots, you will probably be trampled to death.
Basically, it’s like a low-security state prison.
And so I had to sit there with my backpack perched awkwardly on my lap, because you do not want your backpack down there under the table accumulating greasy food stains and families of insects, and I was eating my weird but probably healthful lunch that Dad had packed because if I ate pizza and Tater Tots every day I would be even more overweight and my face would have a pimple somewhere the size of a human eyeball. And Naomi was loudly talking about how Ross Said Something Ignorant and I Was Like Don’t Even Go There, and I was attempting to listen politely and probably had some kind of dumb smile or grimace on my face. And that’s the state I was in when Madison Hartner came over to sit with us.
So in case you don’t remember, Madison Hartner is the insanely hot girl who probably dates one of the Pittsburgh Steelers or at least a college student or something. She’s also the girl that I relentlessly antagonized in the fifth grade, with the Madison Fartner nickname, the Booger ChapStick accusation, etc. That’s all water under the bridge now, of course, and in October of senior year, we were on vaguely friendly terms with each other. We would say hi to each other in the hall sometimes, and maybe I would even make some kind of bland inoffensive joke, and she would smile or something, and I would daydream for a couple of seconds about nuzzling my face in her boobs like an affectionate panda cub, and then we would both get on with our lives.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl Page 7