by Dan Ryckert
I have no idea what Larry is up to these days, but I’m confident that you can find a big guy at a 311 concert who would love to have an impassioned chat with you about chemtrails.
Squeaky Wheel
Outside of an 18-month stint after college in which I worked at a sports-based TV station and a company that made GPS devices, my resume could effectively double as my “Hobbies” section in a dating profile. I’ve worked at McDonald’s, a video game store, a liquor store, a video game magazine, a video game website, and as a professional wrestling manager. For a guy who has spent most of his life thinking about fast food, video games, and wrestling, it’s been a pretty great run, and I consider myself very fortunate.
I was also a fanatic about movies when I was younger. During the mid-‘90s, I’d frequently go into video stores and beg them to give me their promotional cardboard standees when they were done with them. Sometimes they’d let me write my name on the back as a reminder to call me instead of throwing them away. Eventually, my bedroom was filled with these large displays dedicated to movies like The Rock, Broken Arrow, and Face/Off.
My mother also enjoyed these movies, and we’d often watch them together. They were usually R-rated, which ran the risk of featuring an errant boob or tame sex scene. To combat being in the same room as her if anything sexual was happening on screen, I always had my bathroom breaks timed out. A sudden urge to pee (or poop, depending on the length of the scene) would conveniently overcome me during specific parts in each movie. Stanley Goodspeed having rooftop sex with his fiancée. An animated woman shaking her breasts on the screen of Castor Troy’s bomb at the LA Convention Center. Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor having sex to an acoustic version of the Terminator theme (this scene in particular is what taught me what sex was in the first place).
I eventually found a book at Borders that listed fan mail addresses for various celebrities. I’d cut out pictures of Nicolas Cage, Michael Biehn, and Bonnie Bedelia in Entertainment Weekly, put them in a package along with a note and a self-addressed stamped envelope, and hope to get anything in return. Cage signed a picture from Face/Off with a “To Dan, Best Wishes.” A picture that I sent to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York intended for Conan O’Brien came back with signatures from both him and Andy Richter. I was thrilled to get a Jim Carrey one-sheet with a “Spank You Very Much” note, until I realized that it was a facsimile that his people sent out to every fan who wrote in.
In junior high, I devoted an hour a day to an independent study course that tracked box office results. My school’s gifted class allowed me to pick whatever independent study subject I wanted to focus on, which proved to be great for learning more about the things I was passionate about. From studying box office results to pro wrestling to video production, being able to say “Here’s what I like. I’m going to make sure that most of my schoolwork revolves around it” was fantastic. During ninth grade, I decided that I just wanted to watch movies and write papers about them. I told my teacher I was interested in films that had a psychological angle. She recommended A Clockwork Orange and secured a VHS copy of it for me to watch at school. Within a few minutes of sitting in a classroom and seeing bare breasts and a graphic rape scene, I found myself looking over my shoulder wondering if she had made some terrible mistake.
Transitioning from junior high to high school made me more ambitious when it came to learning about movies. I was previously content with watching a bunch of films and tracking their success at the box office, but now I wanted to make them myself. My dream job was always to cover video games for a living, but I figured that “Hollywood director” would make for a solid fallback option.
In high school, I was allowed to sign up for several hours a day of the independent study program. One of these hours was dedicated to studying the professional wrestling industry. Each day started with the school’s official video production class and ended with three consecutive hours of video production independent study. During these hours, I had no oversight. There were no assignments or lectures, just a room full of cameras, tripods, and iMacs with Final Cut Pro installed.
I had all the time in the world to do whatever I wanted, and I referred to my camera as my “universal hall pass.” If you were a student who happened to be walking the halls of Olathe East during class time, a faculty member would almost assuredly ask you about why you weren’t in class. However, when I had a little MiniDV camera strapped to my hand and a tripod over my shoulder, no one ever gave me any flak.
This was the only period in my life in which I seriously considered focusing my career on something other than the video game industry. Shooting videos was so much fun, and it was easy to stand out considering how bad everyone else was at it. When other students in my production class were assigned a video announcement, they always phoned it in with dry, information-driven pieces.
I was always more interested in flash than I was in information, so I took that approach whenever I received boring assignments. Cross country running sounded like the most boring thing in the world to me, but making a parody of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video starring the OEHS Cross Country team was a blast. One assignment required me to raise awareness for our team of janitors, so I made a full Fight Club parody starring our quiet, awkward custodial team. Making parodies of popular music videos and movies isn’t exactly high art, but considering the dry, by-the-books work my peers were making (and the fact that I was 16), I might as well have been Stanley Kubrick by comparison.
One person who wasn’t particularly amused by my approach was our school’s guidance counselor. After receiving an assignment to make a video announcement about her services, I talked to her about a variety of ideas I had. She was adamant that this announcement be strictly about the facts and her role in the school, and refused to play any kind of character. I told her that I understood and that I’d just need some footage of her working in her office. I set my camera on a tripod and captured a minute or two of nearly silent footage of her leafing through papers. Then I thanked her and went back to the edit room.
It’s a good thing she didn’t request to see the video before it aired, because it never would have made the announcements if she had. The announcement began with Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” blaring, accompanied by text that read “DO YOU WANT A CAREER THAT’S…” followed by a series of adjectives in loud font, set to the timing of the guitar riff. “EXCITING?! SEXY?! REWARDING?! FUN?! LUCRATIVE?!”
Immediately after the text montage, I cut the music and replaced it with thirty seconds of crickets chirping as I rolled raw footage of the counselor staring at paperwork in a sterile office. A painful amount of time passed, and then a final slide popped up as Hendrix’s “YEAH!” signals the return of the music: “BE A GUIDANCE COUNSELOR!!!”
Later that day, my video production teacher informed me in no uncertain terms that the counselor was not a fan of the finished product. It wouldn’t be the last time that an official class project got me in trouble with my teacher.
Like every other teenage idiot film dork back then, I was a big fan of Quentin Tarantino. I didn’t know how to write clever or believable dialogue to save my life, but I could try to ape his trademark moments of sudden violence. Of course, mine were free of character development or style, and just boiled down to “wouldn’t it be crazy if this dude just got shot all of a sudden?”
One project was called “The Aviator.” It featured a cheery guy in aviator goggles and a bomber jacket playing on a jungle gym (set to U2’s “Beautiful Day”) before getting shot down. Another was “Lex Talionis,” which I wish I had done as parody but was probably made in earnest back then. First off, I did the cliché “let’s take a cool-sounding phrase but translate it into LATIN to make it sound super badass!” thing that every film student or crappy local band has done at some point. Also, it didn’t make any sense and existed solely as a dumb vehicle for me to include a bunch of random deaths.
“Lex Talionis” starts with dudes in suits sitting in a dingy
basement, smoking cigars and playing some indeterminate card game. Not long into college, I learned that every single student filmmaker makes the dumb move of casting their barely post-pubescent white buddies as fucking Yakuza godfathers or whatever, and it always looks super dumb. It looked super dumb here.
Three of the guys win the card game and celebrate, causing the other two guys to get sad for a second and pull guns on them. The three winners split up and run away with their cards, because I guess the cards themselves were the prize for winning this card game? The rest of the short film features the losers hunting them down and taking their cards back. One guy tries to hide in the woods, but gets discovered and killed after he farts loudly. Great stuff. The second hides out in a bathroom. A gunman finds him, puts his head into the toilet, and blows his brains (ketchup and hamburger meat) into the water. Top-notch material.
The last of the three gets gunned down in the street, but not before I utilized my first celebrity cameo. You gotta start with something big, so who could be bigger than 1991-1992 Kansas City Royals pitcher Mike Boddicker? Most people, it turns out. Not being a sports fan, I had heard his name on TV a couple of times, but had no idea if he was well-known and/or good at baseball. I still don’t. Regardless, my friend Bret told me that Boddicker lived just around the corner from where we were shooting that day.
“Hey, baseball players are famous!” I figured.
We walked over to Boddicker’s place and knocked on the door. A middle-aged and presumably famous guy answered. I explained that I was a student shooting a short film, and was curious if he’d be interested in doing a very brief cameo. I just needed him to nod his head and then point down the street when the bad guys came to his door. He agreed, and the most uneventful and celebrity-devoid cameo of all time was filmed.
With the hot tip from Boddicker, the bad guys track down the final target and take him out. The villains stand tall, with all three of the sought-after cards in Bad Guy #1’s hands. In a “shocking,” “Tarantino-esque” turn of events, Bad Guy #2 interrupts #1’s gloating by shooting him in the head and taking all three cards for himself.
That was the foundation for a lot of my short films back then. I bought prop guns from Walmart, downloaded a few songs on Kazaa or Morpheus that I thought would be cool in a video, and then assembled some bullshit that would serve as a loose excuse for people to shoot each other to music. In these pre-YouTube years, I’d dump the videos to a VHS and physically mail them (along with a submission fee) to a website that showcased student films. Feedback was hard to come by, as few people spent time on a site that was composed mostly of idiot 17-year-olds trying to make Reservoir Dogs on 1/1,000th of the budget and 1/1,000,000th of the talent.
One form of feedback that I did receive during this period was from my video production teacher. Mr. Snozek was a wide, towering, Catholic man who resembled a living refrigerator, and he was very concerned about any student project that featured violence. Inserting fistfights into a video was enough to get yourself pulled into his office, and here I was trying to find the right raw meat to best resemble bloody brain particles.
During this semester, each school day included four hours in Mr. Snozek’s video production lab. I had a lot to lose if I pissed him off, but I continued to make videos that focused on gunfights. Considering that these usually involved intentionally stupid elements like farting and guys in monkey suits and U2 songs, I hoped that they’d come off as silly enough to keep me out of trouble. Mr. Snozek only saw the guns, however, and eventually banned me from his video production classroom outright after several warnings.
This left a huge void in my daily schedule. My mom assumed I was at school and my gifted class teachers assumed I was in the video production lab for over half the day (Mr. Snozek failed to inform them of the ban). With no one to hold me accountable, I did the only reasonable thing that a high school student would do: egregiously skipped class.
Three of my four video production hours were piggybacked at the end of the day, meaning that I had nowhere to be starting at noon. My personal MiniDV camera would serve as the key to my escape, since I wasn’t allowed to use the school’s cameras any more. When the bell rang at the end of my fourth-hour history class, I’d grab the camera from my locker and head out to my 1994 Ford Taurus. If anyone tried to stop me, I was always ready to hold up the Canon and say I was shooting something for the video announcements. If my own gifted class teachers didn’t know about Mr. Snozek’s ban, the school’s security guards sure as hell wouldn’t.
No one ever tried to stop me from leaving. That wasn’t going to keep me from feeling like I was some school-skipping rebel, breaking my way out of the confines of Olathe East and peeling out into freedom (actually, I never knew how to make my car peel out and probably wouldn’t have done it anyway, since that would be loud and rude). With a total lack of self-awareness, I’d put on Rage Against the Machine or, more frequently, the theme song of the wrestling group D-Generation X. This was rebellious stuff. I was breaking the rules and getting the hell out of Dodge. It seemed only fitting to blast songs about Che Guevara that I didn’t understand or theme music for a bunch of wrestlers whose defining character trait was “wearing neon green and gesturing toward their penises.”
In hindsight, this high school view of myself clashes somewhat with the reality of a socially awkward wrestling dork leaving school to go to the FuncoLand that he works at to play a Dreamcast game with fake maraca controllers because he’s too nervous to tell his mother that he got kicked out of class. It was less “sticking it to the man,” and more “getting pretty good at Samba de Amigo.”
In those days, I had a couple of great options if I needed to stay out of the house. My two jobs at the time shared the same parking lot and centered on two of my favorite things. One was a FuncoLand video game store, and the other was a newly constructed 30-screen AMC movie theater. For a kid who didn’t like to socialize but loved video games and movies, it couldn’t have been a better situation. Both positions paid barely over minimum wage, but I saved a ton of money thanks to unlimited free movie tickets and the ability to rent games from the store whenever I wanted.
About six months into being 14 years old, I left my first job at McDonald’s to work at the theater. My age prohibited me from performing most functions at AMC, but I was allowed to work the concession stand register as long as I didn’t venture anywhere near the popcorn popper (this was deemed too dangerous for our young brains and hands). Concession was the starting point for virtually every employee and everyone hated it. If you could prove to be reliable there, you could start ushering. Do well there, and you might get bumped up to the box office. Then, you could go to Guest Services, the projection booth, or start working toward being a manager.
I wanted to move up the ladder quickly, as I hated working the long concession lines during the frequent rushes. This desire was at odds with my even stronger desire to do the least amount of work humanly possible. Better shifts, more power, and higher pay sounded fantastic. Working hard? Not so much.
Avoiding work entirely was impossible at my lowly position, but I assumed that it would get easier if I moved up the ladder. I constantly badgered my managers about being promoted to supervisor.
“We don’t move 14-year-olds up to supervisor,” one of them said. “But keep asking...the squeaky wheel gets the grease.”
That advice stuck with me for years because it made sense. You rarely get anything if you don’t ask for it, so I made my desire to become supervisor known to everyone who outranked me. When these decision-makers were around, I was the most gung-ho, take-charge employee anyone had ever seen. If a rush ended, you couldn’t put a broom in my hand fast enough to enthusiastically clean up all of the popcorn kernels.
When the higher-ups were out of sight, I was no better than a loiterer. In fact, I was actively impeding the theater’s ability to properly serve customers. I’d hang out behind the soda machines, dipping popcorn into nacho cheese and trying to get it to stick to
the ceiling. Batches of popcorn turned into dumb social experiments as I’d see how many spoonfuls of radioactive-looking orange salt I could put into a batch before customers complained en masse. I’d dare coworkers to drink horrible concoctions that consisted of soda, popcorn salt, nacho cheese, chopped-up hot dogs, and our “butter-like” substance. This escalated until a coworker vomited during a shift.
After a solid seven or eight months of “working hard” at the right times and bugging the right people, I was finally bequeathed the green epaulets of an AMC supervisor. With my newfound power, I graduated from useless to insufferable. Here was a cocky 15-year-old kid who managed to weasel his way into a supervisor role, and he was running around telling people twice his age what to do. Every time I asked some 30-something coworker to grab a pushbroom, I felt like it took everything in their power not to chokeslam me onto the hot dog rollers.
Hypocritical as this was, I couldn’t stand the laziness of my coworkers. Couldn’t they at least pretend to want to work hard when higher-ups like me were around? Their constant smoke breaks infuriated me to no end, and I frequently complained to my managers about how employees shouldn’t be granted bonus time off just because they picked up a stupid habit. Considering that most of my managers would smoke by the dumpsters with the same employees I was complaining about, I didn’t get a lot of traction in this area.
In any situation that would allow it, I took full advantage of my supervisor status. During the weekend that Toy Story 2 was released, it was featured in all four of our biggest theaters. Our concession stand was cursed with nearly day-long rushes that were composed mostly of children. This meant a lot of indecision, a lot of noise, and making a ton of annoying-to-assemble Kids’ Packs. I wasn’t even on the front lines (the registers), but I still needed to get the hell out of there.