Man, I’m getting frazzled.

Item one: Last night we attended Daymented’s annual Blogger White Elephant party. I am too pooped to post the pitchas. I will state for the record that I have very, very entertaining footage of a certain photoblogger enjoying a particular sort of endorphin stimulation. Tara ended up with Hopkin, which she stole from Manuel. I chatted with Samantha, was sorry Jeff couldn’t make it, and confirmed that Heather is indeed moving to New Jack central.

It was lovely to see these folks and others, whose lives I keep up with wholly online; I should make a point of arranging for non-group interactions with many. But, oh, the time.

Item two: Please note, the following item has been edited pursuant to a call from Chris Strompolos on the evening of December 22, 2004. Use of the ‘s’ tag indicates original post wording.

Speaking of time, we hadda duck out early so’s I could catch Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation at the new Northwest Film Forum location near my house. As I noted earlier this week, I interviewed project creator Chris Strompolos for a piece that appeared in The Stranger this week and was happy to meet him. I will be staying in touch with him as the Scott Rudin movie project progresses.

The video was, as advertised, a low-budget, lo-fi work with numerous technical flaws. But, again as advertised, the wit and ingenuity of the filmmakers in the bloom of their adolescence – substituting a boat for a floatplane, and a dog for a monkey, let alone the less visibly obvious bits of on-the-fly solutions – appealed directly to the capacity audience. Indiana Jones himself won America’s heart for his improvisational combination of ability and reflexive, post-modern wit. It’s a fair cop to say that these kids from Biloxi give Indy a run for his money.

An unexpected critical subtext cropped up for me during the film. After a cursory investigation into the circumstances under which this ur-fan-film was made, it’s clear that economic advantages pertained to one or more of the families of the kids that made the film. Chris’s mom was a TV news anchor who eventually married the owner of the TV station that she worked at. His partner (and the film’s director), Eric Zala, lived in a coastal Mississippi mansion. Today, when asked, Strompolos notes that the film cost between $5000 and $8000, over the period from 1982 to 1988. The filmmakers were eleven when they started shooting. The film includes footage shot both on a real airplane and a real World War II submarine. they started shooting on betamax and moved to VHS when the format was discontinued. The film was final-edited on the broadcast facilities of the local television station where Strompolos’ mom worked.

In short, while the film is justly celebrated for its’ improbability and accomplishment, many of the very things about it that amaze and baffle us on first viewing it are equally evidence of wealth and privilege.

AN UPDATE, 12/22: Chris Strompolos called wanting a chance to clarify and share a different perspective on these matters. He – and his partners – were concerned that my remarks above unfairly depict the filmmakers as well-to-do. This is a fair concern. I wrote a post about Chris’s call to me which I encourage you, dear reader, to consult. To summarize, my reference to economic advantages pertains to advantages of class rather than to the (non-existent) wealth of specific families. As Chris has made clear to me in our conversations, all three filmmakers grew up in female-headed divorced families, with all the privation that implies. For example, while I cite the use of an airplane and access to the submarine as evidence of privilege, from his perspective it’s evidence of childhood persistence, creativity, and ingenuity. He points out that in both instances, the shoots occurred without fee, and due to his persistence. Three years’ worth, in the case of the boats. It’s a fair clarification, and my fault for not clearly outlining the parameters I referred to. With those parameters understood, however, I don’t see that my view and Chris’s view are necessarily in conflict. I see things his way, but also in my own.

I must note, however, that not all of these things display the wealth gap. The use of Strompolos’ pet dog in place of the monkey, for example, or the amazingly successful, if not authentically persuasive, use of back-alley Biloxi to reimagine the mid-eastern souk of the original pretty clearly argue for the imaginativeness and determination of the child filmmakers.

There’s another subtext to this most pomo of all films. The kids were shooting in Mississippi, with the tacit – and sometimes financial logistical – support of what I’ll term, for the sake of poesie, the tidewater aristocracy.

To my knowledge, the film contains onscreen appearances of two one persons of African descent: the freighter captain near the end of the film., and one other I’ll discuss in a moment.

The freighter captain role was originally written from a post-modern perspective – and it’s not a half bad part, using presumptive prejudices on the part of an American audience to poke at us about white women and sexual desire. It’s clearly written to tease on the subject. In the original, the part is delivered knowingly, slyly, an object lesson for right-thinking hipsters. In the kids film, the actor is stiff, clearly not comfortable with his innocently salacious lines. It actually leaches a layer of cynicism from the film.

The only other appearance of a person of obviously African descent comes at the end of The Adaptation. The crate apparently containing the Ark of the Covenant is wheeled into a vast warehouse. In the theatrical film, the worker who wheels the ark to its, um, current resting place, is not clearly racially identifiable, as he’s seen in longshot. In The Adaptation, the worker is clearly black, and while his warehouse is impressively huge, the credits thank a Biloxi area storage company in a way that makes me suspect that the end of the kids’ film is roughly documentary in nature.

UPDATE, 12/22: I was completely wrong about this. The warehouse worker was played by Chris. Which kinda deflates my whole conclusion here.

Why am I harping on this? Well, race is clearly not central to the original film, but colonial relations are. By the same token, the film that the children shot in an intended duplication is not about race. But significant amounts of time were dedicated to depicting the flower of Biloxi’s children as Nazi villians, with the apparent blessing of the region’s television station.

In light of this, I think it’s interesting that the only adult I observed on screen, unambiguously, was the warehouse worker wheeling the Ark into storage. I have many hours of entertaining rants upon this subject, all just beyond my reach this evening, as an exhaustion sufferer.

UPDATE, 12/22: I did, in fact, write this immediately after seeing the film, at around 3 in the morning. After talking to Chris I think this whole riff is just wrong, though. I could still probably find interesting race-and-class material in the film to write about. The blond forest savages in the film’s opening sequence, for example, provoked a chuckle in the audience which could well reflect the unexpected juuxtaposition of light hair and loincloths. But based on the material in the film, the argument I sketched out here is based wholly on my own perceptions, not on what the children shot. So, as I promised, Chris: I got this wrong. Mea culpa, and thanks for calling.

Other readers, feel free to post more-specific critiques. Folks who get a chance to see the film are particularly encouraged to post!

There’s one more showing in Seattle, at 11pm tonight. If I were you, I’d start lining up right now.

Speaking of The Stranger, they paid me for the article already! That’s a surefire way to win admirers in the freelancing community, no doubt about it.

Item three: Last but not least, I have been insanely busy at work, something which has also cut into blogging. I’ve heard that mainline retailers expect to do between a third and half of their annual revenue during the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. While I don’t know that those percentages hold up for our revenue numbers, this is certainly accurate for our gross orders. The week before Thanksgiving, our daily order rate was just about fifty discrete orders, concatenating about sixty-five items.

Starting immediately before Thanksgiving, our average daily order count shot up to about two hundred, often totaling 265 or more items. One product alone has sold about 500 units in the past six days. We are working our asses off to try to keep up.

Late night update: I actually passed out from exhaustion while editing this this afternoon. Happily, I recalled my changes this evening and was able to complete them.