Director, cinematographer, editing: Aaron Dylan Kearns
Music: Fuji Fujimoto's "Regenesis" and "Mercurial", with permission, both of which are from her album Skyrise at iTunes
Genre: Documentary
Runtime: 6:09
Budget: $0
Release Date: April 10, 2015. The recut version was released August 28, 2017.
Festivals/Screenings: The 2015 version of Rusted Waters and Busted Trucks had its world premiere at the 2015 Smells Like Teen Film Festival at the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta.
The footage to this short was originally shot in early 2015, and edited to Herbie Hancock's music from Antonioni's film Blow Up. I was a junior in high school and, though I knew better, all I cared about was that the music was a perfect fit. However, the SME Entertainment copyright gods didn't like that too much and removed the film from Youtube when I posted it there, so in 2017 I re-edited the film to music by the artist Fuji Fujimoto, and re-released it between Velocity into Execution and Weightless Bird in a Falling Cage.
The story of Rusted Waters and Busted Trucks is that, during the equivalent of my junior year in high school, a few scenes of the movie Table 19 were being filmed at our apartment building, and I ran out the first morning wanting to make a short documentary of the crew setting up, hoping to get a few interviews as well. I quickly realized the interviews weren't going to happen, but as a few comic incidents began to unfold I realized I had another film in these.
I had gone out prepared for the crew possibly sending me away, but most everyone was pleasant and said they had no problem with me filming as long as I quit when the stars arrived.
When filming began, I was left with the option of either being shut up in our apartment or being relegated to a holding pen down the street. I returned to the apartment that would be infused for hours with the smell of some flame accelerant while Anna Kendrick, in a driveway next the building, acted trying to set fire to some paper right under the air conditioning unit in one of our bedroom windows. A difficult time was had so this was done over and over and our apartment stank more and more. Some of that footage was in the trailer of Table 19, but didn't make it into the film, replaced with the fire-setting incident occurring instead inside an apartment completely unlike any in our building.
Later, when filming commenced in our hall and outside our entry door, we decided, as the landlord was being paid for this inconvenience and we were not, to do an underground version of Table 19, filmed by phantom denizens of the building, amusing ourselves with the idea of our eyes viewing through the camera eye viewing through the peephole, and secretly acting our peeping tom roles on our side of the door, for our film, while they acted their feature film roles on the other side. All we knew about Table 19 was who it starred and that it was reported to be about people meeting at the misfit table at a wedding, which meant our building was chosen as it was appropriate for a misfit. Through the peephole we watched as Anna Kendrick and Wyatt Russell filmed a scene in which, as they are leaving the building, Anna calls out, "You forgot the baby! You forgot our friend!" Wyatt returns to retrieve an infant in its carrier that had been left on the stairs. The dialogue struck us as bizarre, highly mockable, and, consequently, more entertaining than anything we could have imagined about the movie.
Because we didn't want to put up a spoiler, we waited two years until Table 19 was released to post Peephole on Table 19: The Right in Front of Our Door Cut, which I include below. The monologue was mine and completely ad-libbed. I don't count this as a real film; it was a little record of an entertaining event that we made into our own kind of fun. For a little while our building was film central, as at the same time I was also filming and editing my movie, The Counting Man, with the apartment building as a backdrop for many scenes. In fact, I had been filming a scene for The Counting Man when what I later realized must have been location scouts came by to look around and happened on me filming myself to the rear of the building in full costume.
