This little (and I mean little) film just got into it's first festival the other day and I thought it would be cool to post it here. Not only to sing the praises of it's editor, the very bearded and quite dangerous Tim Moyle and the vocal talents of Gary Mahmoud and his lady-friend Bonna Tek, but because this film is a great example of a story that I thought was zigging, when it was actually zagging.
I set out to shoot this as no more than a lens test with a set of loaner Zeiss primes - the same I used to shoot the Urban Dictionary series.
First, a confession. I LOVE percolator coffee. More than French Press, more than Clover coffee (thanks for fucking that up Starbucks) more than just about any other method. But I don't love waiting for it to brew in the morning in a semi-catatonic state. So before I go to bed, I set a timer to automatically turn on the percolator at 6AM and voila, my coffee is brewed by the time I stumble into the kitchen with any one of three screaming children. Someone once said they were so tired in the morning they needed coffee just to be able to make coffee (I stole that one immediately, BTW) and so in presetting my percolator, I've become the cleverest man I know. I'm the Sir Edmund Hillary of Mount Cleverest.
Now, My friend Leslie has an incredibly sexy bakelite percolator, and I have a standard Farberware plug-n-perk. I thought a funny idea might be to see what happens in the morning when the percolator is alone, brewing quietly - what are it's thoughts, it's dreams? I decided for the sake of this test that it's fantasy was more or less the coffee equivalent of late-night Cinemax.
And so the footage was shot, the lenses performed beautifully and the project was shelved while life rolled in like an avalanche. Then one day Tim - a former student - who had cut a different project in class with equal skill, asked if there was anything he could dig into. The rest is milk and sugar - except this:
He made a movie out of the footage that not only did I not intend, but that I never even saw i the footage! To my further discredit, everyone who's seen it also sees it the way Tim did! So it only goes to show that you can plan something, shoot something and think you have a simple story about two percolators getting interrupted while having hot-brewed quickie-sex, when what you really have is some nit-wit drinking coffee ejaculate while the satisfied percolator sits and laughs, waiting for his next victim.
Tasted like coffee to me, though now that you mention it, a little heavy on the cream...
Looking for Mr. Coffee or The Dirty Dream of Your Coffee Machine or What your Percolator's Really Brewing
Director - Josh Apter
Editor - Tim Moyle
Farberware - Gary Mahmoud
Coffematic - Bonna Tek
