Girlfriend Is Better


Maybe not a total coincidence.


Remember two years ago, when I announced Writers? I made a nice little video and everything. Well, ‘nice’ is a relative term – looking back on it now, the framing and lighting is terrible and I acted like a snotty bastard the entire time. Rest assured, had I made a video for you today, it would’ve at least looked nice. The rest of it would’ve been more of the same: “Maybe, if I use just enough big words, people will finally like me.”

And I was going to make a video for you today – honest. I mean, I work in a room filled with cameras, and I’m an electronic media major. It would’ve been a great idea. I could’ve edited it, and had musical cues, and special guest appearances and everything.

But I’m also busy – so fucking busy, really. I’ve got five classes left to take before I can graduate and I’m taking four of them this term and working as much as I can to save up a good deal of money. I even quit the basketball band, a decision that apparently entitles my own friends to punch me in the balls whenever they feel like it.

These sacrifices (my free time, followed by my genitalia) were made due to the love of cinema. Please, let me explain.

I my feelings about journalism are the same as my feelings about proper sewage disposal – I really like and appreciate its role in society, and enjoy it when other people do it for me, but it’s not the sort of thing I’d ever want to do myself.

Now, my experience with sewage disposal really stops after the sewage creation phase (which I am great at, not that I’m bragging), but I’ve actually tried journalism. Remember that year where my blog updates were halfhearted and sucked more than usual? That’s because at the time I was working as a journalist, writing for the Oregon Daily Emerald, and writing when I have to make sure everything I say is 100% correct is pretty taxing and really takes the fun out of the whole process.

God, that sounds bad. Look, keep reading.

The simple fact is that journalism is a field in which you write about real people who exist in the world, and, with respect to all of you, none of you on your own are quite as interesting as the people and events that I make up. All of you are fabulous in your own special ways, but I don’t want to write about you. Don’t worry – I know plenty of people who do, and they’re all way better at it than I am.

After this term I’ll be clear to graduate as a Magazine Feature Writing major, whereas I would have two more classes to complete in my Electronic Media sequence. Both of these classes are very grueling fare about how to properly attach a lavolier mic to a person’s lapel and interview them about something boring, like a parking garage or baseball.

I want to write scripts; I don’t want to be a journalist. I realized two months ago that if this were the case, I shouldn’t be spending my last term at the University of Oregon busting my ass to learn how to be a journalist.

So instead, I wrote a script for a 40-minute short film over the break. At the end of the term, I’m dropping the Electronic Media major, hence why I’ll only have to take one class (Geology 103) in the spring.

And with all that free time and the help of some close friends, I’m going to make that short film and take it with me to Hollywood.

The movie is called Girlfriend Is Better, and like most of my work, it’s a dialogue heavy piece about three guys who sit around being assholes. More specifically, one of the guys gets a girlfriend, and the other two decide to try and break them up.

Yes, it sounds a lot like Saving Silverman. However, it’s not. Maybe it also sounds a lot like Writers. It’s also not.

Unlike Writers, we’re making this movie pretty much independently of the University of Oregon – we’ve got our own camera and sound equipment and our own copy of FinalCut, so we won’t be dependent on the School of Journalism, nor hemmed in by their restrictions on how many anal sex jokes we can tell (one or less).

Unlike Writers, we’ll be shooting on an HD camera, so it’ll look like a million bucks, and this time around we’re planning on not leaving a piece of camera equipment in basically every shot.

Unlike Writers, my tech savvy better half in this endeavor isn’t chain smoking, life hating Mike Whitman, but the diet-albino Dylan Sylwester, whose skills involve being thin and practically every aspect of multimedia production.

His skin tone is somewhere between 'Conan O Brien' and 'Mirror'.

And unlike Writers, I won’t be befouling this movie with my presence as an actor. No, this time around we’re looking to hire the best people for the job, which is why we’re holding open auditions on Friday and Saturday, January 28th and 29th , between 6 and 8 PM in the Chambers Electronic Media Center in Allen Hall. If you’re interested, hit up our event page so we can send you an audition script.

I mention this to all of you both because I want to create a significant amount of buzz, and also because this will be dominating my life more and more over the course of the rest of my college education, hence you can expect to see a lot about it on the blog.

For example, I could already write an entire update about how hard it is to find an adult shop willing to let you film a non pornographic movie inside it, or how few restaurants are willing to let you use them as a location when the scene you want to shoot involves a dildo.

Not joking. This is going to be awesome.

Truman Capps regrets to inform you that he may have to start using Twitter to build more interest as time goes by.