TRRS Films
The acronym "TRRS" is pretty obvious, eh?
Todd Reynolds and I made our first film together in 1981 to submit to a contest promoted by Cinemagic Magazine.
This short flick was called "Previews of Coming Attractions" and featured our mutual friend, Frank Alexander
as a theater patron who witnesses violent movie scenes repeating themselves within the audience he's a part of, ultimatly victimizing him.. Todd wrote & directed while I supplied gore effects and edited the film. It was shot on Super-8 color silent filmstock. The contest required a separate soundtrack for silent-film submissions but we didn't put much effort into the audio. That mistake led to a pretty bad grade from the contest judges, unfortunately.. But we perservered, continuing to make other films. Next was "Abomination." It was my turn to direct. Todd wrote the script and acted the lead role. There wasn't much plot because this film was rather experimental in it's bizarre, surreal presentation. A simple exercise in gore effects and weirdness, to be honest but it was a fun little 13-minute application of cinematography and editing techniques. This one was shot with magnetic sound stock, so it didn't suffer from the "Previews" shortcomings. Music was stolen from the vinyl PHANTASM soundtrack, dialog (using that term loosly) was recorded on the camera mic and sound effects were recorded on the balance stripe after the film was edited. The film survives to this day; it's teeny-tiny tape splices still hold it together and the color hasn't faded a bit. It's scratched all to hell though after having been run through various projectors a jillion times. I never attempted to glue-splice my Super-8 films. Kodak presstapes worked just fine although I didn't like the fact that they covered four frames of film, two frames each on the butted-together pieces of film so I painstakingly sliced them in half, only covering the joined two frames. It made for smoother, quicker transtions throught the gate and almost never broke.
In recent years, I've gotten into 16mm film collecting and was delighted to discover that presstapes are still being manufactured. I can't explaing the chemistry behind what makes those tapes so strong, but they're tough as nails and it's a lot of fun handling actual celluloid. ..but I'll save that for another blog entry. Todd was up at bat again with our next flick, which only got about 80% completed. I don't remember the original title, if it even had one during production, but with so much footage in the can, I decided to have fun and put it together anyway, supplying shitty crayon-written exposition for the missing scenes. It was all pretty silly anyway, our one and only attempt at horror-comedy we ultimately called "Those Nasty Fiends." High-school zombies, 'nuff said. Todd had written a short story called "The Laundromat" in the vein of Steven King. I thought it had cinematic potential so I made it into a short film in the summer of 1982 with my sister Sharon, our friend Mary Rose Atwill,
who was in "Abomination" and some other friends. An odd kind of malaise crept into our filmmaking projects after awhile and the whole effort sort of short-circuited somehow. It got finished, but it didn't have the energy and enthusiasm to fuel it like earlier efforts. Same thing happened years later when Todd was making KITTY KILLERS. It was like the process wasn't as much fun anymore. It became more "labor" than "love" which sullied the finished product. I think I still have the one and only print of the film in a box somewhere, but I haven't entertained the tought of screening it again for over three decades.. Maybe I'll dig these films out and attempt a home-made transfer to video just for shits-&-grins.. Hmmm... College and real-life took over for the remainder of the '80s decade. There were a couple of half-hearted attempts to revive the super-8 adventures around 1988 or '89 but equipment broke down and we gave up. Todd and I kept dreaming and brainstorming. I got married and divorced a few times but Todd was always there as my best man.
Finally in 1993 we made the leap to feature-length movies with the formation of BORDERLINE ENTERTAINMENT.
Addendum: "Abomination" was included as a bonus feature on the 2017 SINISTRE DVD release.
