The ground floor of Founders Hall at Manhattanville College used to have a row of cubbies each with a phone and chair. Each door had a window and you could see who was inside when walking by. Even in the 1990s when I was a student there, before everyone had cellphones, the cubbies were usually empty.
One night, I walked down that hall and heard the muffled but distinctly raspy voice of my roommate, Liam McKiernan, coming from inside of one of the cubbies. We had entered the building together a few minutes earlier but split up.
Whatever he was talking about and whomever he was talking to, he sounded agitated. I popped up to the window, but when I did I saw the phone had been ripped out and removed from the cubby ”” a frayed wire was all that poked out from the wall.
There was Liam, sitting, talking to no one.
I laughed harder at that than I”™ve ever laughed at anything else in my life. It goes to show you sometimes things don”™t end up like you expect. The universe is funny that way.
***
On Oct. 18 this year, 13 years after we graduated college, Liam and I premiered our first movie, a short film called “Unfit to Print,” at YoFi Fest, the three-day Yonkers film festival. We went into the cavernous Yonkers Riverfront Library theater with the nauseating realization we were about to see gigantic pictures of our faces projected onto a big screen for a whole theater of people to recoil from. We were also equally terrified at the prospect that the movie, a comedy, would be met by silence rather than laughs. Liam said nervous heat radiated from his body.
“Thank God I brought my flask,” he said, jokingly. At least I think he was joking. We directed, wrote and starred in the movie, and that puts your ego in a precarious spot: If the movie is really bad, you can”™t tell yourself it was anyone else”™s fault. That is, except YoFi itself.
***
We both attended the inaugural YoFi last year and got caught up in the idea that there was a film festival right in our home county. I had read about it in local papers including the one I worked for and spoken about it on WVOX Radio in New Rochelle. Caught up in the whole thing, we vowed that night on the red carpet that we”™d submit something for the second YoFi Fest.
I kind of figured the vow would fade. We”™d had a history of not delivering if I”™m being honest.
Liam and I used to be a writing team in college but we seemed to always have various projects in various states of incompletion. We finished a rough draft of a screenplay called “Shady Biz,” about a couple of college students who smoked too many cigarettes and struck out trying to get dates with women (we told ourselves it wasn”™t based on our actual college experiences). We also started but never finished a zombie movie that would have revolutionized the genre ”” years before “28 Days Later” and “The Walking Dead.” We also made a home movie on a camcorder called “High School Dogs” that one of the stars recently offered $1 million if we never showed it to anyone ever again. That was the closest we came to ever delivering on our goal of doing a screenplay and making our own movie.
“For me, maybe subconsciously, if we didn”™t see something through to the end, it didn”™t leave us open to any criticism,” Liam says. “Almost self-defeating.”
After we graduated college in 2001, I became a journalist and he went on to work in production for television. We had a few false starts but never really delivered on anything until YoFi.
***
By summer, we had completed a script and were in the midst of production. We were putting together crews, borrowing equipment and calling in a favor from everyone we knew who could operate a camera, do sound or act. We had the intensity and thriftiness of a startup with no access to capital, making something out of nothing, shooting at places where we got out of spending money on locations: like my parents”™ house (they laughed at the dinner table while we called “quiet on the set” from the living room).
Our director of photography/editor Neil Stephens spent long nights in post-production out of kindness or perhaps sympathy. And when we submitted the project, we crossed our fingers that it would even be accepted into the festival. Then it was and the real panic began anticipating that premiere.
Turns out, it went over pretty well. People laughed at the right parts. We were mentioned in a few local newspapers. The reaction has meant a lot to me and Liam, with whom I am already working on our next film project. “It”™s taken away some of that crippling fear of failure and given us confidence to get started on something else right away,” Liam says.
Maybe it isn”™t too late for a career change after all. “I”™m trying to figure out a way to get hurt on the job so I can collect disability while we get our names out there,” Liam says. “It”™s proving harder than I thought. Maybe just move in to your parents”™ basement. I don”™t think our significant others would mind.”
We”™re not planning to move to Hollywood just yet, but then again sometimes things don”™t end up like you expect. The universe is funny that way.
