Excerpts From Lost Branches #4
The Rat King...
Welcome to the fourth installment of “Excerpts from Lost Branches,” a weekly (okay, I’m pushing it here) post where I highlight the threads that likely won’t make the cut of the various threads explored in Farewell, Hello: A Blood & Corn Podcast.
Each week, I’ll post an excerpt from something that I wrote or created in the past. Some pieces have a tangible relationship to the comic. Others will seem to have zero connections. Who knows what threads will emerge from following these severed threads?
It’s been a couple of weeks since I made one of these posts, but I should be back on track after this! Expect the third episode of Farewell, Hello in the next week or so.
In the meantime, let’s talk about King Rat…
If you follow me on Instagram and Facebook, you may have noticed last week that I was spamming your feeds with clips from my first film, King Rat. The posts were a nostalgic trip down memory lane inspired by a visit that week to my alma mater, DePauw University (where the film was shot), and in recognition that we are just shy of a month away from the eight-year filming anniversary of that film. That last fact is baffling to me.
It’s been a few years since I’ve revisited any footage of this film. Due to some circumstances out of our hands, King Rat is no longer available on any streaming services and any copies I have were stored away on old computers and hard drives. After the trip to DePauw, I came home and dug through those old files. In my memory, King Rat is a messy, sometimes embarrassing, and occasionally beautiful film (This last part has nothing to do with me, by the way. The artists behind and in front of the camera were leagues ahead of me and elevated the work on every level). That assessment is still mostly true, but several years removed from the thing, I was caught off guard by how much joy this rewatch brought me.
If you’ll indulge me, let’s walk down memory lane again and revisit some clips from this EIGHT(!?!) year-old film…
In this first clip, a hotel clerk (Tyler Ross) approaches one of our protagonists, Seann Taverner (Brad Smith), a washed-up screenwriter visiting his own alma mater to give the school’s commencement speech. Prior to this scene, the hotel clerk had snuck a screenplay into Seann’s room -
The second clip features a joke that I wrote when I was 10 years old.
I tracked down one of the earliest completed drafts of the screenplay (dated 9-9-14). That initial screenplay is almost an entirely different film. The general setup is the same, but the overall tone and execution couldn’t be more different than the film that ended up shot and released. It’s more Judd Apatow, less Richard Linklater. For example:
Surprisingly, the scene above remained virtually unchanged from the initial draft to the finished film (although you can clearly tell the Linklater influence in the cinematography and execution).
Here’s the scene from that initial draft from the mind of a 22-year-old Henry:
This next clip is where the opening credits of the film are supposed to be. Since I could only find an early, unfinished version of the film (a full ten minutes longer than the released cut!), the credits do not appear. What’s left is a slightly meandering tracking shot of Weston Davis (Julian Hester) walking across East College lawn on DePauw’s campus. It looks pretty though! Say hi to the Boulder!
This clip features one of my favorite poems, “This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams (a poem I learned in high school and never forgot). It’s one of my favorites from the film.
Here’s the final scene from the movie (featuring a song by Sad Brad Smith himself)! We filmed this at DePauw’s actual graduation. All of these extras are real graduates! Brad Smith posed as a professor and our wonderful Cinematographer, Zoe Lubeck, and our camera operator, Blaine Baker, posed as documentarians/videographers. This day required an insane amount of planning, all of which was orchestrated and executed by KING RAT’s producer, the BRILLIANT Alex Thompson. Be expecting a deep dive interview with Alex on the podcast in the future.
Here’s another scene, featuring the legendary Austin Pendleton (Fun fact: the role of Professor Stillman (played by Burt Young in the film) was written for Austin. Ultimately, Austin was not able to be on set for the full shoot, but he did come to town for one day in order to play this role)!
One of the things that stuck out to me most upon rewatching this film was how much of what ultimately became Burcliffe, IN (the setting of Blood & Corn and many other projects) is represented on screen. In fact, I could probably get away with saying that King Rat takes place in Burcliffe, IN. That fictional town has always been an amalgamation of Greencastle, IN (where we shot the film) and Carmi, IL (my grandparents’ hometown).
Here are a few stills from King Rat that shout Burcliffe to me…
Zoe Lubeck REALLY knocked it out of the park with the cinematography in this film!
When I watch this film now, I’m flooded with only positive memories. So many stories. So many mistakes. So many lessons learned. I’ve always been proud of what we accomplished with this film, but I’ve never been truly proud of the finished product.
It’s been eight years since we shot this thing. We’re different people now. From that lens, I see my 22/23-year-old self in full force. Angsty. Dealing with a surface-level existential crisis about growing up and entering adulthood unsure of my purpose. But still, there’s a lot to love in these scenes. And I can’t help but think…what if I tried editing it again? In all of that footage, is there a great film to be found? Perhaps it’s time I found out…
Songs I listened to writing this post: