In our youth (when we were beautiful and interesting) Laurie and I made a movie together. "Milk of Amnesia" (AKA "Oedipal Breakfast") is a lot of things to us: a major achievement, a source of ongoing disagreement and a financial millstone around our neck that took years to shed. It is feature length and professionally finished. It is far from perfect and arguably not close to what we had originally envisioned but it has it's charms. It was a labor of something like love (maybe a "toil of like"?) - Laurie worked at a motion picture lab, and I worked at a video equipment rental house and studio. We made this film on a shoestring, using volunteer unpaid crew and talent. It took two plus years. It was a slow motion marathon. Once it was done, exhausted, bored with our new toy and afraid that any further exposure to it would doom our marriage, "Milk of Amnesia" was relegated to a pile of film cans and tapes in the closet beneath our stairs. Our kids never asked about it. We blissfully forgot. Like an itch that was never scratched we would poke at it every few years and think about breaking it out to show somewhere. Crowd source funding of course took over and we are transferring it so we can run it in a theater. People seemed interested. It feels both good and uncomfortable. I don't like messing with the dead. I had put this part of my life away, and it was pretty easy not ignore the pile of cans in the closet.I am hoping that it doesnt dredge up any bad sediment that had settled under us. Digging it all up it is delicate.
