Benway's Deathbed Re-Released

It's not the best of the independent short films (in fact it's the worst) but is of some kind of interest anyway for having taken 43 years to complete. That is a record, I'm sure. It's only 3 minutes long, by the way. My account of its creation is below, reprinted from my original posting two years ago. I actually only saw the entire film once, and an excerpt once, when it was broadcast on CBC television, also explained below. All I've had all these years is fifty feet of negative 16mm film, so I was never able to actually watch it. About thirty years ago I stuck a couple of pieces of it in an enlarger and produced a couple of prints, one can be seen here, and one here. About ten years ago I looked into having it reversed to positive and dubbed to videotape but the cost was astronomical. But technology advances, bringing new and cheap ways to do the almost impossible. My friend, Dave Say, is one of the hottest jazz and R&B tenor players in the country. He also, as a sideline, transfers film to video. Yesterday I took my little roll of film over to his place and in no time I had the movie on disk. We agreed it needed sound so later that night he played the film, improvising the music along with the movie, a la Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, the 1958 Louis Malle masterpiece for which Miles Davis produced the music by improvising to a screening of the film. A couple of things. One, I remember shooting Peggy and Willie, and my stuffed seagull, Igor, but now that I've seen this thing for the first time in 43 years, I find there's a saxophonist, as well. I have no memory of who this is. And two, the thing is utterly meaningless garbage, as far as I can tell. Although I'm confident there are smarter and better educated cinephiles out there who will recognize the deep meaning of my film and, I hope, they'll tell me what it is. I have to say, though, that my camerawork isn't bad, considering I'd never held a movie camera in my hands before. So call your friends, make some popcorn or drop some acid and sit back and enjoy Benway's Deathbed. Here's my original story as posted two years ago: A tragic tale. One night at the Swiss Hut someone gave me a puppy. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks old. My lifelong dream of my own dog came true at last. I named it Benway, after the character in Naked Lunch. What idiots we were. That damn dog was too young to leave its mother. We were all too young to leave our mothers, obviously. I didn’t know what to do. The dog got sick within two days. I went to a payphone in the middle of the night (phone was cut off again) and called the SPCA for advice. They were no help. The next morning Benway was dead. I couldn’t even figure out how to get rid of the corpse. It was December, probably 20 below zero outside. I found a shoebox, lay Benway in it, tied it up, and put the coffin outside where the body would freeze till the trash collectors picked it up. I swear to god I didn’t realize till Harvey came over and I told him what I’d done that he looked outside and noted that Benway was in a Hush Puppies® box. I couldn’t stand it! Benway’s death disturbed and haunted me. I thought I’d make a movie about it some day. Benway’s Deathbed (1964) 3 minutes. No rating. In 1964 I talked a lot about becoming a filmmaker. I talked about it so much that, in some sense, I was a filmmaker already. My friend, Karen Sorenson, worked at the CBC, in the research department of a network public affairs and arts show called The Observer. She called to say they wanted to do a piece on an independent filmmaker - would I be interested? You bet I would! She didn't know my film career existed solely in my mind. “Independent filmmaker” was, to most people, an unfamiliar concept that was just barely starting to penetrate mass consciousness. The CBC, always on the cutting edge, wanted to do a short interview and show an excerpt from one of my films. No problem. My friend Roger was making a movie at the time and I helped him shoot some incomprehensible scene in Central Station which I'm sure never saw the light of day. Somehow he managed to wangle permission to rope off half of the busiest train station in Canada in the middle of a weekday. I asked him to lend me his Bolex and give me one reel of 16mm film so I could shoot my “excerpt”. I got Peggy (at the time a student at the École des Beaux-Arts) and Willie, and asked them to "act" for one minute. Peggy sat on the couch trying to "act" something and Willie played a game of chess with my stuffed seagull. (Very symbolic.) I told the CBC I had no money to develop my film and made them develop and print the one reel. In the editing room I acted like Akira Kurosawa, threatening to pull the whole thing if they didn't give me final say on the editing. The director's cut, so to speak. They thought I was a lunatic, but were committed by then. They showed the clip (the whole friggin movie was a “clip”) and interviewed me on network TV for 5 or 10 minutes. The next day Karen called to say the response to my bit had broken records. The phones had lit up like a . . . whatever. The Toronto producer was on the phone one tenth of a second after my segment wanting to know, “What the hell was that?” Read a review of Benway's Deathbed here.