The Last Picture Show?

Young Love
A short comedy film
written by: Jocelyn Parker (10th grade student)
directed by: A.J. Stich

This movie signals my mini return to film making. Upon graduating Asbury College with a media communications degree, I escaped the life of an over worked and under paid video production assistant in urban LA and exchanged it to be an over worked secondary school teacher in urban Memphis. Ok, I guess I'm simply a sucker for cheap gigs.

Either way, I took a hiatus from film making, dropped my production companies website, and let Final Cut Pro sit gathering dust on the shelves...until March 2008. Over a year has passed since my last short, and I decided it was time to get behind the camera again.

With the help of many of my students at Kingsbury High, we created a film club of sorts and produced our first film. It was written by a girl in my tenth grade class, and I really liked her script. Honestly, this film was a bit of a stretch for me since it is a big step away from the quirky sophisticated dark comedies that have consumed my film arsenal for the past three years. This film takes me back to my roots, back to films like "Kung Fu Theatre 3" (There was never a 1 or 2), "A.J. Chases J-ED," and "The Four Square Mocumentary." These films were defined by a low brow, Garfield like slapstick comedy that seems to effortlessly make people laugh. That's cool with me. I no longer need to make the next "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" or "Pulp Fiction." No. My endless nerve bending journey to be Martin Scorsese has ended, and I've become my own.

This film is not a comedy that will provide streamlined inspiration to the next generation of film makers or will define the genre of "funny" for years to come. Rather, this film is a movie that a community will see and laugh at hysterically because their friends and family are properly projected onto the big screen and they sort of for six minutes look and act like movie stars.

In time, we will see where this style of film making leads me to. Future goals? 100-158 YouTube views...Eat that Wes Anderson...