And, of course, a seal.In 1999, a creatively fertile year for Hollywood, the most successful movie was an obvious one: Star Wars: Episode I-The Phantom Menace. All I need now is some unknown actors, a video camera and a huge promotional budget. I've already got a script written ("It's got me by my darned ankles!"). I'll start with "Hunt for the Latrine Demon," which will be about an ill-fated attempt to make a documentary about an entity that dwells, according to legend, in a primitive hand-dug campsite toilet facility. So I'm thinking I can cash in on my Camp Sharparoon stories by turning them into terrifying, low-budget films. Not to brag, but some of my stories were a lot scarier than "The Blair Witch Project," as determined by the standard unit of measurement for bedtime-story scariness, which is Bedrolls Wetted. When we were out in the woods at night, I could make the youths at least briefly stop hitting each other and making bodily sounds by telling them scary bedtime stories. In my college days, I spent my summers working at Camp Sharparoon as a counselor for disadvantaged youths, and one of my key counseling techniques was terror. I hope I don't appear to be criticizing "The Blair Witch Project." I happen to think it's a great film, because despite its flaws, it meets the ultimate artistic test: It will make more than $100 million. They respond to this predicament exactly as Lewis and Clark would have: by holding long, whiny arguments wherein they wave the camera around and repeatedly shout a very bad word that I cannot put in the newspaper, so let's just call it "darn." Much of the dialogue sounds like this: The characters set out and almost immediately become lost in the legendarily huge uninhabited forests of Maryland (motto: "The Endless Vast Expanse of Wilderness State").
The three movie characters are looking for the Blair Witch, who according to legend is a mean witch who is never actually seen because of the high cost of special effects. (For some reason, the camera is often pointed more or less at the ground, as though the seal were hunting for ants.) The effect of this technique is to create a mood of intense realism for several minutes, after which it creates a mood of intense motion sickness.
This means the camera constantly moves around, as though it were strapped to the head of a hyperactive seal. Not wishing to be a cultural holdout, I went to see "The Blair Witch Project," which tells the story of three young actors who attempt to make a documentary without a tripod.
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