mobileCategory: nostalgia
05/05/07 07:06 - ID#39160
Buffalo Movie
This post was originally a comment on (e:anne)'s post (e:anne,39151) on Buffalo Movie. But the overwhelming nostalgia it digged up turned into a full-length post.
The Buffalo Movie playwright was one of my script-writing/acting partners in crime back in Ithaca College when I was a television-production major working on college TV shows. One show we wrote/acted on together was a sci-fi sitcom called "Tales Of The Rounded Pie" about a pizza joint in a college town and all the things you'd never imagine happening to a pizza joint in a college town. TOTRP is how I met (e:bugmuncher), who was the producer of the show and my roomate junior year. And (e:bugmuncher) was how I met (e:lizabeth).
Jon's writing was funny, although a little obsessive at times. A play where he uses the word "Buffalo" 160 times does not suprise me. Then again, Jon wrote the character I played on TOTRP, a vicious mobster in the style of Mr. Blonde, as waking up to find out that he got sexually molested by a whole fraternity (cue the screams of "FRAT BOY SCUUUUM!"), so I have a pretty hard time being surprised.
Those were the good old days. If you had told us back then that one day people would be buying digital camcorders for $300 and editing them on relatively cheap computers that came with software a hundred times better and easier to use than what we were using, and that we could do all this from the comfort of our living rooms and find a ready audience for our stuff (i.e. YouTube) without having to go through the whole TV industry to do so, we would have jizzed in our pants.
I'd like to be naive enough to imagine that all this virtually free access to technology has made Roy H. Park School of Communications a far more democratic society where taping of shows doesn't have to revolve around "we've got to tape a football game this weekend" and where cool niche shows are allowed to thrive instead of being killed off in popularity contests. I'm sure it's changed the dynamics of the school, but humans always tend to find new and different and interesting ways to make caste systems when the old ones are on the verge of being removed.
It's a shame I've never been able to get in touch with Jon. He was a good friend at IC and I had fun hanging out with him. When I first came up here, he was the only person that I knew lived up here. But aside from the fun I had at college, I also fucked up in a lot of ways that alienated a bunch of people (probably including Jon). While I'm a different person now, my guess is that any bridges that could have crossed the gap of years had been burnt long ago.
Damn, now I'm even having more of an urge to go on a road trip this summer to Ithaca. It's been almost 10 years since I've last seen the place.
As for what I'm doing today, it'll probably be finding out the best places to go in Buffalo for Cinco de Mayo. I want to see (e:soma) perform at Off the Wall, but I also need to put down one or two half-way decent margaritas to celebrate.
The Buffalo Movie playwright was one of my script-writing/acting partners in crime back in Ithaca College when I was a television-production major working on college TV shows. One show we wrote/acted on together was a sci-fi sitcom called "Tales Of The Rounded Pie" about a pizza joint in a college town and all the things you'd never imagine happening to a pizza joint in a college town. TOTRP is how I met (e:bugmuncher), who was the producer of the show and my roomate junior year. And (e:bugmuncher) was how I met (e:lizabeth).
Jon's writing was funny, although a little obsessive at times. A play where he uses the word "Buffalo" 160 times does not suprise me. Then again, Jon wrote the character I played on TOTRP, a vicious mobster in the style of Mr. Blonde, as waking up to find out that he got sexually molested by a whole fraternity (cue the screams of "FRAT BOY SCUUUUM!"), so I have a pretty hard time being surprised.
Those were the good old days. If you had told us back then that one day people would be buying digital camcorders for $300 and editing them on relatively cheap computers that came with software a hundred times better and easier to use than what we were using, and that we could do all this from the comfort of our living rooms and find a ready audience for our stuff (i.e. YouTube) without having to go through the whole TV industry to do so, we would have jizzed in our pants.
I'd like to be naive enough to imagine that all this virtually free access to technology has made Roy H. Park School of Communications a far more democratic society where taping of shows doesn't have to revolve around "we've got to tape a football game this weekend" and where cool niche shows are allowed to thrive instead of being killed off in popularity contests. I'm sure it's changed the dynamics of the school, but humans always tend to find new and different and interesting ways to make caste systems when the old ones are on the verge of being removed.
It's a shame I've never been able to get in touch with Jon. He was a good friend at IC and I had fun hanging out with him. When I first came up here, he was the only person that I knew lived up here. But aside from the fun I had at college, I also fucked up in a lot of ways that alienated a bunch of people (probably including Jon). While I'm a different person now, my guess is that any bridges that could have crossed the gap of years had been burnt long ago.
Damn, now I'm even having more of an urge to go on a road trip this summer to Ithaca. It's been almost 10 years since I've last seen the place.
As for what I'm doing today, it'll probably be finding out the best places to go in Buffalo for Cinco de Mayo. I want to see (e:soma) perform at Off the Wall, but I also need to put down one or two half-way decent margaritas to celebrate.
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Garrett Frawley, Scott Geissler, and Jason Sherry. They were in the class of 1995; I believe the show was being produced as early as 1993. The plan was for the show to die in 1995 when the creators graduated - instead I begged them to let me take it, and we wrote a "transitional episode" to get away from the problems that would occur due to the whole cast graduating.
I was not much of a producer then - I guess I was unaccustomed to doing real work - so the show was pretty lame and a bunch of my actors quit. I saw that others would do more with the show, so Ryan Bedell produced after me, and I think he actually got more episodes done.
One episode (Episode Eight) was never finished; it was co-written with Adam Mickelson, a Computer Science major at University of Maryland. I think I may have finished Episode nine, but I really don't remember.
Anyway, this show preceded both the "Two guys, a girl, and a pizza shop" and "Good Burger" which were the concepts I thought were closest. What really set this show apart in its origin was that it was really a sci-fi series. It just happened to be set in a pizza shop. Not every episode had anything to do with science fiction, but it was an important part of the universe and had a role in the overall plot progression.