forty years on...

bundies-2014

This weekend is the 40th reunion of what should have been my high school graduating class. I went to school with the same kids from kindergarten until my junior year. That summer my family moved from Topeka to Austin, Texas. There I graduated early, in January, and left the next day to head out on my own. I moved back to Topeka and the rest as they say is.....

I planned to be at the reunion until last Friday when my doctor advised against 8 to 10 hours of traveling by car. As my tele-portation device, made for me by a 2nd grade GT student some ten years ago, has never really worked correctly, I won't get to make it. I still wanted to share several things with everybody.

TREAT NUMBER ONE:

Here's a link to Audio House Studio recordings of NE Kansas garage bands from 1960s

Kansas Garage Bands 

The Bundies Saga

In the spring of 1971 I was walking home from Landon Junior High when an idea for movie popped open in my mind. I was always getting ideas and it was that year when I started jotting them down. I still have lots of those notebooks.

On this day a fully formed story came to me. Maybe not all the names, but plot points, scenes, characters and music. The music selections dominated my thinking. I made super 8 movies with a group of friends. We used a primitive lip sync method called Bell & Howell Filmo-sound. There was always a carefully weighed tradeoff in our movies between sound/dialogue and cinematic vision. If only we’d had the HD recorders almost all kids have access to now there is no telling what we might have done.

That day walking through Hillsdale park at Huntoon & Fairlawn I thought of my idea as a modern opera using rock songs from my past(tunes from way back in 1967) to tell the story of young love and betrayal in 6th grade.

It seemed like heady stuff at the time. I carried the idea around for years. During high school and college when discussing great ideas for movie projects I always had it ready to pull out and pitch.

Fast forward to 1981, June, my brother, Crager and I find ourselves in Los Angeles so he can check out the graduate film program at USC. We’ve spent the day at Disneyland. Even at 25 it was all I’d ever dreamed it could be. For the drive back from Anaheim we stopped at a grocery store and dang if you couldn’t buy real booze in a grocery store. Back home in Texas, we couldn’t buy light bulbs on Sunday, but 18 year-olds could buy any manner of alcohol and drink and drive as long as you weren’t intoxicated. Scout’s honor! Talk about goofy, I worked for the state and got both Juneteenth and Confederate Veterans Day off. Like a whole other country.

35 bucks American(1981dollars) to borrow that costume to nab these snapshots...

Needless to say by the time we got back to Hollywood Blvd. where we were staying at a motel with perfect audio access to various business  transactions of prostitutes on the corner(this was before 1984 Summer Games) in Room 237. 

Once more I digress. As ardent fans of Kubrick’s take on The Shining we thought it was darn trippy. Your humble narrator was a tad less than a shade away from being able to drive in his newly adopted  home state of Texas. When we saw the bright lights of the Tower Records on Sunset I blabbered at Crager to stop, please can we stop.

I love record stores. Before I became an educator I worked in them for over a decade. Not that much different from a severe alcoholic tending bar where he gets free drinks. Remember, in ‘81 there were still “record” stores filled with actual records, cassettes, and 8-tracks. You could get lost in a store like Tower that had a 45 section that had, that had, that had….almost any 45 I was looking for. I stocked up with the songs I needed for my still oft discussed operatic tale of young prepubescent love. I walked out with almost 50 bucks worth of 45s.

Back in Austin I made a tape called, “Going Steady,” which had been my working title for years. I had a spiral notebook I’d been adding to for 5 or 6 years with ideas for this one project. I played the tape whenever I was in my truck. I especially liked putting the tape in after I got off work at the Children’s Unit of the State Hospital, cranking it up, sipping on a cool G&T, windows down, driving west from Austin into the dark & starry nights of the Hill Country, out around Enchanted Rock and back home maybe 3 hours later. Some nights I ended up pulling off the road and “resting” until the morning, falling asleep to Crystal Blue Persuasion.

the rock

In April of 1982, during a month period between jobs, I finally sat down with my index cards and notes and tape and typed out the first draft of what became, Bundies. The PDF posted here is very close to the original but was finished in 1986? as my submission in the Nichols Fellowship Screenwriting Competition.

Obviously, I didn’t win. Now, after a surprise career shift very late in my career, I’m a 2nd & 3rd grade math teacher. I’ve never sold a screenplay but it never stopped Crager and me from trying. The only one that ever really mattered to me was Bundies, well, and, Somewhere Cold in the Midwest, What Did You Expect a Bubble Bath?, 100 Pieces, Gone, The Story of the Christmas Potato,Thunderhead,...not to mention the ones I never completed, Adobe Walls, Battle Dance, House of Three  Brothers, This Version of You, The Orphan, My 3 El-vy, The Big Yard, Frito and Thud, The Music Supervisor, George Clooney IS "The Book Club Detective, Cart Monkeys, 8:38, Los Matavacas, and I've got demons that need a jesus.

If you read Bundies, which I hope you will, (that’s why I posted it) you won’t get very far before you go...wait a minute, this sure reminds me of, that show, you know the one from the 80’s, with Kevin and Winnie….

10 roger on that good buddy. There are many similarities, coincidences, all I can say is, just like inventions good ideas have a way of serendipitously emerging at the same time. Even though Bundies floated around over two years before "that TV show," there is nothing that would lead me to believe it is anything beyond coincidence. Do I wish I’d been in the right spot and the right time first? As cool as that would have been, no, not really. I’m where I am right now because of all that has happened before. Because of that, this, etc.

I’m happy and selfishly that’s all that matters to me.

I hope  you will take the time to read it. Obviously it isn’t perfect and I’m betting there’s typos and other flaws. I haven't even read since I digitized it 6 years ago. I wrote it over 30 years ago. Looking back it was a different life time. 

Bundies, a screenplay PDF 

I’ve also provided links to two playlists on YouTube. One has the songs I bought that night in LA and originally imagined telling the story.

The other is the soundtrack for what  I’d call Bundies II or When we were immortals. One of my best friends(actually my cousin) used that term to describe the point in time when an incredible joyride/horror show experience happened to him just south of the border which he related to me 25 years after the fact in his backyard on a summer’s eve. Dub has stories, true stories, that could fuel more than just a couple of movies about the folly of youth.

Spaceship Orion would be the alternate title to the movie which doesn’t actually have much to do with Bundies except the characters are the same age and mention is made peripherally about certain Bundies characters. The basic story revolves around friends remembering a botched trip to Texas to see the Grateful Dead, the misadventures, and the tragic consequences retold as they sit in a surgery waiting room while one of their circle is having open heart surgery. If I ever get it all typed up I’ll post it too.

Please stay in touch. Leave a message and an email. Because of my role as a teacher I no longer used Facebook or any other social media. It makes it much easier all around.