The Student Film

My roommate Dan kept talking about his student movie and how terrible it was. One of the guys he'd worked with on the project had moved to L.A. and was sending him a copy of their film. According to Dan, the script for their student film had been great, but filming constraints and limit to enough child actors made it difficult to shoot as they'd intended. They ended up rewriting during shooting, and in his opinion the final cut was pretty bad. The movie arrived in our mailbox one Thursday afternoon, and my other roommate Bill and I both got home pretty late that night. Dan was on the couch and kept talking about the movie, saying he was going to put it on. It was already late, and Bill had gone off to his room. Two hours on the couch with a terrible movie never sounds like a good time, but I understood I'd have to watch it eventually. Starting it Thursday late wasn't what I had in mind, and I was trying to find the words to let Dan down without hurting his feelings. Mostly, I didn't want to sit there for two hours. That was when Dan dropped that the movie is only 12 minutes long. Bill was still in his room and didn't overhear, and he walked out with about a dozen excuses for why we couldn't start the movie that night. I kept shouting, "It's only 12 minutes! It's only 12 minutes long!" but Bill was locked in and had to get off his chest why he couldn't stay up to watch Dan's film. Once everyone calmed down, we turned on the movie. It was bad, but Dan's running commentary on what it was supposed to be like was reasonably entertaining. Plus, it was only 12 minutes long.