EEEEEooooEEEEEEoooooEEEEEEoooooo!!! Da Boss was blowing the air horn alarm he’d installed in my editing bay last week when I was starting to slow. “You’re working on the wrong SECTION too long!” I told him to shut up and he told me to shut up and I reminded him that whenever he said anything about me he was really saying it about himself. Da Boss looked puzzled, then plucked some feathers from his corduroy coat before storming off into another room where he would once again forget why he went there in the first place.
There was much to do in Baltimore, much to do. The Maryland Film Festival was coming up in May; New/Next Festival was likely to return in the late summer or fall; and one contraband film we’d both been dying to see, The People’s Joker, would screen at the Parkway on April 19. It would be the first time either of us had been in that theater since New Year’s Eve 2022-23. Da Boss and I saw Black Christmas, and I stayed overnight stowed in one of the projection booths so I could catch the next day’s showing of Gremlins for free. I’m not a Gremlin but they are very cute creatures.
Da Boss hurtled back into my office to tell me about our new assignments. I asked about all of the events coming up, but he brushed me off and went on talking like always: “I need ‘One Day in NYC’ ready by April 24, and I need ‘The Couch’ ready by May 1. No delays. There can’t be any delays, Monica!!!” Whatever you say about me… Both pieces, like the movie itself, were about 60 percent there. This has been a strange movie to edit: huge, bulldozing chunks present themselves while weeks go by and no work gets done. Everything I’ve done has been through chance, and it’s resulted in some of the most exciting work of my editing career. Most of the things Da Boss has liked have been accidents: misaligned audio, late cuts, juxtapositions neither of us ever would’ve thought of.
In “The Couch,” four women destroy a black “casting couch” out in the suburbs of Baltimore. They’re all wearing white t-shirts, blue jeans, and red lipstick. In “One Day in NYC, Summer 2022,” two women wander around Tribeca, the neighborhood that Da Boss grew up in. I’ve given him several edits of that one, and he’s highlighted all the important landmarks to feature: the Tribeca Bridge, the Odeon, the Woolworth Building, 33 Thomas St., Duane Park, the Balloon Saloon, the Hudson muthafuckin’ rivah!
They’re fine short pieces, might make it into the Ann Arbor Film Festival, but Da Boss dismisses me again and tells me the details of their final destination: “One Day in NYC” will premiere at 2640 Space as part of the New Works series organized by Jimmy Joe Roche and Lydia Milano on April 26, while “The Couch” will premiere along with Matt Barry’s feature film The Cinema Detective at Normal’s on May 2. Da Boss is going to play some music at the latter, as well. I tried to compliment him on the score for both pieces, especially the song for “One Day in NYC,” but he brushed me off AGAIN, so I un-did auto-save and “lost” four days’ worth of work. I had it on a hard drive, blamed Da Boss, and let him have a panic attack while I “looked for” the project file. He doesn’t know it yet, but they’ll be ready in time.
—Follow Monica Quibbits on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits