PROPOSAL

During the spring and summer of 1986, my friends and I collected ourselves for a most ambitious undertaking. Together, we would make ED THE MOVIE.

ED THE MOVIE is a creature flick…a paranoid thriller…a collection of music videos. And a parody of all three. I shot and edited the film with deeply discounted Chinon Super8 gear from K-Mart, then added a completely over-dubbed soundtrack with the help of an incredibly generous friend who worked in a college media department. It was finished just a few days prior to its first and only screening at a church camp in Tennessee, where it was played on a VHS VCR and exhibited on a living room television set.

ED \ NOW is a seven-part documentary film that will explore the heady days of my youth among teenagers in an evangelical Christian youth group in the American Deep South. These are completely unjaded, uncynical…sweet teenagers (and a few of their young adult sponsors) who appear in the film, and operate behind its scenes.

ED THE MOVIE is not the work of a cinematic prodigy. Rather, it is a security camera glimpse into a community of kids, safe and secure within a loving and accepting extended family.

I want to know what happened to my friends after the summer of ED THE MOVIE. I want to know how that particular nest of youth affects who they have become. Clearly, I am a much different person than I was in 1986. And yet, in many ways, I am so much the same. I am eager to learn how my old friends have changed. And…in what ways they have remained the same.