I’m going to tell a little story and get to the point of to why this is called 1996:

Yesterday, I was thinking about all the movies that I haven’t seen in a long ass time and that I had wanted to see but I never get myself to putting them on. One of those movies was the Sean Connery/Nic Cage starring action film: The Rock; not to be confused by the actor (former wrestler) The Rock, these are two totally different things, one is the island of Alcatraz in San Fransisco and the other is a big guy who if given a great script should become the next Arnold. Anyway, I popped the DVD in and I started watching it.

The interesting thing about the DVD was that I remembered when I bought and why I bought it…I purchased this DVD in the spring of my freshmen year of college. I already owned The Rock on VHS, but now everything was coming out on DVD and The Rock had already come out on DVD a few years back but in a basic, “here is your movie, its like the VHS copy you have, but on DVD” and I wanted the Criterion Edition. Criterion is a group that buys the rights to films and make special editions off of them and sells them for about five to ten dollars more. Kind of a rip-off now that I see it, I have only purchased two Criterion editions and I had one given to me, all of them have not been worth the money spent on them. I just like the movies so much that I wanted them.

Anyway, I was in my second semester of my beloved film major, and I believe I was with Melissa already around this point, and one of the projects that we had to do was come up with a reimagination of a scene from a film. My first one was the Scary Movie (the first movie) scene in which the ghost face (the killer) with the tongue calls some of the boys who are all smoking pot, it was a complete and utter rip on the Budweiser comercial that with the “Wazzup!” but I liked it so much that I did it. And it was great! (I know I still have this, and if I can, I’ll get Mr. Chinoy to dump it into the computer and see if I can post it).

But for some reason I needed one more project complete before summer break, the professor (who at the time I hated and grew to love and now I miss, I hope to one day be able to work with him as a producer of some kind) asked me to make another “reimagination”.

I was asked to work with this other kid, I don’t remember his name, nor do I even know what happened to him other than the fact that he was leaving shortly after this semester ended and I never heard from him again. We’ll call him preppy emo glasses guy (because quite frankly he wore emo glasses but was very preppy and proper, he always dressed nice, and if you are going to be emo, you should not have blondish hair…that’s just wrong). Preppy emo glasses guy (PEGG–ohh! I didn’t even mean for it to come out like that, that’s so appropriate, we’ll call him PEGG!) PEGG and I were going to work together to knock it out at the same time and we thought about using a great scene from Face/Off, the scene that again, Nic Cage and John Travolta have already traded faces and identities and they are lying on the floor with only a mirror in between each other and they end up shooting at each other. Great scene, but alas, it was way too short.

So, I thought about it very quickly, and I came up with The Rock and the seen with the “Glass or plastic, GLASS OR PLASTIC!” that happens towards the end of the film and has Nic Cage telling one of the Marines that if he kills him and the wind changes, when the rockets shoot off, they will all be dead, and that they’ll either pic up his body in either a glass jar or a plastic bag. (Damn, I didn’t even have to look that up, I still remember it to this day, even though I saw the movie like two hours ago, I still remember it, word for word–and if I look, I will probably find the script that we wrote out using the words from the movie and pausing and typing it up–upon further review, it was probably lost during the exchange between my old DELL desktop and my current Toshiba lap top, which had a overhaul done on it around this time last year by Vault Keeper–I did however find something from Fall 2000 which said that “I’m leaning towards Al Gore” man would things have been different with him around rather than our Commander in Idiot! Getting back to what I was saying). PEGG actually said that the Criterion Edition fo the DVD was coming out and I went out and I bought it.

We shot the scene, I used: Chris, my roommate as the Sean Connery character Mason, D (yes he liked to call himself D instead of Dainel) as Goodspeed, and Rich (D’s roommate) as the marine. We were going to shoot it in the back of the school property by where the train passed through, it was actually a jogging and bike riding walk way that lead to the train station. PEGG had some fake guns, they were actually bebe guns that looked damn near real and we went to Public Saftey to ask them if we could do it (I didn’t want to have someone on the train see us and call the police thinking we were gunning down poor D! That just would not have been cool). They said no obviously and we went to plan B.

In Madison (or is it Morristown at that point) there is a Friendly’s ice cream place and directly behind there is another part of this pathway to a trainstation and we went there, there was a lot of good visuals there. I knew that PEGG was going to out do me, I had no real experience doing anything, but I was trying, PEGG on the other hand lived, breathed, shit film, I wish I could do that, I just live it and breath it, but shitting film would be way too painful. I went first and we shot the scene. I don’t know what became of this film, I think I might still have a DV tape of it in my room at home, but I don’t know if I threw it out or not, would have been funny I must say.

Anyway, I never really watched The Rock, DVD, it just sat there, and sat there, and this was the first time in about probably eight years or so that I actually watched it completely. I saw it in the theater when it came out, in 1996. That’s right, The Rock is now (or will be in June) 10 years old. Oh man! And it still stands true to today. Its one of my favorite movies of all time. (Once was number one, but when Pirates came out, it slipped to number two).

1996 was a great year for movies, The Rock came out yes, but there were a whole bunch of other great movies that all used a ton of special effects and made a shit load of money, including: Twister, Mission: Impossible (the first one!–the second came out in 2000), The Cable Guy, Independence Day….just to name a few. Great year for movies. Twister I saw about a month ago at Melissa’s house, there was a time I couldn’t stand that movie, but seeing it again so many years later (like The Rock) gave me a new respect for the film. I also did something similar to Face/Off a few months ago, still stands strong as a film, just don’t watch it all the time.

Ten years have gone by. I can’t believe it.

Maybe I don’t have a moral to this story nor do I have any real end, I wanted to tell a story that may have been lost for all time in my head and in the minds of all those involved. It may not have been the best of stories, but I was just writing it from my mind. I wanted to tell you about The Rock and about 1996 and how its been 10 years. In 1996, I still had the computer that my parents bought in 1991, we would later get a Gateway in 1997. In 1996, when The Rock came out I was in 8th grade. I don’t even know what songs came out in 1996, I wasn’t paying that much attention at that point in time, not until my friend Kashif sent me my first MP3 from an MP3 chat room (which I don’t believe are in existence anymore) in the spring of 1997. I still remember the first two I asked him to send me and when one plays its weird not hearing the second one come right after it (Sex and Candy as well as Bittersweet Symphony).

A lot has happened over the last ten years. I can’t believe that much has gone by…crazy!

–Socram