Eli | Mike | Mary - click for individual bio

June 8 , 2004

Shooting the video, part 1

We decided a long time ago that we wanted to make a video, and thought that we’d better hurry up and shoot it before Mary explodes--I doubt that many other bands feature highly pregnant people in their videos, so if nothing else it should serve as something of a novelty. So, with that in mind, we’ve been rambling around Los Angeles for the past two Saturdays with a Bolex movie camera and a bear suit and generally sweating a lot.

First we had to decide which song we wanted to use for the video. This is harder than it seems, since we don’t have an obvious ‘hit’ and have nothing to go on but our own biased opinions. Originally we planned to use “Rejection Set Me Free,” since it sort of encapsulates everything we stand for (i.e. that we’re losers), but some of our friends suggested that they thought “Take It Outside” was catchier, and also has swearing in it (in Spanish). Plus, we all sing on it, and it’s peppy, so “Take It Outside” it was.

It also helped that “Take It Outside” (which is a song about getting into a fight) vaguely matched the content of some video footage we previously shot depicting a man in a bear suit getting into a fight with my friend Ron Wingate. Being cheapskates, we decided to recycle the outtakes from this unfinished project into our video. We had to rent the bear suit again—twice, as it turned out, which almost broke the bank—but, in retrospect, it was all worth it, if for no other reason than I discovered how much more popular I am to the general public when I am dressed as a big furry animal with a grotesquely enlarged head, as opposed to the way I normally look, i.e., as myself.

Our first day of shooting was Saturday before last. We started out filming the part that’s supposed to represent a Monolators concert, where Mike, Mary, and I pretend to play our instruments and sing along to our song. We chose a deserted amphitheater behind Occidental College as the most picturesque setting for this—it had big stone steps and looked a bit like an Aztec pyramid, and plus nobody (or almost nobody) was there when we filmed and so we went unmolested. Cody (our director/cinematographer, also bass player for the Trainables!) ran his 16mm movie camera while we gamely tried to lip-synch along with “Take It Outside” as it played over and over on a tiny boombox hidden behind my bass amp; if you’ve never tried to lip-synch before, it’s a little unsettling, like trying to sing underwater--my timing was always a little bit off. Mike’s niece, Jade, served as the single member of our audience, and we discovered one disadvantage to filing in an abandoned amphitheater, which is that Jade had to spend several minutes clearing away broken beer bottles from the stone steps before she could find a place to sit down.

Because I had to sing and play bass in this part of the video, I didn’t wear the bear suit myself during this part; Mary’s old roomie Dennis did this (and very well, I might add). Cody had him wander out of the woods, see the Monolators playing, and climb down the stone steps to dance with Jade. I watched Dennis and thought “I bet that bear suit’s kind of hot in there,” which was not a very brilliant thought but, as I later discovered, was totally correct.

After we finished the “concert” scene we went back to our house and then it was my turn to wear the bear suit (Dennis had to leave). In fact, I didn’t get a chance to take it off for the rest of the day, as Cody filmed me getting run over by a truck, sprayed with water, attacked by picnickers, threatened by punks, and taunted by bikers (this last shot, sadly, did not turn out). We shot a lot of film in Griffith Park, and I was a little surprised that nobody around there seemed to care much that there was a guy wandering around in a bear suit—until we got up to the observatory, where I suddenly became everybody’s friend. Want a bunch of Harley Davidson bikers to like you? Wear a bear suit! Somewhere there’s a picture of me in bear outfit standing in front of a line of Harleys while being hugged by a biker babe. “Look scary!” said the guy taking my picture. “Grrrr!” I said, and raised my paws/mittens threateningly. The biker girl giggled. I never got a good look at her because the eye-holes provided in the giant cartoon bear head were so small that all I could really see was her feet. But I’m pretty sure she loved the bear—well,. everybody loved the bear! I almost regretted taking the suit off except that I was sweating heavily and getting exhausted. When we met up with the rest of the crew back at the Gelson’s parking lot in Silverlake I leaned against a wall and fell asleep right there.

We would have finished the entire shoot that day had we not run out of film. That was okay, I just wanted to go back home and sleep; so we shut down for the day, and the rest of the filming would have to wait until the following Saturday.

Eli