Director: Mac Boyle (Hey! That’s me!)
Cast: Bill Fisher, Mac Boyle, Candacee White, Kerri Hensley
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, man. Where does one begin?
For the last couple of years I’ve been occasionally almost hyper aware that this day was coming. 06/15/2022. Twenty years since The Adventures of Really Good Man had its one and only public screening at the Aaronson Auditorium. Twenty years since I locked myself up in the editing room (really, Bill Bland’s apartment) with all the footage we amassed over two years, and didn’t emerge again until we had something of a movie I could show people.
Using a perhaps hilariously preposterously conservative estimate, I’ve seen the movie* about 50 times. I have not had occasion to watch it in ten years. For a brief flash of a moment, I thought we might do something more elaborate for the 20th anniversary. But in all honesty, I haven’t given the Average Avenger much thought over the last 8 years or so.
That’s the way he would want it, too, I think**. Looking back on it too often means other horizons might go unexplored. Really Good Man was absolutely, 100% my life from about the spring of 2001 to the summer of 2002. I lived and died by the ups and downs of the movie, and in my mind there should have been ten movies, 6 seasons of a TV show, a theme park, with a subsequent corporate takeover of the IP and in the process I’m banished to some kind of wilderness (which also has Wi-Fi, a refrigerator, and a microwave oven) where people could wonder what happened to me.
So yes, I’ve seen the movie before, and yes, I have a certain romanticized view of the whole thing. And in honor of its 20th anniversary, I’m turning these reviews back on to myself.
Did I Like It: There’s so many things about the movie I could say right out of the gate without rewatching it. The camera work is occasionally a frightful mess. I know whose fault that is; you don’t have to tell me. The sound recording is going to be so bad, that I can only hope the viewer likes overblown recordings of Oklahoma wind and traffic cut together badly. Again, I know who’s responsible. The performances (especially Bill) are genuinely pretty good, which of course I had almost no control over. Catching a Burger King drive-thru at precisely the right moment was pure serendipity.
And here’s the really odd thing that happened as I watched again for the first time in years.
It wasn’t nearly as bad as I had feared.
Some of the camera work is still pretty shoddy. I didn’t know how to stage a scene of dialogue (or, at least, didn’t have the resources to properly stage one) for the life of me, but in those long takes with no coverage to spare, the background sound is better than I remember. There aren’t a lot of jarring noises of traffic cutting in and out.
Bill’s performance is still an exceptionally deft melding of improv and scripted comedy. In scenes I know to be improvised, he is in the moment and reacting as the character would. In written scenes, every line reading is believable. A cynic might say he is playing a version of himself at the time, but I would counter that with the realization that every great movie star in history is doing precisely the same thing.
God help me, more than a few of the jokes still work. The line about stopping the Damsel in Distress-ish’s (Hensley) wedding was a good line then, and it’s a good line now. The Burger King scene is the movie I saw in my head the whole time I was making it. I had all but forgotten the new title cards I had written for the 10th anniversary edition, and they made me genuinely laugh now. If making yourself laugh ten or twenty years in the future isn’t a kind of magic, I don’t know what is.
Is the film objectively more than some kids messing around with a camcorder? Probably not. However, if we can accept “kids messing around with a camcorder” as a legitimate sub-genre of the movies, then I think it may be one of the best examples. I know, deep within my heart of hearts, it was the best possible movie I could have made at the time.
I look at it now and remember what it was like back then. We are all preserved at a particular moment which was fun and adventurous. I see all the people who were there and remember only happy times, and the hope at that moment that even happier times were to come. Most people have a yearbook. We have this.
What more could one want out of a movie?
*In all of its iterations: the 1:15 minute rough cut (which never screened outside of the MacBook upon which it was originally edited), the 1:05 minute version that screened in ‘02 and was given as a copy to anyone who would ask, the 35:00 minute version I cut together in 2007 after Bill and I during a casual chat agreed that if we had to do it over again, we’d do less, the 15 minute version we sent to fly-by-night film festival at OSU, and the eventual four-part web series recut from 2012, which is currently available on YouTube.
**And if I think something about Really Good Man, it is canon. Provided Bill agrees with it, too.