"Once upon a waste of time ..."
Comedy. Adventure. Magic. Sex. Wouldst thou like fries with that?
(90 min., 2000) This was the last of the "old" movies before we started shooting and editing digitally. This had better sound and was shot slightly better than the previous movies, but I still knew absolutely nothing about filmmaking. Which was kind of okay. It was that sort of movie.
In a time of kings, legends and fast food, despair and darkness have sloshed over the land. The last king was unable to produce an heir or indeed do much of anything in bed, and his most prized possession, Excaliburger, a spatula encased in stone, is the only key to breaking the spell. Spanky, a wide-eyed young former fast-food clerk, sets out on a quest for some reason and encounters magic, danger and stupidity at every turn. He is trained by Merlin. Not the famous Merlin, but a very good wizard indeed. And he meets a young girl squire named Arthur who apparently wants to be king herself - The nerve! Will Arthur and Spanky conquer the obstacles and idiots around them to reach the spatula in the stone? And what are they supposed to do when they get there?
I was 19, and had just finished my first year of college. After filming four movies in Connecticut in the first half of 1999 alone, I felt creatively lost when I wound up in Los Angeles attending USC. I was doing a lot of writing, including some quite serious scripts. But I wanted to make another comedy in Connecticut. I had an idea for a comedy fantasy film, spoofing Arthurian legend and Ridley Scott's Legend. I kept writing about hamburgers and sex, and somehow the title Excaliburger stuck. So did the character name "Spanky," to my eternal shame. I wrote the entire script in about a week, which probably shows. The influence of Douglas Adams and Monty Python is so obvious they should get royalties.
David Ashe paid for my flight back to Connecticut in summer 2000, giving me room and board and less than three weeks in which to shoot a feature-length motion picture. Despite the time constraints, we wanted to make an epic, as usual. By the end of it, we were very tired. Michelle Caruso played Arthur, David Marshall was the cameraman for a good chunk of the movie, and Niket Doshi and David Ashe relished the chance to have another swordfight onscreen. Much of the cast was also appearing in A Chorus Line at our high school. David Ashe and Steve Nagy adlibbed the best lines. Like an idiot, I even tried to shoot another movie at the same time, The Animal Effect, which was never finished.
I finished editing the film a year later, in 2001, and by that time I'd already started editing digitally, and directed more serious short films like Stripped Away. Excaliburger already seemed like a relic - the somewhat choppy editing would have been much better if edited digitally. It was very popular among those who'd liked The Phantom Movie and our early work, and we had several great public screenings of it, notably in South Dakota at the Rewind Fest, two years in a row. But David Ashe himself didn't like Excaliburger much - partly because he didn't co-write it! Perhaps we were already getting too old for this sort of comedy. My next feature would be a completely serious one - Gods of Los Angeles. But I miss the days of The Phantom Movie and Excaliburger - in some ways they had an energy that would be hard to recapture today.
(90 min, 2000) "EXCALIBURGER (or, the Spatula in the Stone)" was an Orange Cow Production written and directed by Garrett Gilchrist and produced by David Ashe. Director of photography was David Marshall. Original music was by Greg Nico!ett and Tal Pearson and David Ashe. It was recorded on location in Fairfield County, Connecticut during August 2000.
The film starred: Garrett Gilchrist as Spanky, Michelle Caruso as Arthur, David Ashe as Merlin, a Narrator, the Dueling Customer and the mummy, Miche!!e Mo!a as the Lady of the Lake and a Dancing Black Dress, Justin Bielawa as Stan, Jennifer Simmons as Oona and a Gypsy, Dan Buzi as Mr. MacDonald, Niket Doshi as Lord of the Sword, Greg Nico!ett as Lord of Mirrors and Lord of the Dance, Ben Sipprell as King Arthur, Desiree Accomando as Queen, Gabe Cooper-Bey as King of Fairies, Steve Nagy as Town Crier, a Fairy, a Ninja, and a king, David Marshall as minstrel, David Brown as keeper of the mummy, Liz DiMenno as Young woman, and Jon Miller, Pete Guerrera, Megan Finnegan, Heather Bombero, Jennifer DiMeglio, Bethany Veerman, Sara Jeruss, Melissa Duphiney, Tal Pearson, Sarah Rowe, and Tom Vandevoort.
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![Excaliburger as or, the spatula in the stone]](exhead.jpg)
