Thursday, January 7, 2010

Some mostly uninteresting notes about The Doppelganger

The latest ChurchOfBlow is probably the weirdest thing I've ever done, but it's loosely based on something that happened to me years ago.

I grew up in a very small town in rural Maine, and about halfway into my junior year in high school I started wearing a bowler hat everywhere I went. I never drove, so everybody in town would see me walking. To this day I'm amazed nobody beat me up. I only had to endure the occasional drive-by call of "Faggot!"

Like Bernard, I spent a large amount of time at the local diner, sitting at the window, drinking shitty coffee and reading. One day a friend of mine (Ryan Wing, the man I spin around during the chase) came in and was a little startled to see me, claiming he'd driven past me mere seconds earlier. He didn't put his finger in my coffee (this was an organicprankster touch) but he seemed a little freaked out, or at least pretended to be.

Turns out there was another man in town walking around with a bowler hat. He didn't exactly look like me but he had a similarly shaped face and perfect posture. Enough to fool my friends.

He wasn't hunted down or beheaded, but those bits from the sketch grew out of jokes we made in mock fear of this man. I shot a really, really crappy version of this idea when I was in film school. I might upload it to my weepingprophet channel if I'm feeling sadistic. It was a little project I shot for a class, and it's bad even by YouTube standards (though my friend Alex - who you might know as Lord Fauntleroy - a nice little ad lib).

I passed the details along to organicprankster when he started writing the Bernard Smith series, and he wrote it into a script that was sent to me on February 23, 2007. I've been dying to do it ever since. It's one of my favorite scripts of his and I'm glad I finally got around to it.

I'm also glad I waited because it wouldn't have been as impressive in 2007.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I have a few friends who don't drive -- each has their own reason. Wondered if you'd been in a car accident growing up, that made a permanent impression on you? Or, I had one friend who said he could not drive without constantly accelerating, so he was dangerous. Another friend tells me that when he tries to drive, all he can focus on is that he's handling a lethal object, which freaks him out and he can't concentrate...

Hinimation Studio said...

Hello Jeremiah,

Follow you from churchofblow, I find your videos of genius ( "a lot of loss" in particular).
I'll give you my compliments, you expect a new creation,

Bye;)

ps. sorry for my english!

deltajuliet said...

Fedoras are where it's at.

Anonymous said...

dammit, why can't I comment?!

Oh...Um, I've watched a few of your videos and just wanted to say something that won't make any difference whatsoever and that is the following:
1) you are really funny ( my serpentine +1! )
2) deviations from your initial norm were fun and also painful, so probably effective ( the "a lot of loss" video was v,v good )
3) your patience for video editing is something I envy and I'm glad there are folks like you around to do it because if it were left to me, it would never get done - i tried it once and i went ballistic though i am not writing you from jail
4) please make the Comment links more obvious as i almost went ballistic
5) make more videos...NOW!!