Free Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews Page A

his computer. It was to videotape his lectures or something. We didn’t know the specifics; we knew only that the specifics were boring. We knew also that this technology had come into our lives for a reason: We had to re-create every single shot in
Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
    We figured it would take about an afternoon. Instead, it took three months, and when I say “it,” I mean, “re-creating the first ten minutes and then giving up.” Like Werner Herzog in the South American jungle, we faced almost unimaginable setbacks and difficulties. We kept taping over our own footage, or not hitting record, or running out of camera battery. We didn’t really know how the lighting or sound was supposed to work. Some of the cast members—mostly Gretchen—proved incapable of delivering their lines properly, or staying in character, or not picking their nose. Also, we usually had a cast of just three people, or two if someone needed to hold the camera. The location weused was Frick Park, and joggers and dog walkers kept entering the shot, and then they would make things even worse by trying to start a conversation.
    Q: Are you guys shooting a movie?
    A: No. We’re opening a mid-priced Italian restaurant.
    Q: Huh?
    A:
Yes of course we’re shooting a movie.
    Q: What’s the movie about?
    A: It’s a documentary about human stupidity.
    Q: Can I be in your movie?
    A:
We’d
be stupid
not
to put you in it.
    Moreover, props and costumes were impossible to replicate. Earl wore a pot on his head, and it looked ridiculous. Nothing we had looked like cannons, or swords. Mom said we weren’t allowed to bring furniture from the house to the park, and then when we did, we had Suspended Camera Privileges for a week.
    Also, our process was dumb as all hell. We’d get to the forest and then completely forget what shot we were working on, or if we remembered it, we couldn’t remember the lines, and how the camera moved, and where the characters started and where they ended; we’d struggle for a while to shoot something that we thought was correct, without success. Finally, we’d go back to the house to try to write down what we were supposed to do, but then we’d end up having lunch or watching a movie or something; at the end of the day we’d try to get everything on the computer, but there was always some footage missing, and thescenes that survived looked like crap—bad lighting, inaudible dialogue, shaky camerawork.
    So we did this for months, eventually realized how slow we were working, and gave up after creating ten minutes of footage.
    Then Mom and Dad insisted on watching what we had done.
    It was a nightmare. For ten minutes, Earl and I watched with horror as, on the screen, we wandered around waving cardboard tubes and Super Soakers, mumbling in fake German, ignoring cheerful joggers and families and senior citizens with beagles. We had already known it was bad, but somehow, with Mom and Dad there watching, it seemed ten times worse. We became aware of new ways in which it was crappy: how there wasn’t really a plot, for example, and how we forgot to put in music, and how you couldn’t see anything half the time and Gretchen pretty much just stared at the camera like a house pet and Earl obviously hadn’t memorized his lines and I always always
always
had this stupid expression on my face like I had just had a lobotomy. And the worst part was,
Mom and Dad were pretending to like it.
They kept telling us how impressive it was, how well we had acted in it, how they couldn’t believe we had made something so good. They were literally oohing and ahhing at the stupid garbage on the screen.
    Basically, they were dealing with us as though we were toddlers. I wanted to murder myself. Earl did, too. Instead, we just sat there and didn’t say anything.
    Afterward we retreated to my room, utterly bummed out.
    INT. MY ROOM — DAY
    EARL
    Damn. That sucked.
    GREG
    We suck.
    EARL
    I fuckin suck worse than you do.
    GREG
    attempting to