Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

The first film Earl and I remade was Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Obviously. It couldn’t have been any other one. We were eleven, and we had seen it approximately thirty times, to the point where we had memorized all of the subtitles and even some of the dialogue in German. We sometimes repeated it in class, when the teacher asked us questions. Earl especially did this a lot, if he didn’t know the answer.

INT. MRS. WOZNIEWSKI’S FIFTH GRADE CLASS — DAY

MRS. WOZNIEWSKI

Earl, can you name some layers of the earth?

EARL’s eyes bug out. He breathes hard through his nose.

MRS. WOZNIEWSKI

Let’s start with the one on the inside. What’s another word for—

EARL

Ich bin der große Verräter. [subtitle: I am the great traitor.]

MRS. WOZNIEWSKI

Hmmm.

EARL

Die Erde über die ich gehe sieht mich und bebt. [subtitle: The earth I walk upon sees me and trembles.]

MRS. WOZNIEWSKI

Earl, do you want to tell us what that means?

EARL

glowering at classmates

grrrrrhh

MRS. WOZNIEWSKI

Earl.

EARL

standing up, pointing to MRS. WOZNIEWSKI, addressing class

Der Mann ist einen Kopf größer als ich. DAS KANN SICH ÄNDERN. [subtitle: That man is a head taller than me. THAT CAN CHANGE.]

MRS. WOZNIEWSKI

Earl, please go sit in the hall.

And then one day Dad bought a video camera and some editing software for 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 we used 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 the scenes 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 match the casualness with which eleven-year-old Earl can say words like “fuck”

Uh, shit.

EARL

Fuck.

DAD

offscreen, through the door

Guys, dinner’s in ten minutes.

after we do not reply

Guys? That was really pretty amazing. Mom and I are very impressed. You both should be really proud of yourselves.

a shorter pause

You guys all right? Can I come in there?

EARL

immediately

Hell no.

GREG

We’re OK, Dad.

EARL

If he come in here and talk about that stupid movie, I’ma kick myself in the head.

DAD

OK then!

Footsteps indicate that DAD has left.

GREG

That sucked so bad.

EARL

I’ma get that tape and burn it.

GREG

still having trouble swearing convincingly

Yeah, uh, fuck. Shit.

GREG and EARL are silent. CLOSE-UP of Earl. Earl is realizing something.

EARL

Werner Herzog can lick my ass-cheek.

GREG

What?

EARL

Man, fuck Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Werner Herzog can stick his face all up in my butthole.

GREG

uncertainly

OK.

EARL

We gotta make our own movie.

gaining momentum

We can’t try to make someone else’s movie. We’re gonna make our own movie.

now excited

We’re gonna make a movie called The Wrath of God II.

GREG

Earl, the Wrath of God II.

EARL

HELL YEAH.

In our creative partnership, Earl has always had the best ideas, and Earl, the Wrath of God II was one of his best. It never would have occurred to me, even though it wasn’t that complicated or crazy of an idea: Basically, it was to remake Aguirre again, but this time, to change all the parts that we couldn’t do, or even just the parts that we didn’t feel like doing. If there was a scene we didn’t like, in our version, it was gone. A character we couldn’t recreate: sayonara. A jungle that we couldn’t reproduce: converted into a living room, or the inside of a car. The best ideas are always the simplest.

So Earl, the Wrath of God II ended up being about a crazy guy named Earl and his search for the city of Earl Dorado in a normal family house in Pittsburgh. We shot it on location in the Gaines residence in Point Breeze, and we ad-libbed a lot of the dialogue, and Cat Stevens made some awesome cameos, and we set the whole thing to a funk CD Dad had lying around, and it took another month or two. At the end of it, we burned it to a DVD and had a secret viewing of the movie in the TV room.

It sucked. But it didn’t suck nearly as bad as our first film.

Our careers were born.