He seriously did. We were watching a clip from the first season of the Jerry Springer show and I commented on how nice his hair looked back then! That’s all! Just an innocent little quip!

Of course, he was just joking around. All in good fun.

I guess some background. Because I am part of Campus Events, the Speakers part (the triumvirate of Campus Events programming is Speakers, Concerts, and Films) asked if I would moderate this Jerry Springer event. He was coming to talk, there would be clips from his show, questions, answers, a few of his bodyguards, all in all a pretty good evening, so I agreed with full gusto.

And the evening turned out pretty well, I must say. The people at NBC have a good sense of humor, so there was lots of joking around. I cracked a couple jokes to Jerry and amused him mightily (and one comparing the food fights to the Splash Zone at Seaworld got spatterings of laughter from the audience!), though he barbed back about my “failure” to dress well (I WAS DRESSED JUST FINE).

What was interesting about Jerry was how much more a politician he is than a talk show personality. He definitely has the comedic timing and storytelling ability of a talk show host, but he talked endlessly about politics, the value of the common person (we’re not better than any of the people on his show, we’re often just luckier in life), and other fairly serious matters. I, and others from the CEC staff, were surprised at this part of his personality. I felt a little bit like a tool having to segue to stupid clips from his show about transvestites or a man married to a horse when he just finished talking about members of his family dying in the Holocaust…

He’s a really interesting person, but he talked… and talked… and went an hour over how long we were supposed to chat, and we had to forfeit the Little People Montage. Freakin’ sad.

The evening, though I had many audio difficulties (mic cutting in and out, switching mics for me halfway through, for Jerry at the beginning, speaker cutting in and out…), was pretty good.

The ensuing Q-and-A was hilarious. It definitely is a “you had to be there” situation, but one guy did have the courage to ask Jerry about his infamous encounter with a prostitute (he paid with a check), to which Jerry revealed…

The check was never cashed! Nothing illegal happened!

Jerry did a bit of a dance afterward and it brought delight upon all the lingering fans.

cec. jerry jerry jerry!

Oh, and then he checked the score of the Lakers game for us on his Razr before leaving to catch his plane. Nice guy.

Sharpie Shoes 2 from jeffreezy17 on Vimeo.

Vimeo HD, far superior than YouTube! Try watching it full screen! It’s amazing, no?

Anyway, enjoy it! I think it is better than last year’s trial in several different ways… I actually used the tripod correctly this time, I tried it from a couple different angles, putting a sock in the shoe itself reduces some of the bumpiness of the fabric… yeah!

I should get to bed since it’s past 1 and I have to get up at 8, but why not regale you with tales of the film school application process while it’s still fresh in mind?

Applying to film school was something I thought I would do before coming to UCLA (and ironically, that’s why I took History of Musicals… I thought it would satisfy a theater prerequisite… D’oh). Then I got waylaid and seduced by other majors before ultimately deciding last fall that I would need to apply to at least give myself a shot. I don’t think I’ll mind terribly one way or the other in regards to acceptance, but I know that if friends of mine got accepted and I didn’t even try, I’d beat myself up over it.

I didn’t do much work over Winter Quarter, though maybe I should have, and really started to pick it up the last few weeks and Spring Break. There are three main components to the application that we have control over (hard to tell people what to write in Letters of Recommendation), and they are the Personal Statement, Critical Essay, and Creative Supplement.

As my journal could show you, I’ve had many, many different attempts at each of these. Some are well-conceived, others are pretty bad, and some are just plain illegible…

For the Personal Statement I bounced between quite a few different ideas. Some were very cocky and vindictive, declaring that I didn’t need film school because I had the belief in myself that I’d be successful regardless. I didn’t know how well the jackass technique would play with the elderly film school advisors, so I toned it down and tried to channel a more imaginative, childlike essay.

This consisted of me explaining why I wanted to volunteer and help children instead of take a film prerequisite, and that seemed a little off-base, but I’m sure plenty heartwarming. That led to a massive rhyming manifesto that I thought was really cool and would stand out and they would either love or hate it… and then my brother came in with his cool wisdom. He said that my application should stand out for its quality. Rhyming would just make it stand out pointlessly…

I wrote a normal personal statement (still has some rhymes in it!), one that doesn’t attack the school too much and also states stuff about me, personally. They are really frustrating to right, as I’m sure you remember from applying to college… how do you cut down your whole self to two pages?

The critical essay does not have many cool stories, other than I was going to write about television until I went to the informational meeting and they basically shot down television as an inferior form of media…
As for the creative story, it ranged from a college kid who went home after graduating and is disillusioned about how to attain success to a story about a village that fends off weekly dinosaur attacks and how life is lived in that kind of world to a father competing with his son to sell lemonade.

Yeahhh… If you would like to read any or all of these, let me know. I’d be happy to show them to you.

Thank you to everyone in the past few weeks who has asked how the application is going, made sure I wasn’t going insane, helped me find grammatical errors or alter complete plot points. It all helped, and if anything is to come out of this, it was really a group effort.

The next step, for those wondering, will happen in a few weeks when they send out e-mails to those who get interviews. If I’m fortunate enough to make it to that step, I will interview (supposedly torturous), and then find out in July.

As for my feelings about the whole process, I obviously feel relieved to be done. It did take a lot of time, and kept me from doing more schoolwork/exercise/creative stuff/friendly hang-outs over the past few weeks, but I did it. That may not count for much in the long run, but to have edited three pieces of work to what they finally become is something of which I am proud. They are good pieces of writing, and while I hope the film school recognizes it, I’ve talked to too many people who didn’t go to film school and still entertain people in the medium to get down about not getting in.

As Kurt Vonnegut says, so it goes. I’ve had a pretty good streak of applications and interviews over the past year, but streaks eventually break, and who knows what kind of motivation would come out of this?

It’s now out of my hands, so I’m going to put my hands back to work.

Thank you all again.