Brumski's
I made my first and only short film 15 years ago
Blurb by John Beifuss
I love movies. The first film I saw was “What’s Up Doc?” with my family. That movie came out in 1972, so it was probably 1974 or 75 when we saw it in the theater. My next earliest movie memory was seeing “Gumball Rally”. In that film, I remember a car driving by a motorcyclist with a person hanging their bare butt out the back window and whoever the adult with me was smacking me in the face in an attempt to cover my eyes.
My big brother, Kim, took me to the movies constantly as a child. He took me to my first R rated movies which were “Enter The Dragon”, then “Animal House”, then Halloween, then every horror movie that came out every week after that. Didn’t matter if it was good or not. Kim loved the magic of movies and when he was a kid, he played around with my dad’s old Super 8 “Brownie”. Here’s his earliest work:
In 1981, Kim signed up for Memphis Access Video Volunteers, the cable access channel volunteer program at the local cable provider which was called Cablevision at the time. If you volunteered your time training and helping put on tv shows, eventually, you could put your own content on the channel. First, you had to go through the classes on how to use the gear, then, you had to reserve the equipment, then, you could take out the gear and shoot your content. You’d have to book an edit suite to put your show together, which was three giant tape machines, then you would have to work with the station to find the proper time to exhibit your work.
Kim started bringing really large video equipment home. Compared to today, the equipment used to make video was physically huge. The cameras, the tape decks, the tapes, the lights, even the cables were much bigger than what’s used currently. The lights he had access to, not only illuminated the scene, but generated enough heat to turn any enclosed space into an oven. Kim and his creative friends started working on some horror themed shorts while he volunteered on Thursday nights at Cablevision to help produce “On Cable Tonight”, a news magazine type show that featured local issues and people of note. It was the most popular show on the channel for years.
At the time, we were obsessed with zombies. We had just seen Dawn Of The Dead at the Bellevue Drive-In. VHS was taking off and we rented every zombie movie we could get our hands on. The first thing Kim and company did was titled “Back From The Grave”, a quick 7 minute short where a corpse climbs out of the Earth to get revenge on a drunk guy for disrespecting his grave. I was allowed to tag along and be another set of hands. The second short Kim made featured me at 11-12 years old and called it “Blood Brother”. Take a look:
While that little video is hard for me to watch ‘fro’ obvious reasons, all I can think about now is what a positive effect this had on my life, my work ethic, and my approach to creativity. Pre-teen boys are worthless by and large. If anything, they’re a mild nuisance. Kim gave me a role. Not just a literal role in the short but this was going to be our film. Kim gave me things to do. Load the gear in the car. Unload the gear. Set up the tripods for the lights. Then take them down at the end. Nothing a chimpanzee couldn’t do but no one else was letting this chimp help make cinemagic.
I was 13 years old when Blood Brother aired on the local public access channel around Halloween. We lived in Southaven, MS and we couldn’t watch it live at home since we lived in another state, even though we were a 20 minute drive from the station. Fortunately, my cousins, who lived in Memphis and had local cable, recorded “On Cable Tonight” on VHS for us. The hosts of the show were gracious, generous, and played along by faux retching in Blood Brother “Barf Bags” Kim made while doodling on a pair of white paper sacks at his job at Memphis Furniture.
Later that week, when Kim went to Cablevision on 3549 Emerald St. for his volunteer shift, everyone at the station were excited and had positive things to say about our airing and informed him that the station actually received complaints about our show! A lot of them! Well…for cable access, anyway. The people that answer the phone forgot that people might be watching and found out some were. Management was thrilled and aired it a couple more times that year.
They were so thrilled, in fact, we ended up being nominated for an award!
Every year, CPN (Community Programming Network, the name for the local channel) held awards for their station programming and some actual local celebrities would attend and present awards to winning shows. We had no idea this was a thing and it never entered our heads that our silly short would be anywhere near an awards show. Kim came home from the station and told me that we would be going to The Peabody Hotel on February 24, 1984 for the Community Programming Awards.
Below is the evening’s program that I’ve kept for over 40 years.
Guess which category we were nominated…
I mentioned that we must be on the weirdest cable access channel in America if there’s enough strange programs to elicit it’s own category every year. Kim said “They created this category for us. We stirred up enough stuff that the station felt like we should be acknowledged. We’re going to win.” The competitive side of me was a little disappointed since we weren’t really winning anything, but the fact that they cut out a little section of their show for us was a bigger win than an actual competition victory eventually sunk in.
I asked who our presenter, “Kip Sharp”, was. It was a pseudonym. Kip Sharp represented an open position that was filled by someone doing double duty or a stopgap measure like locking down a camera for a two-shot. On the credits for the show, the camera operator position for that camera would be listed as Kip Sharp, even though there was no operator. Sorta like Alan Smithee. Both Kim and I wondered how someone who was no one was going to present an award to us.
I’ve never been to the The Peabody Hotel before or since that evening. The hotel, which opened in 1925, is famous and held in high regard. When I told kids my age about this event I was going to attend, they looked at me like a dog shown a card trick. When I told any adult about it, they said “Wow!” and told me what a big deal it was to attend anything at The Peabody. My memory of that night is minimal but I remember:
My brother and I sitting at a big table with total strangers.
Drinking virgin sloe gin fizzes
Being awestruck at the proceedings. It was in a large ballroom with a stage, podium, a line of tables on the stage, two movie screens on both sides of the stage and dozens of round tables. The lights went down, the screens came on and it was speech, highlights, speech, speech, highlights, etc.
It was a long night for us since our category was the 2nd to last of the evening and I had been needing to pee for most of it. Our category came up and we were finally introduced to “Kip Sharp”. It was someone, still don’t know who, with a brown paper sack on his head with eyes cut out, ala “The Unknown Comic"
We saw our “competition” which looked like the station had to work hard to find something that would qualify as strange. Then it was our turn. They showed a quick :60 second highlight reel of the most outrageous bits of our short which climaxed with the post murder belch. It looked like the picture below:
My stupid face 10’ tall, staring in the camera, smeared with fake blood, belching at high volume in front of such local media celebrities like George Klein, Mason Granger, and Ron Olsen…RON OLSEN! and the crowd going completely berserk; laughing, yelling and whistling. It was late and I’m guessing everyone was pretty toasted.
I had been holding it for over an hour and a half when they said the words “The strangest program award goes to…Blood Brother directed by Kim Walker!”
Kim asked me to go up to the podium to accept the award with him but being paralyzed by fear at the very real possibility of losing bladder control in front of a ballroom of adults, I had to decline.
Kim and I both sitting in The Peabody bathroom after the show for an extended period of time. We both remember being in the crowded space and feeling great for different reasons. Kim, for his award, me for peeing a river…and the award.
The next project Kim and company did was “It Came From Frayser”. This one didn’t involve me at all since Kim had moved out of mom and dad’s house at this point. You can see how he was maturing as a filmmaker. The practical effects had gotten better, the cinematography improved and his title sequences looked better. The titles showcased his talent for drawing, since he hand drew the title, then filmed it.
Watch below:
I honestly feel like there’s timelines in the multiverse where my brother and I are another successful sibling filmmaking duo like the Coens or the Zuckers or the Farrellys or…well…maybe not the Wachowskis. As soon as I got my driver’s license, I signed up for MAVV. I spent high school volunteering every week at Cablevision in Memphis on Thursday nights helping produce On Cable Tonight, just like my big brother. My junior and senior years of high school, I helped the local cable access channel in Southaven broadcast my high school’s football games.
By the time I was old enough to really be able to contribute to a production, Kim got married, started a family, and got a job in video production which allowed him to express himself just enough that when he was done with work, his preference was to be with his family, not try to make movies. I think the most important thing to Kim was making a living creating. The subject matter was secondary. Instead of pursuing a career in video, I chose audio and went in the concert business and you know how that went.
Even though I was running a rock club, I still had a creative streak that wanted to make video content. That desire was sated when I started helping some friends who also wanted to create video content. They were getting together and filming a comedy spoof wrestling show on the weekends and after watching some of their work, I jumped in with both feets. I ended up getting our show on public access, since I was familiar with the process, although everyone I knew from my time there was gone.
We were making funny stuff but I still wanted to do my own thing. I had this idea for a story for years before I wrote an actual script. It was born from a debate I had with a family member. That family member believes that being gay is a choice. I do not. I asked when did they make their choice to be straight, like I do anytime someone says that to me and the usual response is something to the effect of “It doesn’t work like that…” I don’t know why I like what I like but I happen to like the most socially acceptable target of desire: the heavy chested woman. What if that wasn’t acceptable?
That’s the premise of my short film, Brumski’s.
The name is taken from an old SNL skit where Joe Piscopo hosts “Guy Talk” with the joke being the host is an Italian, heavy New Jersey accented bro who wants to talk “scorin’ babes” with Liberace (played by Dave Thomas) and Michael Jackson (Eddie Murphy). Piscopo asks Liberace if he ever gave those big breasted showgirls a “Brumski” which he physically demonstrates as what is known in modern parlance as a “motorboat”.
The story of making Brumski’s is very large, hilarious, hard to believe and I will not attempt to tackle it here. It took me 2 years and $9200 to make this 19ish minute short. I made up about 400 DVDs that I give out to people who I like who might appreciate it. It has never been online for anyone to see. Until now.
For the first time on the internet in 15 years, my short film Brumski’s:
Starts at :10 seconds (Warning: Not Safe For Work - nudity, language)
Making Brumski’s was hard. It was not fun. It should’ve taken no more than a month to make this thing. Mainly scheduling issues with the cast, myself, and whoever I could get to loan a camera for a day and operate it (which was my brother 90% of the time) were the culprit. I watch this now and all I see are the things that are wrong with it. Overall, I’m not proud of it, but I will list the things I am proud of:
The music. Some outstanding bands. Most of which I booked at one point. All the artists were kind enough to give me permission to use their songs for free.
Patrick Cox. I got to know Pat from his attendance at my all age punk rock shows at Barristers. He kinda sticks out. Pat saved me from a rowdy, crusty punk band single handedly once by getting in-between the band and myself after they shoved me for requesting they leave the premises in a less than polite manner, then walked them out by opening his arms out the way you would if you saw a loved one for the first time in a long time at the airport, gently enveloped them with his arms and took them out to the alley. No one got hurt.
Pat was kind enough to donate an evening to being a bad guy in my short. I had seen his work in some mutual friends films and thought he’d be perfect for what I needed. He really applied himself to the craft and now he’s a real life, bona fide Hollywood actor. See for yourself:
Gregg Turkington. Gregg’s alter ego that made him famous is Neil Hamburger. I’m a massive fan and I started booking Neil Hamburger in the mid-00’s and we had gotten along well enough that he was willing to let me pay him to be in my silly movie. Now he appears in movies with famous actors:
SPEAKING of Gregg Turkington…Brumski’s was shot from 2007 to 2009. Fast forward to 2015. The Marvel super-hero film, Ant-Man is released. I heard that Gregg was going to be in it and was really excited for him. Not so excited that I was going to see it in the theater, but when it got within my streaming radar, it would be top priority. When that happened, we sat down to watch it. Roughly 10 minutes into the movie, Gregg made his debut:
I was gobsmacked. Here’s the scene I wrote with Gregg:
Brumski’s came out 6 years before Ant Man. The similarities between these scenes disturbed me so bad that I turned the movie off and I’ve never attempted to watch it or anything with Ant Man in it since. I’m not angry nor do I believe that they were stealing from me in any way. How could they? I’ve never shown it publicly.
Honestly, to this day, I still don’t know how I feel about it. Part of me hates it but part of me feels assured that I make good casting decisions. You couldn’t buy a decent used car for what I spent on my film and a multi-million dollar blockbuster made the exact same choice I did, 6 years later. I’ve seen Gregg since Brumski’s but I haven’t talked to him in over ten years. We have not discussed this. I said I’m not mad. I’M NOT.
If you were in my film, because of Gregg and Pat Cox’s presence, you are one degree of Kevin Bacon to the following actors:
Paul Rudd, Anne Hathaway, Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Amy Adams, Tim Robbins, Ben Stiller, John C. Reilly, and Dwyane “The Rock” Johnson.
Lastly, the fact that I completed it. It took two years and many months in between of no shooting or progress. I had to pay for it in increments and destroyed my credit in the process but I finished it. It ain’t Citizen Kane, but I finished it.
I entered my film into a festival once. I had to send a copy of my film, paperwork, and a check. A month later, I get a letter from the festival saying thanks for the submission but you didn’t make the cut. I felt like a jackass. That letter saying my film wasn’t good enough cost me $50. It’s likely it went unwatched. From that point, I swore that I would never, ever, pay anyone for the right to screen my short film. In the grand scheme, a $50 lesson is nothing.
I would like to make another film, but under the proper circumstances.
Which means I probably won’t be making another film.
POST SCRIPT!
I forgot to post some inspiration for Brumski’s when I originally published this. It’s a music video from Bob Log III called “Boob Scotch” and if you made it through my film, you’ll see where some of my ideas came from, not to mention, Boob Scotch is featured in the film’s soundtrack. Have a gander: