Fallout

STAGE/SCREEN 75
-fall 2005
A short film by Andy Rath, a young filmmaker who ran his own company. He produced art pieces and corporate films. FALLOUT was initially created for use in rehab centers, showing drug users going through their lives, with all the trigger behaviors that addicts would recognize. The film would splice Andy’s segments between educational footage. Andy had already shot the other “drug users”, and hired me as his heroin addict. We filmed over three days - around the waterfront in Brooklyn, in a Greenpoint apartment, and on the streets nearby. I played a fella named Steve, and the film shows the progression of his life from occasional heroin user, to seeking it on the street, to living on the street doing crack. It was an absolute blast. Andy had great energy, very laid back and focused. His assistant Ryan was at least as much fun. My first acting partner was Miki Mosman, whom i actually met for a blind date the day of the shoot. She joined us on set, and was pressed into service in a flashback, as the girlfriend who introduces me to heroin. It was very trippily shot…and wouldn’t this be a much cooler world if all fizzled first dates were that much fun? My second acting partner was a fellow named Luis Rodriguez, who played my drug connection. Luis used his own car in the film. I fear i may have offended him by assuming that all the Puerto Rican flags and bandanas and seat covers were just for the shoot. I initially laughed at them, not realizing that that’s how the car always looked - living in America, i’m just not used to non-ironic patriotism. The shoot was often tough physically, because of the simulated drug use - regular cigarettes and crack pipe. Because of the intimacy of film, i couldn’t get away with my stage trick of “appearing” to inhale, so i gutted it out and sucked it in, take after take. Interestingly, the following year i did another short, one that required chain smoking, and after thirty straight minutes i began to feel debilitatingly sick. That film was abandoned in production, and had also included footage of me being drowned naked in a bathtub. Back in FALLOUT, i was crack-smoking a combination of aspirin, tobacco, and steel wool (take that, you weenie asbestos inhalers!). Ryan had a wonderful dog who almost made it into the film. We nicknamed him Cracky the wonder dog, and joked that the sequel should be about him. The producers were so happy with the final product that they commissioned a separate art film, using just the footage involving me. There were real life elements that made it into the film…a huge rat on the waterfront, a bicyclist i suddenly jumped up after and chased…it was such a cool creative process. We used a borrowed forklift for an overhead “zoom away” shot. To make the heroin injection realistic, a setup was concocted using a sealed tube of fake blood, and superglue on the syringe tip so it would “stick” in my skin. The effect was disturbingly realistic. One of the funniest things to come out of the film was the shirt i wore for the apartment shots - a T-shirt from the children’s camp where my brother’s brother and his girlfriend taught. The shirt had a happy cartoon sun, and that smiling sun was all that was visible behind many of the heroin shots. Were our film a bigger production, might the camp have sued? As it was, it was just hysterically funny (to John, Brian, and Janice, especially). The film was submitted to festivals, but rejected because it lacked narrative structure. It’s wild to think about the thousands upon thousands of rehab vets across the country who might recognize me on the street. The most unlikely fanbase to ever approach an artist publicly?