Written by Linda
February 07, 2009
Calling Put the Camera on Me a documentary is a bit of a stretch. This is creativity in action!
At the film festival screening, an audience member stood up and thanked filmmakers Darren Stein and Adam Shell for sharing their film, calling it "probably the single most accurate portrayal of growing up in the suburbs in the 1980s." Heck, I know I recognized more of MY suburban past in this movie than anything else I've seen on the big (or small) screen.
As a kid in Encino, California, Darren Stein was a budding movie director. He was one of those twerps who knew exactly what he wanted to be, and would get there goshdarnit, if not by talent, but by sheer force of will. He had the attitude (pitting neighbor kids at each other to vie for parts in his films), he had the ego, he had the means (heck, let's just point out how lucky he was to have a video camera at his disposal), and shoot, judging from the examples, he certainly had a head full of ideas.
Marvel at the examples of youthful creativity at work: There's the Holocaust movie, with one (Jewish) kid giving a Heil Hitler salute, and dragging his shirtless and gauntly made-up friend across the kitchen floor to the "gas chamber" somewhere off-camera. There's the nuclear war film, complete with the bright flash of the bomb and crazed survivors writhing on the lawn. There's the one about the crossing-dressing kid who converts football players to be "Gay as a Whistle!" Of course, there is plenty of murder and mayhem (with some gross, homemade gory make-up effects), and even some simulated gay sex! Hilarious! Especially when you consider that the ages of those involved was anywhere from about 15 down to 5 or so.
Put the Camera on Me revists these days through interviews with the "kids" as they are now: mostly middle-class 20- 30-something professionals. You can still hear the neighborhood-gang dynamics at work (they are all still friends), as stories are told and argued, and teasings and fights from the past resurface like uncomfortable unhealed wounds.
Those reflections offer a nice perspective on the movies, but what makes this film so richly funny is that some of the parents of the kids are also interviewed, and for the most part, they had no idea what was going on. "I told him to stay off the roof..." says one mom, as we then see a movie of a couple kids scampering across a rooftop, simulating a fight where one kid ends up a bloody-faced carcass on the driveway below. If Put the Camera on Me is not indicitive of the average suburban upbringing, I don't know what is!
