The Profit

Made for class assignment at USC School of Cinema, Los Angeles, CA, 1973. Silent. My third film for Cinema 290 used sound along with Super 8mm film, but the soundtrack on audio cassette has been lost. Here then is the jist of the film:

I cut the beginning for YouTube because it included a lot of black footage since the premise was that the TV station Channel One was having technical difficulties and kept losing its signal. Eventually a soap opera is interrupted for a special news bulletin: The Prophet is dead.

We see footage of still images of the man (cut for time) and the last time the Prophet was seen in public, getting into a car and being driven away. (Yes, that's me in the black and white hoodie.) This cues a review of his life a la CITIZEN KANE starting with home movies of him as a child (bleached for age), continuing through the wealth of properties amassed by whatever he did (in-jokes abound like the Kodak Lab where we all took our films to be processed) and finally a crowning achievement of a theme park consisting of the entire city of Los Angeles built to scale in Death Valley (the white-knuckle freeway ride).

Breaking news interrupts: The PROPHET IS ALIVE! We see him again with his fanatical followers outside the Shrine Auditorium...or is it all part of the theme park fantasy???

Oh, well, back to the soap opera already in progress...

I've included outtakes where we did it until we got it right (ha!), attracting the attention of at least one passerby. Note the nuances of my royal wave. Also the Australian version which ends this travesty.

NOTE: Video thumbnail is a lucky shot I found, shooting the Shrine building from several blocks away to the west with a couple of piles of dirt in the foreground that look like hills or mountains. The dirt is from a construction site that became the shopping center to the north of the USC campus that included a new 32nd Street Market.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• USC
• Cinema
• 1973