Greg Grummer
Director's Notes
After a fund-raising presentation for my movie, Long After The Fall Of Communism, in Glencoe, Illinois, I took questions. As always happens during affairs like this, an emigrant from a Soviet Block country, France, I believe, challenged me as to my feelings about communism…Didn’t I realize how oppressive and cruel the Soviet regime had been? How could I be nostalgic for something so horrible?
Indeed, I couldn’t. What I was nostalgic for was the dialectic…the debate…the competition. Of course I didn’t want communism as it was then constituted to win. But, for some reason, I wasn’t prepared for capitalism to win either. As I tried to explain myself to the audience, I could see that it was hopeless.
I looked at the $17 I raised that day and began, from that moment on, I think, to give up. Several months later, after 5 years of shooting, I pulled the plug. Jorge and Madeleine, my two leads, were distraught. They’d given years of their lives to the project because they believed in it, and in me. I had to send them away because it hurt to see them so disillusioned...so destroyed.
But, out of the ashes, as they say, rises…what? I’ve had a lot of time to reconsider things. I accept that my movie, Long After The Fall Of Communism, has been rightfully discredited. I was wrong headed. But with this type of admission often comes total clarity, and from such clarity comes…a new direction!
I’m confidant I now know the movie I should have been making the whole time. I don’t have a cast yet, a budget, a location, or even a script. But I do have a working title, and often that’s more than enough. My new movie will admit to the realities of the world…it won’t bury it’s head in foolish, if not actually immoral, nostalgia. My new movie will be concerned mainly with facts, statistics, and the other boring stuff of praxis.
My new movie will be titled: The Peace Dividend.
Lights, Camera, Action!
(skip the credits)
Interview With A High School Basketball Star was first published in Hunger Magazine.
Filming The Drought Scene Is Held Up For Days By The Threat Of Rain was first published in Rhino Magazine under the title Long After the Fall of Communism
If you have any questions for the director, please send them to greg at arnoldgrummer dot com.
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