Vader With an Eyepatch

(Latest Chieftain column)

I recently saw extremely rare footage of a scene from a movie I wish all of you could see. I really, really, wish you could. It was gold. Pure movie magic. And you’re going to have to trust me on this because I was running the camera at the time and it turns out the ‘record’ and ‘pause’ buttons are close enough together that things can get confusing.

A little red light came on, I think. Shouldn’t ‘pause’ be a yellow light? I don’t know. It was a heartbreaker, sitting down to edit the tape, wondering what I was going to say when I won my Emmy, or Grammy, or Oscar, or whatever. There I am waiting for cinematic history to unfold and, instead, there’s a blurry shot of a coffee table, couch, and somebody’s knee while I was moving the camera around, thinking I’d just turned it off instead of on. What? Who’s knee is that? Run it back . . . where’s the pirate Darth Vader scene? What is a knee and a coffee table doing on here?

Apparently there’s a reason movie people do more than one take. But if you’d seen this one through the viewfinder like I did, you would have agreed there was no point in doing it over. Assuming the camera was on.

The little movie we were filming, ‘Path of a Gearboatman,’ is set in the picturesque mountain town of Joseph. You may have heard of it. ‘Gearboatman’ is the story of young Patrick Baird, who triumphs over incredible odds to realize his destiny of rowing the cargo raft for Winding Waters River Expeditions. Along the way he performs an angry interpretive dance in the snow, exercises with propane tanks and gains wisdom from a stuffed animal. All this in under five minutes. We weren’t messing around.

The movie guest stars Paul and Penny Arentsen as themselves and Morgan Jenkins in a complicated role that combines Yoda the Jedi master with Micky, the trainer from the Rocky movies, and also Mister Miyagi from The Karate Kid. I make a brief appearance as a guy wearing a life jacket and it was supposed to co-star Mike Baird, Patrick’s dad. But . . . ahem . . . that’s the part I was supposed to be filming.

The special effects in this thing are amazing, though. I will say that. Except for the scene where the garage door is supposed to be opening by magic. Don’t look in the lefthand corner or you’ll see Mike Baird hauling on the chain. That kind of takes away from the illusion of magic a little bit. And in the scene where Patrick appears to be lifting a huge pile of life jackets all by himself, I think you can see my hand on the rope. Whoops. But considering our budget was zero and we knocked this thing out in a couple hours, I think it’s right up there with any other masterpiece on YouTube.

Check it out at windingwatersrafting.com. Click on ‘Gearboat Chronicles’ in the upper left-hand corner and the movie will be at the bottom of the page. The Chronicles are short essays, with a new one every week, offering a glimpse of what it’s like to work for a whitewater rafting company in Hells Canyon. I don’t quite understand the sense of humor of the guy who writes them, but he seems to know what he’s talking about.

The lost footage can never be recreated. Unless we did it again, but that seems like a hassle. So for the sake of history, here is the script from the missing scene:

(note: Mike Baird had an operation on his eyeball recently and is wearing a black eye patch while it heals. He claims to be growing weary of pirate jokes, but I can’t believe that’s true. My favorite one is to pretend to brush something off his shoulder on the side where his eye patch is and say, “What have you been feeding that parrot?”)
The scene opens with Mike and Patrick Baird hunched over a pile of maps. Mike is playing the part of Grey Baird, the grizzled buccaneer.

Grey Baird (pointing at map and talking in a pirate voice): “Patrick, This be Hells Canyon.”

Patrick: “I know, Dad.”

Grey Baird: “This be Wild Sheep Rapids, and here be Granite Rapids . . . a good captain is wise to use caution when passing these waters.”

Patrick: “Dad, I know.”

Grey Baird (shifting to Darth Vader voice): “Patrick, I am your father.”

Patrick: “I know, Dad.”

Yeah, well, it would probably make more sense if you saw it in context. But there’s only one person to blame for that, and that’s whoever designed the buttons on that video camera.