By Other Voices voices@moviecitynews.com

Shorts… and to the Point: Joey Garfield (Ex-Bully)

Posted Friday, October 31st, 2008 - Comments Off on Shorts… and to the Point: Joey Garfield (Ex-Bully)
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Joey Garfield’s comedy short Ex-Bully is as quick on its feet as anyone who had to navigate and negotiate their way through school around the bigger kids and bullies just to survive to the next grade. It’s funny, but better yet – it’s shared experience funny. Ex-Bully works because the majority of us did have to walk a minefield of mean-spirited doofuses (or is the plural, doofi?) and dullards that populated our youth. And if we admitted it to ourselves, we all likely would have a personal hit list of people from our school years that not-so-arguably deserve some payback. And not all of us can be Bill Gates, if you know what I mean…
What inspired EX-BULLY?

I was bullied when I was young and some of the scenes in the film are true events like the Twister board scene. That incident has been on heavy rotation in the back of my mind since I was little. Now I have a chance to get it out of there and maybe connect with other folks.

Is Classhaters.com your version of Fight Club for grown up nerds?

I’m not going to give away anymore than you just did by mentioning that …nerd.

But there is an element to sites like Facebook and My Space that puts a positive/happy spin on getting in touch with people from our past. I think there also exists a darker side to that notion.

Seriously though, some kid’s cassette tape did make for awesome dental floss during the 80s, right?

Yeah, mix tapes work the best like Slow Jamz or Poppin’ Fresh Mix. Cassettes like Howard Jones or the St.Elmo’s Fire soundtrack are too soft and not effective. The stylist brought J.Geils Band’sFreeze Frame, but that fortunately ended up in my car where it hasn’t left.

In the extended cut, does ‘Byron’ actually get to deliver a beatdown?

My producer Jon Singer would like to take this moment to express the following “The only beat down Byron gets is from the producer because he busted the door of the Lincoln Towncar by jumping through the window.”

Aaron Alexuk gets an apology from you during the acknowledgments. Was it for something that happened during filming or was it a wedgie you perpetrated on him in junior high?

I messed with his mental game, which I think is worse. He was a kid who, if you pushed the right buttons, would fly off his handle and I knew that and used that against him…and what was lamer is that I saw other kids do it to him so that’s why I did it…how lame is that? By high school we were cool but that incident kept popping up in my mind as I made the film so…

What will happen in the feature-length sequel to Ex-Bully?

Funny you asked that because we have been developing the story a bit. They get better at getting back that’s for sure. I got a talented cast of goofballs, a 1976 Lincoln Towncar, and today’s technology so I’m good to go. The bully list is long and we know how to find them.
EX-BULLY screens as part of SHORTS PROGRAM FOUR – AMUSE BOUCHE 9:50PM November 6 @ ArcLight 10 and 12:30PM November 7 @ ArcLight 10.

Joey Garfield will be attending both screenings and will participate in the Q&A afterwards.

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Posted in American Film Institute Festival, Festivals | Comments Off on Shorts… and to the Point: Joey Garfield (Ex-Bully)

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon