After doing so, I consulted my list of movies watched multiple times and it appeared on there. However, given that this list was made in retrospect sometime in the last 15 years, based on assessments made at that time, a previous second viewing is not definitively verifiable.
The point is, this movie that's considered a childhood classic for my generation or the generation just after mine -- I was 19 when it came out -- is not one of my own personal cultural touchstones. If I haven't seen it only twice now, I've seen it only three times. (Though of course, bits of it are such a part of the zeitgeist that I've seen certain scenes dozens of other times.)
So how is it that I ended up appearing in a shot-by-shot remake of this movie?
Well I'm about to tell you.
First off, the movie. I'll post a couple links so I don't have to fully explain all the wonderfulness that is Jurassic Park: Castlemaine Redux. Here's the link to an article about it in The Guardian. And here's the trailer:
I won't send the link to the video of Sam Neill wishing the project well, and I'll stop getting ahead of myself at this point.
If we want to start longer in the past, I'm close friends with the brainchild behind this absurd and legally shaky project -- more on that in a minute -- who you'll see quoted in that article and who you'll see in the trailer as the Muldoon character, played originally by Bob Peck.
Might as well name him, since the above article does anyway: John.
John founded the review site that I took over five years ago, when he could no longer fit it in to his list of priorities. We were close friends before and have remained close friends since, though John now lives 90 minutes away in the aforementioned Castlemaine, plus has been doing stuff like this for the past three years, so I've only seen him about once a year during that time.
One of those was last July, when I went down for a single day of shooting on this crazy, quixotic endeavor. Although the concept was to use exclusively Castlemaine locals in the key roles, to complement the exclusively Castlemaine settings, any of John's mates from, well, anywhere were invited to show up and serve as extras.
Although John would regularly put out calls to a WhatsApp chat, inviting people to a shoot where extras were needed, I wasn't able to work it out until the very last day of extras shooting. I was determined to appear in this project and I almost missed my chance. But I did get there, for a shoot located at a high school using their science lab facilities, which doubles as the lab we see John Hammond show his guests, where the scientists are cultivating the dinosaur eggs. I had the duty of appearing on screen reading a book (which is the best look you get at me in the whole film) and you can see my hands placing an egg into a basket with other eggs (which is my most significant contribution). After we finished shooting this, I also changed wardrobes and appeared as a worker outside the Jurassic Park headquarters. The action I chose to pantomime was sawing a fence, though to be honest, I have no idea why that would be something my character would be doing.
It was great fun and I knew there was no chance I could be cut out of the final film, because all the footage was going to appear in the film. That's what you have to do in a shot-by-shot remake.
A few months ago we started hearing about a premiere date at the single-screen cinema there in Castlemaine. It had always been the plan to show the film a couple times on one weekend and then that would be the end of it. We'll see if that's the end of it, but with all the copyright infringement involved in the project, not the least of which is the use of all of John Williams' music, there was no way to envision it as something that would reach a wide audience or involve any profit whatsoever. In fact, the tickets would be given out for free.
That premiere date was this past Friday night, with two showings on Saturday and one more still expected today. Which is why I watched the movie on Thursday night, to have it in my brain, to mentally store away all the individual moments that I wanted to see how they would recreate on essentially no budget. (They estimate they spent about $3,000, but the vast majority of the film was made on the backs of volunteers who were as interested in this crazy idea and its brief moment of public existence.)
The point of this post is not to go into great detail about my experiences for a night in Castlemaine, but I'll mention I got there around 4:30 on Friday and had a 6 o'clock dinner with another two ReelGood writers and their young son. I didn't know who else I would know would be at the premiere -- the two I had dinner with were going the next morning -- so I rocked up by myself to the red carpet, dressed as well as I could manage on short notice (John sent out a message the day before saying they would be dressing up) in my only slightly rumpled sports jacket, and selected a seat in the balcony. John introduced the film with a nice speech beforehand, they showed two era appropriate trailers (The Last Action Hero and Sleepless in Seattle) and then we were off and running. Afterward, cast and crew appeared on stage for a Q&A, and the biggest surprise of the night came when the crowd finally filed out. I expected to just give John a hug and a congratulations and then get back to my motel room -- like you would for a groom at his wedding since you wouldn't expect any one-on-one time -- but John actually invited me back to his house for a drink, where I stayed until after 1. (The film let out about 11:30.) This felt extra luxurious because his wife, who I cherish, was also there. She played the Wayne Knight character in the movie in a hilarious performance.
Which makes a good transition into what I thought of the film itself. Well, it was both incredible and hilarious. John made a good comment in the Q&A where if you try to do this intentionally poorly, it's just shit, but if you try to do it as well as you can, it's funny. And Jurassic Park: Castlemaine Redux was funny not because it was bad, but because of how close it was to being really, genuinely good. I mean, I sort of think it is genuinely good -- the actors are pretty amazing, as you can tell from the trailer above -- but what I mean is, we were laughing because we could not believe they could so closely approximate the look and feel of Jurassic Park, in terms of the locations, the line readings, the actual close appearance of some of the actors to their counterparts, and even the effects. Obviously there were a lot of models and instances of forced perspective involved, but you would not believe how smartly they solved some of the obvious problems of a project like this, while still keeping the same camera angles. And John told me afterward that some guy in Texas did the digital dinosaurs for them, and they actually look really good -- never mistakeable for actual Hollywood digital dinosaurs, but good enough to leave me as delightfully surprised as I felt throughout.
And some of the comedy was just inherent. Since the movie was made over the course of three years, the two kid actors grew from something like age 11 to age 14, or maybe older than that. The male had grown so tall by the time they filmed the scene where he's carried after his tussle with the electric fence, that the Alan Grant actor had to throw him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, whereas the boy in the film is actually cradled. Stuff like this -- and like the fact that the Knight and Samuel L. Jackson characters were both played by women -- leaned into the whimsical ways they intended to give this movie their own flavor. The audience ate it up and found themselves in a delirium of recognizing neighbors on screen and just having a blast generally.
There's one important star I forgot to mention, which is John's dog Basil, who played any goat in the film that a dinosaur needed to eat. This dog sat on my lap for most of the time I was at John's house afterward.
Here are some pictures from the event. Modesty and I don't know? privacy? will prevent me from sharing the selfie I took of John and me in front of the theater, but you can certainly see these, including my name in the credits:
Obviously, the showing of the movie did not get shut down, though that was a realistic fear right up until go time. Whatever legal apparatus extends out of Steven Spielberg's creative output (I'm not sure if it's Universal or Dreamworks) did not obviously see it fit to squash this little DIY effort that had made a splash in the local media. Even if they felt threatened by it, which I doubt, they likely knew that the story of them shutting it down might go even more viral than the story of these plucky Castlemainians making it in the first place, and that's not a good look.
However, there does not seem any viable way that this film will be seen by a larger audience -- which, as I understand it, is exactly how John wants it. Not without Universal/Dreamworks taking some if not all of the profits, maybe leaving a scant 1% for the filmmakers if they were feeling really generous.
I do think there's a world where that could happen, though. I do think there's a world where we all -- where you all -- get to see Jurassic Park: Castlemaine Redux, and even though you won't experience the joy of seeing your neighbors appear in a remake of Jurassic Park, you will be charmed and tickled generally by everything else about it.
So that's why I'm calling it a future cult classic, which it may be even if, perhaps especially if, few people can see it. It's a movie lots of people will know about, and seeing it, in whatever way may one day be possible, might be considered a rare treat.
And yes indeed, I am a (very small) part of that.
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