Goonie Gossip: Health Workers with AIDS
Directed by Stefan Koski
Written by Michael Schenkel, Brandon Bujnowski, Daniel Parks, Stefan Koski
Starring (in order of appearance) Stefan Koski, Michael Schenkel, Brandon Bujnowski, Daniel Parks, Justin Leonhardt, Tyler Morin (appears briefly from the right), Edward Wild
Voice-Over by Daniel Parks
Length: 3 minutes, 42 seconds
Click to watch it on Google Video Synopsis and Director's Notes Hosts of the talk show Goonie Gossip Frappe (Michael Schenkel) and Pepe (Stefan Koski) invite Dr. B (Brandon Bujnowski) onto their show to have him reveal that he is a working medical professional with AIDS. Two of D. B's former patients are then brought out, Dan and Justin (as themselves), and a confrontation ensues. Frappe and Pepe tell them they're going to get a blood test to see if they have AIDS now. Features a commercial for Ragu Pasta with Edward Wild.
This was the first Goonie Gossip we ever filmed. It was a science project in eighth grade, and was filmed in March of 2002. Mike, Dan, and Brandon conceived of the idea to do a video instead of a written presentation for the class. Since they came up with the script with practically zero factual information in mind, they asked me to write some stuff in to make it sound like we did research for it. It was filmed in Mike's basement with a very old VHS camera, with Mike and I sitting in front of a fake brick wall that we had drawn to make it look more like the Jerry Springer Show. It's might be a misnomer to say I "directed" it because so much of the filming process was new to us that no one really had any idea of what we were doing.
There are a couple wonderful idiosyncrasies to this video that are very subtle. One of them happens to be when, while drinking from my cup, my legs crossed and with one pant leg pulled up ridiculously high to show a sock that practically goes to my knee, I completely forget the line written for me on the cue card. Mike elbows me to pay attention, and I respond with a quick, "Oh, I see," to fill time (to which Mike can't help but laugh). Mike also slips on the line and is about to swear when he remembers that he's doing this video for school: "We're about to ah, da-- We're going to go to a commercial!" The choice to do a Ragu commerical comes from a promotional sponsorship that our middle school was doing at the time with Ragu. Each of us had gotten a free box of Ragu pasta one day as part of some kind of nutritional program to get us to eat healthy. It amazes me to think that even at this young age we were satirizing the school system for all its worth. Unfortunately the commercial got cut when we had to do a second take on the show because our camera had to be rewound to the correct spot each time we had to do another take. On this part we rewound too much and cut off the commercial, and then not enough, resulting in a clip of myself saying, "And we're back!" twice. For some reason the camera person shifts position during the second half of the show, causing the light to suddenly grow dark and then light again as it is announced that Justin doesn't have AIDS. You'll also notice that after it is announced that Dan has AIDS and we shake hands to leave that I subconsciously wipe my hand, as if expecting something to be on it. Mike's last line at the end about pregnant teenage daughters ("and why their mothers hate them") I'm almost sure was an ad-lib he threw in on the spot.
This crude, but at the time popular, video would lead to two more Goonie Gossip episodes filmed later that year and a fourth during sophomore year.
Goonie Gossip: Transmito en Espanol
Written and Directed by Stefan Koski
Starring (in order of appearance) Stefan Koski, Michael Schenkel, Serena Coppola
Voice-Over by Brandon Bujnowski
Length: 10 minutes, 4 seconds
Click to watch it on Google Video Synopsis and Director's Notes In the fourth episode of the Goonie Gossip series, hosts Frappe (Michael Schenkel) and Pepe (Stefan Koski) invite somewhat famous chef Senorita Sedina (Serena Coppola) on their pseudo-Hispanic cooking show to make some delicious Flan. Includes blooper reel and English subtitles.
The biggest thing about this film to be thankful for are the English subtitles - without them this would probably be a waste of viewing time. My Spanish is by no means perfect (or even good) though, so not everything will be correct in the translation. The opening few scenes of the cooking portion were so botched that we had to redub them in editing to try to keep the Spanish more accurate. That's why it looks like the audio drops out on the first few cooking scenes.
One of the cornerstones of a Goonie Gossip film has always been the idea that we create our own commercials for commercial breaks during the show. Due to timing constraints, however, we were unable to do that for this one. The script for Judak was originally written at this time to be a commercial. Another cornerstone is to always have a "hot chick" character to break up all the male roles in any given episode. Here that service is provided by Serena Coppola, who was working with us on a film project for the first time.
Speaking of timing constraints, the reason why Mike Schenkel doesn't appear in the last few scenes is because he couldn't make it to the second day of shooting due to a baseball game (which he completely forgot about up until that day). We didn't have the time to schedule another shoot date so we had to make due with what (and who) we had. We all had problems with doing a video entirely in Spanish, but Mike handled it particularly well. We were never far from the Spanish script on the set (in most of the cooking scenes the paper is completely visible), but Mike also insisted on learning the script in English so he would know which words to accent and how to properly annunciate each sentence in Spanish, thus proving, in my mind at least, his capabilities as an actor.
As an additional note, the classy Hawaiian shirt that he's wearing in the opening scene is from my wardrobe. I just thought I should point that out.
By far the question that I'm asked the most about this film is, "What's up with that thing on the exercise bike?" That scene (which is now on the blooper reel) was originally supposed to be inserted during the cooking process. We were presented with the problem of how to kill an hour while waiting for the Flan to cook. I thought it would be great if we just took a time machine one hour into the future. The exercise bike seemed like the perfect vehicle to be transformed into a time machine, especially with the way the "dashboard" lights up. The problem, again, was Mike couldn't make it to the second day of shooting. The brilliance of the time bike thus became confined to the out-takes. The music for this scene, by the way, was composed by Brandon Bujinowski on the spot. The eerie lighting effect is provided by a desk lamp on top of the canopy of an outdoor bench directly in front of us.
The closing comments I make thanking the cast and crew, as well as the Spanish teacher that we were making this for, also deserve some explanation. The group that was originally supposed to be making the video consisted solely of myself and Serena. Everyone else volunteered to make it happen. At the time the Spanish teacher (Senora Pom) was stating that this was the last project that we would be able to pick our own partners. As I say on the video, being able to pick our own partners allows us to work with people who are all comfortable with one another and able to produce quality work.
The Flan that was made for this video was not the Flan we served in class at the time of its premiere. The Flan we made for the video turned out to be rather disgusting. In some instances you can see things like clouds of steam billowing up from the milk, which should not be happening if the Flan is being cooked correctly.
Music in this Film: (Da Le) Yaleo--Santana
A Word on the Goonie Gossip Series
Perhaps the most prominent thing that I need to answer about this film is, "What the hell is Goonie Gossip?"
Well, simply put, it was an idea originally thought up two years before the fourth one was shot. As part of a science project, Michael Schenkel, Dan Parks, and Brandon Bujinowski (who, along with myself, are the only consistent cast and crew memebers through each of the four videos) created the concept of a spoof Jerry Springer Show that could be adapted to whatever subject that we would have to do a project on. The masterminds that they are, they quickly discovered that shooting a five minute video was a lot easier than writing any kind of actual report. I was brought on for the first one ("Goonie Gossip: Health Workers with AIDS") to act as a co-host with Mike and to add in the factual information part of the script to make sure we didn't fail. After the first one, though, I took over writing the full scripts for each.
The first two episodes of Goonie Gossip (the second, "Goonie Gossip: Chernobyl Disaster"), filmed not more than a month or so apart, are the only ones that maintain any semblance of this kind of "Jerry Springer" theme. By the time the third one came along ("Goonie Gossip: The Movie"), we decided to drop the daytime talk show theme for the basic feel of a short feature film. It was actually a complete parody on the movie Ocean's 11, where recently released from in-school suspension con artist Frappe teams up with his longtime partner in crime Pepe to rob the school of field trip money. The plot, actually, made a lot of sense - at this point we were still in eighth grade. We were scheduled to go on the traditional eighth grade field trip to Washington D.C. when 9/11 happened and all class trips to the capital were cancelled. Because of the high price of the field trip (roughly $350 per person) had already been paid in full and because all this money had to be returned to the students, there was a large sum of cash just sitting in plastic containers in the closets of the eighth grade classrooms for quite some time. It wasn't tightly secured or anything, so a plot to rob the school of this money seemed logical.
The third Goonie Gossip is considered (both by those who have seen it and by those who created it) to be the crown jewel in the Goonie Gossip series. It was a full twenty-two minute short feature - twice as long as the two previous Goonie Gossip shorts combined. It was properly soundtracked, with scenes fully set to music from a keyboard that had pre-recorded tracks already programmed into it.
But perhaps the most important question that I can answer about the Goonie Gossip series (beyond just explaining what it was about) is what made it such a cult phenomenon among the people who have seen it, to the extent that five years later the videos we made in eighth grade are still being discussed and are as prevalent a topic as any other.
My answer to that would be is that there is a unique kind of charm and originality to the Goonie Gossip films. While the plots themselves are hardly original, the style of shooting and the style of the characters are both quite innovative. The way the first three Goonie Gossip films were shot is much more comparable to a type of avant-garde theatre than an actual filmmaking process. The camera we were using was very antiquated (the same one that I refer to in the "About" portion of the movie section of the website) which eliminated any kind of editing process. Each scene had to be done perfectly from start to finish, and any retakes had to be done from scratch. The scenes also had to be filmed in sequential order, since we had no way of rearranging them later to create the final product. The actors themselves (all the people who worked on the project that I've already named) are all very animated in their performances, and everything from their voices to their gestures to their facial expressions are exaggerated far beyond what is typical for film acting.
The process by which we made each film progressed from one to the next significantly. The first one was haphazardly made in one afternoon in Mike's basement. By the time we were on the third, we were having afternoon lunch-ins to discuss shoot dates, bringing our own sets of wardrobe, and filmed it in the course of three days with multiple locations.
Having said all this, it would readily become apparent that the fourth Goonie Gossip video has little in common with the other three. First of all, it wasn't filmed during eighth grade at the peak of our movie production. It was shot two years later during our sophomore year of high school. The camera for it was digital, producing a much more crisp and cleaner look to it. And while by its nature it was filmed sequentially for the sake of convenience, there was a great deal of editing done on parts of each scene. The music sequence for the second half was also added in editing. Digital extras like English subtitles (although they weren't added until long after its original premiere) and a blooper reel (although we did fake one for "Goonie Gossip: The Movie") were unheard of when we were making the original Goonie Gossip videos.
Still, some of the qualities of the original style remained intact. The characters are still incredibly animated (I laugh at just seeing some of Mike's facial expressions in the bloopers), the feel for the progression of it remains consistent with the others, and most of the music - in particular the opening theme song - are still provided by a nearby keyboard at the time of the shoot.
Overall I'd say that the Goonie Gossip series is unique in its own way. The characters and humor of each episode have made them cult phenomenons in the secluded hallways of Terryville High School in my own time, and perhaps now that they're becoming available for all to see, they'll become internet cult phenomenons as well.