I used to have this notebook that I filled with ideas. I still have one, mind, but I’m speaking of this specific notebook. Frequently I would write down one-liners I found clever; conversations that I’d overheard or had been a part of that were particularly funny or insightful; drawings of characters and sets; and numerous ideas for films I wanted to make.

In the middle of the list – surrounded by a pregnancy test commercial and a story about a boy who lays eggs – I found simply, “Corn Boys”.

While its origins are hazy to me, I do recall my group of friends gathering to discuss ideas for our next movie, and for whatever reason I thought “Corn Boys” sounded funny. That’s it. All I had to go off of was the name; it sounded mysterious and perverse, I thought. We threw it on the list with virtually no explanation, concluding that when the time came, we’d develop the concept then.

In the fall of 2005, my Peruvian compadre Daniel “Kiko” Lama (nobody ever calls him Kiko – this is a self-applied nickname) and I started hosting bonfires in his backyard, as we’d done the previous fall. They were fairly popular, which was mostly bad. Essentially every Friday, word would get around that we were having a bonfire, which apparently translates to “DUDE LET’S GO GET FUCKED UP.” Nary a drop of liquor in sight, these bumfuck bonfire hijackers quickly dispersed into the surrounding forests to have forbidden coitus with its woodland inhabitants.

Eventually the fire + people = talking formula started to wear thin, and while this didn’t bother the two of us in the slightest, we saw the potential to use these fires as a gateway venue. While we’d have been just as happy to sit by the fire as brothers, dissecting pop culture and talking about imaginary girls we’d been dreaming of, we wanted to try our hand at a weekly movie festival of sorts.

My friends and I made films, and we’d been doing so for many years before the inception of the bonfire viewings. In the heyday of our teenage productivity, we estimated that we could easily write, direct, produce and edit films over the course of a week for consumption on Friday nights. I can’t tell you why we thought it would be easy, but we believed it, so we did it. Unsuccessfully. Being funny all of the time is hard work. We’d become relatively well known due to our previous efforts, and I imagine there was a certain level of polish and shine expected of us by this point in time; as much polish and shine that can come from zero-budgeted amateur films, anyway.

The first two weeks of our new bonfire formula were little more than rapidly burning through our back catalogue while we ramped up for our newest feature. They turned out to be very popular; by our count, at least 70 people showed up (over the course of an evening) for the first fire, but the numbers got progressively smaller as the weeks went on. I guess the hunt for free beer was a widely held incentive, and as we had not a single can, these beerhunters fled elsewhere in search of their elusive ale.

We announced our plans for our next feature at one of the fires, and were met with great enthusiasm. I must admit that there may have been a subconscious, albeit small amount of arrogance amongst us filmmakers – and while we’d figured everything we touched would turn to gold, this turned out to be quite untrue.

The production and editing of Corn Boys turned out to be an exhaustive, trying routine. We worked nearly every day; we filmed while the sun was still out and retreated to the safety and solitude of my basement in the evenings to edit. Some nights I ended up playing Sonic games, God help me, while Eric toiled away thanklessly on what was slowly revealing itself to be a shoddy flop of a film. The scenes were inconsistent; editing was taking entirely too long due to the sheer amount of footage we’d shot (most of it unusable in any degree); we were working with Premiere rather than the Apple programs we’d become accustomed to and had to literally relearn everything in order to adequately splice and add effects. What’s worse is that I was starting to get tired of Sonic 3 and had shamefully lowered myself to playing Sonic 3D Blast. If that doesn’t paint a picture of hopeless and dejection, I don’t know what does.

As Friday restlessly approached, it became abundantly clear that there was no way in hell we’d have the film completed in time, yet we continued to slave away on our lopsided feature for the entirety of the fire while our guests waited patiently in lawn chairs. I repeatedly emerged from our underground sanctuary to assure those who had showed up that it would be finished. With only 60% of the final film recorded and far less than that edited, we admitted defeat and left our friends to their own devices. The crowd soon dispersed, and we vowed to have it complete by the following Friday.

Well, Sonic and Knuckles proved to be a formidable opponent, but our shooting schedule continued its campaign throughout the week. The trouble was, the more we shot, the more we had to edit. The material we ended up working with was bizarre and largely unusable, and the film became a lot of good ideas blended with long, drawn-out segments where virtually nothing happened. This made watching the film a chore in that you were constantly waiting for the good moments, which were stretched quite far apart.

We finished editing Corn Boys two hours after the following bonfire took place. I tried everything to burn it to DVD, but this ended up being a time consuming, futile search for codecs. Eventually we got desperate and took my entire computer out to the field to play the movie. After 10 minutes of setup and attempting to avoid electrocution from the power strip lying on wet grass, the movie began; our audience had dwindled to 12 at most. They sat in silence, and would remain so for most of the showing. Occasionally we’d catch a pity laugh from one or two people, and seeing as how Eric and I had never seen the movie in its entirety, we understood why.

Everyone seemed to feel uncomfortable by the supposed racism of the film. We were trying to make fun of racism, really; the film is actually a satirical commentary on ignorance in some degree. Still, this was before we decided it would be funnier if it were censored, which would make more sense since it’s a mock-news report, anyway.

As the end credits crawled up the screen, Eric and I looked at each other in embarrassment; Corn Boys was a flop.

“It was… uhh… interesting! Yeah!”

“There’s always next time, you know?”

“Uhhh… hey guys, I’m Ryan Butler.”

The most recurring statement used by anyone who’d seen the movie was undoubtedly, “Man, I loved that Subway commercial!”

This was both flattering and insulting in that, while we appreciated the praise, it was a throw-away idea we made on a whim one day when it was suggested we add a mock-commercial to break from the news report feel for a few moments. We literally spent 20 minutes on the Subway commercial, and we felt as though everyone had missed the point. Was the movie really that bad, or were we the only ones who “got” it?

Turns out there wasn’t much to get. In its original form, Corn Boys had a running time of  56 minutes. In our attempts to get the movie out of the door, we’d hastily thrown in scenes with little or no editing. It was evident what had been worked on for weeks, and what had been worked on for two hours. We went back and edited the film again, hoping to salvage something from weeks and weeks of work. In its second cut, 15 minutes were trimmed from the original; however, the film still felt jerky and disproportionate. It became an effort with little reward or incentive, so we put Corn Boys to rest, hoping to forget about it and move on.

Two and a half years later, I began trimming and editing the film one final time in preparation for its internet debut. Many people have requested that I put it online for quite some time, and I’m always telling them, “Uhhhh,” hoping this is a sufficient explanation. My good friend, Jacob “crapabear” Capo, of all people, finally coaxed this old man into releasing my crazy Corn Boys movie. I managed to (easily) trim another ten minutes off of it, as well as slap a fresh coat of paint on various areas and make do with what I had to work with. The credits have been completed rewritten and reformatted, and much of the film has been sliced up and blended as to retain that sense of polish and professionalism we’ve always tried to instill in our zero-budgeted, amateur films.

I present to you a film in which I offer no explanation, as there is no explanation. It is what it is, and shall forever remain that way. I don’t think it’s particularly good, but it’s not a hated, shameful mistake best buried in the sands of time like it once was, either. For what it is – two guys with a camera, filming their friends being racist, probably-homosexual corn farmers – I think it’s pretty damned okay. A lot of work went in to making this film, and while it may not be the first thing I’d list in a portfolio, it’s still a pretty funny little thing. I sort of felt like George Lucas – going back an working on a old movie and all that, except I didn’t do it with profit-mongering in mind, and I didn’t add any CG Dewbacks to the Tatooine desert (I put them in a cornfield).

The next film I show will be exclusively written and produced for octonaut consumption – this is the last of my older films being stamped with the octonaut logo (although the Otakon flick was intended for the site, anyway).

And remember: if you stick your hands in the honey pot, they’re gonna come out all sticky.