I wanted to devote this post to Aneta and Alex, the co-directors, co-writers, and co-whatever-else-have-you (co-parent? co-chief-resident? co-conut?), but the other cast members tend to get offended if we leave them out of anything, so here it comes: EVERYBODY, EVERYTHING. I no longer live in Waterbury, so if any of you want to kill me you'll have to go through the trouble of driving all the way out to Storrs. Totally not worth it.
Working off the cast list, which is posted
here.
Joe Pisani is a thug. There's a reason all of Alex's movies up to (and including)
Bleach have featured the mafia, and that reason is Joe Pisani. I first met Joe when he was a freshman, I was a sophomore; he was three times my size, and I was terrified of him despite his assurances that he would never harm a priest (Priest class ability: 100% resistance to all mafia-type attacks). Three years later, I can see that he's a big teddy bear, one that constantly smells like tobacco and wears a relativistic amount of gold chains (equivalent to .65 Mr. T's). Still, he does fantastic impressions, is the best improvisationist I've ever seen, and is overall a great person to have at parties, if not at, say, a poetry recitation. Joe's the other half of my co-producership, due to his contributions to the (what else?) mafia-related part of
Bleach.
Annie Capobianco kind of sticks out among the cast because she is, essentially, a normal person. You see her and you don't think "yikes" or "what a nerd" or "what a pretentious bastard", you think "this is, undoubtedly, a teenage female. yup. no doubt about it" (note: this not the case if she is asleep on the hood of your car). Annie's into theater, having acted in every school play ever, which would be why she was drafted into
Bleach. She tends to have a love-hate relationship with just about everyone I know, including me, which is a real trick. She was also a real sport about what we made her do for the movie, as far as actually doing it. Letting us use said footage is a different story. There might be something up with her, something dark and terrifying right beneath the surface, but far be it from me to worry about it until it surfaces.
Nick Mastracchio has a very nice dad who does not mind giving complete strangers pairs of his own pants. I'm wearing them right now. Nick used to be an enormous fan of Chile's, but we ate there so much during production that I think we snapped him out of it. He got into acting in Alex's last movie (which will never ever be coming out), and carried it into the school plays, where we discovered his perfect career: voice-over guy. Anything he reads (a script, a road sign, love letters, etc) becomes the sonorous version of hot sex. Yes, that is a perfectly normal and heterosexual way to describe another guy's voice. Nick can be a little whiny (sorry, gotta say something bad about everyone. It's The Rule), and moody, and obsessive, and he is far too good at Guitar Hero.
Shane Ferraro goes to Uconn with me. I have seen him twice since we've been here. I sat next to his roommate in chemistry. Shane is very tall. He likes Bruce Campbell, which is very cool. I dunno if you can tell, but we don't interact much.
Mike Diana is shaped like a pear. He is asexual, as well as ageless: 4 years ago, when I was a freshman and he was a sophomore, he looked like he was 40. Now, at age 19, he still looks like he is 40. My guess is that in 300 years he will still look like he is 40. He is every bit as Italian as Joe Pisani, and just as mafia-rific. No one knows what his distinctive accent is, himself included, but it is decidedly unreplicatable. His chief goal in life is to get me drunk, and he is a heavy cigar smoker. Nowhere else on Earth is there another Mike D, with good reason, and it's impossible to fully express his essence in written word. It can, however, be expressed in song, so keep a look out for the Mike D tribute album.
Mark Urbanski is someone I would never have wanted to talk to, had we not met while wearing the same doofy boy scout uniform. He's a, uh, 'straight-up gangsta from da hood', and his role in
Bleach is basically how he really acts. He claims to be a miraculous skateboarder, but I've yet to see anything that someone with basic motor skills (not me) could not perform with ease. He starred in Alex's movie
Shoes, the film that got him into a fancy art school that he doesn't go to anyway. Oh well. I saw Mark the other day in Gamestop, while I was in full geek mode and he was at his ghetto-est. We really broke a couple laws of nature when we became friends in scouts. However, I really like his car.
Emily Roy is a very nice girl that used to bum rides off me all the time last year at school. She's exceedingly tall, frighteningly so, but given (even more than Nick*) to spontaneous and violent mood swings. It'd be against the rules to have anyone normal on our cast. Low self-esteem? Overall insecurities? Something like that maybe, I don't know. Oh, Emily did a very nice job acting; she had to do a lot of improv and did it exceedingly well. She also named Jim, for which we must all be grateful.
*I've been informed that this is not true. Nick wins the mood swing contest, forever.
Jon Caporaso: I know absolutely nothing about this person.
Pedro Ondrush works a lot, so he was never filming on the same days I was around. Still, he's a cool guy, as far as I can tell; we were in the same classes for 4 years and all. He's like Annie in that with basically everyone he knows, it's a love-hate relationship. People tend to get pissed at him a lot, I'm not quite sure why. Despite the whole working thing, he's a supremely lazy ass when it comes to doing school work, but he's good at connecting with the teachers, which always helps. He did the graphic designing for the website, and while we were working on it at his house he gave me a rather tasty cheeseburger. I think that about sums it up.
Chuck Thompson and I were best friends when we were about 4. Now I'm closer to his younger brother, which is maybe a little weird. Chuck is the quintessential (yeah, I said it) underachiever: just barely graduated, huge partier, kicked out of college, lives with his parents and does a lot of drugs. Excellent. Of course, as people like that tend to be, he's also probably the single funniest person I've ever met. Unfair? Most definitely. What's even more unfair is that I know if I went that route, I'd wind up stuck as the creepy drug addict, who is no fun at all.
Joe Carusello once walked up to my mother and told her that she had a lovely son. He named our calculus teacher "Pucci". Evidence abounds that Joe is gay (Mike D tells us so), but there's something about him that suggests he is, in fact, a heterosexual (it's probably the guitar obsession. Note that Liberace and Elton John both went for the keyboard). He does have a predisposition to "gaily flitting about", but it is precisely this quality that made Joe the only logical choice to play Emily Dickinson in
Bleach. We're all taking bets to see how long he lasts in college.
Paige Carusello is not in this movie, and we like it that way.
Leanora Megura isn't really part of the usual movie bunch, but she's a close friend of Aneta's, so we worked her in somehow. Bonus points if you can actually pick her out in the movie. She's definitely an odd one: I was quite honestly scared of her for the longest time (and to be completely honest, still am, a bit), which may have something to do with her multiple piercings and disastrously aggressive attitude. Just a guess. She has some kind of unhealthy obsession with my dog, not quite sure what that's about. Her favorite pastimes include drinking heavily and then calling my cell phone. Knock it off.
Jim is too good for my words.
Ian is a close friend of my brother Jon, and his role in the production of
Bleach was chiefly technical. He did the sound for most of the movie, and he joined me in the crucial job of "showing up all the time". He worked hard to earn his title of "production bitch" (note: are he and Nick co-bitches? Or does Nick claim the title absolutely? We should hold a bitch-off.); you have to put up with a lot of shit before you get it in writing. He's a bit of a gun nut, which is understandable with his secret agent father, but becomes worrisome when you consider what an angry kid he is. I mean, his rage meter* is almost always shoulder height or higher, and that's just not safe.
*Located on your HUD, next to your HP. Foot-level is reminiscent of a sleeping kitten, while head-level transforms the player into a mindless berserker.
Aneta Klusak is in a whole new league of bizarreness (bizarritude. bizarritivity. bizarrisence). She's gradually evolved from your average goth into something simultaneously less demonstrative and more frightening (and animal-friendly), and we're still not sure what that is. All we (who the hell is we, anyway?) know is that she's made
Bleach into the supremely screwed up (seriously) thing it is now. Think about it: this movie was originally your average crappy mafia action movie, and she went and added all kinds of freaky shit in there. Not normal, man.
But it's probably all the abnormality that gives her the certain something that lots of guys, apparently, want (either that or it's some pheromone she exudes). The vast majority of the males in the cast (all but 2, in fact) fell for her at some point or another. Yes, I was included, I'm not going to lie. Whatever her power is over men, it's not normal. It's not...
human.
I should probably mention that she is the writer, and co-(or maybe sub-?) director with Alex,
for Bleach, in addition to being the lead actress.
I'm not even going to bother with the psychological aspect here. Seriously. Not worth it.
Alex Yan and I have a really weird history that I honestly can't even remember most of. We were inseparable for most of middle school and the first year of high school, then I flipped out for reasons unknown (well, the only ones I remember are so completely lame I'm going to just assume that I'm not pathetic and there were better ones hiding in there, somewhere) and we didn't talk (seriously) up until the last week of school. Basically, this summer, we just picked up where we left off.
Alex appears to be really pretentious, but I don't think he actually takes himself all that seriously. A lot of the time he just doesn't care, about anything, (must be all the transcending, what's
that about) which oddly enough sometimes makes him come off as haughty. On a probably unrelated note, he's one of those people that parents tend to hate. He once exclaimed "what the fuck" upon hearing a knock on his door that turned out to be my father. He managed to get himself more or less banned from my house, which is extremely impressive.
He tends to get away with some pretty outrageous shit, but one of these days charm and luck might not cut it.
Alex directed, edited, and actually shot the movie (John Wilkes Booth-style), and he's heading the post-production efforts, since he's the only one among us with any real idea of what we're doing in relation to the real world. Oh yeah, and he's a magician. Like...seriously.
