Casual Observer

By Mark Levy

Movies I Regret

I make amateur movies and I’ve been doing that for years. They are somewhere between home movies and Hollywood productions. Okay, perhaps they’re a bit closer to home movies, because they feature the friends and those members of my family who can be coerced into acting in front of my camcorder.

I suspect that many movie makers have regrets about some of their work. I’m one of them. I’m not talking merely about not winning an Academy Award® this year (or last year or the year before, now that I think of it). And I’m not talking about failing to entice Kim Basinger to act for free in one of my amateur productions. I’m referring to the movies themselves that I should have created differently.

The worst thing about knowing what I should have done is that I have to watch my movie over and over again when friends come to visit or I am invited to someone else’s home. (Being invited to others’ homes is occurring less frequently, too, but I like to think it’s not all my fault. Anyway, that’s a subject for another essay.) The audience may not notice anything amiss, but every time I see one of my defective movies, the mistakes are more evident than they were the last time.

Not only do I know what doesn’t work so well; I usually also know how I could have made the movie perfect. Hindsight is 20/20, as my grandfather used to say. Ironically, he became legally blind in his final years, so his aphorisms don’t always ring true. He also said that if you have a good suit, you’ll never go hungry in a big city. But I digress.

Often, as occurs in other art forms, the solution to perfecting a movie is trivial. Just like adding a teaspoon of baking powder to a cake recipe might make all the difference, a half-second cutaway close-up or a reaction shot inserted into a video sequence might be all that’s missing for the sequence to gel.

Before finalizing the movie, I sometimes ask another person to review my work. That can be very helpful. Of course, I wouldn’t dream of paying him or her for that service. Wouldn’t want to jeopardize my hard-fought amateur movie making standing, you know.

Sometimes I don’t notice the error in my movie until months after I’ve completed it. It wouldn’t take me much time to revise the movie, assuming I have the appropriate shots in my out-takes. But I resist going back and revising instead of moving forward to the next project. Now that I know what I did wrong, I say to myself, I don’t have time to revise it, but I’ll be sure not to make the same mistake the next time.

There’s a perverse comfort in knowing that, every time I embark on another movie adventure, I’ll be able to go on to make fresh, new mistakes.

Mark Levy is an attorney with the Binghamton-based law firm of Hinman Howard and Kattell. He is a contributing editor to ragazine.cc with Ryan Miosek (Feeding the Starving Artist), and an occasional contributor to NPR, where his comments can be heard some Saturdays at noon.