Pirate Cinema

Prologue

A star finds true love/A knock at the door/A family ruined/On the road/Alone

I will never forget the day my family got cut off from the Internet. I was hiding in my room as I usually did after school let out, holed up with a laptop I'd bought third-hand and that I nursed to health with parts from here and there and a lot of cursing and sweat.

But that day, my little lappie was humming along, and I was humming with it, because I was about to take away Scot Colford's virginity.

You know Scot Colford, of course. They've been watching him on telly and at the cinema since my mum was a girl, and he'd been dead for a year at that point. But dead or not, I was still going to take poor little Scoty's virginity, and I was going to use Monalisa Fiore- Oglethorpe to do it.

You probably didn't know that Scot and Monalisa did a love-scene together, did you? It was over fifty years ago, when they were both teen heart-throbs, and they were co-stars in a genuinely terrible straight-to-net film called No Hope, about a pair of clean cut youngsters who fall in love despite their class differences. It was a real weeper, and the supporting appearances in roles as dad, mum, best mate, priest, teacher, etc, were so forgettable that they could probably be used as treatment for erasing traumatic memories.

But Scot and Monalisa, they had chemistry (and truth be told, Monalisa had geography, too -- hills and valleys and that). They smoldered at one another the way only teenagers can, juicy with hormones and gagging to get their newly hairy bits into play. Adults like to pretend that sex is something that begins at eighteen, but Romeo and Juliet were, like, thirteen.

Here's something else about Scot and Monalisa: they both used body-doubles for other roles around then (Scot didn't want to get his knob out in a 3D production of Equus, while Monalisa was paranoid about the spots on her back and demanded a double for her role in Bikini Trouble in Little Blackpool). Those body-doubles -- Dan Cohen and Alana Dinova -- were in another film, even stupider than Bikini Trouble, called Summer Heat. And in Summer Heat, they got their hairy bits into serious play.

I'd known about the No Hope/Equus/Bikini Trouble/Summer Heat situation for, like, a year, and had always thought it'd be fun to edit together a little creative virginity-losing scene between Scot and Monalisa, since they were both clearly yearning for it back then (and who knows, maybe they slipped away from their chaperones for a little hide-the-chipolata in an empty trailer!).

But what got me into motion was the accidental discovery that both Scot and Monalisa had done another job together, ten years earlier, when they were six -- an advert for a birthday-party service in which they chased one another around a suburban middle-class yard with squirt guns, faces covered in cake and ice cream. I found this lovely, lovely bit of video on a torrent tracker out of somewhere in Eastern Europe (Google Translate wouldn't

touch it because it was on the piracy list, but RogueTrans said it was written in Ukrainian, but it also couldn't get about half the words, so who can say?).

It was this bit of commercial toss that moved me to cut the scene. You see, now I had the missing ingredient, the thing that took my mashup from something trite and obvious to something genuinely moving -- a flashback to happier, carefree times, before all the hairy bits got hairy, before the smoldering began in earnest. The fact that the commercial footage was way way down-rez from the other stuff actually made it better, because it would look like it came from an earlier era, a kind of home-film shakycam feel that I bumped up using a video-effects app I found on yet another dodgy site, this one from Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan -- one of the stans, anyroad.

So there I was, in my broom-cupboard of a bedroom, headphones screwed in tight against the barking of the dogs next door in the Albertsons' flat, wrists aching from some truly epic mousing, homework alerts piling up around the edge of my screen, when the Knock came at the door.