When Damon and I wrote out the rough story and synopsis for The Return of Great Guy I thought it would be interesting to explore Great Guy’s relationship with his mother. What originally only began as a small part eventually ballooned into a main character with a lot of involvement in the story and her son’s life.
I ran an ad on Craigslist and soon Damon and I began auditioning possible maternal figures for our protagonist. I had originally imagined a curmudgeon of a woman not unlike the Sam Kinison look-a-like from The Goonies and Throw Momma From the Train. I imagined her puttering around the house in a tattered pink robe and hitting him in the head with frying pans, etc. Who we ended going with was completely opposite that.
Pilar Walsh was anything but curmudgeonly. Damon and I met her at Vivace Coffee on Capitol Hill and we were soon all laughing and carrying on like old friends. A self-professed hippie straight out of the Sixties, Pilar went on and on and about her coming-of-age exploits and adventures. A trained singer and dancer, Pilar had just arrived from LA where she’d been hustling her wares as an actress. I can’t speak for Damon, but I knew I wanted to work with her. She wasn’t what I’d had in mind at all for the part but I was definitely interested in seeing what she could bring to our little film.
I recall even back then Pilar’s desire to make a film about her life, a cinematic ode to everything and everyone she’d loved and cherished and fought for growing up in the Sixties. I’m happy to say that project has finally come to fruition and is in the works. See more at Soulucet Films.
For me, The Return Of Great Guy was really an endeavour of love. And later, even though it was originally my baby, I think Damon felt the same way. We didn’t have any money. I had been fired from the University Bookstore the previous fall and Damon was still working there while he was in school. To find props and locations we scoured our apartments and our friends apartments. We asked for favors and hustled on Craigslist like nobody’s business. This was especially true for casting actors. I knew I wanted our film to look like it had a big budget (or at least a budget) and casting all of our twenty-something friends just wouldn’t do for some roles. In my mind, a sure sign of a “student film” are the young ages of the actors involved and I wanted to steer clear of such hang ups by writing in characters of all ages, regardless of whether we knew anyone who could play them or not.
One of the first people we cast was Ricco DiStefano, an actor, artist and writer/director from Issaquah, WA. I had originally envisioned Great Guy’s lawyer, Rawhide McBride, as a W.C. Fields type character but when we auditioned Ricco at a Starbucks on 63rd and Greenwood what I had imagined for the character suddenly changed. That’s the funny thing about the casting process, you have a certain idea of who these characters are but when you see and hear the lines come out of a living person’s mouth your whole perception changes and entirely new possibilities present themselves.
Ricco reminded me more of Kevin Costner than W.C. Fields but his portrayal of Rawhide remained likable even though the character was not. Damen and I only had him read a few lines before we cut the audition short, which I think confused Ricco. Then we hustled out of there so fast Ricco probably thought we hated him. In actuality we were so excited to have a real actor that we had seen everything we needed to see.
In the fall of 2005, two things happened. The first being that I was fired from my job at The University Bookstore. The exciting version of the story is that I was canned for showing nude photographs of myself to a fellow employee, while the less than exciting version being simply the culmination of a string of many disiplinary meetings during my three year tenure, in which I was asked to do such things as (and this is no joke here) shave more often, not wear white t-shirts and, of course, smile more. Needless to say this set back ended up being a blessing in disguise and I firmly believe not only would I not have become the person I am today but there’d be no Great Guy film, let alone an unfinished one…
The second thing to happen that year was meeting Damon DiCicco, a fellow employee at The University Bookstore who I happened to share some similar sensibilities with, primarily that of hating working at the bookstore and secondarily a similar sense of absurd humor. Damon and I worked the cash registers together briefly and came up with a slew of song titles for our imaginary fake dream band Sex Pants, in which we’d both march around in nothing but microphones and tight fitting jeans yelling over electronic beats about pooping in public and trowser accidents… You might’ve had to be there.
I helped Damon edit a mockumentary about his joke band Bob and The Dangerous Brothers and it was during those sessions that I proposed the idea of working again together on a feature length film about Great Guy. I thought Damon would make a great Great Guy and he, having seen my act before, was very excited at the idea. We began working on a script that winter and by spring had a version we were both happy with.
We cast the film with friends, neighbors, co-workers and Craigslisters and began planning locations and shooting schedules. Shooting began in May of 2005 and lasted until the end of August. I have to credit Damon with being a fantastic and highly organized producer. Without his help this film might never have… well, let’s say it might never have been started.
Okay, enough back story! Let’s jump right in with one of my favorite completed scenes from the film. This is scene 22 as listed in our shooting schedule. It features Damon, of course, as our hero and my good friend Kevin Clarke as Hotwire, Great Guy’s arch nemesis. Enjoy!
This is one of my favorite scenes. I love the awkwardness between Kevin and I as we’re waiting for the elevator to stop.
Collaborating on the Great Guy film was very important for me. From the initial script discussions to the final day of filming, the project gave me something to focus on in a time of my life that was otherwise unfocused and, in a number of ways, trying. I put a lot of these feelings into the character, and it’s not an exageration to say I don’t know how I would have made it through that year had I not had this project to focus on. I will be forever grateful to Michael for asking me to collaborate on this film, and I’m very happy to see it moving forward again, and to be part of that process.
- Damon DiCiccio (Great Guy, co-producer, co-writer)
Though it could be argued that Great Guy himself is a charity case, there was a time when his performances were sought after for various charities and nonprofit fundraisers around Seattle. My favorite (and incidentally the only one of its kind ever recorded) was when Great Guy was asked to perform at a fundraiser for an independent Seattle Dance Company.
Instead of my usual schtick, I decided to choreograph a dance piece for Great Guy to perform and, in usual form, prepared for the event with both utter laziness and utter zeal. I went all out, choosing and editing music to perform to, designing and hand-painting my backdrops for the piece, but then never really bothering to finish choreographing my dance piece past the first minute. Frankly, that aspect of the performance bored me and I figured, like everything else, that I would just improvise.
My lack of planning would always infuriate Alice, my girlfriend at the time, to which I would always say “Great Guy wouldn’t plan, so why should l?”
At some point in 2003, I began performing around the city of Seattle as Great Guy, my “act” being a strange amalgam of both music and comedy/complaining. Some of my favorite and most memorable performances were at the Bumbershoot Art & Music Festival and at The Stranger’s (Seattle’s alternative weekly newspaper) annual Christmas party at The Crocodile Cafe. I took these performances both seriously and lackadaisically, often rehearsing nothing beforehand, improvising my set, then afterwards remaining in character for hours into the night, frustrating both friends and fans alike.
Whenever someone called me by name or made reference to me being “Michael Sanchez” I would emphatically deny knowing who they were referring to. In hindsight I can see how ridiculous it was but it made sense to me at the time. I’m not sure why I was so vehemently opposed to admitting that Great Guy and I were one and the same but I was so adamant about keeping my alterego secret that I went through the trouble of taking and then photoshopping these photographs of myself with Great Guy so as to aleviate any rumors that he and I might share the same identity.
Incidentally, the terrible haircut I have in this photo is the result of another film I was working on at the time called The Haircut Party, in which a group of friends challenge each other to give themselves the worst haircuts ever possible.
Not to be offensive but you just don’t have that “superhero” quality that Great Guy radiates (when he’s not drunk).
By the way, did he move to Chicago too?
- Shawn Dehner (The Teacher)
In 2003, The Seattle Times launched a short film competition they were sponsoring in celebration of that years Seattle International Film Festival. The ten finalists would have their films screened at the festival as well as shown on channel 5’s Evening Magazine.
Coming to the realization I’d perhaps bitten off more than I could chew by attempting to write and direct a feature length film by myself, I scrounged through the footage I’d shot so far in hopes of putting together something I could submit to the competition. I managed to stitch together a few choice scenes and, along with the addition of some photographs and newly shot interview footage, created some semblance of a storyline and ended up with a sweet little three minute “documentary” chronicling the (mis)adventures and (legal) battles of Great Guy.
As luck would have it, I managed to bag one of the finalist spots and am happy to say that my short film was shown that year on both television and at the 2003 Seattle International Film Festival. It stars my good friends DW Burnam, Kevin Clarke and Jennifer Magee.
This last scene in the salvage yard of Great Guy’s complicated film legacy stars one of my favorite people in the world, Wade Atkinson. Wade is one of the few people to hold that title in my life for a number of different reasons, but mostly it is because he always knows how to make me laugh. Ever since I first met him back in Seattle he has proven to be an everlasting example of positivity and ridiculousness all rolled up into one magnificent human being.
One time Wade showed up at my house with a car trunk full of “junk” he was throwing away. I saw a perfectly good tape measure and asked what was wrong with it. He said there was nothing wrong with it except that it was now obsolete due to the fact that he was converting to the metric system.
