In the end, our short film fit the first annual Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival’s Shoot Locally, Think Globally theme to a T. Made in six hours in Island stores and homes and on its roads, the movie is a cynical glimpse into the nationalistic American psyche that mystifies and fascinates so many non-U.S.-ers. The festival itself encapsulates the thing I love most about living on Martha’s Vineyard: so many brilliant and creative Vineyarders coming together to celebrate their simultaneous passions for the Island community and the wide world beyond our fabled shores.

When I heard in the spring about the September film festival, I went home that afternoon and wrote a four-page script about nine-year-old Nathan and his ten-year-old sister Juliet. The story culminates with Juliet playfully draping thick wet strands of seaweed over her brother’s head and holding one underneath her nose. “Why, you’re beautiful,” she declares in her lowest register. “And you’re quite handsome,” Nathan sings in his best falsetto.
Laughing delightedly, they continue their play – exploring the opposite gender’s forbidden language.

I planned the shoot for early September, amassed my crew, and started auditioning Island children. That was my favorite part, meeting talented boys and girls who added their unique perspectives to the roles. This being the Vineyard, I shouldn’t have been surprised when one of the boys, who loves playing with Star Wars action figures and other boy toys, excitedly donned his sister’s striped dress and unabashedly asked me, “How do I look?”

When I instructed a bunch of boys (whose parents have strict no-toy-gun policies) to grab some sticks and play shoot-’em-up, they blasted each other and rolled for cover behind rocks and bushes as if they’d been doing this every day since they learned to walk. The antics of these pre-adolescent Vineyard boys demonstrated the awesome power exerted by cultural mores to penetrate even this sheltered Island sanctuary of non-violence. My script had hit a chord.
Then, two days before the shoot, my cameraperson, my sound recordist, and my lead male actor all canceled. The film was off.

Fortunately, my friend Nora Laudani, a brilliant performer and writer, had approached me a week earlier about shooting a short film she’d been concocting for a while. After attending to the wounds of my aborted film, I called her and said, “Let’s do your movie.” On a Friday afternoon, we met at MVTV, the Vineyard cable access station, checked out camera gear, and started shooting. Nora plays a working-class woman who spends the whole day – while driving, shopping, and eating dinner – singing patriotic songs such as “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” and rehearsing the Pledge of Allegiance. She wears a blue nursing dress and stringy brown wig and speaks with a high-pitched approximation of a Brooklyn accent – in a word, hilarious. My challenge was to keep the camera steady over stifled laughter.

There were other challenges. We were kicked out of the Edgartown Stop and Shop after shooting the first half of the shopping scene, so we raced over to its Vineyard Haven location, the camera concealed as we passed through the checkout area, and shot the rest of the scene as inconspicuously as possible in the frozen-foods aisle. None of this phased Nora. “I love grabbing a camera and shooting by the seat of our pants. It’s my favorite way to shoot,” she told me. This also invites little gifts of spontaneity: in the middle of a take, Nora noticed a stack of loose bananas across from the freezer, grabbed one, and sang into it like a microphone for a few seconds before gracefully tossing it into her shopping cart.

In the last scene of the film, eating alone in her kitchen, Nora’s character pushes away her black plastic tray of microwaved, frozen macaroni and cheese and looks sadly into her lap; she’s unable to translate her jumbled, enthusiastic embrace of our national anthem (“. . . for the home of the land, and the freedom of the brave”) into the boost in personal self-esteem and national pride for which she was striving.

It wasn’t until we were in the editing room that we realized how sad our ending was. I added the sound of a ticking wall clock to enhance the loneliness of that moment; as if to say that even patriotic fervor can’t protect us from the passage of time and the isolation of our shattered communities.

Our little masterpiece screened as part of the festival’s afternoon of Vineyard films. Despite the gorgeous late-summer weather, the house was almost full. There were a couple of films from the high school, two short trailers from full-length documentary works in progress, and films of varying lengths by local professionals. The dearth of Island submissions this first year of the festival allowed me to submit three of my films, but the most thrilling was projecting Tis of Thee for the first time, fresh from my laptop’s DVD burner.

I’d like to say the crowd laughed and cried, but really, I was laughing more than anyone else. There were a few chuckles and light applause at the end. That’s the way it goes with art-making. At first you love it, then you hate it, and finally, you’re bored and move on to your next project. Later, friends told us they liked our film, but not necessarily for its humor. As we learned in the edit room, the film’s satire isn’t so comedic as it is a commentary on the loneliness that can come from trying to be jingoistic.

(A single screening can’t assuage the audience-hungry filmmaker, so I uploaded the film onto YouTube at youtube.com/watch?v=iF7Vf0EzjXw.)