Salute Your Shorts: Kevin Smith's "Mae Day"

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

A lot of directors aren’t so keen on having their student films shown. Terrence Malick’s “Lanton Mills,” directed while he was still learning the trade at the American Film Institute, is kept on lockdown only available at the AFI to the institute’s scholars. Likewise, Kubrick did all he could to destroy every print of his first feature, though luckily he didn't succeed. But there’s a lot to be gleaned from films while directors are still figuring out their voice, and it should be no surprise that the particularly vocal Kevin Smith is one of the few directors out there to really feature his student work without any sort of shame.

Smith was only actually a film student for four months, though all things considered that was still half of the Vancouver Film School’s full eight-month program, which has only grown to 12 during the intervening years. In contrast to NYU or USC’s film programs, VFS is more of a trade school, teaching students so they can get jobs in the field. That’s exactly why Smith originally went with them after being inspired by Richard Linklater’s Slacker—they could teach him what he needed to know in order to make a film as quickly as possible. He wasn’t there to learn film history, he was there to find out how to edit, run a camera, light a room, and run sound, that’s about it.

During that accelerated time, he only made one film, though it was noteworthy in pushing together his long working relationship with Scott Mosier. Since then, Mosier has produced every one of Smith’s films, save tomorrow’s Cop Out. The two hit it off together because both were their class’ respective smartasses, so with only a few months together their relationship was set and before long they were working together on one of the course’s projects.

The pair wasn’t particularly concerned with actually making a film at the time, they just wanted to be shown the respect of their class and faculty. Twelve pitches were to be made for a first 10-minute film project and only four of them would actually be produced, with everyone whose pitches weren’t made acting as crews. Their idea was originally titled “Mae, I” and was going to be focused on a pre-op transsexual who worked in the school named Emelda Mae. While this sounds like somewhat typical material for a Smith film, the pair wasn’t planning on making jokes about the woman, they were planning on treating the subject “maturely and sensitively.” As you can imagine, this didn’t exactly come to pass, though what was made probably ended up more interesting because of this, even if it does keep the world from knowing what a Kevin Smith-style mature-and-sensitive-depiction of anything would look like.

Smith gave one recounting of how the pitch went down in 2005: “We’re like, ‘Oh my god, we’ve succeeded, this is awesome!’ … and then we were faced with the task of actually making the documentary. And it was like, ‘I didn’t know we were actually going to have to do it, I just wanted to be one of the ones that were picked!’”

The pair pretty much decided not to do pre-production, and while they were loafing around the subject of their film decided to drop out of the project. She dropped so far out they were unable to figure where she went (Smith at one point thought she headed to the Phillipines for the operation), leaving them with just one small clip of Mae singing at a restaurant and literally nothing else. Of course, this wasn’t just a film that died, it was a major project assignment with everyone involved being handed the same grade. Needless to say, the failed documentary’s crew was pissed.

It’s at this point that Smith and Mosier turned the documentary around and decided to instead create a film about how much the pair fucked up and ruined things. “Mae, I” was rebranded “Mae Day: The Crumbling of a Documentary” and they were able to turn out a finished project from the ashes of their old one.

You can watch the final version of "Mae Day" here.

In some ways “Mae Day” is a sort of proto-Lost in La Mancha. Incidental footage and anything else available is used to create a film that would have at least some sort of measured success. “Mae Day” does a decent enough job at this, though its 10-minute length means that there isn’t much depth given and, well, student films fall through all the time. That part of the story isn’t particularly interesting, and it seems like the original idea would’ve been a much better way of using everyone’s time. In this way it’s a decent bailout video for the students’ grades, but not much more.

Now, what I really like about the short is that while half of it is about this failed documentary, half of it is Smith and Mosier making fun of their classmates, the school’s faculty and documentary form in general. The pair finds what they’re putting together utterly ridiculous and they’re not afraid to say this, albeit in a highly ironic fashion. Keeping themselves in silhouette as if they’re informants is done to parody bad TV documentaries of the time, as are their overly dramatic pronouncements about what they’d done. Smith in fact wrote all of their interview dialogue beforehand in order to maximize the film’s ridiculousness.

What’s best about this is that while Smith and Mosier know what type of movie they’re making, everyone else interviewed about the project doesn’t seem to be in on the joke in the slightest. The direction the movie’s interviewees were apparently given is to just let the pair have it, to be as nasty and truthful as possible and not to spare any ounce of indignance. I would imagine that the histrionics weren’t asked for but something that instead came out naturally from the process. As with the original documentary, the pair informed everyone that they’d be turning out a serious project, it’s just that this time they were never intending on doing so.

So in fact, the film isn't about the failed "Mae, I" project at all, it's about the way people react to little things that go wrong.  Everyone blows the situation way out of proportion, except for the writer/directors who appear calm and more than mildly amused with the situation they've created.  As far as I'm aware, Smith has never spoken about the class' reaction to this movie, but it's hard not to wonder whether him leaving soon afterward meant they weren't too keen on being the butt of this joke.

“Mae Day” isn’t the most well-written or edited of films, and it was seemingly shot on rather low-quality video, but like much of Smith’s work it still gets by on a certain level of charm. It’s also pretty clever for a student work and does a great job twisting the rules of a project around to fit the idiosyncratic view of the director, something Smith and Mosier repeated not long afterwards with Clerks. The short definitely isn't essential viewing, but any fan of Smith is certain to get a kick out of the film's prank.