I watched the film, The Myth of the American Sleepover, tonight and recommend it as a Netflix streaming option. It was written and directed by a fellow tweep, @DRobMitchell, who is currently working on Ella Walks on the Beach. The film was gorgeously shot, fun to watch and has a mid-90's feel with it's lack of cellphones and chunky t.v.s playing brilliant snippets of films that I seem to remember from that time, but from the credits on IMDb, were almost certainly shot just for the film.
Following Marlon Morton, Claire Sloma, Amanda Bauer, Brett Jacobsen and other gangly youth around a Detroit suburb on a wet evening (lots of gorgeous water imagery) as they try to find their way through the myth of the American sleepover and discover what they want out of life, felt real and rang true to my memories of similar sleepovers as a hormonally mixed-up teen in Pennsylvania. I remember having grandiose ideas that crashing the girls sleepover was going to result in some kind of magical sex party or a sudden complete understanding of what women were all about but they usually just ended up with a bunch of girls throwing stuff at us as we laughed at them in their pajamas and ran away. Later, we told highly exaggerated stories about our prowess with these girls to any of the guys who weren't around and mostly never spoke about any of it again to the guys who were with us.
The film left me wondering about my own myths from when I was younger and made me want to write down some of these stories too. I remember the one time my friend George and I decided to tell each other's parents that we were going to stay at the other person's house. We just wandered around in the humid summer night, climbing fire escapes, talking about random things, buying snacks at the convenience store and running through people's backyards. We had found a six-pack of beer that someone was saving in a hole in a creek and we drank three beers each and got tired and dizzy and just went to his house and crashed on the sofa bed down in the basement. The next day I had a mild hangover and ate breakfast at his house. He had three sisters, two who were twins, and I had a crush on all three of them. I used to look at them the way Rob in MOTAS does and I always wondered if they ever knew. Years later, I've been trying to track George down, but he's fallen off the map, even in these days of Twitter and Facebook. It would be fun to ask him what he remembers of those days we would wander around the neighborhood trying to figure out who we were and dreaming of who were about to be. Thank you for the great film, @DRobMitchell, would love to work you on something in the future!
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