FMillest: a Retrospective
jackie and i are working, slowly but steadily, on our most ambitious project to date:
a feature-length historical documentary/where are they now?/social investigation about the international phenomenon that was/is FMILLEST.
what’s an FMillest, you say? it was/is our crew from our more formidable years, a group of people brought together by rollerblading. but it turned into much more than a skate crew.
so when jackie was down here a few weeks ago, we decided to:
A) see where everyone was, and what they’re doing
B) see if we can scare up as many old photos/videos/letters/etc. from that time as possible, and
C) put it all together as a documentary
we are now in the interviewing and old-media-gathering phase of the project, which we expect will last a long time. my conservative estimate for completion is one year. each interview, thus far, has been at least an hour. we’re looking at the possibility of acquiring THOUSANDS of stills, and HOURS UPON HOURS of old skate/party video.
Wesside’s interview was done on a rocking chair in his daughter’s (pink) room, with little mya in one hand and a quart of old english in the other.
Ol’School’s interview, if all goes according to plan, will be done via conference call on speakerphone while his buddy does the shooting in nashville (where Ol’School now lives).
while the most apparent reason for attempting this project is, as i will call it, active reminiscence, there’s a much more important mission:
we’re trying to figure out what it was about FMillest that made it so…special.
while it may be easy to say that we were so crazy because we’re skaters, that’s not entirely true. see, rollerbladers from around the country/world—young, old, pro, unknown—all thought we were crazy.
my hypothesis is that FORT MYERS was the base of the insanity, and rollerblading was simply an accelerant.
anyway, i’ll give periodic progress updates, along with maybe some little clips or production photos or whatever. this is going to be fun.
