When I was going for my master's in screenwriting at the UCLA film school I had to make a student film for a required course. You couldn't escape without making a student film from start to finish, even if you were just into writing. I came up with a script about a little girl who's emotionally abused by her mother and left alone while she goes out with men at night and threatened with abuse by a boyfriend her mother brings home. But the little girl's toy doll on whom she counts for emotional support and that never leaves her arms comes to life and becomes a killer doll, killing the mother's boyfriend. I had to buy two identical dolls, one in which I put pitch black eyes and black make-up around the eyes to represent the evil doll. I did stop-motion animation with my super-8 movie camera
for the final scene at night when the doll comes alive, grabs a knife, and kills the evil boyfriend, using the movie camera's single-frame feature and moving the doll's head, arms, and legs an inch or two between shots which took a lot of time. It looked surprisingly good especially because it was shot in the darkness and shadow. Like all film students, I had no money and had to advertise in an actor’s newspaper in Hollywood for actors who participate in student films for free because they get exposure. I hired a very pretty and talented little girl whose mother was really pushing her to get into movies. The mother was a good and responsible person who came to all the days of shooting to supervise her daughter and I could see that she was the one with all the ambition. The horror within the horror story is that I started running low on money to get the film developed (I had to reshoot several scenes unfortunately because my lighting technique needed improvement) and my biggest problem was with sound. I simply couldn’t master sound editing skills. UCLA then had antiquated sound editing equipment in its film lab and the sound tape was not synchronized to the picture and the student had to approximate the synchronization while running it on a separate reel than the film.
To make a long story short, I ran out of time and I couldn’t get the sound right and I had to show my film on the student showcase day as a silent movie with only the music. I did get a good grade however because they saw how much effort I had put into it. But the little girl’s mother hit the roof when she saw that and got mad at me for giving her a videotape copy of a silent super 8 film. She had hoped to use the student film to showcase her daughter’s acting talent to get an agent. The mother insisted that I finish the film to add the sound and threatened to sue. I was absolutely flat dead broke at that time and couldn’t do it, much to my regret. I don’t think anyone’s ever been that mad at me and I understand. I just didn’t have sound editing skills with that UCLA equipment.
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