In 1993, with the help of (then-)wife Jen and (then-)friend Eric (no, not Creery; this is another Eric), I put together a fifi “documentary” entitled, “Sorry ‘Bout That.” This was long before the age of iMovie or other consumer-grade digital video editing packages. What I had was about 4 VCRs, a CD player, and a cassette tape player all hooked up to a switching box, which fed into another VCR, which was set to “record.” Eric and I did all of the source switching and volume adjusting “live” during the mixdown, and the results were predictably shoddy.

My personal VHS copy of the film would only play in the VCR on which it was recorded; a fact which I only realized some years later, long after the original VCR had disappeared. In 2007, I complained about this sad fact to Jeff Lageson, who casually informed me that he owned a duped copy of my film, which would play on any VCR. Thus, in much the same way that scrolls from the Alexandrian Library have survived to the modern era only via the second-generation copies transcribed by Islamic scholars… Jeff totally saved my ass. He loaned me his copy, I digitized it, edited out the most painfully boring parts and the most egregiously amateurish editing flubs, and I now present it here, in serialized form, only to satisfy my OCD.

Before you start griping about the flickering video, the inaudible dialogue, the “oh for fuck’s sake is this fucking VANGELIS?” soundtrack, the shockingly inept Ken-Burns-ish cinematography, my gravity-defying Kevin-Bacon-in-Footloose hairstyle, or the fact that approximately ninety percent of the film is nothing but stationary shots of me sitting in a chair, talking… I would respectfully remind you that I made this in 1993, so shut it.

p.s. Holy Crap! Check out Matt’s beard!

Proceed to the next chapter in the spellbinding fifi documentary, “Sorry ‘Bout That.”