Pirate Cinema

Chapter 8

It all went by in a blur. No sooner would we tear down a show than we'd be setting up for the next one. And now that the press knew who I was, I was getting all kinds of requests for interviews -- as Cecil B. DeVil, of course. Annika encouraged me to do these -- “just don't take them too seriously.”

The first three or four made me very nervous, but then I realized that the press always asked the same questions, so I'd just flop down on the sofa with my laptop and my headset and take the call while Jem fed me so much jet-fuel it was a race to see whether I could finish the interview before I attained lift-off and sailed into gabbling, babbling coffee-orbit.

I don't think I ever worked harder in my life, before or since. I'd roll into bed at 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., having come off a night's binge-editing; it'd be even later if I'd been out at a Cinema night. I'd wake up five hours later, merciless alarm beating me into wakefulness. I'd attempt coffee in the kitchen, and the sound of my fumbling inevitably roused Jem, who hated to be woken, but hated the sound of someone murdering his precious beans even worse. He'd make me a pot of French press and I'd go back to work, devouring the night's e-mails, status updates, tweets and IMs, many from other people running their own Pirate Cinemas in other cities around the world, others from film-makers who were hoping to get screened at one of our nights. Plenty of messages from fans, too, people who'd been to one of the nights or had seen the videos on ZeroKTube or some other site and wanted to sing my praises, which felt insanely great.

It was so much stuff that I actually created two separate identities, one for press queries -- I'd get half a dozen of these every day, many for e-mail interviews, others for video or audio linkups. Some even wanted to come and meet me, but I never said yes to these, because I was paranoid that they might bring the police -- or be the police. But I did all the others. The e-mail interviews were easiest, since they always asked the same five or six stupid questions, and I just kept a huge file of pre-written answers in the form of a FAQ on the Pirate Cinema site. I'd just cut-and-paste the answers straight into the e-mail and be done with it.

Then there were all the organizational e-mails. Annika and her people were amazing lo- cation scouts, always finding new places for us to try. But then there was the problem of smuggling in the attendees -- and getting them there without tipping off the cops about our location in advance. For this, they employed tactics from the golden age of rave parties: they'd announce a rallying point and then someone would meet them with instructions for another location, and then another. On the way, hidden scouts would check them out, looking for anyone suspicious. Finally, they'd put them in white builders' vans with no win- dows and ferry them to the actual spot. I could think of fifty ways for the cops to defeat this, but it lent the whole thing an air of mystery and excitement, and it seemed the cops were not trying that hard to intercept us just then, because we didn't get busted once.

So -- organizational e-mails, then I'd shove some food in my gob without tasting it, and hit the editing suite again. I was turning out thirty to forty-five minutes of video a week, and it took me more than an hour to edit together every minute. And on top of that, I still had to do my runs to the skips to harvest food, and on top of that I was always on the lookout for scraps for the mask-making projects, which had sprawled all over the Zeroday, taking over every horizontal surface with sloppy papier mache remnants -- torn strips of newspaper, wheatpaste -- paints, beads, glitter, fur, scraps of fabric and bone, even a load of false teeth that Aziz had dug up from somewhere.

Someone was always making masks, and it had turned into a competition and a game. 26 had upped the ante by making a mask for me one week and demanding that I give her the mask I'd been planning on wearing -- a giant muppet head made out of fake electric blue fur with hundreds of eyes sewn all around it (the real eye-holes were hidden behind a scrim of window-screening). Thereafter, we inaugurated a ritual of trading masks just before heading out on show nights, and we'd surprise one another with our bizarre and hilarious creations.