Gasoline Puddles and Take 2 (shorts)
About the Film
Gasoline Puddles was to be my first short film. The script won the inaugural National Screen Institute Drama Prize and we were so excited because we thought our careers were about to begin. We had the naivety, arrogance and ambition of youth. As it turned out, we shot the film twice.
On August 22, 1991, the Halifax office of the National Film Board of Canada burned to the ground. We had just wrapped a week’s shooting of Gasoline Puddles. Unbeknown to me, the NFB kept their office open late, so my producer could deliver the negs for safekeeping. That night we celebrated our wrap party. We could hear the sirens wailing in the city. The next morning we received two calls. My producer was told there had been a small fire at the NFB, so she wasn’t worried. I was told that the NFB had been destroyed.
We walked downtown to the site and found a gathering of filmmakers mourning the still smoking remains of the NFB, which was the heart of the Halifax independent filmmaking community. Our film was lost.
As I look through the files from that time I am aware of how much changed that day. Many filmmakers who lost films never made independent work again. The NFB came back as a new incarnation, no longer closely tied to the independent community. Sifting through press clippings, I see the faces of filmmakers and film lovers, who have since died. I see me, just out of university, ready to conquer the world, and realize how little I knew then. How little I know now.
The day we stood outside the smoldering ruins of the NFB, we coped by shooting footage. The only way we could look at the loss was through the safety of the lens. From that footage, and stills and video gathered by other filmmakers, I put together TAKE 2.
A month after the fire, we shot another version of Gasoline Puddles.