My Big Break

I was once a part of a student film. Not in the way that Robert Duvall ended up in George Lucas' "THX-1138", in that I didn't have to shave my head or anything, but there was still an arduous day's work involved. My older brother's friend Tom was making a movie for a class in high school entitled "Three Boys And George". It told the story of a trio of boys out for the day at the mall, when one of them happens upon a quarter on the ground.
I was the kid who found the quarter. The quarter was the "George" part of the title. To get a sense of how long ago this took place, finding twenty-five cents was significant in the lives of a group of kids seven to eleven years old. In the film, the dilemma was trying to find just the right thing on which to spend our new-found wealth. There was a candy store, a toy store, and eventually a row of pinball machines. My older brother, who was acting as cameraman and visual consultant, suggested that I pantomime my worries about the impropriety of these pleasure machines. I guess my ad-lib didn't meet our director's approval, since it never made it to the final cut.
The three boys came upon an arcade machine that we could all agree on: a remote control helicopter in a great glass case. We all hopped about in front of it for a moment or two, expressing our enthusiasm, and then I reached into my pocket to produce the quarter. To my shock and dismay, it was nowhere to be found. My little brother and my friend took this news even less well, and were ready to throttle me. In one of my finest moments on film, I improvised a quick check of my back pockets, even though the pants I was wearing had none. Needless to say, the quarter was still nowhere to be found, and the other two boys began to inflict bodily harm upon me as we cut to a shot of the quarter, a few short feet away, laying back on the ground.
It wasn't Chaplin. It wasn't D.W. Griffith. It was a five minute story that taught me a lot about what I would eventually learn all over again in college film classes. I took a lot of those classes, but I never learned more in a day than I did on location with "Three Boys And George".