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where are the Blair Witch actors now?
Tuesday, October 26 1999
The sheer quantity of industrious activity taking place around the company of late boggles the mind.
At just about any time of day and well into the evening you can go out onto the walkway above the
courtyard and witness at least two different meetings taking place, and that's just the overflow from
the several meeting rooms on each of the two floors. When you figure the 120+ employees to which
we've metastasized seemingly overnight, along with a management system designed to wring continual
activity out of each one of them, it's really not too surprising. But it's a precarious work environment;
if you don't demonstrate your worth early, you're history. There's little room for error. Of late
I've been making widgets that are time-released and thus inherently difficult to test. In the back
of my mind there's always this fear that our site will blow up at the stroke of midnight and there
will be no one to blame but me. And my job is basically that of peon programmer. You can imagine
what it's like to work in management. One of those guys told me today that when he gets off at the
end of the day he goes home and smokes four joints before he does anything else, though I suspect
he was exaggerating just a bit.
Every now and then, though, there's a momentary break in the stress. Today at 5:30 pm there was a
showing of the just-released videotape of the Blair Witch Project. The buzz for this videotape had
been extensively fueled on our site for the past few days. I'd heard everything from "you gotta see
it" to "somebody's gotta tell the world how bad it is!" so I was eager to see for myself. Since there
was even free beer provided for the viewing, I decided to make a cheap date out of it, inviting Kim
and everything. Her Rory-inspired vow of abstinence from all drugs and alcohol evaporated even before
I'd finished my first Corona.
As for the Blair Witch Project, my opinion is mixed. I found the deliberately low-fi production
and actor's eye view vantage point innovative. But the application in this movie was decidedly weak.
The movie never made me care about any of the actors whatsoever, and as the movie dragged along
through endless scenes of them being lost in a Maryland forest (as if this is possible!) , I kept
hoping they'd meet their end and get it over with. Some of the scenes were kind of scary, all the
more so from the seeming non-fictional nature of the production. But of course it was
fiction, and those actors and actresses are out there somewhere. Evidently they're being kept
hidden from the public by the film's producers in a shameless attempt to perpetuate the shabby
myth that the movie actually was made by film students who were killed in the woods.
Someday they'll emerge from seclusion and be pop heroes, but for now they're being told to wait.
After the movie we socialized with my co-workers while eating some of the catered food that comes
every night at 5:30. It was Indian food and especially good.
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