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 The Story Behind “Begone Satan,” by its director Matt Micka. I made my first Super-8 film as a freshman for Mr. Donnegan’s English class, in the spring of 1971. The camera and editing device was borrowed from Charles “Chuck” Link. Mark Monoscalco taught me how to edit—how to splice film together. The film was called “Al,” and starred Al Kamarowski. At the climax, he slips into a toilet stall on Wing 2-South of Marquette Hall, and emerges as Nose-Man, a super-hero in a cape with a nose the size of… Al’s own nose! I shot two 3 min.+ rolls of film, and the soundtrack featured Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” in other words, the “2001: A Space Odyssey” theme… The first semester of my sophomore year I spent in Maracaibo, Venezuela, where my father worked for Mobil Oil Company. I returned to Campion in January, and, in the spring of 1972, my mother bought me, for my birthday, a lovely Rollei Super-8 camera, from a tiny camera shop in St. Louis. I shot one roll of film that semester, documenting the all-male production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which took place in a little glade of trees close by the gymnasium. I shot two Super-8 films in the fall of 1972, both starring Roland Winkler. I appeared in the second, which consisted of Roland and I seated on the railroad tracks that ran behind Marquette and Lucey Halls, playing a game a chess. This was intercut with shots of an approaching train, plus some “pixilation” I’d done with my sister’s stuffed animal collection, over the summer in Maracaibo. (Don’t ask what these various elements were supposed to add up to, please!) I was laughing hysterically, seated on those tracks, and could not stop. Roland grew exasperated with me. I never DID stop laughing, but my long hair concealed my face! I was at that time taking Still Photography that semester with Fr. Strzok, and he was aware of my interest in filmmaking. So in the spring of 1973, Fr. Strozk asked me two questions, in the darkroom, while we were developing film. One was whether or not I’d ever considered joining the Society. This struck me as funny, since I had stopped attending mass as a freshman. But he also asked me whether I wanted to make a 16mm film, using the Jeb’s wind-up 16mm Kodak camera, and receive credit for it. He told me that, while I’d have to pay for the film and processing myself, he’d be able to get me the “Jesuit Discount” from the lab. I said sure. I had $100. So I began concocting a plot. Much of the plot was contingent upon features of Campion’s campus that I thought photogenic. I loved the Study Hall, which was no longer used. (I think that my class, the Campion Class of ’74, might have been the last to utilize it.) I loved the cupola on top of Campion Hall. And I was aware that there was an entrance to the steam tunnels beneath the priest’s booth within one of the Chapel’s confessionals. And it just so happened that I was appearing in a theatrical presentation that was to take place in the Chapel over Mother’s Weekend, so I had access to keys! Evidently among the keys on the ring was a key to the padlocked trap-door that opened into the tunnels. I was also an ardent revolutionary at that moment in time, thoroughly steeped in the “Social Justice” ethos of the Order itself—of Mr. Richard Lundstrom in particular (who’d himself been a Jeb, although I didn’t know this, I don’t think, until years later), and Fr. “JVOC” O’Connor, and African-American Ed Smith, who Mr. Lundstrom had been instrumental in hiring as an instructor, in the winter of 1973. With Mr. Smith, I was taking Black Studies, which concerned former colonial Africa, and Urban Studies, which concerned the United States. I loved both classes, and loved Ed Smith, and was one of the few white kids enrolled in both classes. Mr. Smith screened “Battle of Algiers,” which remains a favorite film of mine. I recall one of my African-American classmates objecting that the protagonists of the film didn’t look very Black. Which of course they didn’t, since Algerians aren’t Black Africans! Mr. Smith smiled at this… Anyway I was all for revolution, but I knew that I wouldn’t be all that enthusiastic about killing people. In other words, I supported a revolution’s results, but was squeamish, about its methods. So some of this anxiety figured into the plot of “Begone Satan,” definitely. Superficially, “Begone Satan” might seem to have been made by someone who was vehemently at odds with the Jesuits—or, at least Catholicism. While I wasn’t a Believer, however, I wonder whether there was any student on campus at that time who was more of a proto-Jesuit than I was! For me the S. J. after a Jesuit’s name stood for Social Justice, and I couldn’t have been more in agreement with the whole thrust of the Society, towards that end. I had no problem whatsoever with the Jesuits! I did however have a huge problem with my father. Of course I did my best not to think about this, but it worked its way thoroughly into the plot of “Begone Satan,” in the character played by Dan Fullerton, in other words the Headmaster. He is an authoritarian bully, not unlike my father was. In the end, he gets pitch-forked to death, and the “good” rebel, played by senior John Seery, laments this violence. The “good” rebel was of course the non-violent rebel whom I most identified with. It would have behooved me, however, in real life, to have been more like the “bad” rebel, the rebel with the pitchfork, played by Don Nausbalm… More on that, in a moment. On my 17th birthday, then, May 7, 1973, we began shooting, in the Chapel, two days after the second and final performance of “Through the Eye of Man,” the Mothers’ Weekend theatrical extravaganza. In other words, we still had the keys! Through Fr. Strzok, we’d formally requested permission to shoot in the steam tunnels; but, permission was denied. To Fr. Strzok’s everlasting credit, he not only went along with me shooting in them anyway, he himself manned the camera in one “action” shot, the one where you see the “good” rebel from behind. That is actually my back, and, my long hair, in that shot, not John Seery’s! That, I guess, was my “Alfred Hitchcock Moment,” the moment in the film when the film’s director makes a semi-clandestine appearance! Fr. Strzok in fact was on hand for nearly all of the “shoots” over the next two weeks. He was responsible for doing all of the light-meter readings, and telling me what F-stop to set the camera at. I did the actual shooting. When we got the “rushes” back in mid-May, he chastised himself for not having adequately lit, or else not properly exposing, the scene in the Chapel, but I love those shadows, and all that “spooky” darkness. Alice Krahn, who was our drama instructor, and a friend to me, was on hand for all of the “shoots” but for one, when she couldn’t line up a babysitter. At first I’d thought that she’d be “in charge of the actors,” while I’d concentrate on cinematography, but it became clear from the first day that I had plenty of ideas concerning exactly what I wanted each and every actor to be doing. Alice, however, very kindly continued to show up, to provide me with moral support, and what amounted to artistic nurturance/mothering. Alice’s husband Lucian played one of the three ecclesiastical “henchmen.” He’s the guy who delivers the electrical shock to those who are being punished. The other two henchmen were played by Scholastics. Mr. Romanowski, the fellow in the glasses, had been a star student at Campion just a few years earlier. He’d just appeared in our theatrical extravaganza, believe it or not, dancing a ballet with Alice. He got permission from the Order to study ballet in New York the next school year, but promptly permanently injured a knee at the onset of his training. He soon left the Order. I had dinner with him once in New York, and I wish that I’d spent more time with him. The other henchman was played by Mr. Cretik, who is now the Provincial of the Wisconsin Province of Jesuits! It’s him who we see at the beginning, up in the cupola, surveying the campus, wielding a telescope. (Passing through the very top floor of Campion Hall, which amounted to its attic, by the way, to film on the roof, was one of the highlights of my years at Campion. That top floor had of course once been where the entire freshman class had lived in little “stalls” or cubicles, as best I understand it. When we passed through it, it was used for storage, only, but its stale air exuded Campion history.) We got the “rushes” back just before the school year ended. A few classmates saw them, but of course, you shoot films out of sequence, and only fashion the shots into a narrative in the “editing room.” I duly edited the film in St. Louis, as soon as classes ended, in early June. I rented editing equipment from the same camera store from which I’d purchased my Super-8 camera, and the incredibly nice store owner let me project the completed film on his projector in the store after I’d finished. I then went to the main branch of the St. Louis Public Library, and spent an afternoon listening to scratchy recordings of classical music. One piece by Richard Strauss, whose “Thus Spake Zarathustra” I’d already used in “Al,” seemed uncannily promising. Like “Begone Satan,” it was 14-minutes long, plus a few extra seconds. Using a methodology so primitive that, in today’s digital world, it is almost laughable, I “timed out” the film with notation of when the scenes in the film changed, i.e. when it changed from humorous to dramatic, etc., and compared this against a similar “timing out” of the piece of music, Richard Strauss’s tone poem, “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. And, to an absolutely “uncanny” degree, the shifts in the dramatics of my film seemed to coincide very closely to the emotional shifts in the music. Indeed, the very “plot” of the tone poem is about a mischievous “imp,” Tll Eulenspiegel, who plays jokes on everybody, and who gets his comeuppance, in the end. So I “went with it,” never even hearing the piece of music played with the film when I ordered and purchased an LP recording of “Till Eulenspiegel,” and then recorded it onto reel-to-reel tape. Then my authoritarian father, who I had problems with (!), removed me from Campion again. Halfway through the summer preceding what was supposed to have been my senior year, I was informed of this. I was devastated but silent, because my father intimidated me, terribly. I did not fight back. How I wish, in all seriousness, that I’d been possessed of more of the “balls” of my “bad” rebel in “Begone Satan,” and been capable of defending myself. In a very real way, because I wasn’t at least able to fend of my father’s authoritarian decision with a “metaphorical pitchfork,” I let HIM kill ME, by “aborting” me from Campion. (By the way, my only “sins” at Campion were refusing to cut my hair, not attending mass, and, worst of all, being critical of the doings of Mobil Oil Company in Venezuela, a political perspective which had but of course been provided to me by the “Social Justice” Society of Jesus. I was no pot smoker. I didn’t drink. I wasn’t getting anybody pregnant. No, not even close, there was nobody to impregnate, alas…) We moved to New Orleans, and I entered Loyola University, a Jesuit instution of course, but no Campion! I submitted the film, with its soundtrack, to the 1973 Kodak Teenage Film Festival. Of course it didn’t win. It was returned without comment. What the poor judges must have made of the scene in which the confessional doubles as an electro-shock chamber, we’ll never know! So nobody who appeared in the film ever saw it in its finished form, until it got digitized finally in 2004, 31 years after its completion! Michael Murray, Mark Gomez, Joe Miesen and Ed Egan each pitched in $200 to get the digitization done. Back in 1973, the film had been “hot-spliced,” and the glue of the splices had discolored. So, futzing about somewhat with it digitally, I “removed” single frames on either side of each splice. Then I took the titles, which had been at the end, and moved them up front. Then I removed I think a two or three second pause near the climax of the tone poem “Till Eulenspiegel.” At which point my soundtrack, this famous piece of classical music, gave the impression of having been specifically written for the film. The co-incision between multiple changes in the music and changes of action in the film are “uncanny!” One final uncanny co-incision remain to relate. I’d learned of “shock treatment” while reading “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest”—but of course at Campion, in Freshman English, with Mr. Donnegan. Thus the confessional shock-chamber. Now, in New Orleans, I couldn’t confront my father, couldn’t consciously hold anything against him, even. But, I could hate my mother, and subject her to endless ridicule, for “aborting” me from Campion. I left her have it, relentlessly, throughout the fall of 1973. It was she, after all, who had championed the Jesuits, because she’d attended an all girls’ Catholic high school, Rosate Kane in St. Louis, which had been the “sister school” of the Jeb St. Louis University High School. She took it to heart, too, the fact that she’d at least let herself be bullied into going along with my second and final removal from Campion. When she suggested, in early 1974, that I obtain a ring, a class ring I mean, and attend my class’s graduation, in May 1974 (since I would technically “graduate,” having barely earned enough credits, my junior year), I let her have it ten times harder than I’d been letting her have it since the previous September. And, what did this culminate in, all this miserable family drama? My mom got shock treatment, at Oshner’s Clinic, and was institutionalized for months. Upon her release, she promptly became an alcoholic. Alas! Had I only been more like my “bad” rebel!
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