I suppose my initial foray into art would have been in the form of 8mm movies. When I was 11 or 12, I mowed yards for money. When I saved up enough I bought an 8mm movie camera. My best friend Scott Reuters and I would do send-ups of horror movies, kung-fu movies or parodies of pie-in-your-face flicks. This went on for a few years until I met a new kid named Russell Orr, the wildest kid I'd ever met, and when he joined in the movie making fun, things took a different twist.

We decided to make a really bloody shoot-'em-up flick about some drug dealers. I strapped plastic bags filled with red tempera paint on the front and backsides of all the actors. They'd grab their bellies when they were shot and slam backwards into a wall bursting the second bag. It looked good. There was lots of blood. When it was my turn I strapped a firecracker on my blood pack so I wouldn't have to grab my stomach to bust the bag. That worked great. The firecracker exploded the front of my shirt and blood flew everywhere. Everyone was really excited by the effect until we noticed my shirt was on fire. Of course that actually looked pretty good too.

In the next film, instead of blood I set my legs on fire. Then I thought, "What if we did the bloody shoot-out thing in a situation where people would actually think it was really happening?" We talked Russell's sister Lorraine into being the victim and his other sister Bonnie into filming. Russell and I got a couple of realistic gun models at the hobby store and we went to the plaza in downtown Decatur to see how our stunt would play to an audience. We lit a couple of firecrackers in an alley, then stepped out onto the sidewalk pointing our guns at Lorraine. When the firecrackers exploded, she splashed onto the sidewalk and we ran into the alley. A few blocks away we hid our guns and stocking caps and after milling around some stores for five or ten minutes we headed back to see how things were developing.

We turned the corner to discover a huge crowd. Traffic was stopped and there were three cop cars and an ambulance. Bonnie, who had been filming from the top of a parking garage across the street spotted us and was shouting, "Rusty! Rusty! The police!" I yelled back, "Film!" Russell yelled, "Go home!" Now the crowd was starting to look at us. We ran. Lorraine got up and left. Bonnie ran too. We all got away clean. It was exhilarating.

By the time Russell and I were in our sophomore year in high school, we had a little competition on the filmmaking front. Our English teacher let her three aspiring filmmakers premiere their new work in her class. We seemed to have the other two guys beat on laughs, but one of them had pulled off some more thrilling action sequences. Russell wanted to do a stunt that would show up our cinematic competitors once and for all. Russell decided to set himself on fire under the Lake Decatur Bridge and step into the lake to put himself out. He doused himself in charcoal lighter and lit a match while I filmed. He was instantly completely engulfed in a ball of fire. Disoriented, he turned to run away from the lake, but slipped backwards on the embankment and fell in, emerging minutes later from the icy waters, screaming. He was shaken and overwhelmed, and a lot of his hair was burned off, but otherwise in good shape.

I gave him my coat and we walked a mile back to my house, where I told my mom Russell had fallen into the lake on the way to school and needed a shower and change of clothes. Knowing Russell as well as she did, it seemed reasonable to her. Later when I showed the film in class our English teacher was ecstatic. "The fire looked so real!" she gushed, "How did you ever achieve that spectacular effect?" I explained about the charcoal lighter and the match. No one was allowed to show films in her class again.

The local Army recruiter had been plying us with cases of beer in an effort to get us to sign up for the armed forces. He had an M-16 on display in the front window of his recruiting office. I asked him if I could borrow it for a couple weeks for little filmmaking. He agreed and, after removing the firing pin, handed it over to me. For the next week we had a lot of impromptu fun with it. We discovered you get this heightened respect when you pull out an M-16. Eventually we staged another real-life shooting stunt similar to our first. This time we did it in a supermarket. Russell played the victim. Firecrackers exploded the front of his shirt, spewing blood into the air, and Russell flung himself backwards onto the slick supermarket floor, smashing the blood pack on his back and sliding on the pool of blood into a display. Butch, the shooter, was waving the M-16, screaming, "Take that, you son-of-a-bitch!" It was intensely realistic. The patrons of the supermarket seemed to agree as they ducked for cover. When we returned the M-16, Russell signed up for the Army.

After high school I moved to Texas, where I found my next Russell Orr in a six-foot, seven-inch son of a missionary named Jack Assner. I showed Jack my old flicks from Illinois, and he was thrilled to pick up Russell's torch. I cobbled together a crew of new actors out of a gang of speed freaks I met in Duncanville's Lake Side Park. The new films became the center attraction for my big keg parties, and everyone was more interested in being the hero than in following any script.

After a couple years I lost all patience with these "actors" and decided to do a film where they could act as themselves. The pretense would be an award offered for the craziest stunt performed for my camera. Fueled by an overindulgence in after-hour chemicals, these guys were constantly doing things few would believe the next day. The plan was simple. The Lakeside crew would show up at the park at ten in the morning and proceed to carry on in their dusk-to-dawn behavior patterns. After a couple hours getting into the zone a competition to achieve the craziest stunt ensued. Jack watched patiently as our cohorts tried to one-up each other: Pat with a naked swing from a windmill, Dink with a leap from a car doing forty miles an hour, and Mark's swan dive through a plate glass window. Jack was desperately racking his brain for the piece de resistance when he remembered the crowd's stunned reaction when I played Russell's fire footage. "Take me to the mall," he declared, "I'm setting myself on fire!"

We filled a cooler full of water and stuffed in some blankets. Then we dressed Jack in three layers of cotton clothes, long underwear, shirt, pants, and a jumpsuit on top. We grabbed a couple cans of charcoal lighter and were off to the mall. We set up outside the main entrance, where a small crowd stopped to watch us dousing Jack with charcoal lighter. When we realized we'd forgotten matches, a few generous volunteers rushed forward with their lighters and helped get Jack get started. Within moments Jack had a good blaze going. We'd kept the charcoal lighter soak below his ribs, which was successful in keeping the flames from climbing up into his face. He was able to do a ten-second stroll into the quickly parting crowd before he yelled out "Too hot!" and the crew tackled him with wet blankets. A buoyant, adrenaline-charged Jack pumped hands with a few spectators, and we got the hell out of there. Nobody wanted to try to top Jack's performance.

The glue for The Crazy Awards film was an awards banquet where awards for crazy stunts were handed out, the top honor going to Mr. Jack Assner. After accepting his award, Jack was showered with frenetic applause, raised lighters, and an enthusiastic request for an encore. The lighter-waving mob then chased Jack into the street. What was supposed to happen next was Jack's tackle at the hands of the mob, followed by Mark setting the bottom of Jacks suit pants ablaze. Cut. That's what did happen. Jack stood up, the crowd backed up, and a tiny flame clung to life on Jack's pants leg. Dink pulled out the blanket to smother the little butterfly of a flame, but Jack, disappointed with the pathetic excuse for fire fluttering on his leg, requested of Dink, "Hold off for a minute." Jack casually strolled into the street as the flame quietly rolled around his leg. "Okay, that's it," I instructed. Jack shrugged his shoulders and started walking back to Dink. Suddenly the tiny flame swirled like a tornado around one leg then the other. Jack's bemused expression turned to horror as the fire exploded, engulfing Jacks entire body. Jack had in an instant become a human comet in a frantic sprint away from Dink and the crowd. Jack was insanely trying to outrun the flames while we were desperately trying to catch him. "The Jacket!" I screamed, "Take off the jacket!" Jack obeyed, and the burning jacket flew off behind him. He then turned and ran towards us and we were able to tackle him. Dink rolled him into the blanket as the flames torched out the sides. It took every hand to finally smother the insistent fire.

Thankfully Jack's upper torso was unscathed, but he'd gotten third degree burns on the lower half of both legs and spent the next month in Parkland Hospital. In a moment of morphine-induced euphoria, Jack admitted his long-standing penchant for methamphetamine abuse to his doctors, who, in compliance to hospital rules, cut him off all painkillers for the duration of his hospital stay. The ordeal ended Jack's drug days for good, and after a long healing process he went on to college, where he discovered computers. I haven't picked up a movie camera since.