When Paul McCartney recorded his first solo album in 1970, it was a solo album in the truest since of the term; he wrote all of the songs and instrumentals, he played all of music himself, he was the album's producer, and he recorded it at home on a Studer four-track tape machine. He also promoted the album by putting out a statement to the press in the form of a self-interview; he asked himself questions that he himself answered. Well, I just made a movie short by myself, and since I not only wrote and directed it myself, I filmed and edited it myself, did it all on a laptop at home making AI video segments on Google Gemini, and created not just a character but also created the person playing the character, I thought I could talk about it in a post here in which I interview myself and ask myself about the movie short. I wanted to invite me, but I chose to interview only myself. Two's company, but three's a crowd.
Q: Is this movie by Steven Maginnis alone?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Can you discuss the title?
A: I'd rather I didn't.
Q: Why not?
A: Because I wish I'd thought of a better title. (laughs)
Q: Well, let's discuss the title anyway. A Mime Unmasks. And Talks . . . And Talks . . . And Talks. As anyone can gather, it's about a mime artist who spends most of the movie out of costume and doing most of the talking. What inspired you to make a movie about a mime artist who dominates a conversation when not performing?
A: Well, that's an old joke Marcel Marceau once made; if you get mimes talking when they're not performing, they never stop. And they don't, really. When Harpo Marx, who was a mime without ever being called one, talked in public for the first time at a live event, he talked so much that people thought he would never shut up.
Q: And in this movie short you've made, Thelma [pictured above], the young woman who performs as a traditional street mime, talks almost non-stop for ten minutes describing her act and explaining her approach to the art of mime. How did you come up with such a monologue?
A: Well, I'm a journalist by trade, and on the way to becoming a regular reporter for a hyperlocal news site, I wrote three profile articles on mime artists, all women, one of whom, a woman named Catherine, is a mime in the French, Marceau-esque tradition, and the Marceau-style mime, with the white face paint and gloves and the simple costume, is the sort of character most people think of when they think of mimes, so I used that. The other two mime artists were living-statue performers.
Q: But you still used stories from all three women about their experiences as performers, is that correct?
A: Yes, I blended elements from all of their experiences, and that's what makes it fiction. Another thing I should point out is that Catherine only performs at events, really, and I've never seen a French-style mime perform on the street or in the park. I ad-libbed the monologue as I wrote it, because I'd already had the experience of writing the three articles.
Q: Although Thelma is identified as a mime, she spends most of the film out of costume and character, with only brief footage of her performing part of the way through, while the film opens with her in costume and makeup only to set up the scene in which she takes off her hat and gloves and removes her mime makeup in a time-lapse scene. Why make her a mime at all? Why not make her a folk singer?
A: I wrote a short story about an aspiring male folk-rock musician from Nebraska living in Manhattan and trying to make it in music, and he meets a female folk singer in the vein of Joni Mitchell or Jennifer Warnes while she's performing in Central Park and he is looking for a place to play in the park himself. They become a couple. So I did the street-musician thing already.
Q: Gotcha. So Thelma is a mime, and you show examples of her performing as a mime and wearing the traditional mime costume, but you really want her to present herself as a real woman who talks about being a mime artist. Do I have that right?
A: Yes.
Q: I see you've made Thelma a black woman. You very rarely see black women perform as French-style mimes. Why is Thelma black?
A: It was an accident, really, she was created through AI out of an experiment I was doing with a picture from someone I follow on Flickr, where I post my pictures. This guy I follow on Flickr took a picture of a mime walking in a parade that we both attended, and the mime happened to be a black woman. I tried to take a picture of her myself, but it didn't come out, and of course, I thought she would make an excellent subject for an on-spec profile article, seeing as you rarely do see black women involved in mime, but it took me months to learn her identity, and once I did, it turned out that she wasn't interested. Anyway, when I learned her identity, I saw a picture of her online without makeup, and now I took the picture of her from the parade and made a vertical-format film with AI that would show her without makeup, taking off her makeup, just to see if the face that resulted would match her real-life appearance. It didn't, so I threw it out.
Q: If you threw it out, how did you make a movie out of it?
A: I sent it to my laptop's recycling bin and, just before I permanently deleted it, I thought, wait, I'd already made a video using AI as an experimental exercise, what if I did something serious with this clip? So I saved it and began to make the movie.
Q: And that's the clip that opens the short?
A: Ironically, no. It was a vertical-format video, so I made a new one from the same Flickr photo in horizontal format. I originally thought I could use the vertical-format film to represent the imaginary box that street mimes always pretend to be in, or something like that, but I thought my movie would look classier if I made it horizontal all the way through. And besides, Thelma is a serious artist. She doesn't do the box. Or the rope pull.
Q: Understood. So was this based on an interest in seeing female mimes on the street and trying to visualize them without their whiteface?
A: Completely. When you see someone performing on the street, a musician, a juggler or a break dancer, they look like anyone else on the street, and they're performing in an accessible and familiar manner; they're not performing as characters, they're just putting out their music, their art, their skills. Mimes are obviously different. And when you're a man and the street mime you see is a woman, you want to know the person behind the persona even more so than if it were a male mime, because you think there might be a beautiful face behind that painted white mask. You also want to hear her talk. You try to imagine a nice voice that is not unlike the adorable gestures and facial expressions she makes when she's performing a light-comedy mime piece. But there is also the frustration of possibly never knowing.
Q: You didn't lean so much into the latter curiosity, the voice. Thelma is talking to one person throughout, and she makes it clear that she knows that person was hoping to see her without her makeup on but doesn't suggest that she figured that this person wanted to hear her voice. Why is that?
A: Too easy. Any street mime can break character to take time out to collect the money in the tip jar or something like that, and he or she can talk in whiteface and probably will talk to someone who compliments his or her performance. Any street mime can break the silence. How many of them unmask in public?
Q: Hey. I'm asking the questions here.
A: Then I'll answer my own question. If you counted all of the street mimes who removed their makeup as soon as they finished a show, you'd be able to do it on one hand with fingers to spare.
Q: Fair enough. So the movie begins with Thelma in full mime makeup, she takes off her disguise, reveals herself to be an attractive young woman, and then talks about what it's like to be a professional mime artist. Why so much detail?
A: Because most street mimes are rank novices who are untrained and only imitate what they've seen. That's why so many people hate mimes. Because they see them pretend to be trapped in a box or mock passersby, and they mug a lot, and they're not conveying anything meaningful. And that's the stereotype. And it's a stereotype commonly referenced by people who should know better. Like the folks who make TV commercials. I once showed my mime friend Catherine an old diet-soda commercial from the eighties that's now on YouTube, with a "mime" lady in whiteface and a unitard mugging for the camera and drinking an imaginary glass of imaginary soda and showing off her slender figure at the end. Catherine told me that people who put on whiteface and pretend to hold something for comic effect are cosplayers and what the woman is doing in this commercial is not mime. And she's right, of course.
Q: That commercial must have been an inspiration for your movie. The woman in it is wearing whiteface and she has an attractive figure, and you can't see her real face? That must have been torture for a man with a normal sex drive.
A: You better believe it! You might say that commercial subconsciously inspired my movie, but any woman dressed as a mime, whether a real mime or a cosplayer, is going to get me wondering what she looks like under her whiteface. If I had never seen this commercial back in the eighties, I likely still would have made this movie.
Q: Before we get back to the movie itself, did you ever find out who that woman in the diet-soda ad was?
A: It was model and actress Susan Hess.
Q: Oh, yeah, she was lovely!
A: She still is, and she's a film producer now. I highly recommend her 2009 indie feature movie Not Dead Yet, which she produced and starred in.
Q: So Thelma takes the opportunity to explain mime and express verbally what mime is and how she approaches it.
A: Yes. And because she's not wearing her mime makeup when she's talking, it doesn't feel creepy, because you see her face as well as hear her voice.
Q: Why not more examples of Thelma performing?
A: I'm not sure I wanted to make it that sort of movie. I wanted to keep her unmasked and out of character so viewers would get to know her as an ordinary woman, an ordinary woman who happens to be a street performer who is mysterious when she's in costume and in character. I wanted to explore Thelma as herself. Her monologue is like a one-woman show, only when not in character.
Q: Let's talk about Jim, the young man she's addressing. What's his story?
A: We learn about Jim through Thelma. He stays offscreen all the time, and Thelma explains Jim to us by acknowledging his body language, but she's the only one whoever sees his body.
Q: Why not have Jim onscreen with Thelma? And why not make the movie a dialogue instead of a long monologue?
A: Well, the answer to that is simple - this movie is made entirely with AI, Google Gemini, and I'm not savvy enough or patient enough to write out a dialogue in ten-second video segments, ten seconds being the maximum length of a Google Gemini-made video. That's why I didn't show Thelma performing a mime piece for longer than ten seconds. If I tried to create a part of a larger mime piece longer than ten seconds, I'd go bonkers trying to join the ten-second segments together to create something coherent.
Q: So you conveyed Jim's personality through body language that only Thelma sees?
A: Yes, and not just during Thelma's monologue but in references to his behavior while he was watching her perform, when he was looking at her simultaneously conveying enjoyment of her show and curiosity and an intense desire to see her real face underneath her clown white with the frustration of wondering if he'll actually get to see the "real woman" behind the mask. He conveys, through displays of nervousness and pained facial expressions that Thelma sees and correctly interprets, his guilt for eyeing her with a feeling of sexual curiosity in what her real face looks like. He can't hide his shame and embarrassment.
Q: That sounds intense.
A: It is. But she picks up his vibes, first when she's in character before the story in the movie begins, then when she's talking to him out of character and costume. And she responds with kindness and sweetness, revealing herself psychologically as well as physically, and calling him "honey." As the short progresses, Jim slowly learns to relax. Thelma becomes relaxed herself. When she finishes removing her mime makeup, she no longer needs to wear her hair pinned up, so just before her monologue begins, she lets her down literally, then as she talks about herself, she is letting her hair down figuratively. And Jim appreciates all this.
Q: But he still doesn't talk.
A: No, but he continues to betray his own psychological composition, looking sad when Thelma talks of the abuse she gets from passersby or shock when she shows him a picture of a commercial gig she did that shows her in a costume even more off-putting than the one she wears for her street act. And he does little things for her, like gather her stuff together and hold onto them for her so it doesn't get lost. But one important reason for him not talking is that he's listening. The reason that mimes talk a lot when not performing is because they develop while onstage a pent-up frustration to communicate verbally like any other person. Jim doesn't need to talk to get Thelma to appreciate him. He only needs to listen.
Q: And the viewer only needs to listen to get to know her. But isn't it ironic that the mime does all the talking and the young man from her audience communicates corporeally?
A: Yes, and I was also paying tribute to Mel Brooks when he made Silent Movie in 1976 and gave Marcel Marceau the only spoken line - one word - when I gave Jim one word to say, which is his answer to Thelma's question regarding his name.
Q: Clever. Before I move on, is there any reason why you named your mime lady Thelma? It's not a common name these days, it seems.
A: Well, back when I was thirty and writing mainly as a hobby while trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, I had a similar idea for a story about a mime lady meeting the man who becomes her boyfriend after a street performance, and I was going to name her Thelma then. But I hadn't met any mime artists before, and I really didn't know much about the art itself, so I wasn't ready to create a work of fiction based on a fictional mime artist. I must have seen that name around somewhere at the time.
Q: Let's talk about the one thing most people never want to talk about, and that is race. Thelma is a black woman, and as you said, you decided that presenting her as a black woman would make her a distinctive figure in a performing art dominated by whites. But she identifies Jim as white by mentioning his hair and eye color, and you never bring up race anywhere else in the film. Why is that?
A: Why should I? I establish that Thelma is black at the very beginning because her outfit shows her dark brown skin, and once I establish that Jim is white through Thelma's attraction to his hair and eyes, and that's enough. Besides, talking about race would be a dialogue. Thelma is the only one who talks, the only one you see, so to hear her talk about race alone would sound like a lecture.
Q: So your goal was to tacitly acknowledge the two different races of the characters without making it the centerpiece of your movie?
A: Exactly, because Thelma is talking about herself as a mime artist, not as a black woman.
Q: But white face paint on dark brown skin . . . that's a jarring contrast, isn't it?
A: Of course it is. If I had created Thelma from a picture of a real-life white female mime and made her Caucasian, the effect of white facial makeup against flesh-pink skin would have been jarring enough, but as I had a picture of a real-life black female mime, I created Thelma from that and made her black. Ironically, Google Gemini actually created a Caucasian female mime from this very same picture I used, but I thought, no, I was creating a fictional female figure from a picture of an African-American woman dressed as a mime, and so I wanted the mime lady in my story to be African-American.
Q: You mean Negro.
A: I do, and it's a legitimate anthropological term, like Caucasian, but we still can't use it because it sounds too much like a six-letter word I myself would definitely never use.
Q: Conceded. So you're saying that the contrast of Thelma's white face paint and brown skin are driving Jim crazier than the contrast of, say, a Caucasian mime lady's white face paint contrasting with pinkish Caucasian skin.
A: Exactly. When he's watching her remove her mime makeup, and seeing her warm brown complexion replacing the dead-white face paint, his brain is entering a higher pleasure zone.
Q: I did research for this interview--
A: Why would you do research to interview me? You are me.
Q: I am the interviewer. I am he.
A: You are me.
Q: I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
A: I see what you did there. So about your research . . .
Q: Yes, I did research for this interview, and I learned that when a mime of the opposite sex unmasks, you get a rush of dopamine that rewards you with a sense of pleasure as a form of relief. But when her skin is much darker than her white face paint, it's like the mother of dopamine rushes, as if it were all held back by the Hoover Dam and the removal of the whiteface creates a rush too big for the spillways and it breaks the dam to bits.
A: Precisely. But I don't think I need Thelma, who understands Jim's reaction to her mime face and her removal of it, to get into that.
Q: Fair enough, but why can't Thelma or Jim at least acknowledge the racial difference beyond differences of appearance?
A: Because Thelma's race doesn't matter to Jim, just as Jim's race clearly doesn't matter to Thelma. Jim clearly enjoys her company and wants to be with her, and the only thing that matters to him about her race is that her racial features are what make her so beautiful - her chocolate complexion, her jet black hair, her dark, soulful eyes . . .. I know it's a meaningless cliché to say, "I don't see race," but Jim clearly doesn't either because he's too busy enjoying her beauty. When you see Angela Bassett or Alfre Woodard on the movie screen, you're not thinking, "What a pleasant looking female African-American," or even, "What a beautiful black woman," you're thinking, "What a beautiful woman." And in a color-blind society, well, that's the way I've always heard it should be.
Q: He wants to marry her?
A: Good one. I didn't get that far in the story.
Q: Without revealing the ending, can you tell me if Thelma and Jim become a couple like your street musicians in your short story?
A: I'll only say that Thelma realizes that Jim is her biggest fan. You can draw your own conclusion.
Q: Fine. How is the reception to the movie so far?
A: Great. It's only gotten three dozen views up to now on YouTube but the response has been very positive. Many friends of mine have seen it and they love it. But a few of them steadfastly refuse to watch it because it's all made with AI and the woman in the movie is an artificially created person, not an actress. I have one friend who is a professional actress who told me that if filmmakers use AI to replace real actors, that's the end of the acting profession.
Q: Understood. I'll bet you're conflicted too.
A: I looked at Thelma with her natural face as I was putting the movie together, and I thought, "Wow, what an incredibly beautiful woman!" And she doesn't exist. I did my job too well. What was really weird, is that I would give Google Gemini prompts for Thelma as I was bringing her to life - "Have her laugh here." "Make her pause." "Have her shrug when she finishes her sentence." Mundane commands like that. And then, as I was creating more ten-second clips and editing them together, she seemed to be laughing in the video segments even when I didn't command Google Gemini to make her laugh. And when I saw the first cut, she came across as a cheerful, warm, vivacious woman. She had taken on a life of her own. The power of AI had freaked me out - but in a good way. I got the character I wanted, a young woman who could be the perfect girlfriend.
Q: Does she become Jim's girlfriend?
A: I'll only say what I said before - that Thelma realizes that Jim is her biggest fan, and you can draw your own conclusion.
Q: Given the reaction you got from friends who won't give AI the benefit of the doubt, give it a chance, do you feel guilty for using AI to make a short movie that you could have made with a black actress?
A: I'm a Roman Catholic - guilt is what I'm best at! Yes, I know that the pope has expressed concern over AI taking over and ending professions that previous technologies could never replace, like acting. But I labeled the movie as AI and I have been very straightforward that I used Google Gemini to make it, that there's no real actress playing Thelma, and I worked to make it superior to the usual AI slop. But AI critics remain unmoved. I have problems with AI myself, but making an eleven-minute movie short to express your vision isn't going to end the world.
Q: Will you ever remake this movie as a movie made with real film with a real actress in a real setting if you get the chance?
A: Well, sure, if I get the chance. But I don't think I'll get the chance. I don't know a twit about how to make a movie in the real world, with real equipment and a cast and crew, and even if I did, I don't have the money to make the movie. I guess if I did have the resources, I could make it, because I'd certainly need a lot of help.
Q: If someone offered to fund you to make this movie the old-fashioned way, you'd accept the money, I take it?
A: I take it.
Q: Perhaps if you remake this film short with real equipment and people, you can expand it and give Thelma more scenes in which she can perform mime pieces.
A: I suppose I could do that, show her performing a five-minute routine before she takes off her makeup, so that the payoff of seeing her real face is bigger.
Q: Isn't it ironic that you show Thelma unmasking to reveal her "real face," yet her natural African-American face isn't real at all?
A: I'd rather not think about that.
Q: Any ideas for continuing the saga of Thelma and Jim?
A: I've had some germs of ideas for future storylines, but nothing concrete. I don't think I have any more stories about mime that I learned from those three profile articles that I can use. And I don't want to go down the AI rabbit hole and immerse myself in the technology so much that I can't get out.
Q: Any more experiments?
A: I made a one-minute video based on the picture that started this whole thing to see if I would get a different face. I got the exact same face - with a different hairstyle.
Q: She looks like she's ready to be a director or mainstream actress, maybe that could be your next short movie?
A: Like I said, I haven't come up with any concrete ideas.
Q: Well, it certainly feels like it's a lovely film, with a beautiful idea. How much of Jim is you?
A: A lot of him is me. I've always been interested in women in the performing arts, and women who live bohemian lives. I am also always open to dating a woman of color, because someone once told me I should not rule out dating a woman of color, because maybe the woman who can love me better than any other woman ever could is a black, Hispanic, or Asian woman. This movie short brings together those three attractions to women - performing artists. bohemians, women of color. But also, in this movie, at least, I feel like I brought a young black woman and a young white man together, they come from different worlds, and they are genuinely attracted to each other, and that indeed is a beautiful idea, an idea as beautiful as Thelma herself.
Q: Well said.
A: And the link to the movie short is here.
Q: Well, thanks for granting this interview.
A: It's been a pleasure knowing me.
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