Bad movies: they are fun to watch, but did you know they are fun to make, too? Yes, they are. At the Roberts Hacienda, bad movie making is a hobby, with the creative juices flowing at the oddest moments. All one needs is a video camera and an idea. Late one night Sidra and I were up talking, and sleep deprivation had taken it’s toll. We were happily discussing how we couldn’t *wait* for Fellowship of the Ring to come out, and we started saying all of the Lord of the Rings characters’ names in horrible Texas accents. Lord of the Rings: Texas Style was born that night some 2 years ago. Not only do we beat Peter Jackson by showing our film about 2 months before he shows his, we don’t need no steenkin’ gazillion dollar budget either to translate Tolkien’s masterpiece onto film. We are fortunate in that we have an annual venue to torture people with our creative endeavors: Texas A&M’s SF club, Cepheid Variable (of which Sidra is a member) hosts Schlockfest in the fall, and part of Schlockfest is an amateur B film contest. Man, I’m pretty sure these folks are going to be sorry about the monsters they’ve created with us. But I digress . . . part of the fun of making horrible movies is the joy it brings in the process of making them. Paul, Sidra, and I sit around bandying about really bad movie ideas, and the family that makes really bad movies together, stays together. I have been responsible mostly for the really horrible scripts for our redneck version of Lord of the Rings, but Paul, Sidra and Zack have all contributed ideas and story points. With the large cast needed for a major scale production like Lord of the Rings, we get to know our daughter’s friends in ways we never dreamed of. I still have the vision of one of Sidra’s male friends standing in my living room in nothing but his penguin boxers and Sidra’s bustier. How many parents can make *that* statement about their child’s friends? Not many that aren’t appearing on Jerry Springer, I betcha! Not to mention that we manage to drag folks in that have no intention of appearing in our films. We have a notable college professor starring as Treebeard, wearing brown butcher paper, waving tree branches around in his hands and wearing a mask. I bet he’s grateful for that mask. Things invariably go wrong during filming, too. Some major character can’t make it, or just fails to show up. No PROBLEM! We just use body doubles and film around them! If it was good enough for Plan 9 From Outer Space, it’s good enough for us! Lord of the Rings, being such a major production , featured location shoots all over the Great Baked Hell of the Southwest this summer on vacation. I donned Frodo’s costume, while Sidra, who plays Sam, put on her Hee Haw duds and we were filmed in all sorts of public places like The Grand Canyon, various rest areas, the side of the road with people slowing down to gawk at us...well, you get the idea. As my coworker said to me, "YOU are those *really* weird people we always meet on vacation." Why, yes, yes, we are. No one is safe from our filming mania. Since we had the video camera with us this summer, Paul filmed various parts of our vacation. Joe Singleton went with us on our annual San Diego Comic Con junket. We took photos of him, along with ourselves, in Roswell. All of this ended up in a bad alien abduction film, which Joe found out about later, when he received a copy. Paul filmed the dance at ItzaCon, with the idea that it’ll be some stock footage of Aragorn and Arwen’s wedding hoe down in our stirring conclusion of our low budget Lord of the Rings masterpiece. One never knows when our little snippets of film will come in handy. When Sidra won an award at Schockfest for the alien abduction movie, they made the fatal mistake of giving her a really cool metallic monster that is a work of *art* (and is proudly displayed in my living room) and some little plastic anime style hamsters. Dammit, all this looks like props to us! We have another fine film in the works. It’s not like we *need* encouragement, either. Paul has an internet film in the planning stage, complete with special effects, that he dreamed up on the ride home from Schlockfest. You folks should really phear us. Still, if you want to have old fashioned family fun, brainstorm an idea, drag out that video camera and shoot! You’ll have loads of fun showing the films to your friends and your families, not to mention having fun viewing years later. "To hell with Johnnie’s 5th Grade holiday program, Mabel, let’s drag out our Revenge of the Brain-Eating Bunnies and watch that."

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