Hacker Cinema
The Last Broadcast
1998 · Film · 87 min
Directed by Stefan Avalos, Lance Weiler
In December 1995, a four-man team from the public-access program, "Fact or Fiction", braved the New Jersey's desolate Pine Barrens determined to deliver a live broadcast of the legendary Jersey Devil. Only one came out alive. It took the jury ninety minutes to sentence the lone survivor to life in prison. One year later, a filmmaker decides to mount his own investigation...
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True story…
I grew up within walking distance of Byberry Mental Hospital.
I could see it daily thru the window in the distance from St. Anselm’s Catholic School.
In the 1980’s, after school my friends and I would take our pellet guns in the forest adjacent to Byberry to just target shoot and hang out outside on the then forest edge of the Philadelphia city limits.
All of our parents told us to never enter Byberry hospital grounds, so of course we ignored those orders every single day.
It was split between Old Byberry and New Byberry.
Gothic Old Byberry facilities were long abandoned, while New Byberry continued operations.
It was an incredibly creepy place in terms of gothic architecture, burned out and disheveled facilities, the underground and partially underground tunnels connecting all the buildings, and the detritus left behind.
No BS, we did run across a lot of satanic pentagram graffiti on numerous occasional and locations, with one very elaborately painted and decorated room like straight out of a horror film.
Very carefully painted bright red with black painted satanic pentagrams and symbology, fully furnished. Quite surreal.
Speaking of horror films, I was at Amazon running distribution for their then new music and video categories when I met the writer/director of The Last Broadcast Jersey found footage film that preceded Blair Witch Project, and was filmed in the area, but lost out onto Blair Witch on distro.
I distinctly remember telling him he should consider filming a sequel in Old Byberry Mental Hospital.
Because it wasn’t until I was much older and further away did I come to understand the horrors in that place weren’t too far removed from a concentration camp or horror film.
2 or 3 times we ran across mental hospital patients who were either on day release or just wandering back to where they had once lived.
It was like The Wonder Years meets Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Old Byberry Mental Hospital.
It's inevitable and unsurprising.
I do hope that it remains feasible to shoot on film for those that want to. It's a fun medium to work in, and there's a romanticism about shooting on film that I think is lost in using digital cameras.
About ten years ago, a musician acquaintance and I were discussing the decline of vinyl. His argument in favour of this archaic technology was passionate. He dispensed with technical arguments, which are generally just not very good, but opened my eyes to a very different argument that I respected: that there is an unbroken physical lineage between the artist and the listener, from the session microphone to the tape to the masters to the copies to the stylus of your turntable.
I have a similar affection for film, even if all editing is done through DIs nowadays, and even though I've been rooting for digital film-making ever since "The Last Broadcast".