It was 1988 and the Commodore Amiga was the only computer that could effectively produce videos that were full screen size. There was no video on PCs and QuickTime video was the size of a postage stamp on the Mac. The Amiga was where it was at for producing videos. In the middle of the IranContra scandal, I managed to create what I consider a masterpiece under the circumstances, as at that point in history, commercially available hard drives for users were not available and I remember my first, purchased soon after, cost me over $1000 for a 120MB unit. So, I set about collecting still images and animating them, as well as grabbing video clips from the news and processing them with various special effects.
As I have indicated, there were tools on the Amiga that made all of what I accomplished possible. I decided to use a rather complex scripted language program called Director (not the same later Mac based program of the same name). I produced this video by synchronizing the script to an already finished musical recording of a song I wrote called The Oliver Twist (lyrics pictured above) for my then group Kongress. I had to use about five floppy drives with images I had created from various resources, including beautiful stills of the various defendants in the IranContra trial that I obtained from Associated Press by slipping two hundred dollars to the archivist.
My first task was to flip these pictures around so that everyone would be seen raising their left hands as they were being sworn in, to symbolically portray them as flipping the truth. I had to scan each photo using a three stage color wheel (red, green and blue passes to get the photos into the computer) for both color and black & white images. At one point, I creatively decided to stretch Reagan’s head to the lines,
“The President can’t remember what he signed,
Maybe it’s because he’s losing his mind”
It’s quite a successful portrayal of the lyrics and many of the images have special effects from the program used to symbolize the ‘twist’ in the title of the song. For the lines,
“With special thanks from Central Intelligence
We are without a shred of evidence”
I took a cartoon coffin of Dracula and replaced him with an image of the late CIA Director, William Casey, who mysteriously passed away before he was able to testify. He appears with his left hand raised, but with a gag-ball over his mouth. I used clips from TV coverage, but processed them with a video program called Live! (not the much later audio program for music-making on Macs & PCs). I went to a bookstore days after the Supreme Court ruling that established it was a first amendment right to burn the American flag and video-taped the actual flag on display that Joey Johnson had burned. His attorney, William Kunstler, was on hand detailing the significance of the decision.
Later in the video, I included that footage, but for an actual video depicting foreigners burning the American flag, I meticulously hand painted the flag in all its red, white and blue glory, while I colored the people burning it in the colors of flames so that they looked as though they were on fire! President George W. H. Bush is depicted at his presidential helicopter waving to the onlookers, but in a repeated motion that imitates a Nazi salute. In another image, Bush is nodding his head ‘yes’, while Dick Cheney is nodding his ‘no’, at the podium in front of the ‘White House Washington’ sign in the background, however, all you can see are the cryptic words, “White Washing”.
On the audio front, I sampled the vocalist Marilyn’s voice saying the words “Ronald Reagan” and “Oliver North” so that each speaker is simultaneously saying “Ronald” on one side while the other side sings, “Oliver”, followed by “Reagan” in one speaker and “North” in the other. In between lines, you can hear the refrain, “Reagan, North, Hostage, Guns”. I also transposed her voice so that she sounds like a man, although in the extended mix I leave her voice in tact. She heard it the other night for the first time in years and insisted that it wasn’t her! She also confided that she had long ago opened for The Misfits and they had mistakenly believed that she was a man, based on having heard her voice on that song.
I won only an honorable mention in an Amiga User Group’s competition I submitted it in, although the decision was embroiled in controversy. There were two distinct prizes listed for the categories in question — a hand-held scanner valued at a few hundred dollars for the still image category and a Video Toaster valued at close to $2000 for the video category. The manufacturer didn’t come through with the hand-held scanner, so they deceptively gave the Video Toaster to that winner and gave me a piece of paper that indicated I was granted only an ‘Honorable Mention’ in the video category. When you understand all that went into the music video that I produced, it is impossible to equate one still image to be superior and switch prizes, so I sued the Amiga User Group and its president for their decision.
I contacted the Nobel Prize Foundation and got a copy of their by-laws for how they award the Nobel Prize. In it there was mention that if no one was deemed qualified in any particular year of the award, it would not be awarded. I used that in my argument to indicate that in their official rules, the Amiga User’s Group did not make any provision to switch prizes. I lost my initial hearing and then appealed. I appeared in Hempstead, NY (Long Island) where I waited for several hours for my turn to plead my appeal. Most petitioners were given only a few moments to make their case.
When I was finally called, it was like the Supreme Court, with these judges asking me things like, “Why do you think we should get involved in deciding this issue?” I responded by detailing how if even The Nobel Prize Foundation has to abide by its rules and regulations, why shouldn’t the Amiga User’s Group have to follow their own stated rules, pointing out that they hadn’t by awarding a prize in a different category and giving me a piece of paper. It was a shame that I didn’t have an iPad to show them my video to establish the preposterous position of the defendant and their actions. When I finished and was walking out the door, an elderly man dressed quite sharply grabbed me by the arm and asked me,”Are you a lawyer?” to which I answered, “NO!” He then added, “Well, you sure sounded like one up there!”
I lost my appeal, but I wouldn’t let it rest. I wrote to the manufacturer of the Video Toaster, NewTek, telling them my story in the manner of Dion, “Here’s my story it’s sad but true” about why I did not own a Video Toaster, describing how I was robbed by the Amiga User’s Group and the court’s decision. A few weeks later, I received a phone call from their Vice President, Paul Montgomery who announced he had read my letter and that I would be getting a Video Toaster from NewTek and that while other’s would be paying hundreds of dollars for the new software upgrade, I would get a free upgrade, as well. I thanked him for his understanding of what had happened. Sadly, not long after that phone call, he left NewTek to start a company called Play and passed away while exercising on vacation. Thanks to Paul, I was able to use the Video Toaster for my next acclaimed video, for which I actually won one of the awards in the Sony Home Video Contest - Cybercrazed - but that’s another story. Both videos can be seen on my Youtube Channel
@ www.youtube.com/ottovr … simply click on the Videos link and they are the last two listed. The Oliver Twist video is introduced by Morton Downey, Jr. who aired it on his show after I appeared there on another episode asking whether Oliver North was a hero or villain.
So, how do we get from here to the latest gun law fiasco that has surfaced due to the Trump administration dropping the opposition in a court case and ruling that a Texas company has a right to post online the blueprints for creating a 3D printed gun, called ‘The Liberator’? Well, when people place a 2D president who has no position on anything and just impulsively acts without doing the homework to become knowledgable about an issue — witness his tweets about this issue, now that there has been blowback against the decision that was made to let untraceable and unregistered killing weapons be created on 3D printers by anyone who wants to use them for what purpose other than killing human beings — how pathetic is it that he needs to consult with the NRA to determine what must be done. This is the same NRA whose President is none other than Oliver North who sold weapons all over the world, despite Congressional decisions to outlaw such activity.
Sometimes I really wish that I was a lawyer — I once did manage to appeal a civil case of mine pro se all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States with a brilliant brief, but they only choose less than 2% of the cases they receive to be heard each term and mine wasn’t one of them — especially when I hear the claim of the legal representative of Defense Distributed, the company behind the 3D Liberator, with plans to post AR style weapon blueprints, as well. The lawyer, Josh Blackman was seen commenting on TV about how wrong the Attorney General of New Jersey was in challenging the legality of their website posting such blueprints for guns that allow what criminals and terrorists want: guns that can’t be flagged by metal detectors, don’t have serial numbers to trace, and don’t require the usual background checks. His statement was that federal law trumps state laws. Now, as I stated, I am not a lawyer, but understand the hypocrisy in the way the right cherry picks their issues regarding whether federal law or state law should prevail. If he’s right, then I guess all those state level abortion restriction laws are unconstitutional because federal law trumps state laws!