The cast of the film included Jay Millman, his wife Leslie and me as the three leads in a love triangle. I had known Jay and Leslie for years in college and they were two of my best friends. Jay and I worked together off campus during our senior year and Leslie and I acted opposite each other in the University's production of The Tempest. They also acted in my short film called Homesick.Although Leslie had the beauty of a young Grace Kelly, she was more like a sister to me than anything else. She and Jay had gotten married after college and had then got involved with this Permanent Games project .
So, there's the back story leading up to the point of this memory... the point in the script were Leslie and I were supposed to have a love scene.
Ick.
Leslie and I were not comfortable with the idea to begin with... but we were even more uncomfortable doing something like that on a low budget film with unknown filmmakers. So, we rewrote the scene to be something less tame than what you'd find on TV Land on Nickelodeon.
But, it still involved kissing Leslie.
Most men would love the opportunity to kiss someone as beautiful as Leslie. But, we were friends. Good friends. Buds. And it was icky. It was like kissing your sister or cousin or something. In some parts of the country, that's not such a bad thing, sure, but for Leslie and I it was awkward, to say the least.
The best news is that Permanent Games never got completed or distributed. Jay said he has a VHS copy of one of the edits in a box somewhere, but I haven't seen it. Even though the film has evaporated into the ether of low budget filmdom, the unique, humorous and embarrassing moments of that film have been forever burned into my psyche.
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