So how did the group get started?

This goes back a ways.... Originally it was sort of a--eek--middle school club thing started by Lisa and Katie and including Lindsay. But "club" is misleading on two counts: one, that it was actually called "the GDI Society" and two, that "club" or "society" implies that we actually did something, which we did not. Well, we did make up a long and silly list of "official" club things (dog breed that sounds like a kind of cheese, and so on) and, well, that was kind of it. Basically in this nascent stage "GDI" was a good excuse to go to each other's houses.

Okay, so where did the movies come in?

They came in when Lindsay saved up and bought a video camera in the eighth grade and began, predictably, filming things. Silly things, most likely. Such as the gerbil movies. These were the products of Claire and Lindsay and Keith deciding that, since Lindsay and Keith had some gerbils, a good idea for a movie would be a horror flick starring said rodents. We whipped up a three or four page script and filmed it that afternoon with Keith ably providing the two gerbils' voices. Well. You can imagine the horror. But everyone lived and what we have as a result of two more spontaneous weekend gerbil adventures is a trilogy: Attack of the Killer Mutant Metalloid Giant Skull Gerbil Warriors, parts one through three. (If the title sounds familiar, you probably heard it, in reference to bunny-rabbits on the cartoon Darkwing Duck.) From this came the all-important conclusion that making "movies" was fun, thereby setting the stage for greater things....

Like what?

Like the bar scene! Lisa and Lindsay were at Lindsay's house with nothing much to do but come up with the bar scene, dress up and perform it. This was spontaneous, ad-libbed, and filmed several times as it evolved.

Did you ever get more sophisticated? And what happened to Lisa and Katie?

Lisa and Katie are coming soon. That summer, three more unplanned videos were filmed. First there was the original Alive at Five parody of local news shows, with Claire and Lindsay and Keith playing the anchors, the correspondents, and the people in the news. This was vaguely planned out in the sense that after we thought, hey a news show would be fun, we developed brief ideas about what would happen in a given sequence before ad-libbing the actual scene. The result was a series of sketches that were held together by the fact that they were all a part of a local news broadcast.

But you said three videos.

And you're right. The second was the second Alive at Five parody. This one was slightly more sophisticated and included parodies of commercials, which would become a recurring target for spoofing. The third was the fashion show, which Claire and Lindsay made, featuring Claire modeling some dubious fashions and Lindsay providing an ad-libbed (and frequently really bad) fashion play-by-play commentary to the strains of 80s rock. After the show, Lindsay (while still filming) interviews Claire, the fashion model, asking penetrating questions about her pet armadillo--or is it an opossum?--Clarence. Actually Clarence is a painted gray wooden opossum that Claire owns. Why? We don't advise asking questions like that.

Now can we hear about Katie and Lisa?

You bet. Katie had come up with the joke of "Super Blond" in reference to Lisa who is a...blond! From there came the idea for everyone (we all knew each other) to get together and film a spoof of Superman and other such action heroes that would be called The Adventures of Super Blond. Lindsay wrote the script and, for a change, we had planning. Well, it was kind of necessary to select a weekend when we could all get together instead of just fortuitously ending up at each other's houses with a video camera. Props and costumes were made and collected. So on a Saturday morning we filled the back of a Dodge Caravan and took until about three in the (hot) fall afternoon to film Super Blond, starring Lisa in the title role. A few weeks later we gathered again to film the "Beh"i"nd the Scenes of Super Blond segment which featured Claire as the "blond trainer" and some wonderful commercials, including "101 Ways to Get Rid of Jehovah's Witnesses." (If you're wondering about the I in quotes, "Behind" was misspelled in the title.) It was in this video that the Pope, played by Lindsay, first appeared and subsequently went on to become a recurring GDI guest.

What did you do for an encore?

We continued with some extemporania during the school year.

Such as...?

The political debate! We love the political debate! Also called Meet the Annoying Politicians, it's a brief sketch that parodies what generally comes out of politicians' mouths, and we think it came out quite nicely. Also, somewhere along the way, we made three little stop-go animation videos using Star Trek action figures. And then Claire mentioned in a phone conversation with Lindsay that spoofing the original Star Trek series would be a good idea....

Egads.

Yes, but that wasn't till later. That summer we added Megan, Claire's older sister, to our group and filmed, as a lead-in of sorts to the upcoming Star Trek spoof, the third Alive at Five show, this time with lots more planning involved.

And Star Trek?

It came along, a year and a half after it was first conceived of, with a feature-length script, great uniforms from Claire (who stole the show as Kirk) and an amazingly real bridge set made of . . . cardboard. We called it Star Trek: The Undiscovered Episode and it took five days to complete the principal photography and lots 'n' lots of preparation.

Star Trek is all well and good, but I am worried about my upcoming SAT test. Have you got anything for that?

Fear not, the instructional How to Take the SAT video will help you out immensely! This short video that was filmed during the next school year is delightfully narrated by special guest Kevin Scarborough, Keith's friend who just happened to be at Lindsay's house at the time. It is one of the best movies in the GDI milieu.

And how, pray, did you spend the next summer?

Productively. Katie had written a prose sequel to Super Blond for school and she converted it into a shooting script called Super Blond III: The Battle of the Business Conglomerates. (And no, she's not dyslexic; the first Super Blond movie has two parts.) Also we lip-synched our way into music videos as the group John Paul and the Brain Surgeons. Keith coined the name when he noticed that a group of scientists accompanied by the Pope in the Star Trek video looked like a band. And finally, we brought back Star Trek with a shorter parody from an anonymous script on the web entitled All Our Everydays, in which we perfect the twitching flower effect.

Is that it?

Almost. The Second Coming of John Paul and the Brain Surgeons was filmed during the following summer, along with our second-longest production, the typically goofy A GDI Guide to the Classics, which parodies a variety of famous literary works (and a few miscellaneous movies along the way). And that's it!

Huh.

Exactly.

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