The sun beats down on the prairie landscape as men dressed in World War II uniforms dart from one ditch to another to escape enemy gunfire. Tanks roll past, sending dust into the air, and loaded machine guns appear behind barbed wire fences as the army advances its attack. The scene, in grayscale, appears to be straight out of newsreel footage from the 1940s, but it is actually a World War II reenactment in Austin, Texas. In addition to the Texans flocking to see this reenactment by 30 young men, for budding filmmaker and College of William and Mary student Caitlin Clements ’11, it is the ideal setting for a scene in her honors thesis film “Rough Draft,” premiering this Friday at the Kimball Theater.

“The whole film community here has been so great and so supportive, so it has all worked out really well,” Clements, a Murray Scholar from Oklahoma City, said, beaming. “At first I felt kind of funny saying, ‘Yeah, I’m a film studies major studying at William and Mary at this liberal arts college in Colonial Williamsburg, but I potentially want to go into film production someday, and I could have gone to Los Angeles, but I wanted to come here instead.’ It’s nice that this is really a culminating moment where a lot of it really makes sense and it has come together.”

Filmed primarily over three weeks in August 2010, “Rough Draft” follows classic film fan Charlotte as she and a used-bookstore employee uncover the story of Tom Montgomery, a fictional screenwriter who died in battle during World War II. Combining flashback montages with present-day scenes, the film not only depicts Charlotte’s discovery of a long-lost classic era filmmaker, but also her own growth as a screenwriter.

While the script itself was a project for her independent study in fall 2009, Clements found inspiration from her study of history and the tale of Ernest Hemingway’s lost manuscripts.

“It came from a lot of what we studied of Hollywood’s involvement in World War II and how different people from Hollywood [in] that era got drawn into the conflict,” she said. “[The film] even started with a story that I heard of Hemingway and [how] some of his stories were lost on this train. At first I started maybe wanting to do a ‘What If? What Had Happened?’ to these lost stories of Hemingway.”

The plot change turned out for the better. In the many months that she has spent working on the project, she has met people whom she now calls good friends, including Thuraya Masri of Richmond, who plays the leading role of Charlotte. She also enlisted the help of fellow College students, including Zan Gilles ’09, who worked as the film’s director of photography. The total effort of five full-time College crew members and five primary cast members led to a fun and rewarding experience.

The best part of being the director, producer and screenwriter, however, was her opportunity to cast the film’s characters. Since the majority of characters could not be performed by College students, she posted notices on Craigslist and casting websites, hoping to draw different people from the Tidewater community.

“That whole process was so much fun,” Clements said. “Primarily for seeing kind of the characters coming to life and having that moment when someone would come in and you say, ‘Yes! You’re X character! You’re perfect!’”

Casting Charlotte’s character was the most memorable of these serendipitous moments, since the chosen actress, Masri, only submitted her audition tape on the last day before callbacks.

“Going into [the process] I really thought that Charlotte could quite possibly have been a William and Mary performer just because that was the one role where [the college student] age was really appropriate,” she said. “And then this actress, Thuraya, came in from Richmond and it was just one of those amazing moments. It was sort of like a lightbulb went off. You always hear those funny stories of like ‘Oh, the one
who came in last was the one who just nailed it.’ And it was so cliche-sounding, but it really worked out that
way.”

Clements furthermore enjoyed the “crazy moments” spent on site in Richmond, where she and her crew often filmed scenes at Black Swan Books until 2 a.m.. They still reminisce about the day they frantically protected their equipment from a spontaneous “monsoon” rainstorm, and when they changed the letters on a Norfolk marquee sign with an ominous thunderstorm looming in the distance.

But how did this Frank Capra fan, Classic Film Club founder and future graduate film school student get her start? Put simply, she has always loved American and foreign cinema, and throughout her childhood produced short-length films that were screened in her family’s backyard or at high school film competitions.

“Present-day films have such a way of really sending a powerful message on a really mass scale, and you’re in a very privileged position when you are a filmmaker and you are beginning to make these films,” she said.
“I think in terms of our further appreciation of classic film, I think there is so much to be seen there too, just about history, about time periods … It’s amazing to see how, when done well and done right, films can really catch people’s interest and instruct in a lot of different things.”

Clements hopes that “Rough Draft,” although a small production, achieves this goal.

“I do hope that [the film] will give pause to think,” she said. “While it’s not really teaching a history lesson per se, because it is very much a fiction film, it definitely harkens back to a time period. There’s this overall message of being mindful of history in a lot of different forms. … [The film’s] sharing of stories could key people in to something in their own lives.”

As my time at the College of William and Mary winds down, I find myself thinking increasingly in terms of “lasts.” Some of these lasts are sad and nostalgic: last Blowout, last King and Queens, last Wren 10, last cider walk. Others, however, are a bit more exciting: last exam, last paper, last class, last rainy Williamsburg day, last trip on the bricks. In the process, I have realized that there are a lot of things on this campus that I still need to do before graduation weekend.

Now, I want to be clear that the mindset of “lasts” is never a healthy one. I have been plagued with the curse of never living in the moment for my entire life. I am a great fan of countdowns and to-do lists, and I am always thinking a step ahead. When I was younger, I made enormous countdown calendars for our annual family vacation. They usually involved an intricate grid system that contained squares for the 70 or so days left until our date of departure. Every morning, I would vigorously cross off the day that had passed and gleefully exclaim, “43 days until we leave for Hawaii!” or whatever locale I was anticipating.

In the same vein, I think it is safe to say that I am addicted to Weather.com. The ultimate predictor of the days to come, it has to be in the top five of my most frequented websites. With a 10-day planner, I can form my to-do lists at least a week in advance. While this habit drives some people crazy — specifically my roommate — I am almost always properly dressed for the weather, which in Williamsburg is quite a feat in and of itself, and prepared for a monsoon, should one come our way. I sometimes think I know more about weather in the United States than about current events. Strangely, however, I have never considered meteorology as a career option. I like to think of being a weather nerd as more of a hobby.

Similarly, I have always loved advent calendars around Christmas time, especially the ones with pieces of chocolate inside. I think that these advent calendars are a very useful, if somewhat peculiar, metaphor for our last several weeks at school. Transport yourself back to your youth. During the month of December, every day leading up to Christmas is exhilarating and filled with holiday spirit. New presents appear under the tree, a different classic Christmas film is on ABC Family every night, Christmas cookies abound, eggnog replaces skim milk, and Christmas carols are ubiquitous. As you approach Christmas Day, however, the knowledge that soon all of the merriment will be over and replaced by the gloom of a dreary January creeps up on you. Christmas Day is exciting and wonderful, and then all of the decorations come down and you have a whole year until the next Christmas.

I think it is safe to say that the next six weeks will be filled with a very similar outlook. Every week will be filled with Senior Mug Nights, regular mug nights, festivities, formals, days at the beach, concerts, afternoons on the Sunken Garden, trivia nights and maybe a little work in Earl Gregg Swem Library thrown in for good measure. But as graduation day approaches, I hope that, for once, we can all live in the moment, enjoy our friends, springtime and this amazing College, and not think about the approach of post-graduation day gloom. After all, there are many fun countdowns to be had post-college too, right?

__Emily Walker is a Confusion Corner columnist and will begin to live in the moment as soon as the moment fits her plans. Contact Emily Walker at ekwalker@email.wm.edu.__

Some things should be kept secret. But PostSecret founder Frank Warren believes that, most of the time, it’s better to share. Warren shared his story about PostSecret with a full audience Thursday in the Commonwealth Auditorium, at an AMP-sponsored event.

Warren has made it a personal mission to help people share their secrets — be they sexual, hopeful, funny, painful — with his online art project PostSecret (postsecret.blogspot.com). On the PostSecret Website, Warren posts postcards that have been anonymously mailed to his home in Germantown, Md.

Warren told the audience that he receives about 200 postcards each day. Over the course of the week, he must whittle over a thousand postcards down to the 20 secrets that are shared on his website every Sunday.

“I think I might fall into the same patterns and have certain blind spots, but I rely on gut feeling to choose the postcards … whatever speaks to me,” Warren said.

Not all secrets have come on postcards — if it can fit in Warren’s mailbox, it’s probably been there. Wedding bands, a knife without a blood-crusted blade, seashells, sonograms, death certificates and an Idaho potato have all appeared in Warren’s mailbox.

A thoughtful barista sent Warren a bag of coffee beans with the note “Where I work, they don’t keep inventory. Enjoy this dark roast.” While giving his presentation on another campus, an audience member stood up and asked Warren if he had tried the coffee. It turns out that the audience member had sent the beans in question.

This type of connection is not uncommon at PostSecret events.

Before he was getting free bags of coffee and stacks of postcards, Warren owned his own small business. While on vacation in Paris, Warren bought three “The Little Prince” postcards. In a dream, he found the postcards inscribed with messages for him. One read “unrecognized evidence, from forgotten journeys, unknowingly rediscovered” and another message was about a “reluctant oracle” postcard project.

To kick start PostSecret, Warren solicited strangers on the streets of Washington, D.C. for their secrets. He gave them postcards with instructions to send him a postcard with a message revealing anything true.

“The most common reaction of stranger was ‘I don’t have any secrets.’ I made sure they took a card … they have best ones,” Warren said.

What began with three postcards has gone much farther. PostSecret has put about a quarter of million
dollars into U.S. Postal Service registers. Warren works 50 to 60 hours per week on Post Secret.

His passion for a seamless presentation and his dedication to providing a safe environment for secret-senders has ensured the success of PostSecret.

Warren is no stranger to the suffering that many of the postcards convey. Of the many postcards he showed the audience, Warren identified one as his epiphany postcard: a picture of a door with multiple punched-through holes and the message “the holes are from when my mom tried knocking down my door so she could continue beating me.”

Warren said the most heart-breaking postcards are sent from children and young adults who experience unnecessary suffering.

As Warren shared his feeling of inadequacy after he could not stop a friend from committing suicide, he encouraged the audience to be direct with friends who may be contemplating suicide. Warren showed a postcard that was a screenshot of a text conversation of one friend simply saying, “I’m worried about you. Are you ok?” The sender said this simple demonstration had saved his life.

PostSecret has certainly created an open dialogue for many issues, and even personal joys and triumphs. Online There are even PostSecret fan communities with active message boards. Warren wants PostSecret to be a living project, so his five books are a better place to store the old postcards, but there are websites dedicated to archiving PostSecret.

Some fans have even gone so far as to directly replicate Warren’s idea. Dozens of imitation sites, feature postcards with anonymous secrets in many languages.

Warren asserts that the internet has been crucial to PostSecret’s success. Consequently, he believes that anyone can and should replicate what he has done — and not just with postcards and secrets.

“There’s nothing genius about Post Secret,” he said. “You could’ve done it.”

At the end of Warren’s presentation, he welcomed students to come up to microphones and share their secrets — without anonymity.

Challenging people to share their secrets is one of Warren’s focuses as he tours college campuses.

“[At PostSecret events] I’m talking less and less,” Warren said. “People are sharing their voice.”

Not many people took the bait — to be exact, only two people came forward. One senior shared her “secret”: She is scared to leave Williamsburg and unsure of her life after graduation.

Chris Marazzo ’13 walked to the front of the auditorium and told fellow students that his ex-girlfriend from high school showed him PostSecret, and claimed that he learned a lot from it.

“The only reason I came out [to the PostSecret event] was because my ex and I used to read PostSecret together. It’s cheesy,” Marazzo said afterwards. “Frank’s the man.”

A posting on the PostSecret event’s Facebook wall mused about the students’s inability to share secrets:
“Regarding the lack of secrets shared at the event tonight: William & Mary: a school without secrets or a secretive school? I’d say the latter.”

Despite students at the College having a secretive nature or fear of sharing, many students waited for over an hour to enter the event.

“I love reading [the Post Secret] blog, and I think it’s a really interesting idea,” Kylie Hiemstra ’13 said. “I thought he was a great speaker and really inspirational. Embarrassingly, I got there an hour and half early.”
After the event, students waited to meet and get books signed by “the most trusted stranger in America.”

“It was a good turnout, overall; people were excited, and the event got even more people into PostSecret,” AMP member Nicole Rugayo ’13 said.

Although Warren’s mother has called PostSecret “diabolical,” he has impacted many lives with his ability to share secrets while making people chuckle, cry and think.

Warren may be called a “world class expert on secrets” and he takes this relationship seriously. He doesn’t foresee a conclusion to the PostSecret project, but wants to continue helping people share.

By sharing, people can strengthen and deepen relationships. Because of PostSecret, Warren has been able to reconnect with his father. He wants other people to share and reap similar benefits.

Warren has even put one of his own secrets in each of his PostSecret’s book. But he doesn’t share everything.

When asked where he keeps all the postcards, Warren replied, “That’s my secret.”