Simon Barrett

About me:

3/1/07 - I've been waiting to figure what to write here, and I just found this in an old e-mail. It's my biography from the "Dead Birds" press kit at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival. The imdb rejected it, I can't imagine why. It's still somewhat amusing. Text: Known primarily for his penchant towards writing scripts at the bottom of a well with a box of rats as his only food and comfort, Simon Barrett exploded onto the performing arts scene in 1967 after an inauspicious beginning. Born in Edinburgh, PA in 1953, Barrett was rapidly sold into slavery to a cosmetics manufacturer by his impoverished parents, where he was continually sprayed in the eyes with hairspray from ages two to thirteen. This left him with a keen eye for detail! Ha ha, I am just kidding, that was a pun, actually the experience left him half blind and mentally ill. When he was eventually freed from indentured servitude under Lyndon Johnson's bold "No More Child Slaves on U.S. Soil" initiative, Barrett immediately traveled by foot to New York's Greenwich Village area, where he wrote his first one act play, "Will You Wash My Sweatshirt?!" which was performed to an audience of exactly three vagrants on a subway platform. Undaunted, Barrett turned to film, which he described as "the only remotely relevant art," with his 1968 expressionistic feature, "Black Leader and Feedback Experiment #A1," which made history when the opening night audience stormed the projection booth and tore the film from the projector after only two minutes; thus, the next seven hours and twenty-eight minutes of the film will forever remain a mystery. Outraged, Barrett declared cinema dead and publicly, at a socialist gathering outside the Chelsea Hotel, announced that the only art form with any significance was the unproduced screenplay. He apparently wrote numerous works in the fertile period following this announcement, but, following his artistic manifesto, would allow no one to read his screenplays on the off chance that his reader might turn out to be a producer who might betray him by optioning and producing the script. One of these works was "Dead Birds," which Barrett, in an intimate and unguarded moment with occasional lover Joan Baez, commented, "could conceivably be made into a very spooky film someday." Unfortunately he died of consumption in 1978 before this dream could be realized, alone, destitute and unmourned. Author: (from Dead Birds press materials) ..