(Chapter 1) The Boy with the Camera

On a summer night in 1983, a group of college-bound teens left their manufactured homes at the Galaxy Drive Trailer Park. They carried a cooler, some blankets, and a bag of various snacks under a freeway overpass.  One of the boys carried a Super Eight movie camera with a microphone extending over the lens.  He walked backward in front of the others aiming the camera either at them from the front or letting them pass to follow and film at a distance. Occasionally he pointed at one of them to indicate he was in-tight on one of their faces and they should say something. He didn't care what. He told them to be real. Try to talk about real things in their lives.

On their right, traffic along eastbound Galaxy Drive backed up for almost a mile as those with cars and money waited to enter the Galaxy Drive-In. This single-screen, outdoor theatre venue faced Interstate 94 almost thirty miles north of Detroit.

Pictured: (L to R)

Bobby Marshall, Alvi Trout, Sara Willette, Becky Conroy

Not pictured: Chuck Phillips

(Image courtesy of the True Cinema Archives)

The three boys and two girls going on foot passed the Galaxy Drive strip mall, four stores anchored by a convenience store (known in their neck of the woods as a party store), a coin-operated laundromat, a card and trinket shop, and a pawn shop. Not even a hundred feet east was the Galaxt Motor Inn, a two-floor, ten-unit efficiency motel. East of both of these structures was the Galaxy Club, a place for amateur dancers and the men who paid to watch them. 

The boy with the camera asked them to improvise a scene where they commented on the businesses. The scene progressed with one of the girls asking one of the boys if his mother was still dancing there. They improvised for about forty-five seconds until the boy with the camera stopped filming. He only had three minutes-thirty seconds of film in a Super 8 cartridge. The moments had to be over and done with quickly. 

Alvi Trout: Guerilla Filmmaker 

(Image courtesy of Brandt Books)

East of the overpass was a tool and die stamping plant called Macomb Tool and Die on the south side of Galaxy Drive, which bent to the right, left, and right again to connect with Joy Avenue. Three miles east on Joy was the Edwards Michigan Air National Guard Base. Locals called it Fort Macomber.  F16s and cargo planes were the norm.

Sitting by itself on the north side of Galaxy Drive was the Galaxy Drive-In. Here was an impenetrable of its own. Just outside the gate were two twenty-foot, wood walls painted black and white. Only the upper half was painted black. Bud Colby, the owner of the Galaxy Drive-In, painted the lower portion white to prevent cars from driving into it. The upper half had a mural of the cosmos painted in fluorescent colors that glowed under black lighting effects.  The two-story black and white wall continued in a horseshoe to the back of the towering screen where a a ten-foot high chain-link fence kept movie crashers out and children in.

This was the world the five friends knew. Alvi Trout was the storyteller.

80's poster for the Galaxy Drive-In

(Image courtesy of Ada Innes)

On that August night, when their lives would suddenly change, they spread their blankets on the east side of the overpass to watch the world premiere of a schlock horror movie, CAMP GROUND II: THE RANGER RETURNS.

The original CAMP GROUND told the story of a ubiquitous group of friends that heads off to find the long-closed campground to spend a night of braggadocio, partying, and sex while flipping their fingers at the legend of the park ranger who went on a killing spree and slaughtered a group of deer hunters and ground them in with the venison sausage he prepared, hence the title CAMP GROUND. 

The latest installment would bring back the deranged killer last seen going over a cliff in a burning gas hauler. The Ranger, seeking revenge, hunted the survivors of CAMP GROUND. When first seen in CG II, the Ranger is wrapped in gauze until he finds a beekeeper's hat with a net on the brim. This would become the Ranger's iconic look. To refresh: Deranged ranger, makes sausage out of deer and the men who hunt them, and wears a beekeeper's hat.

The five friends from the trailer park stretched out on their blankets to watch the second installment of the franchise, which would be stretched to five installments before the slasher film exhausted itself in CAMP GROUND V: SON OF A RANGER. The final film would play a significant role in the career of one of those young adults.

They would have no audio. Speaker boxes hung like archaic hearing aids on car windows within the wooden balls.  The friends would provide any necessary dialogue themselves under the direction Alvi Trout, who would go on to become B-Movie mogul and founder of True Cinema Studios,  Alan True.