Scorsese, Spielberg, Crowe, Coppola, Cameron, Kubrick...amateurs compared to the silver screen magic 77 South Studios produced for McMurdo Station's first annual film festival.

My friend Bill Jirsa, similar to myself, is an ex-tech head seeking something more than the dizzying blue and tan hues a cubicle wall provides. Also similar to myself, he left a comfortable, decent paying technology job (with Sun Microsystems) to venture down to the Ice for a few months because the experience was too much to pass up. Having met in LA on the flight down here, we got to chatting about making movies and coincidentally, we both had plans of knocking out a couple short films while we were down here. Thus, '77 South Studios' was created.

On January 2nd, McMurdo hosted its first annual film festival to a packed galley of close to 200 people. The rules of the festival were simple: The film had to be 5-10 minutes in length and had to be completely produced (created, filmed, and edited) in Antarctica. The sixth entry that day was a 10 minute film called "Waiting for Burt Bacharach" written by and starring Mark Wilson and Bill Jirsa; filmed by Craig Mazur; with sound and special effects by George Oliver. It was a box office smash and has gone on to gross over $100 million - just in Antarctica alone. It's a cult classic among the penguin population.

Before you watch, let me give a little background on the making of this epic. As Bill and I pondered what to do our film about, we sat at lunch one day chatting with Andy Young, a supervisor for the Field Support department. He explained that McMurdo supports an emergency runway on Odell Glacier 100 or so miles north of the station. Two people spend the summer season in a tiny hut (see the 2 photos above) keeping the airfield clear of snow in the off chance a plane is unable to land at McMurdo and needs to make an emergency landing at Odell. In the past 10 years, only 1 plane has needed to land here. As Andy sat there telling us about this remote field camp, the miniscule living arrangements, and the only means of communication to the outside world being an HF Radio, Bill and I both realized, almost simultaneously, we had to do a movie about Odell Emergency Runway.

We spent the next 2 weeks perfecting a script and bouncing ideas off of Tina Green, who had spent a season at Odell 2 years ago with her husband. Craig Mazur was looking to get some experience behind the camera and George Oliver, who had spent the past 3 years in New Zealand working as a rotoscoping artist on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, offered to help us with our sound and visual effects. Bill and I casted ourselves for the lead roles and off we went to Willy Field (McMurdo's airport located on the Ross Ice Shelf). The Fleet Operations hut provided a perfect little room to film our indoor shots, and the ice shelf was perfect for our expansive glacier shots.

We spent about a week filming and another week editing. All in all, we knocked out our movie in roughly 4 weeks from idea to the can.

This year's Odell 'tenants', Scott and Kevin, made it into McMurdo over Christmas for a couple days of R&R. We showed Scott the movie and from his reactions I think he enjoyed it. He mentioned about a half dozen parallels that we captured in our film completely by coincidence. For instance, the last line in our movie is a famous quote by Captain Oates, a member of Robert Scott's failed South Pole expedition in 1911. Realizing his feet were badly frostbitten and his overall weakening health a liability to the expedition, Oates quietly said to Scott, "I'm just going outside and may be some time." He then stood up, walked out of the tent into a blizzard, and was never seen again. So, we put that quote into our film, only to find out the Scott at Odell says that line every evening when he leaves the hut and goes out to the tent to bed, much to the amusement of Kevin. Another one is that Kevin always wears a hawaiin shirt and enjoys the fine art of breaking wind. All things in our movie. All a coincidence.

This little gem has everything: drama, suspense, comedy, flashback of a love story, violence, gratuitous bodily function humor, and a hula skirt dancer statue.

Enough build up yet? Alright, I'll stop rambling. Without further ado, 77 South Studios proudly presents: Waiting for Burt Bacharach (this is an enormous file - 38Mb - downloading over a dial up connection would take the better part of a year).