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Messenger Archives - April 2004 Sloppin' the Hogs The Kalakala's Last Ride by Bud Wilton As I stood on the beach at Shilshole and watched the grand gray lady, battered but unbowed, limp her way through the morning mists to a better life, I felt stirring in me once again a spate of memories that over the years I've come to call my Kalakala Nightmares. I used to free-lance for a supersecret Belltown film outfit, Galaxaco Pictures, and in the late 90's I was lucky enough to work on their first-ever feature, the rollicking Armageddon piece "Doomed Planet." Drug use, prostitution, gun-play and mysterious disappearances made working with the cast, crew and entire Executive Team a real adventure, and I came away from the experience with sharply vivid memories and, of course, some anecdotes. We booked an evening on the Kalakala for our World Premiere; at the time, the newly-arrived Art Deco relic still carried a whiff of cachet, and we knew she'd convey an atmosphere of timeless sophistication to our special send-off. The date: December 17, 1999. We had carefully timed the completion date of our two-year project to coincide with the WTO riots and millennial terrorist destruction of the Space Needle (the latter kiboshed), but even our crack Planning Board had not been prescient enough to anticipate a concomitant event of even cooler megaviolence: Windstorm '99. I spent the afternoon readying the craft, and getting to know her. The Kalakala's broad, Rubenesque lines hearkened back to a simpler, more sensible age, while its rusted, weather-blasted skeleton hearkened forward to a post-Apocalyptic desolation world ... nice. Our screen was merely a stained expanse of canvas, which we secured to the bulkhead with halyards; the seats were metal folding chairs scrounged from the hold, the bilges and the surrounding area. The storm arrived with the first of the VIPs, and quickly grew to gale intensity. As the opening credits rolled I hunkered into a private corner abaft the main quarterdeck and observed the carnage. The viewing room was an old cargo deck wide open at the stern, and wind and winter rain roared through this opening and the many unobstructed portholes directly upon the audience. The screen flapped like an unreefed foretopsail, rendering the subtitles illegible. Water began to pool around our feet, sloshing into our shoes as the ship pitched and yawed in the crazy lake. And I watched with a feeling of stoic irritation as sodden, shivering film fans and ferryphiles slunk past me to the safety of their little homes. Soon there were only a dozen left: true lovers of independent cinema. And for these stubborn souls who sat through both screenings and even the credits, I felt at the time an uncommon bond that I might even call friendship, friends for life, even, although the feeling has passed and I do not want them to attempt to contact me. Oh, certainly there were many more Doomed Planet Nightmares to come -- the nightmarish screenings at Hi-Score Arcade and The Big Picture, that nightmarish West Coast tour in that van with those guys -- but none can compare in terms of sheer freakin' disastrousness to the evening on Lake Union to which we were treated by Lady Kalakala, now departed to Neah Bay. You show 'em a good time out there, old gal. The Kalakala's Last Ride (pdf) Search the Belltown Messenger Archives 
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