Living & Arts

Students document a Screw to remember

In print | April 3, 2008

You came, you saw. If you participated, you were humiliated. If you didn’t, you laughed and realized why you refused to agree to this in the first place. And three students, Tally Sharma ’09, Melaine Spaulding ’09 and Sean Nesselrode ’09, caught it all on tape for you to pause, rewind, watch and re-watch. Your shining moments of Sharples glory as you tried to wobble through the serving area, convinced that the dining staff intentionally stocked the menu with five different types of beans served in four different ways just for the occasion will now live on forever in documentary form with “I Want My Bam Bam: The Search for Love, Screw 2008.”

Featuring quirky costumes, disappointed dates, awkward nervousness, amused bystanders, newly formed friendships and frustrated rejection, “I Want my Bam Bam” is short, funny, engaging and perhaps a little too familiar — though the crowd that the movie drew was small, there was hardly a moment when the room wasn’t echoing with knowing, truth-affirming laughter.

Sharma, Spaulding and Nesselrode manage to recreate the timeline of Screw, capture the chaotic shuffling, restless energy, hilarious embarrassment and humiliating familiarity of the event as they tell the collective story of a night that is inevitably compromising for us all. From ditched dates to unfashionably late arrivals, obscure and unseemly costumes to name-calling and the realization that you don’t actually share as much in common with your Screw date as your roommates may have believed, “I Want My Bam Bam” is sure to resonate with at least some aspect of every Swarthmore student’s Screw experience, from the enthusiastic participant to the teasing bystander.

Piecing together individual stories to create a holistic retelling of the night while focusing on and following a couple of students as they progress through their dates, the documentary truly captures the spirit, terror and incredible awkwardness of Screw.

Although “I Want My Bam Bam” was thought up on a half-joking, half-serious whim, it turned into a movie that, despite its constant flow of laughter, is a surprisingly well put together account of the Screw experience. “Tally, Shaun and I were just talking one day and thought it would be fun to get a camera and film some of the more absurd moments of Screw. We initially thought we should make a mockumentary, but we figured that Screw lends itself to mockery so easily that the project became more of a documentary,” Spaulding said.

“Screw is such a surreal experience that we wanted to capture it on film and really get a wide variety of perspectives from people both participating and spectating,” Nesselrode added. “You can’t do justice to Screw in under 20 minutes, but I think the more disorienting aspects come across. We definitely tried to tell a story with the documentary.”

For those who missed the screening of this story of mismatched dates, nervous laughter and Swarthmore tradition, “I Want My Bam Bam,” is available for download on DC++ and will soon be posted on YouTube.

Disclosure Note: Tally Sharma is Director of Business Development for The Phoenix but had no role in the production of this article.