The filmmaker of tomorrow, John Waters once wrote, could take a morning’s news scandal and have a theater-ready feature film done by the afternoon. CultJam Productions and San Jose–based director Mario Glaviano took a little more time, but they’ve sourced the news in a way worthy of Waters in their short shocker Ivy League Exorcist: The Bobby Jindal Story.
Today, Louisiana’s governor is short-listed for the Republican vice-president nomination. But Ivy League Exorcist had been planned some time before Jindal’s political possibilities heated up. Last year, writer-producer Troy Davis discovered Jindal’s 1994 essay in the New Oxford Review, “Beating a Demon: Physical Dimensions of Spiritual Warfare.” In it, the governor describes participating in a 1990 exorcism of a fellow student named Susan, aided by his friends in the University Christian Fellowship. Davis immediately envisioned the film, “made just as the article described the events.” Making the film, says Glaviano, “was a pretty speedy process.”
Mark Balunis, with a black wig and some walnut-toned makeup, plays a very worried Jindal. Ivy League Exorcist‘s Susan is Caitlin Dissinger, who shrieks Linda Blair–worthy blasphemies: “You whiny-ass titty-babies! I queef on your Bible!” Terrifying? Yes. Scarier still is that they’re aware of the film in Louisiana. Reporter Michelle Millhollon of Baton Rouge’s Advocate got no response from Jindal, but the governor’s spokesman Kyle Plotkin went on record: “That movie is insane. It’s just plain absurd.”
When we spoke, Davis had just gotten the news that Jindal’s people had seen the film. “‘Insane and absurd!'” he says via phone from Los Angeles. “That’s music to my ears.”
“People do stupid things in college. My stupid things were more like waking up on the shower floor of the girl’s dorm,” Davis says. “But it wasn’t like Jindal was trying to do anything bad. Even Obama and Biden did stupid things in school, but they weren’t cinematic stupid things.”
‘Ivy League Exorcist: The Bobby Jindal Story’ is on YouTube.
