My Dead Dad's Porno Tapes (2018) - full transcript

This is Charlie.

He was just born.

These are his parents

Jenny and Greg.

In 20 years, Greg will be dead.

But Charlie doesn’t

know that yet.

Charlie doesn’t

know anything yet.

He’s just a baby.

This is where Charlie grew

up, his brother Geoff,

sister Meg, their dog Louie, and

the TV room where his dad hid

these, some of the tackiest

video pornography of the 1980s

had to offer.

Greg will be dead in 10 years.

But Charlie still

doesn’t know that yet.

This is Charlie’s first

project from film school.

Evidently, he loaded

the camera wrong,

so the footage

came out like this.

So he never showed his dad.

Greg will be dead in one year,

but Charlie still doesn’t know.

Charlie has a ticket to

see his favorite band.

It’s the same day

that his dad tells him

he’s gotten a diagnosis.

But he insists that Charlie

go to the concert and not

to worry.

So Charlie isn’t worried.

He doesn’t even know

what malignant means.

Then just before

Greg’s 52nd birthday —

[ring]

Charlie’s mom calls to

tell him that his dad has

been hospitalized and

is basically comatose.

She explains, as delicately

as she can …

“This is to the end.”

At his hospital

bed, Charlie thinks

his dad gives him a smile.

Greg can’t speak anymore.

So they sit in silence.

In truth, this is not

so different from when

Greg was healthy.

They didn’t agree on much

and so they never really

spent time together.

But Charlie was

waiting for the moment

when they could see

each other as adults.

He knew that was when

the strange distance he

felt between them

would finally close.

But then —

[beep]

This is Charlie’s dad today.

He’s been dead for nine years.

In the aftermath, a life’s

worth of weird stuff

is left behind, stuff that

Charlie hoped might explain

why his dad was the way he was.

Like maybe if Charlie

looked hard enough,

he could bring him

back from the dead,

at least long enough to

understand who he really was.

So it’s a pretty stupid plan,

but this is him trying anyway.

[music]

Gregory Allen Tyrell was

born November 14th, 1956,

in Hamilton, Ontario.

Parents, Dale and Stan.

Along with Greg, they’d all die

within a year of each other.

Dale was the last holdout.

Greg was a police officer.

He’d work long shifts

an hour from home.

But it was a job he kept

pretty tight-lipped about.

OK.

Being a cop just paid the bills.

So what did Greg choose to do?

Well he flew airplanes

in his spare time.

He’d often drag Charlie

to airstrips on weekends,

but always ended up chatting

with the other pilots for hours

while Charlie, bored

out of his mind,

would leave to wait in the car.

He fixed planes too.

He loved fixing things.

He left behind a

junkyard of tools.

And their house was in a

constant state of renovation,

right up until his death.

But what did any of this mean?

Greg: “So this is our —

[chuckles] not done yet kitchen,

12 years in the making, this.

This is our front hallway.

What a vast improvement.

It’s actually quite nice.”

“Well, I do nice

trim work, don’t I?”

He was pathologically

protective of his stuff.

Anything misused, misplaced,

or presumably used in a movie

would make him erupt.

So far this is going very badly.

It looks like

everything in this pile

is just as elusive as Greg was.

It’s just trivia.

Greg was hard to live with.

Greg had a volatile temper.

So what?

Unexamined for all

these years, this stuff

could have hidden

anything — revelations,

answers, catharsis.

Examined, it’s

looking more and more

like a big pile of nothing.

And he’s gone all the way

from birth certificate

to cancer diagnosis.

The doctors told Greg that

the most common causes

of this kind of cancer were

smoking, drinking, and stress.

Greg didn’t smoke

and he didn’t drink.

They nicknamed the tumor Dale.

So maybe Charlie’s been

looking in the wrong place.

Dale threw cocktail parties.

Stan was a pilot.

On the surface, they looked

like a pretty typical

well-adjusted family.

This was their house, a

monument to a respectable brand

of normalcy.

Dale’s cocktail

parties were showcases.

Her kids were props.

On Christmas mornings,

she would march

them downstairs in

matching uniforms

and make them write long

thank-you cards immediately

after every gift was unwrapped

to Santa, every single time.

Greg had a speech

impediment back then.

Dale would reluctantly drive

him to corrective lessons,

bullying him the whole

time

about what a burden

he was on her.

Decades later,

nothing had changed.

Charlie remembers how reticent

his dad got every time

they went to her house for

the mandatory holiday visits.

And then Charlie found this.

No, it’s something we

have to be aware of.

Every time you try to —

For a split second, it’s

like Charlie has his answer.

But all he’s really done is move

the question back a generation.

If she made him this

way, what made her?

A pattern starts to emerge.

But rather than see

how far back it goes,

Charlie focuses back on himself.

When Charlie was

a kid, he wasn’t

living in an abusive household.

He was just trying to avoid

another visit to the airstrip

with his dad, his

dad who was only trying

in his own naive and awkward

way to just spend time

with his son.

This wasn’t Greg failing.

This was Greg trying.

He just kind of sucked at it.

A cycle of abuse, echoing

from Dale’s father to her, to him,

left Greg hard and bitter.

But at some point,

he made a decision.

He was going to stop it

from going any further.

I’m dressing up for my

daughter’s birthday.

Get the wide angle

going to get this shape.

[chuckling]

Funny…

You wanna watch

me brush my teeth?

“Sure.”

And after all those years

Charlie spent avoiding him,

Greg still supported Charlie’s

filmmaking ambitions.

And Charlie wasted all that

time at the airfield hiding out

in the car, like he

wasted so much time

combing through his dad’s crap,

clinging onto VHS porno tapes

like they were part

of this puzzle.

But Greg was never defined

by what he carried with him.

He was defined by what,

after multiple generations,

he was finally able to let go.

His loving and devoted wife

who would have happily spent

the rest of her life with him —

His son Geoff, now a father

to his own perfect impossible

kids.

His daughter Meg, who shares his

stubbornness, if nothing else.

And his youngest

son Charlie, the one

who thought his dad could

be a dick sometimes,

who felt like there always

was, and now always will be,

a distance between them.

But he still ends every single

movie he makes the same way,

even though his dad will never

see it, a single credit all

by itself that reads —