Goodbye, Courtney Haden

By David McElroy · January 6, 2017

When I received the rough cut of my short film 10 years ago from an editor in Los Angeles, it still felt woefully unfinished and I was afraid I didn’t have anything that really worked. Inside, I was panicking. The guy in LA had bailed on the project right before it was finished, so I had to figure out how to finish locally.

I went to visit Ed Boutwell, the legendary founder of the local Boutwell Studios, down at his home in Shelby County. He watched my rough cut and told me I had something great, even though he disagreed with my libertarian satire since he was a progressive left guy. Because he thought it was good —and because he was eager to help a wannabe artist — he agreed to help me.

Ed told me I could get a local video editor to easily make the final picture cuts and credits but I mostly needed someone good to work with me on the audio recording, music selection and final audio mix.

Ed was retired, but he set me up to work with Courtney Haden, whose voice I had heard on Birmingham radio for years — mostly notably on Kicks 106 when it ruled local rock radio — and who was now co-owner of Boutwell Studios. Courtney had been a star of local FM rock morning drive radio at a couple of stations — and he still had the voice and personality I recognized.

He turned out to be a terrific human being who was kind, compassionate, creative and very helpful to me. I sat down in this studio — the one you see in the picture — and he pulled bit after bit of stock music for me to choose from. After years in the industry, he had a knack for knowing what I wanted just by seeing the video and having me describe the emotional feel I wanted from the music.

He recommended a voice actor to record the narration and supervised that recording. I then sat there in the studio with him for hour after hour as I watched him stitch the audio together — making tweak after tweak that I asked for.

Sitting there watching him work — and then seeing the video for the first time with that music and the voice of Ken Osbourn — I saw my short film come together. It was there in that little room that I finally saw in front of me what I had seen and heard in my head when I wrote the script.

Without Courtney’s willingness to help a novice and give me amazing creative advice, my film would have never been the minor success it was. I have remained in his debt, especially considering how little he charged me for his hours of professional work. He even did one of the voices during the credits without charge, simply because he knew I couldn’t afford another voice actor.

I found out Friday evening that Courtney has just died at the age of only 66 — and that leaves me feeling oddly empty.

I last talked to him about four or five years ago when I was planning to do another short. I let him know what I was going to make and he was eager to help. I regret I never made that film, so I never got the chance to work with him again.

I can’t say I knew Courtney very well personally and I worked with him on only that one project, but he made a very strong impression on me. Every artist deserves the chance to work at least once with someone who’s as generous with his time and knowledge as Courtney was with me when I barely knew what I was doing.

I probably never adequately let Courtney know how much his help meant to me and I regret that now.

Thank you, Courtney. You were a great collaborator and an even better human being.

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Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

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