Totally Shameless Productions

This book provides the story of the production and distribution of the movies and videos of Totally Shameless Productions, established by Brian Armstrong and Walt O’Hara, two DC-area filmmakers who met at the American University (AU) in the 1970s. During the 1980s and 1990s, they produced the Magnum Super-8 film trilogy (Fist Full of Magnum, Bloody Magnums, and Magnum Opus), and two videos, Dateline Damocles, and Bloody Eye Sockets for FCAC public access station in Fairfax, VA. The Magnum trilogy was a very loose parody of Clint Eastwood movies with the lead character Dirty Jimmy fighting terrorists, zombies, and white supremacists. The FCAC video Dateline Damocles was a story about a reporter who assassinated a middle eastern tyrant on live TV with his sword. Bloody Eye Sockets was a plot concerning an eye eating serial killer. Willard Wheatley, a police detective tormented by aliens that had once abducted him, tries to stop his rampage. Totally Shameless Productions was ahead of the curve covering topics such as terrorists, zombies, resurgence of white supremacy, political assassination, alien abduction, Kwanza, and even an eye eating serial killer long before these subjects were popular in film and video. Armstrong and O’Hara called Magnum Opus the “Heaven’s Gate of Super 8” due to its length and problematic production. The movies provide a historical record of the grungy streets and locations in the Washington, DC area in the 1980s that have been erased by development. Several scenes were shot in Chinatown, Capitol Hill, Arlington, Alexandria, and even the junkyards under the Southeast/Southwest Freeway. The country locations near Dulles Airport have all been lost. As a tribute to the Langley Punks, many Little Tavern Hamburger restaurants appear in the movies. The subtitle of this book using the designation “award losing filmmakers” is related to two award nominations received by Totally Shameless Productions. The first nomination was for Bloody Magnums for the 1991 Rosebud award. Although they lost the award, their film was shown at the AFI theater in the Kennedy Center, and on DCTV, a public access station in DC. In 1993, Bloody Eye Sockets was nominated for a Telly award for video production but also lost. Armstrong and O’Hara share the common bond of having grandfathers that both worked as engineers building the atomic bomb in the 1940s. So, if a Scotch-Irish Protestant and an Irish Catholic can help build a weapon of mass destruction their grandsons can at least make a few fun movies. After the completion of the Totally Shameless Productions films and videos, Armstrong made one short video on his own called Little Elvis Comes to Dinner. This S-VHS video was a story about a successful businesswoman, Mary, who decides she wants to have a baby and signs a contract with a potent man to get pregnant. The 25-minute video shows their conflict and how Mary works to achieve her goal of having a child. Film Without Shame was produced in 1997 by Armstrong Video Production which was an overview of the best of their films and videos. In 2002, Armstrong completed the two-tape overview of the 20 years of the DC area Elvis party called the Elvis Party 20th Anniversary video with hosts Brian Armstrong, Mike Fekete, George Marcou, and Walt O’Hara. O’Hara has become a successful blogger through his blog Third Point of Singularity and Armstrong has written four history books: South River, Franklin Park Tragedy, History Lovers Guide to Bar Harbor, Maine, and Lost Museums. They both had active careers in the computer field unrelated to their film and video work.