Behind the Scenes
The interviews for Bob Garrett: The Motion Picture quickly went sideways. One especially memorable segment featured Chris Riessen casually informing the camera that Garrett had “a fish for a wife,” before implicating himself in an alleged “assassination attempt” involving staples in the teacher’s coffee.
The staples were not a joke invented for the movie. That incident had actually happened, and Garrett had been, understandably, furious.
Daryl and Ray continued roaming El Camino High with the camera, asking increasingly ridiculous questions of students and faculty. What had begun as a loose documentary about one eccentric chemistry teacher was rapidly becoming something closer to an unauthorized oral history of the mythology surrounding him.
Not everyone was amused. Production came to an abrupt end after the line of questioning began offending members of the faculty, most notably English teacher Mary-Liz Guthier, who deemed the entire senior project inappropriate.
With that, Bob Garrett: The Motion Picture was effectively over. Only a few minutes of footage survived, leaving behind an incomplete film that nevertheless captured something unusually specific about El Camino High in 2003: the students, the teachers, the hallways, and the strange ecosystem of stories that could grow around one memorable person.
The film never made it very far. The legend did.
Garrett himself was an intriguing figure. Beneath the chemistry-teacher persona, he quietly aligned with Daryl and Riessen on a number of the political and cultural issues that animated high school conversation at the time. His secret Republican streak added yet another layer to the mystique.
And the rumors never stopped. By the early 2000s, the dominant legend circulating through El Camino was that Garrett was secretly a porn star, a theory he seemed to grin at rather than shut down, which of course only made it spread faster.
Years later, when Brian Grima joined the Dollars & Donuts orbit, he brought an older chapter of Garrett mythology with him. Brian had attended El Camino about a decade earlier and remembered a longstanding rumor from the 1990s that Garrett had once been spotted holding hands with another man in the Castro.
After Garrett’s death in 2009, and the later revelation that he was, in fact, a gay, the old whispers suddenly snapped into focus. In hindsight, it raises an almost melancholy possibility: that the more outlandish porn-star legend may have been easier, funnier, and safer to let live than the truth.
The film itself never survived long enough to explore any of that, but it remains a terrific time capsule of El Camino High School in 2003.
