In 2007, Shauna and I were working on a script about a New York City doorman. We wanted to attach a name actor and seek financing, a process which can take years. During that time, I met the filmmaker Andrew Bujalski, who inspired me to make a much lower budget film using my friends. All I had to do was to pick someone in my life who I thought would be an interesting subject. The first person who came to mind was Andrew Von Urtz.

Andrew and I went to film school together, and we’ve been friends for nearly 20 years. A nonprofessional actor who has never appeared in a film before, Andrew is known among his friends for being an incredibly witty and charming yet frustratingly elusive personality. Although the story for “Loveless” is fiction, Shauna and I based much of it on Andrew’s life, and he plays a version of himself that is very close to the real thing.

In the film we learn that Andrew has written a film script, but we never quite find out what that script is about. In real life, Andrew wrote a screenplay called “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You,” about a young man in downtown New York and his encounters with a Russian prostitute. The opening scene describes the young man sorting through the possessions of his recently deceased father. I knew that Andrew never knew his own father, so when I read this scene I felt that it might offer some insight into Andrew’s otherwise elusive personality. The idea of lost fathers and their impact on people’s personalities and relationships helped form the basis for the story of “Loveless.”

The characters of Ava and Ricky have also lost their father, but, unlike Andrew, they deal with it in a very open way, a way which he sees as foreign and absurd. Andrew clings to his prized independence, while Ricky and Ava cling to familial bonds. These basic character contrasts dictated how the film was written, cast and directed, and inspired us to develop “Loveless” as an experiment in contrasting tones.

Andrew’s world, for which we sought to create a naturalistic tone, is populated by nonprofessional actors playing versions of themselves. Cindy Chastain, who plays Andrew’s ex Joanna, is Andrew’s real-life ex-girlfriend. Kendra, Andrew’s office-mate, and Sabin, his boss, are both played by his close friends. One exception is that Gary Wilmes, a professional actor, plays the character of Tad. Reality and fiction come together, though, when the real-life Tad makes a cameo, as a banker who, in one scene, is seated next to the fictional Tad.

For the absurdly comic world that Andrew encounters represented by Ava’s family, we cast professional actors. Ricky is played by Scott Cohen, with whom Shauna and I have been friends for years. Ricky’s younger brother, Paul Jr., is played by Scott Cohen’s son, Liam. And Ava is played by Genevieve Hudson-Price, the daughter of the novelist and screenwriter Richard Price; we found Genevieve on an audition tape through our friend Meredith Tucker, who is a casting director. Shauna produced the film out of our apartment, all the actors wore their own clothes and all the locations were donated by friends. Our daughter, Lily, plays herself in the film. It was truly a labor of love.

Recently, we introduced to you director Alex Munt and his feature debut, LBF. As if the film weren’t unique already, Munt shared with us some interesting stories of what happened on the set.

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The film stars Toby Schmitz in the lead role of ‘Goodchild,’ with Bianca Chiminello (as ‘The Beautiful Financial Backer’) and Gracie Otto (as ‘The Dead Girl’). These off-beat character names are lifted directly from the novel. Septimus Caton (‘Cash’), April Rose Pengilly (‘Tanya’) and Iren Skaarnes (‘University’) complete the central cast.

For LBF, there was no official casting process. I’d seen Toby onstage and in other indie films, and thought he was terrific. He is mates with Sep Caton, who came on board shortly after. Gracie Otto was the first to read the screenplay, and she suggested April Rose. Iren was a friend of mine already. April and Iren had not acted before, so we built their characters around themselves in a sense. Knowing April could play drums, we did an LBF ‘drum montage’ at one point in the film!

I remember one of the first things we did for LBF is to shoot our wardrobe tests. I like these—shot with lots of colour on white walls of Blank Space Gallery. They pre-empt the ‘pop’ aesthetic of the film, with retro-appeal. In fact, I liked them so much, some ended up cut into the film, set to music or narration. People have often asked what I mean by LBF being a ‘pop-art’ film—which for me, is really about the way in which the film enfolds pop-culture into the cinematic frame primarily the music, but also fashion, photography and visual-arts. LBF trades on a ‘hyper-real’ aesthetic to create its film world.

Day #1 of Production: We shot the first scene when ‘Goodchild,’ just off the plane, is picked up by his best-friend ‘Cash,’ on the way to an afternoon motel party (cocaine and hilarity) where he connects with ‘The Beautiful Financial Backer.’ For this scene, my friend owned an Alpha (Spider), which I borrowed for the shoot. But a day or two before shooting, we learned neither cast member held a current driving license, for the opening travelling shot, which served to introduce ‘Goodchild’s’ return home, and feelings of dislocation. This demanded a quick solution, which was to tow our actors in the rolling car, elevated behind a tow-truck. Our cinematographer Gareth Tillson ‘cheated’ the camera angle to allow for the tilt, with me riding next to the tow-truck driver ahead, wired into the performance.

I guess, this story reflects my feelings about micro-budget filmmaking. You always need to keep moving forward, finding creative solutions to problems that are typically resolved by money. I think we got this scene in the bag for $180 (cost of a tow-truck driver for 1 hour), which made me think ‘yes, this is possible… we can actually make this film.’ The driving scene, which opens LBF, unfolds to the song ‘We’re All Gonna Die’ from Sydney band ‘The Model School.’ It sets up the tone for the film: pure-pop with a dark undertone. After LBF wrapped, I ended up filming the music video for this track, which you can check out on Vimeo. It’s also the track used for our Sofia Coppola-inspired trailer that uses music to introduce the story.

LBF the film (Official Trailer) from muntmedia on Vimeo.

In the novel, the story takes place between Perth and Melbourne, but for the film we set the story between Sydney and Paris. The decision to film in Paris on a micro-budget sounds an unusual one—but again, with digital filmmaking anything is possible. In Paris, we saw the story of ‘The Dead Girl,’ and chose to film in Paris since Gracie was spending a lot of time there. For these scenes, Gracie doubles as our 2^nd Unit Director. Armed with a HD handy-cam and a few sketches from me about what I thought would work—she came back with some great material of a greyed-out Parisian winter. For LBF this worked well (the story of the past) compared to our images from the Australian summer (in the present).

In LBF, the character ‘Cash’ is played by Septimus Caton, who is front-man of the band ‘Kids at Risk.’ In the film, ‘Cash’ forms a relationship with ‘University’ (Iren Skaarnes). For this scene, it was the actors who came up with a really nice, effective scene that gets across the idea of their romance. ‘Cash’ sings the song ‘Sugar’ (‘Kids at Risk’) to ‘University’ as an acoustic version. Sep did it in a single-take. It’s one of those on-set moments, when the crew intuitively gets that a scene is hitting the mark.

On Oxford Street again, ‘Goodchild’ interviews pole-dancer ‘Zahra Stardust,’ as part of his work in writing ‘The Love Enterprise.’ Again, this scene isn’t scripted. At the start of the interview ‘Goodchild’ says, ‘I just have some one-word questions, it’s how I’m rolling at the moment’—which also describes LBF made off-the-cuff.

For LBF, I was also interested in making a set of creative collaborations, outside of the immediate film. Filmmaking is of course a collaborative art, but often this means just within the crew—and not beyond. For example, in one flashback scene of ‘The Dead Girl,’ we worked with Tangent fashion magazine. Here, we see the backstory of ‘The Dead Girl’ modeling in Paris. The fashion photographer in LBF is Tangent’s Emmanuel Giraud. This was interesting since both the DP and the fashion-photographer (in the scene) were using the same technology and light set-up, DSLR photography. I like films that capture a sense of ‘reality’ within the cinematic frame, when the fiction film narrative is opened up to the real world. Like in a later scene, when we see ‘Goodchild’ lonely and dejected—walking the streets of Sydney on NYE, which was shot guerilla style in the city.

I often get asked what we shot LBF on—to which the best answer is probably, ‘anything we could get our hands on.’ It was all HD, but across a range of cameras. The dSLR’s surfaced during the making of the film, which we put to good use. ‘LBF’ is a splintered story, which unfolds between ‘Goodchild’s’ past and present, and I think that our use of multiple digital formats works with that idea.

It is our honor to introduce a new name to your cinephile vocabulary: Alex Munt, writer and director of LBF (Living Between Fucks). Munt tells FilmBuff how he came into contact with the material for his film and how he set the wheels in motion to begin production on his passion project, “a story of love, loss, and desperation.”

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LBF was made on a shoe-string budget. It’s part of the micro-budget feature momentum, which I think is a really interesting trajectory of independent cinema today.

As writer/director of ‘LBF’ it was certainly an interesting ride, at times on the brink of chaos. The film is based on the novel Living Between Fucks by Australian author Cry Bloxsome. It gathered a cult following online back in the days of MySpace, where it was big in the ‘Favorites’ section—both from readers in Australia and abroad. I actually came across it on the shelf at a bookshop, an attention-grabbing cover to say the least. I read Living Between Fucks’ in the span of a few hours and knew it would work for the screen. Bloxsome’s writing was bold, pacy and immediate. I liked the inner-city setting. I call ‘LBF’ a story of love, loss and desperation.

When I say ‘screenplay’ this is overstated, since there was no final script heading into production. Instead, for ‘LBF’ I put together a collection of images and scene fragments, which I published at Blurb.com in a book format. You can see the cover here. It has an earlier working title: ‘Between Days.’

Music is a really big part of ‘LBF.’ At the time, I was listening to a whole range of new Australian indie music thinking, “This is great,” and it would work really well on-screen. In ‘LBF’, four live-performance songs structure the story, and give a sense of the main character ‘Goodchild’s’ state of mind at any given point. I’d seen this approach used in Michael Winterbottom’s low-budget digital film 9 Songs, and recalled his view that a good pop-song can say a whole lot more about what it means to be in love, than either exposition, dialogue or narration.

In terms of microbudget, this scene works well in providing a cinematic location full of light, texture and colour (shot at Ruby Rabbit nightclub). It didn’t require set-dressing and for ‘LBF’ we didn’t have the luxury of a production designer. We did have one costume designer in Alex Smyth-Kirk, who did a great job with limited resources.

‘LBF’ proved to be an experiment in many ways. The film was written, shot, edited all at once in an organic fashion. Editor Andrew Soo was key creative on ‘LBF’, who was with the project from the early stages, as the film was constructed from blocks of shooting over time. From my perspective, it takes longer, but this process is creatively interesting since it lets you re-shape the film, the characters, their trajectories—you can literally find what the story needs, go and shoot it, then drop it back in the edit to see if that works. It makes filmmaking less of an industrial process.

‘LBF’ had its world premiere at SXSW in 2011, followed by its Australian premiere at Sydney Film Festival. It played the Revelation Film Festival closing night and the Cine/B Film Festival in Chile as part of a showcase of ‘visceral and resonating cinematic experiences from Australia.’ So, if you like what you’ve read, you can, of course, watch ‘LBF’ right now at FilmBuff!

Fellow ‘Buff Gearheads, boy do we have a present for you. An EXCLUSIVE with the director of Racing Dreams. And for those impartial to the automobile, this guest post, written by Marshall Curry, truly translates nerdy car talk into an accessible and warming tale of culture. Like little league baseball and pee-wee football, cart racing has grown into the feeder series for all big-time, racing leagues. And it is this analogue to tee-ball that provides the very revealing look at life in motorsport. Enjoy! And Thanks to Marshall Curry!

Racing Revelations

NASCAR is the second biggest spectator sport in the country after football.  It’s more popular than basketball or even baseball. And yet, here in New York, no one seems to know anything about it.  Quick: can you name three NASCAR drivers?

A few years ago I began to wonder how it was possible that in a city this diverse, where we’re exposed to such an amazing variety of cultures, so many of us could be so ignorant about America’s second-favorite past time?

It seemed like something I should learn about if I wanted to understand the red-state/blue-state divide (or, more accurately, the “New York/rest of the country” divide) and so I wrote down “NASCAR” and dropped it into the file I keep of documentary ideas.

Soon after, I read an article about extreme go-kart racing—a nationally competitive sport in which 11 and 12 year olds drive karts that go 70 mph (!).  It’s widely considered the Little League for NASCAR, and a lot of the top professional drivers started out in the series.  I went to a few races to see for myself, and it was unbelievable.  The racing was noisy and dangerous, and the kids were smart, funny and dazzlingly charismatic.

I put aside the project I had been working on and dove in.  I found two boys and a girl – Josh, Brandon, and Annabeth — who were great racers with magnetic personalities.  They were at that perfect age where they were old enough to be interesting and insightful, but young enough to be open and unrehearsed.  They began to teach me about their passion for racing.

According to Richard Petty, who is the greatest NASCAR driver of all time (think Wayne Gretzky/Michael Jordan/Pele rolled into one) there’s something universal about racing.  He was once asked in an interview, “When do you think the very first race occurred?” and he answered, “As soon as they built the second car.”

When I told the kids in the film that most New Yorkers don’t have cars, and a lot of us don’t even have driver’s licenses, they couldn’t believe it.  To them, racing is a just a part of the larger story of growing up.  The three-day race events are where you fall in love for the first time.   Races are where you test your inner strength and figure out who you are.  And races are where you bond with – and declare independence from — your parents.

Annabeth told me, “When you are 11 or 12, everyone is always telling you what to do.  But when you are racing, you can’t hear anyone else. Should I pass this guy?  Should I wait a lap?  It’s all up to you.”

For the parents, racing is just an addiction, and as Annabeths’ mom says, “We’ve got it bad.”  She explained to me early on:  “A lot of people don’t understand racing.  They think it’s just cars going around in circles.  But we don’t understand, say, baseball.  To us, that’s just guys standing around in a field, hoping someone will hit ‘em a ball– and they might not even hit it to him—so we think that’s crazy…”

It was such a great comment because it reminded me that everything seems absurd when it’s viewed from the outside– whether it’s racing or baseball or jazz or documentary film.  But once you get inside a little bit and start to understand, for instance, what makes a good pass in a race, it suddenly comes into focus and life becomes a little bit richer.  It’s a nice lesson about stretching yourself and paying attention to the world.

Check out Racing Dreams now!

What inspired you to make this film?

I’ve always loved when great music and great film come together. I was a musician before I was a filmmaker, and I always knew music would play an important role in the films I make. I was considering several other projects, but I decided to do this story because I love music and know some great musicians, and, since I knew we weren’t going to have a lot of time and money, I wanted to make sure we had at least one advantage going in. And it worked. The film has some great moments, and we were able to show off some beautiful parts of our city, but there hasn’t been a person we’ve talked to who hasn’t been blown away by the music and the soundtrack.

How much time and money did you have?

We had about $10,000 to shoot the movie, and we completed principal photography in 14 days. The key was having a group of talented friends that wanted to do something amazing and were willing to work for little or no money, most of them taking their two weeks of vacation from their full time jobs to be there. We also called in every favor we had to get the equipment and talent we needed to make this film.

What was the timeline? How much time did you spend on casting, shooting and editing?

We knew we wanted to start filming something at the beginning of 2010, and the only question was what we were going to film. Matthew Brown, the writer, and I decided on which film we wanted to make in about mid-October of 2009, and that’s when he started writing the film. While he was writing, we did the casting and location scouting, and started getting the music together. We began filming February 4^th and had a final cut of the film in August. It was a crazy year, but a lot of fun.

Christopher Grissom (left), David Ramirez (right)

How did you cast the film?

From the beginning I knew that I wanted David Ramirez to write the music. He’s a good friend and one of my favorite songwriters. Once he was on board, I asked him to play the lead. He hadn’t done a lot of acting, but he is a performer, a really good one, and I knew he would play the part well. Shelby Cook is another good friend of mine, and it was a no brainer to cast him as Will. One of the few good things about writing a movie so close to shooting it is that you can tailor characters and dialogue for the people you cast, which is something Matt did really well when he wrote this script. I never read Will’s part without thinking of Shelby.

We didn’t have a clue who to cast to play Annie and Jen. We turned to a local Dallas casting agency and were so pleased to find Brandi Price and Brittany Joyner. They were spectacular in their auditions, and it was such a relief to get them cast. I think we ended up finalizing all of that around Christmas, and once we had them we knew we were actually going to do this.

David Ramirez (left), Shelby Cook (right)

What was your shooting schedule like?

The shooting schedule was tight. We filmed all the scenes in the loft, which is about half of the movie, in six days. We had to fully furnish the loft, which was on the third floor, twice, since it acted as the loft for both the girls and guys.

Eight hours into filming, we were six hours behind schedule, but somehow everyone pulled together, and we managed to squeeze everything in. Well, not really “somehow”—we did it by shooting 18 hour days and not sleeping, but it was still a bit of a miracle.

I remember having a total of five minutes to shoot one scene; we set up the shot, David walked in and said his lines, one take, and that’s the take we use in the film. We just had to do things like that.

After we finished in the Loft, we moved to the Park where we were limited to as long as the light would let us shoot. I’m sure cast and crew appreciated that, but it was another tight week. And around the third day of shooting we had the biggest snowfall that Dallas had seen in the past 30 years.

We were scheduled to shoot outside all day, but there was a lot of debate as to road safety, the sanity of filming in sub-freezing weather, etc. But instead of calling it quits while the snow was falling, we decided to shoot. It turned out to be the most magical moment of the film. It was cold and miserable, and I still don’t have feeling in one of my toes, but once we saw the footage we knew that the frostbite was worth it.

Snow in Dallas, TX

What did you shoot on?

We shot on the RED in 4K HD, which is what we wanted to shoot on from the beginning. We wanted this to feel like a much higher budget film, and we knew the RED could help with that. We also knew that renting the RED would eat up our entire budget, but we called in some favors, and through friends, we were able to get everything at a discounted rate, including Zeiss prime lenses and a well-stocked 2-ton grip truck.

Cast and crew of Between Notes

What were some things you learned directing this film?

I think I learned that a director is first and foremost a storyteller, and every decision you make needs to be made with that in mind.

What advice would you give other filmmakers struggling to make their first film?

You just need to make it. Equipment is affordable and readily available. Write a story, or find someone who can, get your friends together and shoot. Most of us making Between Notes had full time jobs, and we took our two weeks of vacation for the year to make this film. It’s hard work, but if you want to be a filmmaker it is up to you to make that happen.

You’re reading this page for one of two reasons; you’re thinking about watching Becoming Santa or you’ve watched Becoming Santa and you have some questions.

If you’re thinking about watching Becoming Santa, the fact that you’re thinking about it is reason enough.  Go watch it!  Director Jeff Myers and I had a number of people say to us, and critics report, that they didn’t think they would like Becoming Santa because they were not fans of Christmas.  Or they thought the film would be sticky sweet and cloying.  It’s not.  Just go watch it.  Then come back here and I’ll answer the top five questions Jeff Myers and I got while on the festival circuit.  Which leads me to the second reason you’re reading this page; you have more questions.

The number one question people ask me after seeing “Becoming Santa” is: Are you still doing it? SPOILER ALERT!  If you haven’t watched the movie yet, go watch it and come back.  I did a few Santa jobs the year after we shot the film, and this year I am working for the month of December in Hong Kong as Santa. Am I still doing it?  Okay, yes.  But I will not be doing this forever and I am certainly not a 24/7 Santa like many of the gentlemen in Becoming Santa.

The second most popular question at each Q&A: Where did you get the idea for Becoming Santa?  Years and years ago, I was trying to get work in television commercials.  Around July, the Christmas commercials would start casting and I noticed that every time there was a commercial with Santa, all the best Santas had their own suit, a real beard and their wives came with them to the audition.  And they all knew each other.  I realized there was a big subculture of Santa that most people were unaware of and wouldn’t that be an interesting doc? Jeff and I searched for an actor we could follow through Santa School and out into the world, but we couldn’t find anyone willing to do it.  My father died a few weeks before Christmas and the following June, I called Jeff and told him I was already dreading Christmas and I was going to bleach my beard and we could follow me through Santa School. I thought total immersion into Santa would help me get through the season.

How do you write a documentary?  Isn’t it all in the editing?  Great question. After I had the idea for “Becoming Santa” I started doing research.  I looked into the Coca Cola Santa. I learned about Black Peter, Sidewalk Santas, Saint Nicholas and his followers.  I researched Santa Schools and started talking to people.  Each person I spoke with told me of another person we should interview.  When we were done shooting, we had almost 250 hours of footage.  I did an outline of what I thought the film should be, and our awesome editor Todd Zelin put together a 3 hour cut.  Then Jeff and I pared it down to 2 hours, and then the final 93 minutes. We also got great advice from the Academy Award winning producer of Errol Morris docs, Julie Alberg.  Julie told me we needed to transcribe all our interviews and then go through them and highlight the parts we felt we useful, and to use those as the basis for an outline, or to fill in the outline.  In retrospect it seems an obvious exercise, but Julie’s advice was spot on.

What was the hardest part about making Becoming Santa?  Mostly because of the press that followed Borat and Bruno, we encountered many people who thought Jeff and I were going to make fun of them or ruin their events.  Because Becoming Santa is our first documentary, we didn’t have work to show people to prove we could be trusted.  We had to pave the way by sharing footage we had already shot and answering a myriad of questions before people started to believe we were not out to skewer anyone.

Will there be a sequel?  Jeff has suggested to me that we should make Staying Santa, but I think he is just trying to annoy me.  We had a great time making Becoming Santa, but as soon as we find funding we want make more films on other topics—and I’d like to trim my beard.

Got more questions?  Go ‘like’ the “Becoming Santa:the Movie” Facebook page, post your queries and we will try to answer them.

I moved to Rio six years ago because I’d wanted for many years to make a film there. The city reminds me of the vital, unpredictable energy of New York in the 70’s, with a madcap undercurrent straight out of the screwball comedies of Preston Sturges from the 1930’s and 40’s. Sturges was able to fuse a lightness of tone and a delight in people’s misguided intentions together with the most serious issues. In contrast to Frank Capra’s sentimentality, Sturges took a hard, biting look at the devastation of Depression era America…and then laughed deliriously (while making us weep without knowing it)!

In Rio, the mad contrast between sensual delight and grave injustices jumps out from every street corner.  And there’s this feeling that everything is possible there…which foreigners (mistakenly of course) think means everything is permissible. But foreigners’ misreadings are not all of their own making.

There’s an expression in Brazil which dates from the colonial era: “pra inglês ver”, literally “for the English to see,” but it actually means something like: “a façade for foreigners to mask a Brazilian truth.” Brazilians are very conscious of their image and play with it to both seduce and thwart the expectations of outsiders. The two Brazilian heroines of the film are Iracema, the Veronica Lake-like Amazonian played by delightful newcomer Daniela Dams and Maria Angelica, played by City of God veteran Mary Sheyla as a subtly subversive favela born nanny. Part of what makes Mary Sheyla’s performance so powerful is that she herself is the daughter of a nanny and grew up in the favela in which her character comes from. And this mixture of fact and fiction is at the heart of the film.

In fact, I’ve always mixed fiction and documentary. Resident Alien was technically a documentary but had many staged and fantastical encounters. Sunday is a fiction film laced with real characters, situations and places in Queens, NY.  Signs & Wonders is dependent on a tension between Stellan Skarsgard and Charlotte Rampling’s illusions and tells the often brutal reality of the streets of Athens. Mondovino, and its epic cast of characters, is built like a 19^th century novel. But finally in Rio Sex Comedy I’ve been able to entwine my two passions –documentary and actors in absurdist situations. The always enchanting Irène Jacob for example plays a character obligated as an anthropologist to interview real life nannies and maids for her fictional work in the film. Having actors play her cameraman and her translator allowed for her and her colleagues to improvise fictional moments in direct exchange with the real life nannies being interviewed in circumstances the nannies viewed as authentic but which were always heightened and controlled because of the skill of the actors (including Irène’s real life husband, the famous French stage actor Jérôme Kircher, who plays her illicit lover in the film!).

Bill Pullman is the US ambassador (though everyone on the streets of Rio called out to him as “Meester President” from Independence Day fame) who is thrust into the heart of several favelas and learns, along with the audience, the realities around him from real residents, even as Fisher Stevens –as uproarious in real life as his character Fish in the film- created a second layer of fiction around him. All of legendary Charlotte Rampling’s interactions with (the real-life father of plastic surgery) Dr. Ivo Pitanguy and the patients in his clinic are entirely documentary and yet by staying in character she was able to guide them to the limits of fiction. But even the most burlesque scenes, like the (the real-life) English favela hotel owner’s NGO presentation, have their roots in his real experiences living in Rio for the last 25 years. So no matter how whacky the comedy gets, it’s all firmly rooted in my and other collaborator’s long fermenting experience of Rio life.

We shot for four and a half months, mixing scripted and documentary scenes, actors and non-actors, blending into the city and using its population as extras with our small crew even as we staged elaborate and rehearsed set pieces with dollies and steadicam etc…

The actors came several times over three years to Rio to absorb the background for their characters and to forge a relation between their own lives and the realities of their characters’ situations. My intention was to apply the freedom of discovery in the gestation and shooting period of a documentary with the discipline and narrative pleasure of a fiction. It took nearly a year and a half to edit the 300 hours down to less than two. This approach was a direct result of the joy I experienced during the shooting and editing of Mondovino and my hope to transpose that experience within the framework of a fiction film.

The actors, as profound creative collaborators and as co-producers of the film, were also responsible for the creation and maintenance of their costumes, hair and makeup and continuity.  At one point, Bill Pullman changed into costume behind the trunk of a car while Charlotte Rampling finished ironing her dress in the front of the camera van! The crew was rarely larger than 10 people, led by the deeply talented and responsive Lubo Bakchev, French-Bulgarian DP (of Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris and upcoming 2 Days In NY and Abdelatif Kechiche’s The Secret & the Grain among other credits). The point was to allow the actors 360 degree awareness and create as committed and concentrated a working group as possible.  All this so the fiction could permanently coexist in a tension with the reality of Rio life. Thanks to the actors’ generosity and courage I think this is visible in every frame of the film.

The idea from the beginning was to create a kind of workers’ joint venture in which in return for sacrificing immediate gain (everyone was paid the same low weekly salary), we would have not just control over our financial destiny as co-owners but we would be able to ensure complete creative freedom in a way that demanded the least possible amount of expenditure (the former always depending on the latter). It was a collective response five years ago when we started planning the film to the oncoming crisis in the film business. We already felt in 2005 that we needed to find new models for film production if we expected there to be new models for film exhibition to counterbalance the death plunge of conventional art house distribution. Even before the current epidemic crash in cinema, the cracks in an untenable system were showing clearly.

By creating intimate working conditions in which even the stars participated on an equal footing with the other crew and production members, we felt this was one possible response among hundreds to how to make films differently. This economic model also mirrored the aesthetic aims of the film. By limiting the costs but working with actors and technicians of the highest level in a truly collective spirit, we could take our carefully honed script and let documentary reality slowly seep inside it in a way that would have been impossible within the context of a conventionally financed 5-8 week shoot.

I was also interested in making a choral film with multiple storylines where there could be deeper connections between the characters’ actions than just plot coincidence. The mania in recent years for movies with apparently diverging plotlines that become ever more “cutely” linked together as the film progresses until every last loose end is tied up neatly into a single life affirming message…left me with an appetite to pursue a fiction that could breathe the air of a documentary world.

The entire film is built on a tension between delirious unpredictability, within scenes and between scenes, and a tighter governing narrative. But by not supplying obvious interconnections, I hope it pushes the spectator to dig deeper into himself to find the resonances.  And after all why can’t we go from ridiculous comedy to slowly simmering drama in the same context in a film when it’s almost always that way in life?

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Expect bad things to happen…

Paul Marcarelli: As an actor I’ve been in hundreds of commercials over the past fifteen years, the last ten years playing the ‘Can You Hear Me Now’ Guy for Verizon.  I remember being in a beer commercial in the nineties where the crew accidentally started a fire in the house we were shooting in.  The homeowners just stood there as it turned from a scene in a commercial to a scene in a movie, with firefighters racing in to stop the flames that literally engulfed half the house.  I’ve seen so many crises go down on set from armed robberies to actors collapsing to equipment failure at golden hour to the DP’s wife going into early labor to car crashes to hurricanes… I have seen anything and everything go wrong that can possibly go wrong.   In a way I think these experiences have made me immune to panic.   Somehow the show always manages to go on.  The best producers (and I’ve worked with a lot of them) go immediately into problem-solving mode; those are the ones I like to watch and learn from.

Molly Pearson: If you go into each day knowing something bad will definitely happen at some point, you are far less likely to freak out when something does.  That doesn’t mean expect the worst out of everything because that wouldn’t be a fun way to spend your time; it’s just a shift in mindset that keeps you on your toes and hopefully keeps you thinking three steps ahead of every eventuality.  As long as someone on set is thinking this way everyone else can be free to focus on doing their best work.  The script for The Green called for lots of bad weather… wind, rain, flash floods.  The weather in Connecticut did not disappoint.  I feel like it rained at some point every single day… except for the days we needed rain.  You make it work.

The play is the thing…

MP: You have to start with a good story.  Paul and I always ask ourselves a series of questions about a script we are considering.  One: Why now?

PM: You have to know why it’s relevant the day you are reading it and whether or not it will be relevant by the time you can realistically get it to the screen.

MP: Two: Do we have a burning need to tell this story?

PM: It has to be a story you are bursting to tell… seven days a week… twenty-four hours a day… over and over again… for the next three years.  At least.  Because that’s how long it will take you to tell it.  If you’re lucky.

MP: Three:  Is it a story that won’t be told unless we do it?

PM: Sure everyone thinks what they’re doing is special and unique, but we don’t see the point in working this hard unless we’re making something you won’t see anywhere else.  And approaching the work this way is what makes it possible to get a top-notch team to work with you like we had on The Green.

MP: If people are going to work for next to nothing, they want to feel like they are part of something different from the kinds of things they normally get paid well for.  And that brings us to our next rule…

Collaborate.  But really…

MP: Ideally, your job as a producer is to assemble a great team and then get out of the way.  If you are (or think you are) the smartest person in the room then you are doomed. Doubtless you’ve heard the expression “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link… ”  And nine times out of ten the thing that attracts an amazing team is an amazing script (so refer back to rule #3).  Oh, and if your gut tells you that someone is not going to work well with the rest of the team, replace them immediately.  Your instinct is probably right and the situation will only get worse with lack of sleep and time ticking away.

PM: You will need to call in a lot of favors, but as my friend, theater director Karen Kohlhaas, always says about producing on a small scale: “A favor is a commitment.”  Sometimes the producer’s job is to remind the team of this.  We shot The Green in my hometown so lots of people we knew were excited to chip in with locations and help in all kinds of ways.  But most people don’t know what they’re signing on for until a crew of fifty shows up on the day.  And often times your friends who work in the business don’t want to say no, so they agree to help, and then don’t – or can’t – follow through because they have responsibilities of their own.  Just make sure everyone is aware that you will consider their generous favor a commitment.  The reality is people want to be part of something special, and if you’ve done your job right you will be able to attract professionals that normally get paid way better salaries, fly first class, luxuriate in their own trailers and stay in the best hotels when the day’s work is done. You might as well aim high in the hiring process.  The worst thing that will happen is someone might say no.

There’s some money you DON’T want…

MP: We shot The Green entirely on private equity investments and have operated in complete transparency with all things financial.  Any creative endeavor is a risky investment and we would never accept an investment from someone that didn’t understand the risks involved.

PM: We made our film during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.  In fact, I was working on the second draft of the script when the stock market crashed.  The conventional wisdom at the time was that film investment had dried up.  We looked at it very differently.  A lot of our investors saw the risks inherent in leaving their money in traditional investments and thought supporting a project they believed in was far less risky than keeping their money where it was.  At the end of the day if the film tanked, at least their money helped contribute something to the culture rather than disappearing into the Wall Street abyss.  The reality is if the film performs the way we all believe it will, the return could end up being on par with — or better than — any conservative investment out there.  Now that we’re raising money for Clutter, our second feature as a team, we are finding that having a success under our belt has greased the rails a bit.  Ideas are a dime a dozen.  What people want to invest in is a company’s ability to execute.

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New York based Table Ten Films, about to release its first feature The Green through a partnership with Filmbuff, was co-founded by downtown theater producer Molly Pearson of Partial Comfort, whose most recent play “Bright New Boise” won the Obie Award and was nominated for three Drama Desk Awards this year, and Paul Marcarelli, an award-winning downtown theater veteran and the actor most recognizable over the past ten years as Verizon’s ubiquitous ‘Can You Hear Me Now’ Guy. The Green, which the San Francisco Chronicle called “a thoughtful and sophisticated film about life in a post-marriage- equality world,” is a drama about a gay teacher accused of misconduct with a troubled student.  The film premiered at this year’s Outfest and has already won several tops honors at festivals worldwide, including three Best Narrative Feature awards and accolades for direction and cast members Jason Butler Harner, Julia Ormond, Cheyenne Jackson and Illeana Douglas.

Paul Marcarelli continues to travel the world as Verizon’s Testman character (although with less frequency), and Molly Pearson’s latest theater production with Partial Comfort, Chad Beckim’s After, directed by Stephen Brackett about a man exonerated after seventeen years behind bars, runs September 14^th-October 8^th at New York’s Wild Project.  Table Ten’s next film Clutter, a dark comedy about a compulsive hoarder and her complicated relationships with her grown children begins shooting in early 2012 with Diane Crespo directing.

A Unique Collaborative Genesis

If I told you an afternoon conversation in July between three actresses and a writer/director about maybe doing a web series, short film or even just workshopping scenes from previously written screenplays turned into the four of them shooting a feature in Northern Michigan two and half months later, you might ask how?

Having seen a few no-budget Mumblecore movies, in that initial conversation, I convinced the Ambers: Polly Cole, Mekenna Melvin, and Natalie Smyka we should try to make one but tweak it to have more of a distinct visual style and genre feel. The four of us began throwing around ideas: “Let’s play sisters,” said Polly. “What if we all have the same name?” added Mekenna. “My family has a lake house in Michigan we can shoot at,” said Natalie. I took a day to turn those three kernels into a few story ideas. We voted out-of-a-hat on a basic one paragraph concept and genre. Three sisters with personality disorders (not going to spoil the movie with more) in a psychological drama/thriller. Now, how to pull it off?

I figured our main challenge would be time. It was a given, if we got the movie off the ground, we wouldn’t have money, so we’d need time to maximize production value and performance. I first tackled this in the story’s structure. The film Rashomon came to mind as a way to address both. The “Rashomon Effect” of subjectivity in a person’s recollection of events would inherently allow each actress the opportunity to sink her teeth into her Amber’s disorder and shooting some of the movie’s events multiple times would limit locations, allowing us hopefully to put more value on the screen. Another way to maximize performance was to try and give the actresses real ownership of their Amber. This only seemed natural as we were building this story together. So, I had them choose their own personality disorder (without telling each other), do detailed research on it, character histories, meet me in public as their characters for job interviews, and sat them down with a real therapist as their characters. I then gave them a framework of the entire movie I’d been working on and filmed them improving the scenes based on those guideposts.

By this time, other elements of the film were starting to come together. Inspired by the improv tapes, I began to write the script. I asked a friend and film executive, Lauren Craniotes, to come on board to produce, and within weeks she had found investors interested in funding our tiny budget. With the help of Polly, a member of the Actor’s Studio, we began to fill out our cast. We were interviewing crew while I was still writing. I finished the script on Sept. 4th and remarkably we were climbing on a plane to shoot in Michigan on Sept. 20th.

Crazy.

It was never part of my career plan to make a documentary.  Not that I actually ever had a career plan, but whatever I had, making a doc wasn’t part of it.  When I took my leave of journalism–after stints at Newsweek and freelancing for many publications–it was with a commitment to the world of comedy, a commitment to laughs, both with my collaborators and from the audience, and a commitment, as it turned out, to working for sociopaths.

The decision to make “The Big Uneasy” was really instantaneous, a reaction, borne of revulsion, incomprehension, and fury, caused by watching President Obama, in a town-hall appearance in New Orleans, refer to the 2005 flood as a “natural disaster”–a usage he repeated in a fifth-anniversary-of-the-disaster talk, so it was no accidental slip.   If a man so arguably intelligent and well-informed could get something so basic–a fact unrebutted on the public record for four years–so wrong, then all that I’d been doing–interviewing the experts on my radio show, and blogging about the investigations–was clearly nowhere near enough.   What could have a chance to impinge on the national consciousness sufficient to reach the President?   Skywriting?   How about a feature-length documentary?

All the choices that flowed, surprisingly quickly, from that decision were  grounded in my desire for the film to be a counterpoint to the national media’s slant on the story, best summarized by a comment Brian Williams made to me publicly at a New Orleans luncheon:  “We just feel the emotional stories are more compelling for our audience.”  So, no horsing around.   Interview subjects would look directly at the camera, at the viewer.   They’d be photographed, where possible, in front of or next to what they were talking about.   There’d be compelling animation graphics to clarify a potentially confusing story.   There’d be no off-camera know-it-all (really?) narrator.  There’d be New Orleans music, but not cliche New Orleans music.   There’d be a breather every ten minutes or so, a rest from the dense information, to address in a more light-hearted way some of the pernicious canards about the city that had proliferated since the flood.   And the film would be completed in time for a one-night-only sneak national showing to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the disaster, in what turned out to be a wrong-headed attempt to attract the national media’s attention to the story they had missed, and that they continue to miss, almost as if  by design.  Now, at least, the film and the information in it can be widely seen, regardless of whether or not a major media ‘bureau’ decides the story’s worth reporting, in-between ads for cat food and anti-depressants.

Making a documentary is hard work, but this experience was profoundly fulfilling: working with a great, primarily NO-based crew, getting to know three extremely courageous individuals whose stories were at the core of the film, meeting audiences across the country who were infuriated and galvanized by the film’s story.   I’ve been known to swear I’d never do it again, but, as they used to say on TV, stay tuned.

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Writers love to give advice, especially to each other.  One bit you hear often is: write about what scares you the most.  Write about the stuff your first instinct is to run from, which is why I made a documentary film and then wrote a memoir about what scares me most: Alzheimer’s Disease.

It scares me because my mom was in her late fifties—not so far from where I am now—when she began to wonder if something was wrong with her brain.  At the time, we told her not to worry, that surely it was just normal aging—as if we, her six kids, all of us then in our twenties and early 30s, knew anything about aging.

Mom was right.  It wasn’t “normal aging” – whatever that is.  Something was terribly wrong with her brain.  But it took ten more years—years in which she felt forced to quit teaching, years in which we shook our heads in exasperation as she locked herself out of her house, lost her car, forgot what we’d just told her or what she just told us—ten years before a doctor finally said to her: “Arlene, we think you have Alzheimer’s disease.”

Devastating news.  And yet, when it was delivered to her in 1997, there were steps she and we could take.  Medication that might slow the progress of the illness.  Planning in which she could still participate.  Acceptance, though not always easily, of help.  And—this is important—she was still early enough in her illness to understand that she had Alzheimer’s disease.  To say it out loud.  To forgive herself for falling short of her own high intellectual standards.

Today, September 21^st, is World Alzheimer’s Day, an awareness event organized by Alzheimer’s International.  This year’s theme is the importance of early detection and intervention.  With any other illness, it’s a theme that, pardon the pun, is a bit of a no-brainer.  You catch cancer early, you have a better chance of beating it.  But with Alzheimer’s disease, early detection is a tough one.  Why, people ask me, would anyone want to know, when there’s still so little one can do?

Because there are in fact so many very important things you can do.  We don’t know how much the medication our mom took may have slowed her Alzheimer’s, but it might have, which is the point.  We do know that involving her in planning made all the difference later on, when it was very, very important to her care to have legal, financial and medical decision-making issues resolved in advance.  And we know that her awareness of her illness helped her to gradually let go of what she couldn’t do and focus on what she could do: welcome each new grandchild.  Revel in the beauty of Mt. Rainier or a perfectly round rock or a bowl of ice cream.  I’m not saying any of it was easy, for her or for us.  But my World Alzheimer’s Day pitch is this: if you or someone you love is worried about Alzheimer’s, don’t put off getting help.  Your local Alzheimer’s Association is a great place to start.

Alzheimer’s International estimates that of the world’s 36 million people with dementia, 28 million are undiagnosed.  Which means they’re living in denial, depression, shame, danger to themselves and others.  Could we imagine tolerating such a low diagnosis rate with any other illness?

We titled our documentary film Quick Brown Fox: an Alzheimer’s Story after poking around an old telecommunications museum one day, looking for images that would illustrate Alzheimer’s: tangles of wires, big old switches with labels like “memory” and “data.”  An old teletype machine caught our attention.  We watched as it spit out the classic test line—The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog—over and over again.  Then the keys jammed, the words overlapping and finally melting into a swamp of ink.  It was the perfect visual metaphor for Alzheimer’s Disease: an illness we can not afford to ignore, no matter how much it scares us.

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On the angle of the film

Making an indie film of any nature is a pretty daunting task; especially when you’re talking feature…especially when you’re talking “genre.” In this case, either out of sheer stupidity or misplaced machismo, we picked the toughest genre around. Science Fiction. Today’s sci-fi crowd is used to pretty big films. The three ‘R’s’ – as I call ‘em – are actively present. Robots, Rockets, and Rayguns. Well, we have one of those R’s technically. I mean you will see rockets in Earthling. However, instead of trying to compete with the Transforming Robot movies of the local multiplex, we decided to use the genre to do something not often attempted. Tell a personal story. One, in this case, about an infertile school teacher going through a mid-thirties life-crisis.

Now, I’m neither infertile nor a school teacher, but I feel this one woman’s story is reflective of many issues everyone can relate to. Well, at least the type of people I relate to myself. Ideas of alienation (literal and figurative in this case), isolation and self discovery. These are at the heart of the film. A weird little indie film we shot over sixteen days in the Texas summer heat back in 2009.

On Sci-Fi then and now

Hollywood may be lost the brash edge of the 70’s, but it’s alive and well on the low budget circuit. Why not attempt to take back science fiction from the Michael Bay’s of the world? I mean sci-fi began as the cinema of ideas, right? Look at some of the classics. The Day The Earth Stood Still. When Worlds Collide. The Incredible Shrinking Man. These were considered B-movies in their day. They were the flipside to larger budget, serious dramas made as vehicles for famous actors. And where they lacked in budget, they more than compensated for in the breadth and scope of their ideas. Ironically, as the tides shifted due to the success of films like Star Wars, the former B-movie became the A-movies, and with the shift, they lost their imagination. So, here I am, an indie filmmaker trying to reinvent the wheel a bit. My thought is to take the ideas and the bravado of the contemporary festival films I’ve been exposed to, and to try to apply their aesthetics to a genre relatively abandoned by the underground since the mid 60’s.

On the production of Earthling

We shot Earthling in sixteen days. It has lots of special effects and it has several really stellar performances. Actually, across the board, the level of acting is far beyond even most studio sci-fi. I’m not bragging here about my ability to direct; just my eye for talent. You hire the right people, then get the hell out of their way and let them work.

We did do a huge amount of pre-planning. When you have little to no money, the thing you do is plan everything out as much in advance as possible. When the meter isn’t ticking. Cause, believe me, once you’re on set, every second has a price tag attached to it. I had an amazing director of photography, a great assistant director and a phenomenal art department. Everyone put in hours in pre-production well beyond what they were getting paid. Because we knew at the time allotted for the shoot, there would be little opportunity to figure things out on location. I recommend this practice to anyone making a film, sci-fi or not. Plan, plan, plan ahead when it doesn’t cost you money because sooner or later, the money wheel rolls into motion. And it has momentum to spare.

For all you techies, Earthling was shot on HD. We used Panasonic cameras that, through use of a third party adapter, allowed us to attach a series of beautiful still photography Nikon lenses. I think this decision led to much of the film’s amazing look. It certainly made the film look a lot more expensive than it truly was. We tried to capture as many of the special effects, makeup and otherwise, as “practicals”—meaning in the actual camera, and not through the use of computer graphics. I’m a child of the 80’s, so I have a generational aversion to CGI. At the end of the day, we added some amazing CG shots that saved the film. I think we pretty much used every trick in the book. Monsters on fishing wires, balloons filled with air to simulate alien growths growing on people’s foreheads. The B-movie catalog is in full effect here.

Which leads me back to the schizophrenic life of Earthling.When you mix B-movie elements in a big ‘ol pot with those of art films and dramatic indies, you run the risk of making a potentially grody stew. There’s a fine line in invention between success and explosive fiery death. The audience Earthling has found over its life on the film festival and art house theater circuit has been truly validating. It shows that people do truly enjoy old school sci-fi. The cinema of ideas.Films that attack big ideas on the small scale. If Earthling is anything, it’s epic in its mind scape, because at its core, it’s about people. And coping with change. It’s a bit of a classic tragedy, really. It’s low-fi sci-fi on the mental hi-fi.

On influential films in the same genre

I think the most overt would be Nick Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. At certain points along the way, some crew members began to call Earthling “The Woman Who Fell to Earth.” That’s because crew members are a clever folk but, yes, that film is sci-fi about people. People with personal problems not usually expressed in science fiction and in that, it’s a (much more adept and amazing) kindred spirit. I’m also a huge Cassavetes fan. I made my crew watch Killing of a Chinese Bookie before we shot our film. I liked that in Bookies, he took a well-worn genre trope (in this case a typical mob film set up about money owed to the mafia) and applied it to the indie world of personal filmmaking. It became more of a film about one man’s journey and not specifically his journey as it relates to the general plot. Though we’re playing with a different genre here, I was looking to capture something of the same essence. I realize I’m no Cassavetes but a girl’s gotta start somewhere.

We here at FilmBuff are very excited about the film PressPausePlay and we’re even more excited to present to you this edition of the FilmBuff Guest blog written by none other than the directors themselves, Victor Köhler and David Dworsky!  This blog features discussions about “tipping points,” “stamped-sized videos” and the magical “it!”  Enjoy!

TIPPING POINTS

While directing PressPausePlay over the last one and a half years, we heard a lot of stories about the time when people realized that everything “had changed.” That one precise moment when they, from a personal point of view, understood that nothing would ever be the same because of digital tools. Probably inspired by Malcom Gladwell’s writings, we named these stories “Tipping Points” in all our internal documents. When counting the tipping points, the undisputed winner was the first time people used Napster, followed by the introduction of cheap consumer cameras, sound and video editing tools and how people “stopped caring about CDs.” If you think back you will probably also find your own personal “Tipping Point” sometime in the early, or late, nineties.

I come from a rather small city in the south of Sweden; the kind of city where you as a kid feel that nothing cool or new really seems to happen. Then on one particular day, Apple computer resellers came down from Stockholm to demo the latest software and hardware releases. I was probably about 12 or 13 years old at the time and my dad, who’s been an Apple lover way before iPads, iPods or even Forrest Gump, was kind enough to let me come along.

It was 10 nerdy older men and me, sitting in a small room being fed the new “cool” features from software like ClarisWorks and FileMaker Pro. I wasn’t too excited but they said that they had saved the best for last, and presented an early version of QuickTime. They had recorded some shots of a child on a ski slope and then encoded it in various compressions—all the way from full screen to stamp size. They told us that with this new technology we could even send a film we’ve recorded through an e-mail, which I think is still a preset in certain software.

The e-mail compression could only be a few hundred KB large since the Internet was so slow back then. We could hardly see what was happening in the small player window but it was still something totally revolutionary to me. First of all, just being able to play video on the computer was pretty new. Then to be able to compress and distribute stuff you’ve done yourself was just something totally mind blowing. The day after we bought a DV-camera and a QuickTime license and several years of really bad home video production was suddenly set in motion.

Victor Köhler – Becoming a professional

Most of the things mentioned above as “tipping points” happened about 10 years ago. At this time I was a 14-year-old boy living in a small town in Sweden, spending most of my time skateboarding, or at least hanging around skate parks, like 14-year-old boys have been doing since the mid 70′s. The difference for my friends and me was that our parents had video cameras and it did not take long before we spent most of our time filming rather than skating, mostly because this was ridiculously easy compared to landing a kick flip, and far less painful than skinning your palms.

When not out skating, we edited our material on copies of Final Cut Pro that someone’s dad ripped from a local film school, made score music on software which took about four weeks of download time and watched QuickTime’s of other people doing the same films we were doing, just a little bit better.

The thing is that I never experienced any of this as revolutionary, culturally significant or even that interesting. Of course, in retrospect its very clear that we were playing with a whole new arsenal of toys than even our older brothers, and that kids like ourselves where learning skills you usually only got from years of education, if even then. But I never gave this a minute’s thought and settled with the knowledge that I was having fun doing it.

Then suddenly “it” happened. That thing that made me recognize there was something going on, that the collection of self-made films on my hard drive was perhaps not the only product of what I had been doing for the last couple of years. That thing that made me think” perhaps something was about to change”. Suddenly, someone was willing to pay me to do what I always had been doing. This meant that I was now considered a ”professional”, and that all the other people who had been making skateboard films in their childhood rooms where also considered professionals, and that all the younger kids just picking up their parents video cameras could also grow up to be professionals.

This had to change the playing field for creative professionals. It meant that anyone could be a filmmaker, or a musician, or a designer. It meant I would have to compete with a whole bunch of other people. My plans on going to a serious film school and doing it ”for real” suddenly seemed like a waste of time. Surely there had to be a better career move than spending more years in a classroom?

And yes, as it turns out, the people who paid me for my first project are the very same people who are still paying me to make commercials and direct feature documentaries. Hopefully they will continue to do so.

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Check out PressPausePlay directed by Victor Köhler and David Dworsky on iTunes!

Daniel Davila - Director, Harrison Montgomery

It is only the 4th day of production on Harrison Montgomery, and my nerves are wearing thin.  We’ve been on location in the Tenderloin neighborhood (“The TL”) of SanFrancisco since we started, and while the passing whispers of OC , Vicodin and chiba from the locals still have the opiate intrigue of privilege-slumming-it, there is a pressing reality that has me distracted – our lack of an actor to play the title character.

We always thought Harrison was the man to build the movie around – the man that an actor of a certain age and repute would jump at.  But the fact was we’d built the movie, and started the machine without its core.  Ill advised, perhaps, but the entire enterprise of independent film is folly, and I was an ardent fool.

It wasn’t for lack of trying.  Our number-one choice, the legendary Martin Landau, had considered us, even agreed to be attached, but schedule and resources did not allow us to seal the deal.

Martin Laundau

We made lists, long lists, tried to imagine who else could fit the bill.  But we always came back to Martin.

His generations-spanning career that included roles in the films of some of the legends of our art form including Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, and Tim Burton was a fun, cocktail-party bit of information.

The opportunity to tell friends and family that out of the gate I would be directing an Oscar-winning actor had its appeal.

But that had nothing to do with why Martin Landau was the only Harrison Montgomery I or my partners, Karim, Catherine and April could envision.   Martin with his thin figure, weighted now by years, his long face, and scratchy voice was tailor made for a character whose concern was the fate of the world.  Martin Landau was Harrison Montgomery.

And yet, he was not.  The part would fall to someone else.  Someone down the list.  Someone my producing partners were breaking rules to get to set in 48 hours.

The Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco's Tenderloin Neighborhood

As the sun set over San Francisco, the crew scurried in frenzied picture-wrap activities, and the fog poured  in through the nooks and crannies of the city’s Victorians, I found a spot on the curb with a view of the copula of the Golden Gate Theater and settled into a soul-rattling panic.  We had no Harrison, and 4 days in, we needed an actor by the next day.

Sweat broke on my brow, as the indigent man behind me, whom I assumed to be a fairly stable, drug-induced catatonia, stirred and grumbled.

Perhaps filmmaking had driven him to this state.

Quietly folding in on myself, a shadow crossed my face and I looked up – looming over me, like summoned super heroes were Karim, and Catherine.  They were both flushed, but serene, like they’d just finished running their first Marathon.

Two producers at once – oh man, must be bad.  We’d had to fire a key crew member that morning, who was it now?  Catherine, my sister, smiled at me – “It’s Martin, Harrison is Martin.”

I didn’t ask how.  I didn’t ask why.  I just sighed.  We were making a low-budget indie.  We’d climbed one mountain and while I was happy to take off my pack for the night, I knew there were many peaks left to summit in order to render the magic of our ambitious film.  At least now we had our lead magician.

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The Internet has made everything perfect: coupons, exhibitionism and independent film.  Nobody under 65 goes to arthouse theaters anymore.  Like vinyl record collectors and people who get their porn from bookstores, arthouse film-goers have become anachronistic kooks to avoid.

You’ve heard about films and filmmakers “growing” from the internet to features.  Lena Dunham rode this wave masterfully from internet shorts to Tiny Furniture to her HBO deal.  Derrick Comedy’s Mystery Team took the Donald Glover-led comedy troupe from shorts to the feature world and used a “demand campaign” to let online fans bring screenings to their town.

The bulk of what’s crossed over so far has been comedy, but comedy is just a harbinger of what’s to come.  Savage County, my “first feature”, was never supposed to be a feature at all – it was a webseries, and some comic books, and some apps, and a poster made out of human blood.  It was supposed to be short and clippy and “viral” – whatever that means.

It’s cool that the baby steps of Savage County snowballed into a full run.  Much like Derrick Comedy, we used a “demand campaign” and showed some clips to horror fans to let them determine the webseries’ fate.  150,000 votes later my little webseries was a movie – on TV, in iTunes, Amazon, Xbox, and now an actual DVD (win!)  But, if you’re worried that this kind of attention would give an emerging filmmaker a big head, fear not, the DVD box doesn’t even list me as the director  (fail!) Coming from the internet still doesn’t have quite the prestige of coming from the festival world.

But that’s going to change…  The Alamo Drafthouse in Texas, Cinefamily in LA…  More than theaters, these are living/breathing tumblr pages, ushering in a wave of digitally released features with all the snark and irony of an animated gif, films like Trollhunter, Hobo with a Shotgun, and Rubber.

If the first phase of this crossover Internet filmmaking was comedy and the second was genre, the next will be the birth of a new kind of filmmaking entirely created by kids who’ve never been to an arthouse theater.  Let the New York Times and the mumblecore set defend slow, good-for-you movies.  The internet people will make films that are so smart, fun, dumb, boundary pushing, incredible looking, etc., that you have to see them, talk about them and share them.  Just like indie filmmakers used to do.

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Check out David’s film Savage County and understand how an awesome viral campaign can make an even awesome-r movie!!

Joe Winston, producer/director of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, provides us with his insight into the daily life of indie film-making. He offers a personalized and eloquent look into documentary production and his experience during the election season in Kansas. We are excited to announce that What’s the Matter with Kansas? is now available on Hulu. It is a proud addition to the FilmBuff family – one that we are certain you will enjoy.

THE VELVET BULLDOG

by What’s the Matter with Kansas? director Joe Winston

The narrative of the movie “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”  is loosely structured around the 2006 elections, when evangelicals split from the Republican Party, leading to electoral losses in Kansas and around the nation.

We knew we needed to capture the drama of the final days of the campaign and the election night watch parties.  Since we didn’t have the luxury of multiple film crews, we stayed embedded with our characters, who were all staunch conservatives, and followed them to as many events as we could get to.

Laura and I produced the film together, and we’re also married.  This is fairly common among documentary-making teams, I’ve noticed, maybe because the films take so long to complete that collaborators either marry or stop speaking by the end of the project.

Anyway, on location our practice was generally to unleash Laura as the Velvet Bulldog, the really nice lady who wouldn’t quite take “no” for an answer, to corrall people and sweet-talk them into being filmed.  Then it was my job as credited Director to follow them around as invisibly as possible and pry their secrets from them.

The week before election day we arrived in Wichita, a bustling hub of social conservatism where many of our characters live.  Laura got Angel, one of the film’s stars, to introduce her to her friends who were doing the most volunteering for campaigns.

Angel introduced Laura to Dawn, who suddenly became Laura’s best friend, and phoned every hour with updates.  “We’re going to be on a bridge over Kellogg, sign-waving at four o’clock” followed by “at six we’ll be holding a prayer vigil in front of Tiller’s abortion clinic.”  It was like Dawn was producing the film for us!

To get a bit of the other side of the story, we followed Terry, a Democratic candidate who was (it turned out) about to score a narrow upset victory over the incumbent Republican state representative.  Helpless in Laura’s velvet jaws, he said “sure!” when we asked to follow him as he walked the district.  Terry had been planning to just leave campaign literature on people’s door knobs, but Laura talked him into actually knocking on doors to speak with voters.

This shoot day produced the very opening of the film, the now-classic scene where a balding resident of a modest trailer home rejects him with a diatribe culminating in, “The Democratic Party is just too pro-abortion, pro-gun-control, pro-homosexual, and I’m a Kansan.  We’re conservative.”

We later learned that Terry won his election by six votes!  Did we influence the outcome by persuading him to knock on a few more doors?

Back with Dawn and her gang (all five of her home-schooled children generally accompanied her to campaign events) the Republicans gather in the ballroom of a downtown Wichita hotel to watch the election results come in.  Jaws drop and long faces ensue as one Republican after another loses.

The most interesting thing about the reactions of the conservative faithful in 2006 was that they said EXACTLY the same kinds of things liberals moaned about two years earlier, when President Bush won re-election:  the other side “had way more money” and “they rallied their base and we couldn’t.”

As the party was winding down, we had loaded out and were packing up the car when Laura turned to the cinematographer and asked, “did we get enough sad faces?  I saw people crying in there, did we get that?”  Plenty tired, we all agreed to send her and the cinematographer back to the watch party to get a few more shots – two of which ended up in the finished film.

Songwriter’s best friend: A portrait of the smallest and quietest member of the Magnetic Fields

We have done a lot of press for this film, but there is one movie star who hasn’t had a chance to speak. His name is Irving Berlin. He is a chihuahua and he was a wee six-month-old pup back in 1999 when the Magnetic Fields’ epic triple album 69 Love Songs was released and when we started filming. In those days songwriter Stephin Merritt would carry Irving everywhere with him in a red felt tote bag. Merritt kept him in the bag during a meal in Boston once, feeding Irving barbecued ribs one by one, while Irv never let out a single peep that would alert restaurant staff and have us all removed. I spent some time backstage with Irving at the Middle East in Boston — not a very charming room. If I let Irving alone back there, he would bark loud enough to disrupt the whole show (why we didn’t leave him back at Chris Ewen’s Cambridge apartment with other chihuahuas I will never know; oh yes, it was because Stephin wanted to bring him to the show). Luckily Claudia’s sister JJ came to my relief so I didn’t have to spend the entire evening *not* watching the show.

Back in New York, Irving accompanied Stephin most everywhere. He could be seen at Dick’s Bar (where, as Stephin points out in Strange Powers, half of 69 Love Songs was written) barking at most everyone who came in (especially gents in hats and those with beards) and listening to the new wave jukebox or watching Xanadu (or porn) with the rest of the gay men. He could be seen at chickfactor parties at Fez — I remember watching Irving lick the plate that had been the serving dish for the “Sorbet Sampler” (a typical Merritt dish) and praying that the health department would not close down the venue. Irving came with Stephin, in the bag, to a Tibetan restaurant in the East Village once but was discovered and asked to leave well before mealtime commenced. And he spent many hours at St. Dymphna’s, the Irish bar where Merritt used to meet with Daniel Handler to brainstorm over pots of green tea and full Irish breakfast (mostly consumed by, yes, you guessed it, the wee Irving).

Irving is one of those chihuahuas who probably needed to get out and race around like a madman, to get those ya-yas out, more than he ever was able to do as the domestic playmate of Mr. Merritt, who probably does the minimal walking required (though these days he does have a small yard in Los Angeles, where Irving gets to spend much time barking at hostesses in fancy restaurants, chewing on his chicken and riding around in the Mini Cooper). How Stephin has managed to do so much recording in his apartments and houses without having Irving disrupt the proceedings is a mystery. One has to wonder if Irving can hear at all, after all the gay bar crowd noise and sound-check shenanigans he has been exposed to. But one thing is sure: He appears in the film to be friendly, as the filmmakers spent so many hours gaining his trust and getting to know him. But it is probably best not to approach him too closely if you see him on the street.

- Gail O’Hara

As the 83rd Academy Awards approaches this month, I’ve only got one thing on my mind – Natalie Portman.

Why shouldn’t I? Everywhere I turn she is there. I look at a billboard – Natalie Portman. I see a commercial – Natalie Portman.  I look in the mirror, Natalie Portman.

Seriously when I was looking in the mirror, I truly saw Natalie Portman which is why I made a 16 second video of Black Swan to prove it.

Sometimes when I see kids now, it reminds me that Natalie Portman is pregnant. I can’t even look at the Valentine’s roses that are beginning to flood stores without thinking  - NATALIE PORTMAN (i.e. her Golden Globe dress).

Either Black Swan has some serious marketing techniques, or she really deserves to win “Best Actress” because I can’t get her out of my head.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of the American sweetheart.  She absolutely deserves to be nominated.  If she wins, I hope she is ready to top this: