Movie Saturday Memories, Volume 4

THE FORTUNATE ONES



After our lengthy, unplanned hiatus (which I remember as being almost a year, but which research reveals to be about 4 months), things were different for Movie Saturday. In the interim, we moved out of the 14th street Superhouse, which was the setting for . . . with a View, part of Weekend Warriors, Aware, Sustain, and the Cold Grey Light. We made ourselves a sweet new logo, utilizing the stuffed monkey that was viewed so distantly at the end of Because it was Dead. We made some other, unimportant changes.

Okay, okay, the other changes were the most important of all. We basically came to realize that the Movie Saturday format was kind of limited, and decided to expand it so that we could continue to grow as amateur artists. Specifically, we introduced an element of pre-production. One of the most important parts of a director’s job is pre-production – assigning the right people to do the right thing, finding locations, gathering props, etc. Alfred Hitchcock used to plan things out so extensively that even if he never showed up on set, the movie would still turn out exactly as he planned it. In other words, in Season 1 of Movie Saturday, the director wasn’t fully directing.

For Season 2, then, we started picking the director ahead of time, preferably at the screening of the previous project. They would pick the time of the next project and, two weeks before shooting, pick a handful of scripts they were interested in. We would think vote on a script over the subsequent week, and the director would then have one last week to prepare. This was very exciting for me, as it meant I wouldn’t ever get shoehorned into directing a script I didn’t care for, like The Fallen Ninja or What You Want!! Also, and even more importantly, it would allow for rewrites. You see, most of our scripts were hastily written first drafts. In Season 1, we never had time to do any rewriting after the script was chosen, and no one wanted to put the effort into multiple drafts on a script that may or may not be used. Now, not only would we have time for rewrites, but the director would have a chance to affect said rewrites, putting their personal stamp even more fully on the final result. I cannot tell you how stoked I was for this. With these new procedures in place, the quality of Movie Saturday was poised to go through the roof.

Relatively speaking, I think it ultimately did improve dramatically. You’d never tell from watching The Fortunate Ones, however.

Trevor James Pincock Blackford was the chosen director for our inaugural effort. We wound up selecting one of Rachel’s newer scripts, Fortune Cookies, to shoot. It was, like all the others, a quick first draft. I asked Trevor if I could take a crack at a revision, since Rachel doesn’t like rewriting. He agreed, I took a crack, and I was pretty pleased with the result.

Rachel was not.

Boy, and I thought The Fallen Ninja was an uncomfortable situation. She hated every single change I made to her script, bar none. We wound up spending about three hours hashing through the whole thing the night before shooting, with Trevor refereeing and making the final decisions. In retrospect, I probably should have just backed off and let them go with the first draft. Of course, if I had a time machine and could go back and change things in retrospect, I’d be more concerned with the outcome of that diamond heist I was involved in than with avoiding this confrontation.

Oddly enough, since then, Rachel and I have discovered that we work pretty well as a writing team, so long as one of us isn’t revising the other’s pre-existing script. Go figure. At any rate, we wound up using an even mix of my changes, Rachel’s original ideas, and new compromises. I don’t really remember what parts of the final version were mine, except for the new title. I wasn’t really happy with the outcome, and I don’t think Rachel or Trevor were either. Oh, well.

This brings us to shooting and – oh, wait, is that – yes, I think it is – yep, it’s me, on camera again. Fortunately for all of you, this was the last time. Boy, check out my big hammy death scene. It’s probably the second take, too, which is too bad because I spewed up a pretty good blood fountain on the first take. We were using a few spoonfuls of our standard Karo syrup blood mixture combined with a quarter tablet of Alka-Seltzer to make the mouth-spew. I wasn’t paying attention and took a whole tablet of Alka-Seltzer. By the time action was called, my cheeks were about to burst, and I could barely stumble through a few seconds of pre-amble. In addition, I was trying to figure out a way to release in a controlled fashion, so as not to ruin the carpet. At this, I was partly successful.

I think the reason we didn’t use the first take is that the increased proportion of Alka-Seltzer to blood made the final concoction come out light pink.

That’s really all I can remember about this one, except that did make a box cover for the Turbid Serbian video game, which is completely invisible in the final movie.

The next one is better, I promise.
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THE LAMP



This was the week we coined the term “Gynocracy” which, as it turns out, we didn’t actually coin. It’s a real word. But it applies. We were shooting a script that Adrien (a woman) had written. It was directed by Mavi (another woman). It was edited by Rachel (holy shit! There’s three of them!). The story was about a dominant woman becoming super-dominant (that’s. . .still three of them, but now there’s a theme, man).

Technically, Shawn helped edit as well, but he was more of an assistant editor, trying to learn how to work the software so he could edit in the future. So by the time post-production rolled around, us guys were pretty much cut out of the loop – which was okay, because it gave us more time to drink beer, play video games, and barbecue steaks in the back of our monster truck in the parking lot of the strip club.

There are a lot of things I really like about this movie. It’s the first time we ever tried to light thing a whole movie, instead of relying on ambient light. Jeff (not Weekend Warriors Jeff) and I collaborated on this process, and, while the results were kind of mixed, I like a lot of it, and I enjoyed doing something a little different. The ending is probably our creepiest, and everything comes together to make it very effective. The only real complaint I had was the final showdown, which I thought came across much too broadly. That opinion has softened over the years, and while I still wish it was a little more grounded, I do enjoy what we have.

Turns out them wimmen-folk might maybe kinda know what they’re doin’ after all.
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SHADOW



After The Lamp, we lost our momentum again and it was over a month before we made another movie. We decided to do a quick one-off in order to get things rolling again, and the best way to accomplish that was to do another one-take movie, like Sustain. Unlike Sustain, this project was ambitious enough to include an actual story (gosh!). The plot developed pretty organically (“we want a moving background” became “let’s follow someone walking down the street” became “someone is following her” became “no, he’s not really, it’s all paranoia”), and the final inversion was added late in the process because it made the whole thing more psychologically interesting.

We mapped out the route and actions on the white board, then did two run-throughs, and probably five or six takes, sometimes using different cameramen in order to try and get the smoothest image possible. In order to accomplish this, the cameraman had to walk backward and be able to completely ignore the issue of what’s behind him, so we had to have a guide. It was incredibly difficult, and I’m amazed we even pulled it off – but as I may have mentioned before, that’s the sort of thing Luke is good at. I tried running the camera for one take, and didn’t even make it past the first corner.

The dogs you hear barking in the alleyway were a natural part of the ambience. In fact, during the second to last take, some guy came outside to ask us just what the hell we were doing to get his dogs all riled up every ten minutes.

I should also mention that this was the first appearance of Bruce Swihart in a Movie Saturday. He is an old high school friend and had been in both of my longer movie projects from before Movie Saturday. He was with us for the rest of the season and, given the uptick in quality, maybe he was a good luck charm. Or maybe it was a coincidence. Yeah, probably that one.

This is another movie I wound up directing by default. We initially planned that there would be no one director, that it was just a quick group project. About halfway through, we realized that, in the absence of an official director, I was doing all of the directing anyway. So I officially took the job. This makes four times that I had directed, without ever once getting to develop the project. I was starting to wonder if I would ever get the chance to really, fully direct one of these things. Still, at least this was a movie I was proud to have my name on. In fact, it’s still one of my favorites.
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Next week:
I don’t direct Try Again and Ticking!

It's About Damn Time

Yes, I know this isn't really the first snow of the year. It is, however, the first snow that's worthy of the name.

Is it a Guilty Pleasure if I Don't Feel Guilty?

A few weeks ago, I did a bad, bad thing.

Thanks primarily to the involvement of this man-

-I started watching a reality TV show. The man in question is the genius writer of The Specials and Slither (and ex-husband of Pam Beesley from the Office), Mr. James Gunn. The show in question is Scream Queens, on VH1.

I’ll wait while you finish chuckling to yourself.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Waited.

Okay. This isn’t some sort of confession. I’m not trying to get this off my chest. I’m actually asking, why in pluperfect hell aren’t any of you watching it? This isn’t just reality, man. It’s what reality ought to be like: ten aspiring actresses competing week after week for a role in a major Hollywood blockbuster.

Oh. Said blockbuster is Saw VI. Well, I hear the runner up gets a candy bar. Which is just about as good.

Prize lameness aside, the competition itself is fascinating. Every episode has three acting segments – a semi-improv/ad hoc scene, a workshop, and the director’s challenge, where they actually shoot a scene. These scenes include being attacked by a snake in a bathtub, kicking the ass of a psychopathic killer, seducing a man in order to drink his blood, encountering a swarm of man-eating cockroaches, and the highlight, a trailer for the imaginary movie Reform School Zombie Squad. As much as I love these scenarios, the really interesting thing is watching the girls progress through the program, changing and growing each week. It’s like acting boot camp - they aren’t just competing for a role, they’re training for it, and you can actually see the results. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there’s honest to god depth to the proceedings.

Of course, they’re also all locked in a house together and like to hang out in the hot tub, engage in petty dramatic conflicts, and record bitchy remarks in the confessional booth. But we don’t have to mention these things in polite company.

Even if you don’t appreciate all of the acting craft method rigamarole, Scream Queens still has plenty to offer, mostly in the form of gutbusting hilarity. Sometimes it’s a great bit of a scripted scene, like in Reform School Zombie Squad:

Warden: I’ve been reviewing your record, Channon, and I don’t like what I’m seeing.

Channon (dropping her robe): Review this record, Warden. And by record, I mean Vagina.

Sometimes it’s the magic of a complete idiotic train wreck, such as Michelle’s response to the judges’ complaints that she wasn’t emotionally present in her scene:

For me, it’s kind of hard, because I didn’t have a lot of emotional stuff happen. . . I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging or anything, but I’ve had a really, really great life growing up.

They also like to deliver scripts to the girls in the most hilariously “scary” way possible. The first week, the scripts were in the middle of a bunch of live snakes on a breakfast tray. The second week, a midget dressed as a doll leapt out of a pile of real dolls to deliver the message. One week the scripts were around the neck of a zombie that was vomiting blood all over the swimming pool.

Ultimately, though, the best part of the show isn’t even part of the show itself. This brings us back around full circle to James “PG Porn” Gunn, one of the three judges. Anyone who’s seen his work knows that he is a funny, funny man. Turns out he’s also a funny, funny man with a blog (I know, I know, what are the odds). Every week he posts a lengthy description of his experience on the show, discussing the reasons why the judges judged the way they judged (Judge. Judgejudge), the funny things that didn’t make the final cut, the stupid decisions made by VH1 producers, and the fact that fellow judge and acting coach John Homa apparently cries like a girl. One could argue that, taken on its own, the show does not actually have the depth that I ascribe to it – but when you put the show and the blog together, you get something that’s actually kind of special (no, not that kind of special).

So watch the show, read the blog, and be prepared to have you life changed. Not that Scream Queens will change your life; it’s just good to be prepared in general. But don’t take my word for it – take James Gunn’s word (Re: The midget/doll encounter)

The girls were honestly freaked out on the midget. No feigning here. Tanedra took of her shoe and swatted at her! That's correct: TANEDRA TRIED TO HIT A MIDGET WITH HER SHOE BECAUSE IT WAS DRESSED LIKE A DOLL. Why are people watching fucking SURVIVOR?

PS: My pick to win is Angela. That’s right, I’m predicting the winner of a reality TV show. Someone shoot me.

Movie Saturday Memories, Volume 3

THE COLD GREY LIGHT

This was one of my scripts. I’d like to share with you the mental process that produced it, step by step.

1. I got a fog machine for Christmas.

2. I want to use it in a movie

3. We have no scripts that would work for it, so I’ll have to write a new one.

4. The fog should be a semi-metaphorical dimensional vortex of dubious reality that reflects the loneliness and isolation of the protagonist and translates it into a tangible form.

I promise I didn’t leave out any steps.

The Cold Grey Light was Luke’s first directing opportunity, which is kind of strange considering how heavily involved he was with all of the previous productions. I would have expected him to step up sooner. On the other hand, maybe he was just too smart to take on The Fallen Ninja and What You Want!!

There are three major things that I remember from this shoot. The first was the fog itself. Everyone hated it, in particular, the actors who had to walk into the bathroom and stay there for minutes at a time. I never understood what their problem was – for me, the smell of artificial fog is a happy, nostalgic one because it reminds me of haunted houses. Everyone else seemed to think of that smell as nasty chemicals coating their lungs. Weirdos.

The second thing I remember is that Luke decided to try a little bit of method work with his actors, and Neil wound up enjoying a nice big jug of Carlo Rossi wine throughout the shoot, in order to give him that blank stupor that was necessary for the character. This worked well during the shoot, amazingly, but not so well during post production when Neil and several others who helped him with the Carlo Rossi loudly decided that they wanted to watch Rushmore. This wouldn’t have been a problem, but Luke still needed to record music, and it didn’t fit his artistic vision to have Jason Schwartzman’s voice playing over our soundtrack. This led to a stand-off that was eventually resolved in favor of finishing the movie, but much belligerence was expressed before that time.

The third thing, which might have been related to the second, was that this was Jeff’s final Movie Saturday. He was dragged back in to help with the music and narration for the next project, but this was the week when he decided he was done. I never really understood why it happened, and he’s never fully explained it to me, but I hope you’ve enjoyed his contributions so far, because you ain’t getting’ no mo’. Except for that bit in the next movie. But no more after that.

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MODERN COWBOYS

Like . . . with a View, Modern Cowboys was intended as a warm-up project for something bigger. In this case, it was a Kung-Fu version of Hamlet that Jarred and Neil had written. Unlike Weekend Warriors, Hamlet never actually materialized. This is perhaps for the best.

In addition to being the last Movie Saturday in the first year of production, and was also the only one not shot on my Canon GL-1. Instead, Jarred’s technically superior XL-1 (which was also our second camera in What You Want!!) was used, although I think any benefit gained from the better model of camera was negated by that horribly dirty, scratched lens. When I see it I hurt inside, the way a mother might hurt if she saw a dirty, crying, abandoned baby on the street right outside of a gentleman’s club.

This is also the second (of three) on-screen appearance of yours truly, although it’s a pretty brief bit that didn’t require me to do much more than play video games and twitch spastically. Fun side note – after Trevor kills me and goes on a mini-rampage, he knocks a plastic cup off of the table. You can only sort of see this in the movie, but the cup actually ricocheted off the wall and landed back on the table, right-side-up, in its original position. You can’t plan something like that, but you can point the camera in the wrong direction when it happens.

I found myself in a strange position during this production, doing something I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever would have expected to do – argue for the removal of profanity. It was something that had been bothering me ever since I saw the script, and I couldn’t really figure out why, since not only am I not normally bothered by it, I frequently don’t even notice it. Post-production was almost over before I realized what the issue was – Modern Cowboys is a television program, and television programs get bleeped. A few button presses later and everyone was happy.

I also want to mention the terrific opening credits, which blow my meager What You Want!! effort out of the water. The fact that two out of nine productions were television parodies for which the fake credit sequences were the highlights was a bit disturbing, though.

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That’s it for Movie Saturday: Year One. Looking back at it, I don’t think it was nearly as successful as it felt at the time, but I have mostly fond memories of the experience despite all the fights, which I seem to remember in more detail than anything else. I do think it’s a shame that things shuddered to a halt after Modern Cowboys, since the best part of Movie Saturday was the momentum that kept us producing on a regular basis. On the other hand, if it weren’t for the extended break and the considerable effort it took to get things going again, we might never have had the newly revamped Movie Saturday: Year Two, in which the promise of Movie Saturday finally started coming into focus. Join me next week for The Fortunate Ones, The Lamp, and Shadow – same Movie Saturday time, same Movie Saturday channel.

From left to right: Neil, Me, Trevor, Ben, Rachel, Jeff, and Luke in the front, happily basking in the afterglow of "Because it was Dead."

What I've Done

Today I sorted through all of my MiniDV videotapes. And by "all," I mean, "the ones that were in my videotape box." There are still a few here and there, lying around - in fact, I can see three more unlabeled tapes right now that are sitting just down and to the left of the photo - but what you're looking at here is the bulk of it. The stacks are, from left to right:

1 and 2 - The Red King and related material (2001)

3 - Fritz and Franz: Fight the Future (1998, German)

4 - Two Legs at Noon, AKA The Unwritten Rule (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006)

5 - Movie Saturday (2003-2005)

6 - Professional work (look how small it is)

7 - A Month and Change (2006)

8 and 9 - Hell if I know. Lots of different miscellaneous stuff. I'm sure Intuition is in there, along with some more Movie Saturday stuff. There's some personal material as well, like my trip to England and a couple years worth of Art Days.

Each of these tapes holds one hour, so that's just under 100 hours of raw footage. This was then condensed down to, by my estimation, just under ten hours of final product. Now that I've typed out the dates above, I see that this actually represents almost ten years exactly. I wish there was more than this; but even still, looking at these stacks of videotapes gives me all sorts of warm fuzzy feelings. There's something very validating about being able to tangibly see your accomplishments, for good or ill. Hrm.

Here's to the next ten years.

Coming Soon: 5 Movies to Watch this Winter

In terms of movie releases, any given year can typically be divided into three parts. The first runs from January to April, and consists primarily of movies that only get released because, hey, if you sink that much cash into something, you may as well show someone. There is also occasionally a really great independent release (Memento, Brick), but you can’t count on one of those every year. Fortunately, most of the great movies from the end of the previous year don’t make it into theaters until this time, so there’s still something to see. This year, the early period was particularly bleak for me, with only two 2008 releases that managed to interest me enough to get out to the theater (Be Kind Rewind and Leatherheads).

The Summer period, which stretches from May to August, was particularly good this year, with four very strong movies (The Dark Knight, Hellboy II, Iron Man, and Wall-E) and three solid mid-grade releases (The Incredible Hulk, Tropic Thunder, Get Smart). Unfortunately, summer movies tend to be graded on a bit of a curve. The Dark Knight is legitimately a very good movie, but if it’s the best of the year (which is so far the case), then I will be a very sad panda.

Things do, however, typically look dire at this point in the year. That’s because the studios like to hold the movies that they expect to actually be good until the end of the year, in hopes that they will be able to take home a tiny golden eunuch of their very own. So in the spirit of hope, I’d like to present five movies being released (barely, in some cases) this winter, which are all certain to be fantastic. Take it from me. Who can better evaluate the quality of a movie than a guy who hasn’t seen it? Titles link to trailers.

5. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

David Fincher has been up (The Game) and down (Panic Room) over the years, but I think he’s earned a whole career’s worth of good will, so anything he does is worth at least looking into. Plus, it’s based on a work of classic literature, so all of you students out there can see it instead of reading the story.

4. Synecdoche, New York

Besides the arresting title, the most interesting thing about this movie is writer/director Charlie Kaufman, the man responsible for Being John Malkovich and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, among others. This entry is technically cheating, since SNY has already been released – but I haven’t seen it yet, and I’ll bet you haven’t either.

3. Timecrimes

This has been described as a pulpier, better-thought out Spanish version of Primer. I can’t say any more, since I’m trying to go into this one as clean as possible. In fact, the trailer already told me more than I wanted to know. Which isn’t hard, since I wanted to know nothing. So why did I watch the trailer? For the sake of you, my readers. After all, if I didn’t watch it myself, how could I be sure it wasn’t secretly a link to “Two Girls, One Cup?”

2. The Wrestler

Darren Aronofsky is three for three so far, having directed Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and The Fountain. This movie looks completely different from all of those, which could be cause for both elation and fear. I’m going with the former for now. Sure, the trailer looks kind of sappy, but look who’s in it: Mickey “Angel Heart” Rourke, who was both handsomer and cooler than you in the eighties, went insane for a while, and is now both uglier and cooler than you. His co-star is Marisa Tomei, who doesn’t get nearly enough credit for being the glue that holds a movie together (watch Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s breakdown in the car in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and try to imagine it without her reaction shots. Not a pretty sight). The fact that she happens to be the hottest 43-year-old woman on the planet is icing on the cupcake. The fact that she’s playing a stripper is the little edible BB on the icing on the cupcake.

1. The Brothers Bloom

This is, bar none, the absolute must see movie of 2008. Rian Johnson’s first movie, Brick was the best theatrical release of the past six years, and by all accounts, this is even better. I can’t even think of anything else to say about it, on account of my brain being shorted out by the awesome vibes traveling back in time from the future (fun fact: awesome vibes are made out of tachyons). Just watch the trailer.

There you have it. Five awesome movies from the future. Is there anything I missed?

Setting up Shop

Somehow or another, I've managed to use Photoshop with some regularity, both at work and in my home life, for several years now without ever actually having to composite two images together in any serious way. This era of illogic is now over, thanks to my brand-new title header thing! It was put together pretty quickly and sloppily, and I think I gave poor Ingrid Bergman some sort of deformed monkey snout, but I like it. It also serves as a pretty big hint if anyone doesn't understand my title.

One of these days, I'll probably make a nicer version. On the other hand, I have been told that the wheels of Brian turn very slowly. . .

Movie Saturday Memories, Volume 2

The weekly upload limit on Vimeo resets every Saturday night at midnight, so here is the second batch of Movie Saturday productions, even though it hasn't been an entire week. This time we're going to talk about Aware, The Fallen Ninja, What You Want!!, and Sustain.

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AWARE




One of the things I was most concerned about early in the life of Movie Saturday was the idea of “pet projects,” which basically meant movies that were written and directed by one person. I was concerned that the whole thing would devolve into “Brian’s Movies” and “Jeff’s Movies” and “Rachel’s Movies” and so on. I was much more interested in having a more collaborative setting, which I thought would also increase participation overall.

Nonetheless, here we are with our second pet project in a row. This happened because a number of participants, including myself and Jeff, had plans to play in a tournament that shall not be named that afternoon (here’s a hint, though – it started with Mech and ended with Warrior. Crap, did I just give it away?). Given our diminished level of involvement, it seemed like the best possible time to let Rachel make her arty Asian culture pet project.

The human actor in this piece was one Mavourneen Graves, a friend from high school who was brought in by Rachel specifically to play this role, and had no other involvement in year one of Movie Saturday. She would eventually return a few times in year two, where she would stage a temporary gynocratic takeover (more on that in a few weeks).

The other actor is Kuro, a shelter cat adopted by my roommates at the time, Luke and Rose. Kuro was a fun, playful cat whose farts smelled like fermenting beer hops. Everyone loved her and I secretly suspect that Rachel wrote this whole script just for the sake of putting Kuro in a movie. Actually, I guess now I openly suspect it. Anyway, while I loved Kuro in real life, on set she was a total diva, refusing to hit her marks and even breaking continuity by forcing her way into scenes she shouldn’t have been in, just to get a few more seconds of on-screen face-time.

Ultimately, I’m not a huge fan of this movie, mostly owing to a script that never appealed to me. As Rachel would be the first to tell you, I’ve never really clicked with her writing. On the other hand, I do think this is one of the more visually accomplished Movie Saturday productions, and demonstrates why Rachel (or, perhaps more saliently, Rachel’s pre-production notebook) eventually emerged as one of the strongest, if not the very strongest, director that we had.
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THE FALLEN NINJA

This was probably the most unpleasant Movie Saturday experience for me, filled with arguments, disagreements, shouting, hair pulling, eye gouging, trepanation, biological warfare, mutually assured destruction (MAD), death-ray lasers, and tears. Actually, when I describe it that way, it sounds like a lot of fun.

I wound up directing this one by default. We all showed up to make a movie and no one felt like directing. Since no director=no movie (and since I do enjoy the process), I volunteered. The next step was choosing a script, none of which I really liked. We wound up settling on The Fallen Ninja, a Rachel script which was not all that bad, but was almost absurdly short. It was written as a joke/tribute for our friend Trevor, for some reason or another that I don’t recall. Don’t worry, though, despite the dedication at the end, he’s still alive and kicking.

The first thing we shot was the mountainside fight scene flashbacks. Jeff and Luke choreographed a rather nice fight scene, which was, like the “Because it was Dead” music, just a bit too difficult to pull off in one take. This was not a problem for me, because I only intended to use short flashes of the fight anyway. So after spending way more time than we should have on that mountain doing take after take after take, I declared the scene over.

This led to argument one, because Luke and Jeff wanted one good whole take of the entire fight scene. I can certainly understand this, since they spent so much time and effort on it. But at the same time, we still had a movie to shoot, and I had given them several chances to pull it off. Argument one quickly transmogrified into the similar but distinct argument two, when Luke and Jeff realized that I never intended to show the fight in its entirety in the movie. Cue argument 1 again, rinse, and repeat.

Eventually we got everyone off the mountain and started into shooting the meat of the movie. The main action of the script took place on a street and in an alley, but someone suggested a bridge on the Colorado School of Mines campus. It meant re-working the action of the scene, but was completely worth it. The location was a lot more visually dynamic than any given street corner would be, and having Jeff jump off a bridge was way cooler than having him run around a corner.

This did not sit well with Rachel, who was unhappy with having her script rewritten. In an attempt to make peace, I left the dialogue sequence largely in her hands while I shot the action material. All told, this part went pretty smoothly, and I was pretty pleased with most of the footage. Unfortunately, there wasn’t that much of it. Turns out a page of action script does not equal a minute of screentime.

Once we finished, Rachel started editing while Luke and I discussed music. Luke wanted to use an oboe, which I approved. What I didn’t know is that Luke had never played the oboe before, and was really just interested in trying it out. This didn’t work out as well as planned and eventually, after hours of false starts, he wound up recording himself playing various notes and mapping those notes onto his keyboard so he could play it that way. I think this may be part of the reason that music always took so long. Luke composed the scores for the vast majority of our productions, and he tended to be pretty ambitious with his plans. Invariably things would go awry, but fortunately for us, Luke is also great at finding ways to make things work against all odds. Eventually.

While Luke played with his oboe, I was working on gathering the last few bits of material we needed, including the opening voiceover. When it came time to record this, I realized I didn’t really like the monologue at all, and wrote a replacement. I decided to show it to Rachel for approval before shooting it. I figured it wouldn’t be a problem, since she had mentioned being somewhat unhappy with the script back when we first selected it.

I figured wrong.

She was already angry about having her action rewritten, and felt that if the monologue was also rewritten, nothing of her script would remain. She started talking about just wanting to take her name off of the movie and leave, which I took to also potentially mean abandoning Movie Saturday entirely. This would be a pretty big blow, as she was one of the big four most actively involved people (the others were Luke, Jeff, and me). Thus began the long, hard road to compromise. We ultimately made a few changes to address my biggest concerns, while leaving the vast majority of her text unchanged. I don’t think anyone came away happy, though since A) I still had a number of smaller problems with the monologue and B) It wasn’t the original monologue that she had written.

This was probably the most unpleasant part of the production, as this single argument dragged on for over an hour and we still both walked away angry, just as Jeff and Luke were still pissed at me for shutting down their fight scene and I was still mad at them for trying to make it more important than the movie as a whole.

Oddly enough, I kind of like the result, although it’s awfully short. The process took its toll, though, and I was less than thrilled at the prospect of making another movie. I took some comfort in the fact that next time someone else would get to direct, and they would therefore get to be the bad guy for a day.

Oops.
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WHAT YOU WANT!!

Once again we gathered and once again no one wanted to direct, so I wound up with the job. I had already picked the best of a bad lot of scripts the week before, so the pickings were even slimmer this time. Actually, there was one script I wanted to shoot, but I had written it, making it off-limits.

Please note that I am not in any way claiming that my script was better than the rest. It was, in fact, quite terrible (in addition to being nearly as long as “Weekend Warriors”). At the time, however, I was blinded by my love for the sound of my own keyboard.

Still suffering from a lack of enthusiasm thanks to the “Fallen Ninja” debacle, I picked a script based on how easy it would be to shoot and edit. The lucky winner was “Untitled,” a Shawn M. Hubbard script which was designed to be a parody of sitcoms, laugh track and all. I figured it would be an easy process because sitcoms are typically shot live with three cameras, which would eliminate the need for a lot of different camera set-ups. Sure, it would be murder on the actors, who would have to run the whole scene without stopping. But since when have I cared about the comfort of actors?

Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a suitably stage-y location to shoot this. I was hoping to do a really bright, vibrant, unrealistic lighting and décor scheme, but this quickly proved unfeasible. We only had three small work lights, and an entire room that needed lighting. Instead, we wound up going verite, shooting in a living room that had a large front window which gave us access to the largest floodlight available. I am speaking, of course, of the sun. Bounced off of clouds. Because it was a cloudy day. Which was better than direct sunlight anyway.

Our other departure from sitcom norms was our pioneering use of the two-camera system, which we developed because we only had two cameras. This system was not unworkable, but it put a lot more pressure on the camera operators to pull it off – which they didn’t, really. This isn’t so much their fault as it is mine, since I was rushing things along and trying to get it over with. Had I explained what I wanted more fully, and had we done a few more run-throughs, I suspect it would have been much better. As it was, we did one dry run and two recorded takes, and that was that.

A funny thing happened during those takes, though. I started having fun. By the time we were done shooting I was completely back on board with the spirit of the whole thing, and I found myself very excited by the idea of creating an opening credits sequence for the sitcom. My favorite part of that process was designing a hideous background graphic, which I named “Whack.” It was inspired by one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. No points for guessing, because it’s just so obvious.

This was also the point where I came up with a title for the piece. “What you want” was a phrase thrown around the now-defunct Warren Ellis forum, generally used when someone would complain about how terrible a given comic book series was. The argument was that if you really hate cliché storytelling, cheesecake art, shitty dialogue, etc, you would just stop buying it. Since you continue to buy it, it must be what you want. This seemed like a very appropriate title for our horrible little faux-sitcom.

My other favorite part of this production was recording the laugh track. We all gathered in Luke’s bedroom with a microphone pointed in our faces and, well, laughed on command. We did short laughs, long laughs, belly laughs, chuckles, whoooos, groans, awwwws, and maybe even sang The Star-Spangled Banner*.

Looking back, this was sort of the inverse of “The Fallen Ninja.” That was a horrible experience that yielded a decent final product. This was a very fun project that yielded a. . . less than optimal final product. There’s probably a moral or lesson in that, I guess.

*There is an 89% chance that I am making this up.
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SUSTAIN

This was the quickest production in Movie Saturday history, running approximately 2 ½ hours from the time we put pen to paper to the time we watched the movie. Despite this truncated schedule, it is still slightly longer than “The Fallen Ninja” if you don’t count the credits.

The project came together at the absolute last minute. We had a Movie Saturday planned, but then, overnight, came the snows. When meeting time rolled around, none of us who lived at the meeting place wanted to get out of bed and we figured that anyone who had to actually leave the house would be even less likely to show up. We quickly declared that there would be no Movie Saturday this week.

That’s when Shawn burst through the door, swaddled in snowgear and huffing and puffing as if he had just returned from Everest. We tried to explain that we were cold and tired and it hurt, but he made it clear that if there was no Movie Saturday after he had gone to all the trouble of getting out of bed and driving over, it would hurt all the more. So Movie Saturday was back on.

At this point, I want to mention that Rachel called me shortly before Shawn arrived and asked me if we were still going to make a movie. I told her no, and that is the only reason she wasn’t involved in this project. It wasn’t a lack of interest or motivation, it was my bad information. I think it’s important to clear this up. And when I say “I think it’s important to,” I mean “I expect to be killed in my sleep if I don’t.”

Anyway, we were still very lethargic and didn’t want to go through with the usual day-long production. Given that post-production was the lengthiest part of the process, we realized that we had to make something that had only one shot (no editing) and had no music. The question was, how to make it remotely interesting? The answer was clearly to do horrible, torturous things to Jeff on camera. Once that was decided, all we had to do was come up with a brief monologue he could recite while we threw water on him in the snow.

For the record, the water was nice and warm. Someone lobbied to use cold water so that the steam wouldn’t show. That someone might have been me. I’m really not sure. All I can say for certain is that I came down on one side of the issue or the other. Which is not saying much at all.

As it turns out, collaborative scriptwriting works a lot smoother when you don’t have annoying things like “character” or “plot” to argue about. The script was finished in about fifteen minutes, and before we knew it we had another movie under our belts.
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Next week:
We finish off Year One with The Cold Grey Light and Modern Cowboys.

Movie Saturday Memories, Volume 1

BECAUSE IT WAS DEAD




“Because it was Dead” was the first of the Movie Saturday productions, and is one of only three (if memory serves) that were literally, totally, completely, 100%, produced on a single Saturday. After the brutally painful experience of writing this as a committee, we immediately decided to start writing scripts ahead of time to create a bank of ideas that we could select from on the day itself. Eventually we started to stretch that pre-production aspect even farther, although we pretty much stuck to shooting and editing in a single day. While both of these changes were for the better, I can’t help but love this project, a pure Movie Saturday from the days before we knew better.

I was selected to direct this one for two reasons.

1. I had actually directed something before, something no one else could claim.
2. It was my damn camera.

The script, as you may have guessed, started with the idea of a man in a suit walking out of the river and interrupting a dramatic scene. After a few false starts, we settled on a final conversation between two former lovers, as they sorted through the last bits of their relationship. After excruciatingly arguing our way through the script line by line, we eventually managed to hammer out something reasonably funny, and maybe even a little bit touching. At that point, it was time for casting, and I discovered that one of my casting decisions had already been made, as Rachel was the only female in the production.

I did not like this one bit. I wanted to pick and choose actors for every part. I was the director, damn it! Then inspiration struck. Why must every relationship include a woman? Thus, Devon and Marcus, the world’s saddest couple, were born.

Shooting itself went smoothly, although there was a lot more background noise than we were anticipating, which led to much more careful location scouting in future productions. Editing also went smoothly, and it was looking like we’d have a nice, early 8pm premiere.

This was not to be.

Music has been the most difficult part of every single Movie Saturday we made (except for “Sustain”, I suppose). What we expect to take three hours inevitably takes five, six, seven, twelve. . . most of the time, it’s worth the wait – but it never felt that way during the wait. There are always different reasons for the extended time frame. In this case, Jeff wrote a guitar piece that was too hard for him to play, so Luke and his magical computer had to splice together a lot of different takes. I think at one point they even played some of it at half speed, then doubled it electronically.

Fortunately, this was one of the less difficult music sessions, and we actually managed to finish the whole thing by around midnight. As we gathered around the TV, basking in our magnificence, a legend was born.
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WITH A VIEW




Once it was decided that we should write scripts ahead of time, we took off and never looked back. Between the four of us, Jeff, Shawn, Rachel and I churned out close to a dozen scripts in the first week. Jeff and I in particular kept attempting to top each other, and he managed to pull it off with his magnum opus “Weekend Warriors”, which was, if nothing else, bigger than any of the other scripts.

He also wanted to direct it. This was a little frightening, since it would be a ridiculously ambitious production, and Jeff had never directed anything before. We came close to taking the plunge anyway, but finally we decided that Jeff would direct one of the other, shorter, scripts this week as a warm-up for “Weekend Warriors”. The script we chose was one of mine, “. . . with a View.”

I don’t really remember why we chose it, or even what I was thinking about when I wrote it, other than the fact that one of my inspirations was Phoebe Cates’ Christmas story from Gremlins. So instead of a discussion of plot and theme, here are some random things I remember from shooting.

--Shawn got sunburned on one side of his face while shooting this.
--Rachel had to keep re-arranging the cookies on her plate to make it look full because we kept eating them.
--We lost some good takes because, as it turns out, if you wrap a microphone cord around a metal pole and stick it in the air, it acts like an antenna. Go figure.
--There was a lot of opposition to the ending, with the smile. As the man who wrote the smile, I greatly appreciate Jeff sticking with it.
--Jeff and Luke had a really exciting idea to cut the movie to the beat of the music. I hated this idea and fought tooth and nail against it. Ultimately, however, it was Jeff’s movie and Jeff’s call. Over time, my feelings have mellowed, and I am now lukewarm to it.
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WEEKEND WARRIORS




You may regard this as cheating, but this is not the original “Weekend Warriors” which, somehow, we actually managed to finish on a Saturday. This is the director’s cut that Jeff and I put together just before we submitted the first eight movies to the Golden Great Film Festival. The Movie Saturday Collection won the best student film prize, which I like to bring up randomly in conversations, despite the fact that there was only one other student film in competition – and that one won best student documentary.

The changes in the director’s cut are basically the removal of the first third of the final sequence and the replacement of some slow, droning bass notes with some more upbeat music. There may have been a very slight change to the opening as well, but I can’t recall for sure.

This was shot basically as four movies (the president’s opening, Cliff and Jake on the porch, Jared’s slapstick-a-thon, and the three friends sitting around talking about taco houses). I was only actually involved in the shooting of the latter two, since Jeff decided to get an early start with Cliff and Jake, and the President’s stuff was shot while I was editing the rest of the movie. Even with those scheduling concessions, it was still a struggle to get this one done. We may even have had to wait until Sunday afternoon to export and view it. Perhaps someone with a better memory than mine can confirm or deny that.

This was my first acting appearance in Movie Saturday and it turned out. . . well, you can see how it turned out. You may notice that I don’t show up in front of the camera in very many of these; if you were wondering why, here’s exhibit A. Exhibit B would be my difficulty trusting anyone else to run the equipment, which stems from an imaginary incident that occurred when I was two years old. I think my favorite part of making this movie, though, was playing Rose’s old trombone for part of the score and discovering that seven years of middle- and high-school band was not all for naught.

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Coming next week:
Aware
The Fallen Ninja
What You Want!
and
Sustain (probably)

In the Beginning

Welcome, welcome, and etc.

This is my. . . miscellaneous online place to put words and pictures, also known as my MOPtPWaP (I don't want to say the B word). Don't worry if you find that acronym to be awkward and impossible to remember; I don't intend to ever use it again.

I've been contemplating of starting one of these for a while, and I finally stumbled across a good reason when I started uploading old Movie Saturday videos to Vimeo. They have an upload limit for free accounts that only allows me to upload 3 to 4 videos a week. In order to keep myself interested in the process over the month and a half that it will take, I decided to start writing down my memories of each one as I upload it. Then I figured, hell, if I'm going to write it down, I may as well put it somewhere that people can read it.

So one thing led to another and here we are. I have no real plan for what I'm going to do with this blo- er, miscellaneous online thing, but I can pretty much guarantee that everyone who stumbles upon this will find something interesting (eventually, anyway), and no one will find everything interesting.

That's the preamble done with - stay tuned for the first installment of Movie Saturday Memories (name subject to change), coming your way this very night.