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)