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!