Movie Saturday Memories, Volume 7

SAFETY IN NUMBERS

This was a new script I had written on a whim the night before Rachel selected her three preferred scripts for Movie Saturday 2.08. My inspiration came from Philip K. Dick, who claimed that he never actually wrote science fiction, but rather that all of his work was fantasy in which something non-literal was made literal. In this case I chose the idea of security vs. spontaneity in mate selection, coupled with the desire that people sometimes have to change one another. Then I literalized it, with the creation of a robot duplicate.

I don’t remember what the other choices were, but obviously, since I’m writing about it now, this was the selection. I then prepared myself for some brutal rewriting, since a) I had forced Trevor to spend a lot of time working on Peephole the last time I directed and b) Rachel was in charge of this one. If you’ve read any of the previous Movie Saturday Memories, you’ll know why that filled me with dread. So when I asked her what sort of changes she wanted and she replied with “no, I like it as it is,” I was pretty surprised. And a tad disappointed, admittedly.

Rachel’s intention, production design-wise, was to give it a sort of retro-future look. None of our usual locations really fit the bill, so we shot for the first time in Denver proper, at an old duplex rented out by several of our friends. This looked pretty good on camera, and I think having a new and appropriate location added a lot to the movie. However, we did wind up riling the natives a bit, as they were upset by the condition we left the place in. My understanding is that everything the other housemates were upset about was unrelated to anything we did, though – except the French Press. We did break the French Press. Yowch.

This was also the Movie Saturday debut of Beth Reed (now Beth Bean), who I had unsuccessfully tried to get into a Movie Saturday for two years. She was an old high school friend, who had appeared in my early German movies that kind of started this whole thing off. She brought along her boyfriend, who was also making his MS debut as 1/3 of the robot research team. The rest of the cast was filled out by regulars Trevor and Bruce, as well as Ben, who I suppose deserves some sort of mention for appearing in the first and last Movie Saturdays, and no others. (EDIT: I forgot that Ben was also in The Fortunate Ones. So he was in the first and the middlest and the last, I guess.)

This was one of the few movies that required props and costumes, since not every character could be best categorized as “this one guy” or “this one girl”. The scanning equipment was thrift store junk, plus part of a Transformer. The shirts were also thrift store material (explaining the awkward fit) with homemade patches sewn on. It was a bit frightening to watch Rachel sew the patch on to Ben’s shirt while he was wearing it, but everyone escaped intact.

You may have also noticed a bit more camera movement than we usually have. This was the debut of the Movie Saturday dolly, aka some cart we got at Home Depot. Inspired by our makeshift dolly from The Economy, we purchased something that we could rig up more permanently. This was meant to take us to the next level of production, which it kind of did. Unfortunately, that next level started with a Kill Screen. But that’s a story for another time (and that time will occur just a few paragraphs down).

Unfortunately, I have no stories about post-production. Rachel and Mavi staged a mini-gynocratic takeover, so I and the rest of the guys (save for Luke) went and had a long lunch at Casa Bonita instead. Mmm. Casa Bonita. We got kind of sick.

I’m kind of glad I did miss post, however, because it was exceedingly rare for me to see a final movie without watching it come together, bit by bit. Sometimes it can be kind of nice just to watch, especially when the final movie is as good as this. To me, it really did feel like a step up, on a technical level, from what we had been doing previously. This, coupled with the fact that we were beginning to bristle more and more under the single day time constraints, led me to make a fateful decision. I floated it by the rest of the major players, and they all agreed.

Movie Saturday would be no more.

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MOVIE SATURDAY: THE DOCUMENTARY

Our intention in killing Movie Saturday was not to stop making movies. We just decided that we had grown as much as we could in the single-day format, and that maybe we could start making slightly longer productions, or spending more time on productions of the same length. It was exciting to think about. I couldn’t wait to get moving on it. We did decide to make one more Movie Saturday first, a big finale that would pay tribute to our past, force us to work in a new, unfamiliar format, and provide us with two movies in one.

The plan was to remake Because it was Dead. It would be rewritten and Hollywood-ed up. More intense drama drama, a fight scene, etc. Maybe we'd even throw in a fart joke. Part of our team would be involved in that. But it wouldn’t be the real Movie Saturday. The real production would be a documentary/mockumentary about the filming of the new Because it was Dead (which was possibly going to be retitled as Dead Reason, by the way). We’d film the filming, interview everyone involved, it was going to be great.

“But Brian,” you’re probably thinking now, “I never saw a Movie Saturday 2.09. What happened to the documentary? And why were you speaking so subjunctively in that last paragraph?”

Well, here’s what happened. We were, for the most part, correct in thinking that we had outgrown Movie Saturday. But there was one thing we overlooked. The most important thing. Movie Saturday provided us with momentum. As long as we had Movie Saturday, we made movies. Once we killed it, we were no longer able to marshal our forces and muster up the manpower to get a movie made. So that’s what happened to the documentary. It never got made. It lives in a magical, imaginary world where it pals around with unicorns and Captain Kirk.

So ended Movie Saturday. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a bang followed in short order by protracted whimpering.

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Next Time:

A wrap-up/overview of the whole shebang, and where we go from here.