So... I'm going to make a movie.

Cafe Society
1

I started ‘making movies’ right after high school. I only made one film that was all my own, though; in a college class. The Walk was a pretentious little piece that I shot on super-8. I was very disappointed with it, but the class thought it was great. (‘Did you see how he portrayed the violence in a beautiful field of flowers?’ Heh. It happened to be Spring, and the poppies were blooming. Noted for future reference.) Everything else I’ve worked on (you can see my résumé on my webpage if you’re that interested) have been no-budget super-8, video and 16mm films made by other people.

I wrote a script in 1996, and updated it in 1997. I updated it again a couple of years ago. It’s a short called Somebody, about an Artist who finds a corpse. I figured it would take four weekends to shoot, and cost about $2,000. It would be shot in Glorious Black and White on 16mm. But I didn’t have the money to spend on a film. When I did have the money, I didn’t have the crew I needed. And, to be honest, I was just freakin’ lazy and didn’t get around to it.

I hooked up with the owner (Jerry) of a video company in Bellingham last year. We hit it off immediately. He’s very enthusiastic about shooting my short. (His business is shooting wedding videos and depositions and the like, and he wants to do something creative.) He’s going to produce my film! :slight_smile: That’s right. He’s going to put money into something I wrote. Incredible. Not only that, but he has connections so that I can have a little crew. He also has a very nice editing suite. Everyone likes the script.

I’m working on a video for one of his cohorts (Paul). Not getting paid for it, of course; but I’m making connections. Paul knows someone who wants to play the part of The Woman (who is the corpse). I was worried about that role because the actress has to appear nude in one scene. (‘We enter the world naked, and we leave the world naked.’ It’s at this point in the film where The Artist makes his last, futile, attempt to immortalise The Woman as Art.) On this shoot I’ve also met a make-up artist. I gave her the script, and she loved it! She has a bit of experience, and she can make the actress into a convincing corpse. This is going to be a pain in the arse because The Woman will need postmortem lividity, deteriorating (but not horror-movie ghastly) skin, etc. and it will take a long time. The make-up artist will work for free. :slight_smile:

I thought processing might be a problem. I’ve only ever used Yale Labs in North Hollywood for processing my 16mm film. They will not process film that contains nudity because of ‘moral and religious reasons’. Fortunately, Fotokem will. It’s also a little difficult getting 16mm B&W processed nowadays. Abel Cine in Seattle, I’m told, won’t do it. I guess I’ll go with Fotokem. We’re going to shoot 16mm Eastman 7231 Plus-X negative film and have it copied onto Beta SP. The video will me loaded onto a Macintosh computer for editing on Final Cut Pro and downloaded onto DVD. I haven’t decided if I’m going to cut the negative. If money allows, I’d like to send the edited film to a lab and have them conform and print the negative using the timecodes of the video edit.

I’ve decided to shoot the nude scene first. I just want to get it out of the way. For one thing, I don’t want to shoot a bunch of film and then have the actress change her mind. For another thing, this will be the most make-up intensive scene. As I said, it’s going to be a pain in the arse. Better to get the difficult part out of the way fast. Then there’s the psychological aspect of shooting a nude. (I’ve shot nude actresses before, by the way.) I don’t want the cast and crew to get nervous wating for The Day. Obviously, that day will be a closed set. I’ll need me there to operate the camera, the make-up woman, The Artist, The Woman, and a sound guy. Jerry can record the sound, and he’s also experienced in special effects so that he can do those.

Before I shoot Somebody we have to finish the current short. We spent much longer on it than the Paul figured. We didn’t shoot the exteriors last night, so we’re going to get the day-exteriors today and just keep shooting into the night. I hope we get it done. After that, Jerry has a paying gig he needs to shoot.

I have some props already. There’s a rotting corpse that I picked up a few years ago that will be in the Dream Sequence. I have an enormous glass and steel syringe for the embalming scene. That needs some work so that we can jab it into The Woman’s heart. I don’t think the actress would appreciate actually being jabbed! I need to get a one-gallon vodka bottle. (The Artist is trying – without any knowledge of corpses – to embalm His Masterpiece my filling her up with vodka, and then varnishing her. :stuck_out_tongue: ) I have a tin that I can use for the varnish (which will be Karo syrup), but it needs a convincing label.

But I don’t have locations. The script was written with my L.A. apartment in mind. I need to find an apartment that I can use. I also need to find an apartment building or motel that has a swimming pool. (Not that easy in the PNW!) I need a futon; one of the triple-fold ones instead of the kind that folds lengthwise. Everything else is an exterior, so finding them will be easy.

I need to make a shooting script. That is, I need to reformat the script into the order we’re going to shoot it. I need to make shot lists. There are some parts of the film where I didn’t go into detail. For example, ‘[The Artist] moves the body into a chair and poses her. He pulls a chair up in front of her. He admires his new objet d’art. For her part, the WOMAN seems to ignore him. ARTIST adjusts the body a few times; admiring it after every new pose is struck.’ Pretty vague. I need to come up with some ways he uses her as art, and make a list of the shots I need for that. I also need to decide who we need (cast and crew) and when we need them (call sheets).

And I need to find the cast and crew. We have the two most difficult ones (The Woman and the make-up artist). I’m the director and cinematographer. Jerry will be Sound, Camera Assistant and special make-up effects. Everyone else still needs to be found. We’re set, equipment-wise. I have a nice, quiet camera and lots of lights. Jerry has audio and editing gear. We have some props, and I have my new camera dolly. I have a very nice tripod, and Jerry has a jib.

I hope we can start shooting in April. I know that Producer Jerry won’t allow me to procrastinate. I think the Embalming Scene (the first one we’ll shoot) will take an entire day. The Party Scene and the Pool Scene will take a day. The Apartment Scenes will take a day. Various exteriors will take a day. Since I think it will take four days of shooting, I’ll plan on four weekends (eight days).

I’ll keep you posted. :slight_smile:

2

Good luck, or break a leg, or whatever film-types say.

Do keep us informed, I’m sure more than one doper in envious. If I can’t shoot a film, at least I can do it vicariously(sp?)

Brian

3

Very cool.

I’m curious about the business end of this, and Jerry’s interest in funding it. Is he doing this to be part of an artistic endeavor, or is there hope of making any money with it? I’m curious about your motivation as well; is this being made for love of art, or is there any hope of making money or impressing people (say by winning an award or such) that could further you as a writer/director?

What will you do with it after it’s shot? Are there places people go to watch short b&w films? Will you post it on the Internet?

Good luck!

4

Isn’t it getting a bit stinky? :slight_smile:

But seriously, congrats on shooting your film. It sounds very artistically creepy.

ME

5

Yay! It’s nice to hear you (uh, read you) being enthusiastic about something.

Good luck! Tell us when to bring the popcorn.

6

On many different levels, that rocks. If you need any help from someone on the east coast for any reason (hey, it cold happen - we do have Wilmington nearby), let me know. Also, good luck and whatever. Happy shooting!

7

That’s great, Johnny!
Here’s hoping this is but the first of many!

On a different, but related note, what are you doing about the music in the film? If you’re interested, I’ve been composing for theatre for about a year now, and I’ve love to have a chance to write for film as well. So if you’re interested, I’m game for whatever. I can also do foley work and sound design if you need it.

But regardless, congrats - these projects require a massive degree of vision and organization, but it really is a labor of love.

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Jerry has his business, and he makes a decent living from it; but he really wants to do something creative. He wants to shoot a feature, and he wants to sell it. In the meantime, he just wants to put together a few projects for the experience. He sees Somebody as a creative project that he can gain some experience on. He’s never shot on film, so it will be a new experience for him. Inexpensive experience, to boot.

My motivation is that I got this image in my head. It’s never going to make any money. It’s just something that I ‘have to’ put on film. I’d like to enter it into a few festivals. If it wins some recognition, I can use it if I decide to pitch a bigger film. (‘And this is my film, which has won 13 awards at film festivals…’) But the main reason is that there are images that I have to put onto film.

MagicEyes: A latex rotting corpse! :wink:

When I originally wrote the script, I was watching a lot of Jim Jarmusch films. I especially liked Down By Law and Stranger Than Paradise. Jarmusch used I Put A Spell On You by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, a great and wonderful tune. In the opening scene I envisioned The Artist walking along a city street to that tune. But of course, Jarmusch already did it; so I can’t. Still, this is the vibe I got when I was coming up with the story. I’m still leaning that way, though freeform jazz is another possibility. Or something else. There’s so much good music out there, it’s not going to be easy deciding on a genre. Whatever it is, it will have to be original music so that I can avoid copyright issues if somehow more than five or six people ever see it.

Speaking of music brings me to audio. Originally I planned for the film to be ‘silent’. It would have ambient sounds, but no dialog. After much thinking, I decided that I would have dialog after all. It’s said that a great film should be understandable with the sound off. I guess this wont be a ‘great film’, because I feel the dialog is necessary to fully understand why The Artist wants to pick up a body. But hey, this is my first film that is ‘all mine’ since The Walk (which I shot with dialog; but I removed the dialog and replaced it with a soundtrack – something from Goblin’s Dawn of the Dead soundtrack).

9

Way cool, and when it is finished, let me know and I know somebody at the Berlin Film Festival where you can submit it for next year (February). I also worked at a major studio in LA so I might be able to help you there, alhtough my contacts are getting fewer by the minute.

Regading use of the corpse by the artist…might be fun to dress her as Mona Lisa, dress her as Christina climbing that hill, do the famous Marilyn Monroe pose from her layout in Playboy…all sorts of famous artistic layouts. It is something an artist might do, just for the fun of it…dead woman or not.

Start thinking about marketing. Get a cameo from a local celebrity…mayor, TV anchorperson…those things always help get a blurb on the local news and will help when you schedule your premere at a lotal cineplex, and it might be a good idea to tie that in with a charity event.

And set 10-20 percent of any profit of this film for districution to the actors and crew. The film might not make a dime, but it is nice for those who are working on it to know they might get some extra bucks down the line, and it helps keep the morale up during the filming.

Contrats and keep us updated on the status!

10

Geez…could I make any more typos?

(Somebody help…I have a new laptop and I can’t figure out how to get SDMB into larger print and I can barely see what I type!)

Forgot to mention getting a really good accountant, or keeping very good books. There are lots of costs involved that need to be verified for tax reasons, for profit reasons and lots of other reasons. Even start putting down the hours you work on this. And it would help if you have a friend who is a lawyer to look over the contracts. Not the fun part of a film, but things can get ugly fast!

Again…CONGRATS and let us know how things are going!

11

This is all really good news! I’m gonna hook Mr. Beckwall up to this post, since he is an old film school grad (now producing/editing/writing a health related show that appears on KOCE in So. Cal.). I keep telling him he’s a sell-out and needs to get his butt in gear and do something “creative” on the side. Maybe your post will be an inspiration to him. Keep us posted on the project, OK?

12

Get him a copy of Rebel Without A Crew by Robert Rodriguez. I’m under no illusion that I’ll make the next El Mariachi (besides, Somebody would be more analogous to Bedhead); and though El Mariachi was a good no-budget film, Rodriguez got incredibly lucky. But it’s very inspirational to people who have thought about making their own films.

In a nutshell: Rodriguez was a student at the University of Texas at Austin (he was born in San Antonio, but was raised in Austin). All his life he’d been creative, and made little films on super-8 and VHS where he learned to pre-visualise the story. But his grades were never very good. He knew his grades would keep him out of film school. He made the eight-minute Bedhead and showed it to the professor. The professor decided he’d do well in the class in spite of his ‘core’ grades.

Rodriguez had a friend in Mexico (who, IIRC, also attended UTA). They decided that they could shoot a Spanish-launguage action picture and sell it to Mexian television. They saw that the action pictures made in Mexico were crap, and they knew they could do better. (Seems that action pics at the time always featured a Mexican soap star, and that was all they had going for them. Carlos’s (Rodriguez’s friend) mother knew a Mexican soap star, and they hoped to get her in the film.

Rodriguez checked into a research hospital to make some money and to have a lot of time to write his script. There he met Peter Marquardt, another ‘lab rat’ who became ‘Moco’ the drug lord in the film. With a script in hand and the money he’d made from the research hospital, Rodriguez and Carlos went to Carlos’s home in Acuña where Like Water For Chocolate had recently been filmed. They couldn’t get the soap star (she said she’d call them, but never did) and found a local girl to play ‘Domino’ (Consuelo Gómez). A friend from film school asked to work as crew, but Rodriguez wanted to do it himself. (A point he makes a couple of times in the book is that the more people that are involved, the more mouths have to be fed.)

Rodriguez borrowed an Arriflex 16s camera from a friend who had borrowed it from a friend. The 16s is a rather noisy camera, and it does not have a synchronous (‘crystal synch’) motor. It had an Angenieux 12-120mm zoom lens (which I have on my own 16s) and another, wide-angle, prime lens. Since he could not shoot sound, he didn’t need a sound guy. One less crew member! He used a Marantz tape recorder and a Radio Shack microphone to record sound takes after the fact. That is, he’d do a camera take, and then have the actors do the take again for audio. When the audio and image fell out of synch in editing (as they would; since not only were a synch-motor camera and audio recorder not used, but the image and audio were from two different takes), he would cut away. His ‘camera dolly’ was a wheelchair borrowed from the hospital next door to Carlos’s house, actor wore their own clothes and vehicles, and the machine guns were borrowed from the local police. Everything on the film was borrowed! The ‘crew’ were Rodriguez and the actors. That is, when the actors weren’t acting they were pulling the ‘camera dolly’ or something behind the scenes.

The film was processed, and copied onto ¾" video. Rodriguez edited it at a cable-access studio gratis during the off-hours (i.e., over nights). He and Carlos took the ¾" master tape and a two-minute trailer, plus Bedhead, to Los Angeles/Hollywood to shop it around the Mexican video distributors. Some didn’t seem interested. Others saw the film was better than their own inventory and suggested he go to a larger company. One company offered $25,000 and they accepted. But they were only going to give him $10,000; the other $15,000 would have to come from Mexico. Rodrigues thought, ‘Why should I sign? Once they have the film, they can copy it all they want and never pay me!’ ANd he gets lucky again…

Rodriguez had a friend who had a friend who knew someone at International Creative Management. He had a name. Robert and Carlos dropped the trailer off at ICM. The Name saw it, and called them back. ICM saw a fresh, low-budget film that was really good. Money could be made.

You’ll have to read the book to fully appreciate what happened next (and what I’ve posted already, for that matter). It was a whirlwind. Phone calls, faxes, flying forth and back to L.A. from Austin, mettings, screenings, and finally a contract! Then there was the 35mm blow-up, which had to be edited. No synch, no slate. Rodrigues had planned to sell his ¾" master directly to Mexican video. Everything was in his head. Thousands and thousands of dollars (paid for by Columbia) and weeks later, they were ready to hit the festival circuit. El Mariachi showed against Like Water For Chocolate and Reservoir Dogs. All of those films did well.

I really didn’t mean to write so much. El Mariachi was a wonderful fluke. The movie itself is a good one. The fast-paced editing came about from necessity. The story of how it came to be made was intriguing. Friends of friends of friends provided valuable leads. Rodriguez was in the right place at the right time. It’s unlikely that lighting will strike twice in this way. Somebody is, for me, a ‘home movie’; albeit one with a plot and actual actors. It will probably make it into a few festivals. Maybe it will win an award or two, but that’s far from certain. I’m not going to be the next Robert Rodriguez. I’m not going to become rich and famous. But what will happen is that I’ll get some images down on film that have been trapped in my head for far too long. I’ll have a little thing I can hold in my hand that I’ve made. I want people to see it. I want people to like it. But Somebody is really being made for me.

Anyway, beckwall, what this post is all about is inspiration. If you want to inspire Mr. Beckwall, get him the book. :slight_smile:

13

Oh man, you’re so reminding me of college.

Best of luck, Johnny.

14

Good luck, Johnny.

I finished my first film last year, and we won our local film festival about three weeks after it was finished. Yesterday, I got back from my second film festival. We didn’t win, but we had a great time. If we had the DVDs ready, we could have sold a hundred of them. Our movie got the best audience reaction and biggest crowd of the whole festival. And then we got back home to find our third rejection letter in the mailbox. And so it goes.

Anyways, good luck to you. It’s a shitload of hard work, but when you get a good movie at the end, it’s totally worth it.

15

Yeah, I’m dreading the shoot even as I look forward to it.

I’ve just sent an e-mail to Anya (the make-up artist). She wanted photos so that she would know how to do the make-up. I found some, but they turned my stomach. It’s all fun in a film, but actual corpses are no fun at all. I didn’t send her the rotten.com link that shows skin texture. I didn’t even want to look at the photos! I told her that I’m looking mostly for post-mortem lividity, so I included a link to a memorial page that has links to some not-very-graphic pics that show the ‘bruising’. I told her that for the Embalming Scene that she should just show some loosening of the skin. I do not want her to see the rotten.com photos of ‘Blonde’. I don’t want to look at them again either. I want realism, but I don’t know that I want it that badly.

Anyway, the Embalming Scene is going to be the most difficult. If I don’t get the varnishing right the first time, the actress will have to wash it all off and we’ll have to do the make-up all over again. I wonder how much it would cost to make a full body cast of the actress so that we can have a foam/latex dummy? I saw one at the L.A. Film Expo that looked alive. That way we wouldn’t have a naked woman on the set, and we wouldn’t have to make a retractable needle for the syringe and could just jab it into her chest and inject the ‘vodka’. Jerry has some experience making body parts, and I think Anya has some as well. It would be much easier to use a dummy, but it would have to look real. Gads, I’m dreading that scene! It’s going to work great though, and should be pretty funny in its absurdity.

Once the Embalming Scene is out of the way, the rest should be ‘easy’ – at least by comparison. Yeah, there will be the tedious camera and lighting setups; but there won’t be any special make-up effects or cumbersome props to deal with.

16

I think Art Deco poses would be very cool. What kind of artist is The Artist? His medium is the human body, so he could be a classical, Old Masters-type artist, so classical poses would work. Just not Venus de Milo, because then you’d have to cut her arms off and that would be too weird.

ME

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The Artist’s art has not been decided. His medium isn’t ‘the human body’, though; he just happens to come aross a corpse, and he gets the idea of making the poor Woman ‘immortal’ as art. I’m thinking that he might be a sculptor. I need to contact Bellingham Tech to see if I can borrow some of the students’ artwork.

Anya thanked me for the link. She told me not to worry about her kids if I send graphic photos. I’m still not going to send anything graphic. I’ll talk to her a bit on Saturday on the video shoot. She asked me last week if I wanted a set decorator. I really don’t want more people involved than I have to have. Still, it might be good to have someone to dress the set with The Artist’s sculptures.

I watched Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood the other day. The Artist is not a sad-sack like ‘Walter Paisley’. He can actually sculpt. He’s not going to simply cover The Woman with clay, as Walter did. One pose I thought of was to have him dress The Woman as Lady Liberty. The work would be called ‘The Death of Liberty’ or ‘American Liberty’. I’ll see if I want to do that.

In other news, Jerry has a wedding to shoot on March 5th. I’ve asked if I can tag along as his ‘assistant’ so that I can see how he works. He might let me do some weddings later. (All of his weddings are two-camera shoots, BTW.) I finally asked him how much he paid for his JCL GV500 cameras. He virtually stole them! I can’t believe how lucky that guy is when it comes to getting equipment. He picked up a virtually new Chrosziel matte box (from some famous guy, but I don’t remember who) for only $600. That’s a lot of money for a bit of plastic and some aluminum, but about a third of the going price. He got his jib for a good price, bought an Arri 16BL and then sold it as a profit, and found all sorts of deals. Why can’t I fall into an Aaton XTR for a song? (My Éclair is a good camera, but it’s no Aaton or Arri SR.)

18

Just curious how this is coming along. Hopefully, still in gear and going well.

19

Hey, Johnny, best of luck to you man! Filmmaking is the greatest.

I was a lab rat in that same facility as Robert. He of course planned on doing a film about his experiences in there. I immediately got to writing my take on it while I was in and the funny thing is there were two other guys working on scripts about being test subjects.