So This Is What It Feels Like To Be Cool...

 

Day three brought a new challenge.  Horses.  I had never tried to work with animals before, and I was seriously nervous about this part of the production, but it turned out to be the most fun I've ever had on a set.

Today I wasn't just the writer.  Today I was an actor.  The deal I made with Scott when we first discussed this project was that I would write it if I got to write a cool part for myself.  I knew I didn't want a big part, but I got to give myself a couple of cool lines and some fun action.

I showed up on the set early to get some time on the horse before they needed me.  Michael Flynn was more experienced than the rest of us, but none of the actors would call ourselves a horse expert.  I was about as low as you can go on the horse experience rating chart.  The last time I was on a horse I was a little kid crying in fear because the horse wanted to go too fast.

Luckily, the owner of the horses gave me a couple of pointers, and I tried to focus on learning how to move with the horse because I thought that would be the key to looking like I knew what I was doing.  The thought that scared me most was having people look at the finished film and think I looked like an obvious idiot who had never been on a horse.  Even if I was really an idiot who had never been on a horse.

It was a fantastic experience, though.  Tye, Paul, and I had some trouble getting the horses to do what we wanted, but my horse, Jade, seemed to respond a little better than the others.  Thank you, Jade, for not making me look like a complete idiot.

When we went to shoot the last horseback shots of the day things got really fun.  We set up the camera looking into the hills, and wanted a shot where the horses came from behind the camera, flew right by and ran up into the hills.  Paul was chasing Tye, and then I was supposed to come just a little ways behind them.  I guess the horses could tell we weren't all that serious, though, because take after take the most we could get out of them was a trot and we were running out of daylight.  Tye went by the camera in this bouncy, little trot and Paul went right behind them, then Tye's horse started up into the hills and Paul's horse wouldn't even follow, so Paul was shooting off in a totally different direction.  I just shook my head and thought, "Oh no.  We had no business making a western if we can't get the horses right.  We look like the biggest bunch of phony cowboys."

We were probably just being too timid with the horses.  I leaned over to Jade and patted her on the neck and said, "Come on, baby, let's run for real."  Then when I got my cue I dug in my spurs and whipped the end of the reins back and forth on her neck the way I'd seen the owner do it, and Jade took off running.  Of course, being the inexperienced rider I am and being a perpetual klutz, I leaned over too far and when I whipped the end of the reins over her neck, I swung them right up and leather-slapped myself across the face.  Nice going, Jim.  But when I passed the camera at a run and flew up into the hills, the whole crew started cheering.  After that, the other horses got the idea and we finally got a couple of good running shots with all the horses.

On my second run, Jade headed straight for the camera, though.  She was set to take it out and trash the whole thing.  I yanked the reins to the side and barely got her to shift over, so as we went by I brushed the camera matte box with my leg.  I'm just glad Kyle wasn't there to see his camera's near-death experience.  He would have had a heart attack.

When we ran out of sun we shot night scenes, and I loved the performances we got from all the actors involved.  Charlie Halford is so natural on camera, and Stephanie Christensen got all the subtleties I wanted in an anguished scene.  Then Michael Flynn and Tye Nelson filmed a blown-up argument that we see through the window, and it was incredibly powerful.  I got chills the first time I walked up to the set and heard Michael and Tye rehearsing the lines I wrote.  It was a great experience for a writer to hear them bring my words to life with power and passion.

Hide The Pipe

 

The second day of filming wasn't as exciting because we didn't have any gunfights and the crew members weren't slipping and falling on loose gravel like everyone did yesterday.

Today's scene involved a lot of dialogue because we were laying pipe. I threw the pipe under a scene where Charlie shows up beaten and bleeding and has to fill in his sister Caroline about the trouble he's in while she tends to his wounds.

We filmed at the Mary Fielding Smith cabin in the historic village at This Is The Place. It was a great set, with a historic building in fantastic condition. A wonderful find, even if we did have to deal with noise from airplanes and helicopters and tourist trains and sirens all day long.

It's always interesting to watch other people reinterpret the things I write. The scene included a lot of banter between a brother and a sister that obviously tease each other nonstop. I wrote it with humor thinking it would be fast-paced and funny with his injuries adding drama and urgency behind the dialogue, kind of the way some scenes are done on Gray's Anatomy, but the actors and director approached it from the opposite direction and made it a dramatic scene, where the humor lightened things a bit. I think it still works their way, but it's always strange to see how different it comes out in someone else's hands than it is in my head.

Start With The Ending

 

Day 1 on the set of my western script. In classic "eat dessert first" style, the first thing we shot was the showdown at the end. Tye Nelson and Paul Mize exchanged gunfire at the entrance to an old mine and the neighbors from the houses less than 100 feet away didn't even call the SWAT team, although one cranky neighbor did come out about 4pm to make sure we weren't going to be there all week. But that was just because she didn't like the 50 or so cars parked in front of her house.

Pitching to Barbara Boyle

I pitched and got pummeled. It was a good experience.

Barbara Boyle came to an event for the screenwriters project and we all got to try pitching our stories to her. She was merciless.

Barbara has an unbelievable resume. She was an english major at Berkeley and got a law degree from UCLA when women just didn't do that. She even had a professor tell her it was irresponsible of her to study law because she was taking a spot away from a man when she was just going to get married and have babies. She told him that men get married and have children, but they still keep right on being attorneys.

She has been an entertainment attorney, a VP at New World Pictures, Orion, and RKO, and President of Sovereign Pictures and Valhalla Motion Pictures. She produced a pile of films including Bottle Rocket and Phenomenon. Now she is the chair of the Film department at UCLA.

Barbara talked 100 miles per hour and dominated every conversation. She was obviously looking for every possible reason to shoot down the pitches after a couple of words. I watched her rip apart writer after writer, and I thought about not even getting up to pitch at all. I would have an excuse. I hadn't participated in anything with the screenwriters project for almost a year. This was my first time back and nobody probably expected me to have anything ready.

But I had a story to pitch, and I think it's a strong one, so I took my punches. When it was my turn I sat down and said, "Ok, what i got is..." and she said "what you GOT?" big mistake on my part. She was an english major. She's an attorney. When she says you have to speak her vernacular she doesn't just mean movie lingo or legal terminology. She also means you must express yourself intelligently. Speak as someone who is at least moderately educated. But the truth is that entire phrase was filler and I should have dropped it. Make every word count. Plan out your pitch word for word.

I smiled and apologized. "What I HAVE is a feature film, supernatural thriller. It's a modern adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde." I started to introduce my main character, "Jack Lereaux is a police detective who has a phobia of..." and she cut me off. "It's Jekyll and Hyde. He's the villain and he kills himself in the end. I know the whole story and that's either what you're looking for or not."

"So maybe I shouldn't start off by saying it's Jekyll and Hyde? Just start with the story?"

"No, it doesn't matter. I know the whole thing. You say that much, you're done."

At this point I got snippy and said, "OK. Thanks." and made like I was going to get up and leave.

She said something more about him killing himself in the end and asked me if that's what happens. I told her about my ending, but then I went on because I had been making mental notes about her comments all night.

I had recognized earlier in the session while she was ripping apart other people's pitches that she gets passionate about films considering big questions. She started talking about films digging into real questions and raising issues about humanity and our lives and said that was what made independent film great.

I knew my story didn't fit her type of film. She produces intelligent films with a lot of heart. She's not a horror fan. So after I told her my ending, I went on and told her I thought there was something great about approaching the question of what you do when the darkness is inside you.

She said, "You kill yourself" like it was obvious, but she also looked at me like she was re-appraising me. I think when I sat down and started with awful grammar followed by a pitch for a horror film, she immediately decided who I was, and when I started discussing my film like literature I regained a little in her estimation.

It was the next morning before I recognized that Barbara's approach the entire night was exactly the approach of a law professor. It's a confrontational, impatient version of the Socratic method. Which tells me there's a good chance she just wants people to stand up and make the case for their film. Earn her respect. She's not being a jerk, so don't fire back at her, or you'll be the only one being a jerk. But when she says something doesn't work, tell her why you think it does work.

That is, if your script works.

But when she questions something and says it doesn't work, don't just take her word as scripture. She's challenging you. Rise to the challenge.

The things I should have said?

There are pros and cons to remaking a literary classic. Yes, you know the ending, but it became a classic because you have a theme, characters, a concept that resonates with people. And no matter how many versions of Romeo and Juliet I had seen on stage and screen, there was still room for Baz Luhrman's version, which I for one absolutely loved. And if you really get what made it resonate with people, you can remake a classic and make an incredible film, especially if your interpretation is original. If you can come up with West Side Story out of Romeo and Juliet or make Clueless out of Emma, you will have a hit.

And I should have disagreed with her kneejerk assessment that when the darkness is inside you the answer is to kill yourself. The whole reason this novel resonates with people is because every one of us has a little bit of that darkness inside us. It's the dark urge that makes us rage at other drivers or take out our frustrations on the kid that gets our order wrong at Starbucks. It's the compulsion that makes us fail at quitting smoking or keep eating the junk food we've sworn off. It's the dark corner of our soul that allows us to shut off our compassion when we need to and justify our misdeeds. Just because every one of us has the darkness inside us doesn't mean the answer is to line up the human race and drink the Jim Jones kool-aid.

And just because the original ends with Jekyll's suicide doesn't mean every film version has to stick to that. How many versions of Frankenstein end with Dr. Frankenstein so obsessed with revenge against the monster that he chases it to the polar ice caps, where the doctor dies and the monster sneaks onto his ship to spend the night lovingly holding the doctor's lifeless body? Because that's how the novel ends.

I think I learned a few lessons that will help me pitch better next time. And even after having her ream my idea, I still believe it's a solid script that I want to see through the whole process. I don't know if very many of the other writers can say that after the things she had to say to them.

Some shooting of my own

On Saturday, while Kyle had the cast and crew shooting scenes on the side of the road, I spent a couple of hours hanging around the trailer trying out a new target I bought for my .22

I did get one jackrabbit on the trip. Unfortunately, I got it with my car.

Thanks to Scott Halford for this photo. Lots nicer than all the other photos on this blog that were taken with my phone.

Burn Baby Burn

A year ago I wrote and acted in a short film for Kyle Mallory. I even blogged about it last April. Kyle liked the script, but he wasn't happy with the way the film turned out, so for the past year he and I have talked about remaking it. Last week we finally did that.

Kyle got together the team from our 48 hour project (Team Firepants), and we headed out to Skull Valley to shoot in the desert. You know you're in a fun place when you get off the highway and immediately pass a sign that says "No dumping nuclear waste without a permit".

We set up and shot the first scenes in the middle of the night on Friday. Scott Halford was on set, even though we really weren't going to be doing much editing yet. I think the main advantage to having him there was so he could transfer all the footage from the camera's hard drives to his editing bay and they could use the hard drives again.

So Scott spent the evening in the trailer teaching his assistant editor Gillian some of the ins and outs of Final Cut Pro.

Since my work on this project was really over about a year ago, I had the luxury of coming and going as I saw fit. About 1:30 in the morning I decided I was tired and I just went into the bedroom of the trailer and went to sleep. They kept shooting until 7am, but I slept right through it. Then they all drove back to Tooele where Kyle had hotel rooms. Scott and I stayed in the trailer. I was up from then on, but I still got the best sleep of anyone on the picture.

About noon on Saturday the group all came back to the campsite and got ready for the second day of filming. Most of the shooting was in a car and on the side of a road. It needed to be out in the middle of nowhere, and Skull Valley was the perfect place to look like the middle of nowhere, because that's exactly what it is. We were a few miles from Iosepa, which consists of a graveyard and a monument to the town that dried up and disappeared sixty years ago. The funny thing is Iosepa is the name on the highway exit because it's the closest thing to civilization anywhere around.

It was well over one hundred degrees and we just cooked all day. In the picture above, Richard Terrell holds the boom. Behind him is Chazz who was shooting behind the scenes footage. In the blue cap and tan shorts is Jim, who I knew from the Utah Screenwriters Group. Jim helped as a grip for this shoot. Standing in the shade of a large flag are Mike Terrell and Wendy Macy. Mike reprised his role for the team as production design. Wendy was an actor in the team's last production, but this time she was here taking care of hair and makeup. Pushing the dolly in the gray shirt is Cory Anderson, a new face to me but a guy who knew his way around the set. You can just see the green sleeve of Chris Forbes who was back as director of photography, and in the red shirt is the assistant director Clayton Farr, who was a real professional all the time.

Here, Kyle (center) discusses the scene with the actors, from left Kellie Cockrell, Robert Easton, and Jamey Martinez.

I broke off and went back to town about four o'clock in the afternoon. Then on Sunday morning, we got to do our work in a more civilized environment. We shot in the front yard of a very nice home in North Salt Lake.

Here Chris Forbes shoots through the car window to pick up some detail shots of Kellie shuffling through maps and papers.

I'm interested to see how this film turns out. I'm always nervous to shoot things at night because I rarely see it come out looking good. Of course, I won't really be able to compare this version with the version we shot a year ago because Kyle's the only one who ever saw the way that film turned out.

Still, here's hoping.

Chickens, jewels, and aqua-aerobics

Our 48 hour film, Watertight, is up on the web for anyone interested in seeing the final product. The file is a quicktime movie and it's a little over 100MB, so it takes a long time to download. I recommend right-clicking and saving the file. That way you at least get a progress bar and you can tell if anything is happening. If you just click on the link, it will go to a blank page and sit there doing nothing until the film is completely downloaded, which could be about half an hour.

Click here to download the film

2 Days and a Chicken Suit

Kyle Mallory asked me to be the screenwriter on his team for the 48 Hour Film Project. 44 teams signed up for the project this year. Every team was given the same character, a prop, and a specific line of dialogue that had to be included in the film. Then each team was assigned a different genre of film (we drew "Road Movie"), and we had 48 hours to write, film, edit, score, and hand the film back in.

At the opening meeting we sat around waiting for them to announce the character, prop, and dialogue line, and as we talked to the other teams, lots of people were impressed by the people Kyle had recruited for his team, and the fact that we were going to shoot the film on Kyle's new RED One camera.

Then the guy stepped up to the microphone to announce things and everyone settled down quickly and got their pencils ready.

"Your character is . . . a guy in a chicken suit."

The whole crowd groaned and someone said, "Are you joking?"

Luckily, he was joking. The character we had to include was really an instructor named Jacob or Janice Simon. The prop was a jewel. The line of dialogue was "Just wait and see."

We all raced back to meet with the rest of our team and come up with the story as quickly as we could. That night was also game 6 of the Jazz vs. Rockets NBA playoffs, so finding a parking spot downtown was like fighting over the last chicken dance elmo on christmas eve, and I was the only person on the team who wasn't smart enough to have picked up a parking pass for the hotel.

Since it took me so long to kill someone and take their parking spot, when I got into the room the group had already been discussing story ideas for twenty minutes. And the worst part was that Kyle and Linda hadn't realized the chicken suit was a joke, so for twenty minutes they had been coming up with chicken stories.

I quickly explained. Come on, don't you remember him saying the real character was Jacob Simon? They talked about calling to get clarification, because if we were really supposed to use a chicken suit and we didn't have it we might get disqualified from the competition. I decided we weren't going to get in trouble for having a chicken suit in the film, so why fight it, and we put the chicken suit into the movie. Could be fun.

We were the only team with a chicken suit.

The other problem was the number of people in the room. There were almost twenty people there. That is way too many for talking about story ideas. When we're on a tight deadline, we should have had two or three people get together, hash out an idea in 20 to 30 minutes, and then I kick everybody out of the room and lock myself away to write a draft.

Instead, we talked about story ideas for hours without ever really agreeing on anything, and I sat there thinking that if we have 20 people in the room, no matter what we come up with I'm going to end up pissing off 19 of them when I finally put this to paper.

Luckily, everyone was very easy to get along with. There was only one person who was really adamant about any one story, and she ended up happy because that was the story we decided to go with.

When I sat down to write, since there were still 20 people joking in the next room, I put in headphones and turned up some brain-numbing trance music (Office Rocker from DJ Steve Boyett's podcast Groovelectric ) to pound in my head while I pounded the keyboard. I like this setup. The music is numbing enough that I don't get distracted by it, but I feel it pushing my pace and keeping my fingers moving.

The script is based on a real experience that happened to Arthur, the lead actor. The main differences are that in real life Arthur was alone in the car, and the fellow in the truck was not actually wearing a chicken suit.

Here is the team that worked on the film

• Scott Halford was editing on set while we shot. Scott is a fantastic editor. He has great instincts for editing meaningfully and improving the storytelling and pace, and he's fast.
• Mike Terrell was in charge of production design. I have been a big fan of Mike's work ever since his animated short Devon's Journal was in our film festival two years ago. Click the link and watch his film. It's dark and disturbing and so . . . wrong. It's one of my favorite animated shorts ever.
• Richard Terrell (Mike's brother) composed our music and did on-location sound. Richard helped out with some database work for our film festival this year, so I had heard some of his music and I knew how good he was.
• Chris Forbes was the Director of Photography again. Chris shot the two films I made with Kyle last year.
• Rory King was a new face. I haven't worked with him before. He's a relatively new resident around here, just transplanted from L.A. He seemed like a great guy who knows what he is doing.
• Linda Eyring was Kyle's producer again, and she took care of everything and everyone. She is meticulously organized and one of the nicest people I know.
• Arthur Lazalde was the main male actor in the film. Arthur actually played a lead in the film that gave birth to the film festival I help run, so it was interesting that after going on to get a masters in fine arts from NYU and working as a player at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival he happened to be back in town for a while and available to be in another film.
• Wendy Macy was the lead female actress, and the one who took hold of this story in the initial meeting and became it's main cheerleader. She really had the vision for the dynamic between the two main characters.
• Mike Hardy said he had always wanted to play a creature in a film. I don't think he really imagined that the creature would be a guy in a chicken suit, but I'm glad we could make that dream come true. And he definitely got the best line in the movie.

There were some others, too, like Mary who I think was assistant camera, and a P.A. who I think was named Tom, but I didn't work with them so I don't know them well.

I'll write another post about the actual production process.