In Celebration of First Features: #2 - The Coen Brothers' "Blood Simple"

Choosing this first feature is so obvious it's almost redundant. But watching it again I'm struck by how much I've taken this film for granted... "Blood Simple" is as complete & bold a cinematic vision as any of Joel & Ethan's subsequent films. The opening voiceover is writing as beautiful & specific as ANYTHING the brothers have delivered these fifteen years since (in my opinion better than the voiceover in "The Big Lebowski," or "The Hudsucker Proxy")...

It's as if the Coen Brothers emerged on the independent film scene as a mature visual storytelling force without any fumbling first steps. To revisit this now, embarking on my first feature, is as overwhelming as it is unnerving....

Up until the release of "Blood Simple" the names of Joel and Ethan Coen were known to few outside the context of assistant editing for "The Evil Dead" director Sam Raimi. I lack hard details, but apparently both brothers had an early interest in cinema - as children working for neighbors in order to save money for a Super8 camera that they went on to make a slew of films, not only remakes of favorites but also a host of original titles like "Henry Kissinger - Man on the Go," "Lumberjacks of the North" and "The Banana Film." It was Joel who went to NYU to study film, and it was he who worked in industrial and music video, until joining Sam Raimi's post-production team opened new doors of opportunity to broader horizons.



As Matt Murray puts it in his review, "Blood Simple" is a "near-perfect example of what good planning can get you." Clearly the film is an exercise in clinical execution - nothing about this film feels accidental or haphazard. According to DVD release notes, Sam Raimi advised the brothers to raise $1.2M to shoot the film on their own terms - following Raimi's lead the brothers wrote the script and shot an elaborate trailer to use on their year-long struggle to successfully find investors.

And maybe this pre-production story is not so unusual or unexpected, and it's certainly not why I felt compelled to write about "Blood Simple." What struck me about this film is just how staggeringly CINEMATIC this film is. Without any preamble, Joel and Ethan serve up this measured and methodical genre thriller with a visual vitality that transcends budget, genre and their first-feature status... The pacing of the scene where John Gentz's adulterous bartender discovers the corpse of cuckolded bar-owner Dan Hedaya, and the subsequent drive into the stark, black open country to dispose of the body... or M. Emmet Walsh's climactic confrontation with Frances McDormand... for me bring to mind the storyboarded diligence of Hitchcock's cropdusting sequence from "North by Northwest" and apartment scenes from "Dial M for Murder."



Watching this film with my own feature debut firmly in mind, I'm confronted by how the cinematic flair of the Coen Bros first feature is precisely the kind of filmmaking I got into this business for in the first place. Through careful camera placement and stylish editing, the Coen Bros build a world for the audience as specific and idiosyncratic as any film they've made since. Their's is not a "slice of life" so much as the "slice of cake" Hitchcock always said his own filmmaking was about.

Being reminded of all this has given me another set of creative options... even creative imperatives... for approaching the production of "Single Malt." I can't speak for anyone else, but I catch myself falling into the same mental trap time and again - that digital video isn't cinematic... And I don't even know where that assumption comes from.

It certainly doesn't have to be the case.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 12/13/09

"The Shade" by Mohammad Gorjestani :: a hot day, a flat tire outside Tehran, and a chance encounter...

"The Last Time I Saw You" by George Pursall & Caitlin Catherwood :: via @shootingpeople ...20 years of a father's remorse...

"ALPTRAUM" by This Lüscher :: a comical fairytale from @Film_Movement - soccer dreams can come true

In Celebration of First Features: #1 - Ridley Scott's "The Duellists"

As I gear up to produce my first feature film, part of my development process has been revisiting first features by directors great and small. Some are the expected naive folly of neophyte storytellers, same the exuberant dabblings of dedicated fans of the big screen, and some are extraordinary exhibits of genuine talent tested for the first time. One particular example of the latter is Ridley Scott's feature debut, "The Duellists."

The 1977 film "The Duellists" is an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad story, "The Duel," by a young English director whose previous experience had up until that point been episodic television drama and commercials, most notably the idyllic television campaign for Hovis. I saw this film when I was very young - my father being a huge fan of this film for reasons he never fully explained to me.

As a child I had already been seduced by the bubblegum charms of what is now ponderously known as "Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope", and by then my father had introduced me to the magnificence of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now" which, truth be told, were somewhat lost on me at that age. But for me, as a formative filmmaker, it was "The Duellists" that struck me as something new and remarkable.

The cinematography is without question the most compelling aspect of Scott's production, with Frank Tidy's work creating a rich canvas upon which Scott paints this period narrative. Scott's use of long takes, using the grandeur of the natural landscape as the epic backdrop for the unfolding human drama, is impeccable. And the attention to detail and texture is both precise and hypnotic - a truly visually arresting spectacle. As Vincent Canby in the New York Times described, Scott's haunting imagery is "a memory of almost indescribable beauty, of landscapes at dawn, of over-crowded, murky interiors, of underlit hallways and brilliantly sunlit gardens." But more than this, what strikes me now is the gentle hand Scott uses with the story, a quality too often missing in contemporary cinema.



Like many in his generation Scott exhibits the influence of Stanley Kubrick's film making style - not only the extraordinary attention to detail, but also the deliberate pacing and the palpable sense of place and time. Here we see a reinterpretation of Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon," embellished as it is for a more commercial audience. But where Kubrick used modernist techniques to create distance between subject and audience, Scott applies a different approach.

What truly brings this film home to me, now as it did when I first saw it, are the moments of naked, unstructured performance - the wild card in this otherwise carefully cultivated film world: The moment at the start of an early duel when D'Hubert (Keith Carradine) interrupts the fight to sneeze, or the awkward naturalism of D'Hubert's proposal of marriage while being distracted by a horse determined to win his attention - all these moments temper the grand epic canvas with a human naturalism that is beguiling and disarming. For a boy brought up on bombastic cinema served up on a bed of hyperbole, to me this small, delicately crafted film was an exhilarating breath of fresh air.



This is not a perfect film, though. The greatest flaw, perhaps, is the unfortunate casting of Keith Carradine in the lead role. A perfectly competent actor as he is, Carradine lacks the weight to balance Keitel's deliciously ludicrous and vain Feraud. Carradine never quite blends with his surroundings This has the unintended side-effect of submerging Keitel's Feraud into the background, making him seem more at home in this world than D'Hubert, and as a consequence he appears more reasonable than he should. It is D'Hubert, rather than Feraud, who seems absurd to the audience, even if only unconsciously.

That said, the film is a remarkable achievement. Everything here serves the story - the images, pacing and score. A Kubrick film for the masses perhaps. Scott would go on to use his affection for Kubrick's meticulous detail, as well as a handling of naturalistic performance, to staggering effect in his next feature "Alien." But it began here, in Scott's marriage of classic cinematic splendor with moments of simple, frail and flawed human reality.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 12/06/09

"Forever's Not So Long" by Shawn Morrison:: via @jessebdylan ...the perfect time to lose everything...

"Path Lights" by Zachary Sluser :: via @DLFTV, a short film based on a Tom Drury short story

"Black Button" by @DarkHeartProd :: recommended by @kingisafink A Faustian pact... in the mold of "The Box"

Life and the Short Film

The problem with making narrative short film is always one of how do you find your audience? With the current glut of online video content portals to choose from, how do you an already overloaded audience to take you seriously enough to commit the 10-30 minutes to watch a dramatic short that has no star power or media buzz?

One approach is the anthology feature film - a 90 minute film constructed from a collection of short films, connected by a common theme. "Paris, Je T'aime" is an intriguing example, where each short film takes place in a different district of the city of Paris, geography connecting each disparate story.

My initial intention for the afilmabout.us project was to create an anthology feature - the body of work would carry more weight at feature length, it would be easier to program at festivals, and it was a measurable goal for the people working on the projects. The problem was that the shorts I was making didn't have a consistent theme. I never found a satisfactory way of dealing with that, and so I let the idea slide. Besides, I had plenty of other things to worry about.

And then last month I was invited to see an anthology feature project that had an innovative solution...



The Wonder Project is the brainchild of the participants of the DnA group (short for "Directors and Actors"), a weekly workshop for storytellers who collaborate to develop their craft. In her article for Filmmaker Magazine, Wonder Project episode director Shari Carpenter explains how the film is comprised of shorts that use the same lines of dialog. In an exercise similar to one featured in the televised filmmaking competition "Project Greenlight," all the directors participating in The Wonder Project were given the same blank script - dialog without any stage direction or scene information - and an entirely free hand to interpret the circumstances of the script and how the lines were delivered. Suddenly you have both a rigorous structure to build an anthology around, and an unfettered creative canvas onto which each director can paint their distinct narrative vision.

DnA director and Wonder Project instigator Dutch Doscher invited me to a lock screening of the Wonder Project last month at Planet Hollywood Time Square, in large part because I'm an outspoken advocate of short film on Twitter (which is how I met Dutch in the first place). I was invited as a blogger, but I was concerned that perhaps I was there under false pretenses - I mean I blog, but I'm not a committed blogger (which you've already noticed if you've spent any time reading this site). Plus I've never reviewed an unreleased film before - a delicate task for someone as opinionated as myself... Regardless, as a filmmaker I was definitely curious to see what Dutch and his partners had done with this short film anthology format. What follows are my entirely subjective reactions to that screening:



The blank script structure was set up with the opening title animation - a brisk overview of all the lines in the blank script as they are both read aloud and projected onto the screen. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the words are the thing. The first two shorts, a couple breaking into a lakeside summer home in "Lake Wonderful," and a psychotic love relationship imploding on the sidewalk in "Wonder/Love," lead the audience into pretty traditional short territory, and set the tone and expectations for this micro-budget production. The third, "Wonder of See Saws," where two couples eating at the same restaurant get into an argument, shows real flair and humor, and segues into the dark and dense "Wondering Darkness," a Chris Cunningham-esque vignette about people trapped in a behavioral study gone wrong - subjects and researchers alike. All four of these shorts attempt story arc and character development, which for me, to be honest, is when short film works best.

"Wonderlust," on the other hand, is something of a shaggy dog story - a visual gag that zips through the blank script so fast the film barely makes an impression. This is followed by the equally light "The Cats of Wonder" - a frothy film that sets two cats with questionable French accents (read Pepe La Pew) as the protagonists. It doesn't last long enough to outstay its welcome. However in the next short it's speed, or rather haste, that is the fatal flaw. "Will of Wonder" focuses on a patient's pivotal visit to his psychologist's office, but the short races through the psychological twists and turns in such a way that defangs the effectiveness of the piece and left me wishing we'd spent more time with the characters.



By now, of course, the pattern of dialog has been made abundantly clear to the audience - the repetition of the lines ceases to be intrusive and becomes the real pleasure of the piece: How will this line be read? How will they fit in that line? A palpable sense of anticipation is created that genuinely ties these films together.

The last two shorts highlight both the strengths and the weaknesses of this project - "The Wondrous Bliss" falls flat for me when we're asked to believe the two young, good-looking and well-groomed actors are supposed to be heroin junkies driven to steal in order to feed their habit... Having recently watched "The Wire" on DVD this conceit really tested my credulity, even though the performances were wonderful - Margaret Donlin in particular.



The last short, "Eye Wonder," on the other hand, was the strongest of the bunch - a love triangle that is revealed when a young man takes one lover to a tarot reading and is horrified to discover his other lover is the card reader. Where the previous shorts felt in some way unbalanced - performances that are stronger that the interpretation of the script, or ideas that needed more development before being committed to camera - this short showed a thoroughness of execution that becomes the keystone to the entire project. If you end strong, I've always said, the audience will forgive you just about everything. This is most definitely a strong ending.

Like I told Dutch, the unevenness of these shorts works in a way that means no one piece overshadows the others, creating a truly complementary anthology with a strong connective vision. I'm told there is likely to be a re-structuring of these shorts - removing the literary quotes that appeared between the shorts in the edit I saw, and re-ordering the sequence the shorts appear in. I can't say how these changes will affect the piece, I can only say that I liked the anthology as it was presented that night and found it to be very effective.



In the end I absolutely admire the ambitions of this project. I'm a dedicated short film advocate, but the truth is that, instead of being easier to get shorts seen, new technology is making it harder for a single short to find any kind of audience. With so many outlets to see videos of all shapes and sizes, unsupported short film releases are getting drowned in the online video deluge. What The Wonder Project offers is a workable paradigm for emerging artists, to pool their resources collaboratively and build a means for experimental short-form content to find a larger audience.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 11/22/09 AND 11/29/09

missed a week, so here's a double dose ::

"Boomerang" by Carla Drago :: Sometimes just being human is embarrassing.

"Combat Rock" by Blake Hamilton :: a boy discovers a love of music - (techno-kiddies may be excited to know this is shot on a Canon 5d Mark ii)

"The Lunch Date" by Adam Davidson :: A classic - a woman in a train station is confronted by her prejudice

"The Red Balloon" by Albert Lamorisse (recommended by @Kevin_Slack) another timeless classic, this one from 1956

"Rusalka" by Alexander Petrov :: (suggested by @jaypea_aitken) a truly astonishing and beautiful glass-painting animation

"Spirits" by Keith Boynton (via @reel13) ...part of the "12 films, 12 weeks" project... nicely done

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 11/15/09

"Dunny" by Phillip Van :: a lovelorn 11-yr-old boy tries to deliver letter to his object of desire...

"Swipe" by Max Blustin :: A lazy young man, refused cash by his girlfriend, resorts to other means.

"Bulletproof Vest" by May Lin Au Yong :: Nine-year-old Jyeshria wants a bulletproof vest.

a film about who?

When you don't have money but regardless you want to produce something worthwhile, something that speaks to your ambitions of making indelible motion pictures, then the penalty is always time and pure sweat equity. Well, at least it has been in my case.

afilmabout.us is my experiment in visual storytelling - crafting compelling visual narratives within a set of limited circumstances using limited resources, but with an overriding ambition to make unforgettable motion pictures, and in the process become a better storyteller.

When I started this project my goal was to build a team that would produce 8 short films for $2,000 per title in one year. Each film would be a snapshot of who we are as filmmakers at that precise moment - warts and all - so that by the end of the production cycle we would have a road map of our storytelling growth. The company would use equipment owned by the filmmakers, who would also write/direct/edit/score everything themselves. Because my particular trade is post-production, I'd develop scripts that would lean heavily in that direction, to relieve some of the burden of production value during shooting. As supervising producer for the project, my unifying idea behind all these proposed shorts was nothing more than "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

As vague as this notion was I wanted to work with other talented filmmakers to make this happen. I was able to attract the incredible talents of Peter Haas, a working editor I had the good fortune to go to college with, Larry McGovern, an engineer by trade and a stellar grip and AD, and Ron Moreno, as hard-working an actor as anyone could want to meet. The four of us made up the core filmmaking team, each bringing a passion and commitment this kind of no-budget endeavor really requires.

In some post-KLF fit of whimsy, I believed that if the same people were involved in all the projects that were developed under the afilmabout.us banner, then our true, undiluted collective creative voice would emerge irresistibly from that body of work... maybe not discernible close-up, but step back a ways and you'll see it.

And this is still probably true, but in the last eighteen months the "we can do it" bravado has given way to a more sober reality about our initial targets. My personal goal was to grow as an independent producer - learn the mechanics of "proper" film production, which I initially believed specifically meant working with SAG actors.

What I actually learned from my producing experience was (1) the scripts I was writing were too ambitious for the scope of production within my immediate means, (2) not every person who displays emphatic enthusiasm when volunteering their services just for credit and experience are going to pull through for you, so you better have a back-up plan, and (3) you simply can't ever, ever give up.

I know now, for example, how much it will realistically cost to produce the 11 page screenplay called "Footcandles." I also know that the sci-fi scripts we've been developing are a tad out of our reach at the moment - but that won't always be the case. These days I write scripts intended to be affordable and compelling (to me, anyway) and that can be shot efficiently with the tools that we've already developed - the proof of that being the more contained but no less dramatically ambitious short script currently entitled "On The Table."

"Undone," the web series that started it all, is in the last leg of post-production. I'll tell the story of that long, long production cycle some other time. But as the final stages approach it's tempting to frame that as an ending, but that's not the case. As it was always intended to be - it's a beginning.

2010 will be a very different year for afilmabout.us

...this was all intended to be a preamble to a discussion about another short film anthology project I had the good fortune to see, a project called "Wonder..." - but that'll have to wait till next time. So until then... good night, and good luck.

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 11/08/09

"Angel of the Night" by @dannylaceyfilm :: (via @indiemoviemaker) a debut short horror film

"Myles West" by Bryn Chainey :: Kid steals his brother's iPod to live a fantasy secret agent life.

"Signs" by Patrick Hughes :: (via @mjodirector) Where do you find love? Sometimes you need a sign...

from my Twitter feed - #ShortFilmSunday - 11/01/09

Here are this week's links, somewhat hampered by YouTube being closed down for maintenance::

"Itmanna: Make a Wish" by Cherien Dabis :: (via @TribecaFilm)
a Palestinan girl goes to the bakery...

"Her Name Is Laura Panic" by @AdamWingard
...a sequel to his "Laura Panic", which is available on his website here

"Foster" by Jonathan Newman :: (via @shortcinema)
...a multiple award winning short featuring an impish leading actor...

Back to basics...

Great things are afoot, but today I'm thinking specifically about the feature script I'm developing for The dotUS Project. We're adopting the practical filmmaking philosophy of Marc Price, director of the no-budget zombie film "Colin" that dazzled Cannes this year with its reported $70 out-of-pocket price tag. I read a quote from Price (can't find the article now) where he encourages filmmakers to embrace making a feature with the resources they have access to right now, instead of waiting for the money.

So that's what we're doing. The script I'm developing takes place in one location (the place where I live), has five speaking parts, and doesn't require anything except minimal props and make-up - a thriller, currently entitled "Jacob," that takes place in a residential building in downtown Brooklyn.

Like 'Paranormal Activity' the film focuses exclusively on the interior of that shared living space. We're going for a lo-fi aesthetic, but to bring some richness to that we're embracing the cinematography of early 20th century horror - films also made for minimal budgets (by today's standards, certainly) that used striking expressionist lighting and camera, the kind pioneered and embraced by the German filmmakers of the 20s and 30s.

And you can help - we're making a list and checking it twice - the most striking horror films of that period that we're going to use as our role-models. Any and all suggestions for films we should watch are absolutely welcome. Here are a few lists I've found so far :

Cinematical Seven - The Best Black and White Horror Movies

Filmsite - Horror films

Obscure Horror Movie Categories - Black and White Films

Share and enjoy : )

Tempus Fugit on Twitter

Good grief. Time has flown by since I updated this blog last. I've got a couple of good reasons - one being the ongoing post-production struggle for my most recent short film, the unfortunately titled "Undone" (Larry, my A.D., has long suspected that I've totally jinxed myself with that one... I choose to be less superstitious than that). More on that project later.

The other reason is Twitter.

I doubt I have anything new to say on the subject (of Twitter in particular or social networking in general), but I will say that when I finally embraced Twitter it was with the intention of becoming part of the independent film-making community. And I'm there. I've seen films I wouldn't otherwise have seen, films made by passionate outsiders to the commercial filmmaking industry, driven by passion and commitment to their craft - dream chasers all. And I'm proud to count myself among their number.

I could go on and on about what I've seen and who I've encountered on there... but it's something you have to experience for yourself. Like blogging, or in fact anything in this life, you get out of it what you put into it. If you haven't already, dip your toe in the wide river of flowing information on Twitter. There's something for everyone there... Maybe join me... @d0kk... Everyone I follow on there is absolutely worth following.

And 'Undone'? We're getting there, inch by inch. I approached this project as a neophyte producer, determined to learn from my mistakes. And I've made plenty. But we're nearly there. I'll keep you posted as we approach the first public screenings. Stay with me. It'll be worth it.