(Skipping days 4 and 5 because I took some personal time off & didn’t have enough time to blog them properly. I may assemble my notes later for a flashback.)
“Today I guarantee you’re going to get some good behind-the-scenes footage” said Gorman confidently. This made me immediately suspicious. I always think it’s good to underpromise and overdeliver. Gorman, as usual, was right. I, as usual, was wrong. Come to think of it, he has proven himself to be a master of the overpromise, underdeliver thing.
Today's shoot took place in a computer services firm that was vacated, we were promised, until 10:00am. We arrived there about 8:30am. I am beginning to understand the rhythm of Gorman’s shooting days. I don’t know if it’s typical of a movie, but the morning always starts off relaxed, then intensity builds as the day goes by. I don’t know if that’s just Gorman, or if it’s the way all movies work, or if it’s typical of independents in which you’re shooting a large number of scenes per day. This morning, for whatever reason, there was a good vibe all around. Bonus: it was a gorgeous spring day and the location was big enough to accommodate everyone comfortably. Gorman kicked craft services (food) outside. “On a day like this,” he reasoned, “it just doesn’t make any sense for people not to be outside.” Smart move. Kept noisy juice-and-snack-seekers out of the set while giving the location a festive atmosphere.
The reason a computer services company was chosen as the location was that one of the characters is a webcam girl and the other is a webmaster who works there at a very confused time in his life. Today’s scenes included some with spicy dialog, some with hot chicks groping each other, and some with the brisk delivery and wit one expects from a well-crafted comedy like Friends (With Benefits). My favorite scene had all that, plus plenty of nudity and even a touching dénouement. Guess which part I plan to write about? Hint: it ain’t the touching dénouement.
Emotional Scenes Work Better with Webcam Chicks
The scene in question calls for several of the friends to be talking about whether sex is better with someone who means something to you. As they do it the webcam girls are doing their thing in the background. One of them undulates slowly and languidly, starting with a bikini and wearing progressively less of it as the scene unfolds.
One of my strategies for the behind-the-scenes will be to show rehearsals of some scenes, along with the documentary camera view, interspersed with the final takes. Normally I can’t get all three but the point is to show the movie from just about every perspective I can muster. My video camera (a Canon XH A1) is an exceptionally good one, but director Gorman Bechard and cinematographer Adrian Correia know how to set up a shot. It will be telling and, I hope, illuminating for the viewer to see how the shot set up for the moviemaker’s camera has almost no correspondence to what the bystander (or documentarian) sees. Gorman and Adrian work swiftly and efficiently at all times, even for intricate shots like a couple of the scenes scheduled for today.
The moviemaker’s camera has the only angle for a good shot. All the lights, reflectors, microphones, and cabling are oriented for that shot. Any other angle might as well be in the building next door. The camera, cinematographer, and the cinematographer’s assistant (who has a more impressive job title than that but I don’t remember what it is) are right in the action. The camera sports a largish reference monitor used at least as much as the viewfinder. Because it is a digital world now, a second, larger monitor rests on a stand several feet away. The director, coproducer/screenwriter Ashley, the makeup artist, the production designer, and the wardrobe person all cluster around it during the take. After every take it’so not unusual for every one of those people to deal with cast or crew.
I view my job as twofold: first, stay the hell out of the way. Second, try to get a good behind-the-scenes filmed. Of all the crew members, I am the only one who is not essential and the one who adds by far the most friction to what is otherwise the smoothly running machine that is this production. Consequently I developed a way of working that involves trying to find the best place to shoot that places the least strain on the crew.
Life's Tough Choices: Politeness vs. enjoying Gratuitous Nudity
Lousy strategy. I just don’t get good shots I stood off to the side behind a ficus and ended up with just a sliver of the scene. Plus, I’m a red-blooded American guy. There were some pretty interesting developments on set I wasn’t able to catch. I have a shot of Gorman requesting that the actress playing the webcam girl in the background take off her top. No problem. Someone had prepped her, because she wasn’t at all surprised.
Ultimately what I ended up doing for this and a couple other scenes shot today was standing in the pocket between the camera and the reference monitor used by the director, makeup folks, and so on. It was a privileged position to be in, and as often as not I had a pretty good view, though nothing like what the moviemaker’s camera saw. I think there were 8 takes of this scene. I got to see a lot of naked webcam girl. She was 40 feet away, but the Canon XH A1 has a very powerful zoom lens. Generally I would alternate emphasizing her vs. the other actors each take. It was pretty cool, because the director instructed her to dance in a way that faced her directly into my camera. She looked fine. And you know what?
It’s just a job. I’ve often read about photographers and cinematographers who spend a lot of time around naked people that they quickly become inured, that you’re just shooting another scene. Patently wrong, wouldn’t you think? Who could ever get used to beautiful naked young women?
People who have a challenging, complex job and very little time to do it, that’s who. People like me, I was a bit surprised to learn. All told I was on set for 12 hours today. When you’re carrying a camera instead of mounting it on a stand, you need to deal as reefficiently as possible with a body that does not like to remain stock still, yet must in order to get a good shot. I had a goodly chunk of that 20X zoom on the Canon XH A1 focused right on the webcam girl’s naughty bits, but the more zoom you use the more wiggly the camera feels. On a fully zoom-in view I can often detect my heartbeat bouncing the camera up and down visibly. To reduce camera shake the handheld operator must resort to such painful kludges as holding his breath, holding arms up to form a sort of tripod out of the arms, back, and legs. These positions do not promote good back health. At the end of the day my hands and stomach were shaking from the strain.
It doesn't end there. I don't get to control what happens, so my ability to compose and frame good shots is sharply restricted. Though I don't succeed, my goal is always to end up with each shot. looking like it was planned. I've learned that motion is interesting, and hard to anticipate, and that unusual items in the frame help make a shot interesting. Sometimes this means a bald sweaty cinematographer adjusting a light and cursing in between shots is a better shot than a woman in a bikini. Since I never know when a good visual will come, I must be constantly aware of opportunities, while balancing them against constantly dwindling battery life. None of this makes for a relaxing time, even when some serious skin is involved.
I’m pretty sure everyone else on the crew has a job at least as challenging as mine, so the upshot of it is that all this glorious nudity went essentially unremarked upon by just about everyone involved. These people are true professionals.
Except maybe me and the first AD (assistant director), Michael. After I got a particularly, ah, comely shot, he winked at me. “Good one”, he said quietly. Hey, I did it for my art. I like to think of myself as a consummate professional. Anything to advance the cause of this fine movie...
Monday, April 23, 2007
Friday, April 20, 2007
Day 3 of shoot: Baby, Come With Me
Friends (With Benefits) will stretch the boundaries of what kind of material can appear in a mainstream movie much the same way American Pie did. The middle of one sequence has an occurrence I will try to describe with as much care as I can muster. I am deliberately leaving out the beginning of this scene as well as its payoff, because if all goes well it will be water cooler conversation across the country the Saturday after Friends (With Benefits) opens. The middle part, of which I am about to describe the filming, sounds utterly disgusting. That’s all it would be, out of context. In context… well, I think when the movie comes out you’ll watch in mounting horror and disbelief, then laugh your ass off and miss the next three scenes while the theatre audience tries to regain its composure. Okay. Tell the kids to go clean up their room so we can have some adult conversation.
Remember, this is just the middle part. It is not wildly out of funny out of context, but this blog is a behind the scenes view of Friends (With Benefits). It’s about the filming, not about the story itself.
The script reads as follows: “HIS POV of the ceiling over their head, and the glob of creamy white fluid which hangs from the ceiling, just about to fall.”
The movie will merit a hard, excuse the phrasing, R. You can guess what the fluid is. Let me try to paint a picture of how I ended up seeing this scene filmed.
By 9 in the morning makeup and the production design team each had its own formulation of simulated man juice ready to, ah, shoot. Production design’s was labeled and refrigerated for safekeeping. Makeup had theirs displayed next their array of brushes and hairdryers. The concoction (sorry) used for this scene was by the production design team, so Alexis, the production design lead, had the unenviable task of somehow launching the viscous fluid in question to the ceiling, such that a single drop fell shortly thereafter.
The bedroom set it was filmed in is an absurdly small room in the attic of Gorman’s office, measuring perhaps six feet wide by eight feet long. Maybe less. When I got to the scene I found the bed occupied by the huge camera, flanked on each side by large men lying down in very back-unfriendly positions, carefully pointing the camera diagonally up at the ceiling. The camera and lens together could buy you a nice BMW or a couple of Toyota minivans, and ultimately they were cooped up in that bed for well over an hour. A big lighting rig took up most of the floor space in the room. Cables trailed into two rooms next door, one with the director and continuity person, another with sound (empty for this scene).
The AD, two electricians, and a lighting guy were there to do their things. On a couch in an adjacent room were the rest of the production design staff. Crowded into the doorway were the AD, a makeup person, and a morbidly obese documentarian (yours truly). There were also a couple of others who had invited themselves up because it promised to be an entertaining shoot. And it was, except for the guys operating the camera, the lighting guy, and poor Alexis. It was hot upstairs on any typical spring day, and nearly unbearable for anyone in a room that had been lit continuously by an array of gigantic movie floods.
By the time I made it upstairs there was an artfully placed glob of goo on the ceiling. It looked pretty good, but it just sat there, photogenic and inert. No drips. After a long wait an anemic droplet worked its way loose. “Too small” came the director’s voice from the next room with unnerving speed and certainty. Somebody stamped on the floor to see if anything could be dislodged. “No!” cried DP Adrian, who was one of the contortees on the bed. Stamping was bad for any number of reasons, perhaps most importantly that it would shake the camera. It might also soil the camera’s $35,000 rented lens.
Nothing.
Production designer Alexis carefully stood up on the bed and wiped off the offending material. They quickly altered the formula. She returned to the ridiculously overcrowded bedroom and readied herself to launch another gobbet. Nope. It splattered, leaving nothing for a good drip. Over the next hour and a half she tried a host of ingenious tactics to get the right effect. Pipettes, medical syringes, plastic spoon catapults—the bedspread was covered in simulated jism within minutes and every time it splashed on her she flinched. Although it was pretty much made out of hand lotion its alarmingly accurate imitation of the real thing seemed to drive her to distraction. Standing up on a bed, hands outstretched to the ceiling for prolonged periods, trying to squirt cinematic Jackson Pollock greatness on demand must have been uncomfortable as well.
And nobody but her own staff did a damn thing to help, because it was sidesplittingly funny and simply too easy to unleash a torrent of junior high school-level puns while barraging Alexis with unwanted advice from a dozen backseat drivers watching her every move.
It was one of the most entertaining hours of my life. It is teasily the worst footage I have shot during this trip. I couldn’t wear my DVRigPro, a bulky harness worn around the torso that stabilizes the camera, because I was already taking up way too much space in the hallway, space that should have been reserved for people who needed to be there, like Alexis’ crew. This left me pointing the camera awkwardly toward the ceiling, zooming in close so I could get a who’s your daddy-sized magnification of the counterfeit ejaculate. I wasn’t going through anything close to what Alexis and the camera guys were, and I was hurting big-time within moments because as people (incorrectly) predicted a drop was imminent, I would shakily pan from a face to the ooze while trying to unzoom manually. I was trying to stay out of the way and get good shots at the same time, not a promising technique.
Alexis grew increasingly irritated and told everyone off hilariously as she and her assistance stretched their considerable imaginations and throwing muscles to commendable extremes, but I don’t know how the story ends. At one point a failed launch left some, um, material on my lens. It had already been 13 hours filming and I was ready to collapse. I took my camera back to the hotel to clean its lens and write this entry. Maybe tomorrow I’ll find out what, well, came of the situation.
Remember, this is just the middle part. It is not wildly out of funny out of context, but this blog is a behind the scenes view of Friends (With Benefits). It’s about the filming, not about the story itself.
The script reads as follows: “HIS POV of the ceiling over their head, and the glob of creamy white fluid which hangs from the ceiling, just about to fall.”
The movie will merit a hard, excuse the phrasing, R. You can guess what the fluid is. Let me try to paint a picture of how I ended up seeing this scene filmed.
By 9 in the morning makeup and the production design team each had its own formulation of simulated man juice ready to, ah, shoot. Production design’s was labeled and refrigerated for safekeeping. Makeup had theirs displayed next their array of brushes and hairdryers. The concoction (sorry) used for this scene was by the production design team, so Alexis, the production design lead, had the unenviable task of somehow launching the viscous fluid in question to the ceiling, such that a single drop fell shortly thereafter.
The bedroom set it was filmed in is an absurdly small room in the attic of Gorman’s office, measuring perhaps six feet wide by eight feet long. Maybe less. When I got to the scene I found the bed occupied by the huge camera, flanked on each side by large men lying down in very back-unfriendly positions, carefully pointing the camera diagonally up at the ceiling. The camera and lens together could buy you a nice BMW or a couple of Toyota minivans, and ultimately they were cooped up in that bed for well over an hour. A big lighting rig took up most of the floor space in the room. Cables trailed into two rooms next door, one with the director and continuity person, another with sound (empty for this scene).
The AD, two electricians, and a lighting guy were there to do their things. On a couch in an adjacent room were the rest of the production design staff. Crowded into the doorway were the AD, a makeup person, and a morbidly obese documentarian (yours truly). There were also a couple of others who had invited themselves up because it promised to be an entertaining shoot. And it was, except for the guys operating the camera, the lighting guy, and poor Alexis. It was hot upstairs on any typical spring day, and nearly unbearable for anyone in a room that had been lit continuously by an array of gigantic movie floods.
By the time I made it upstairs there was an artfully placed glob of goo on the ceiling. It looked pretty good, but it just sat there, photogenic and inert. No drips. After a long wait an anemic droplet worked its way loose. “Too small” came the director’s voice from the next room with unnerving speed and certainty. Somebody stamped on the floor to see if anything could be dislodged. “No!” cried DP Adrian, who was one of the contortees on the bed. Stamping was bad for any number of reasons, perhaps most importantly that it would shake the camera. It might also soil the camera’s $35,000 rented lens.
Nothing.
Production designer Alexis carefully stood up on the bed and wiped off the offending material. They quickly altered the formula. She returned to the ridiculously overcrowded bedroom and readied herself to launch another gobbet. Nope. It splattered, leaving nothing for a good drip. Over the next hour and a half she tried a host of ingenious tactics to get the right effect. Pipettes, medical syringes, plastic spoon catapults—the bedspread was covered in simulated jism within minutes and every time it splashed on her she flinched. Although it was pretty much made out of hand lotion its alarmingly accurate imitation of the real thing seemed to drive her to distraction. Standing up on a bed, hands outstretched to the ceiling for prolonged periods, trying to squirt cinematic Jackson Pollock greatness on demand must have been uncomfortable as well.
And nobody but her own staff did a damn thing to help, because it was sidesplittingly funny and simply too easy to unleash a torrent of junior high school-level puns while barraging Alexis with unwanted advice from a dozen backseat drivers watching her every move.
It was one of the most entertaining hours of my life. It is teasily the worst footage I have shot during this trip. I couldn’t wear my DVRigPro, a bulky harness worn around the torso that stabilizes the camera, because I was already taking up way too much space in the hallway, space that should have been reserved for people who needed to be there, like Alexis’ crew. This left me pointing the camera awkwardly toward the ceiling, zooming in close so I could get a who’s your daddy-sized magnification of the counterfeit ejaculate. I wasn’t going through anything close to what Alexis and the camera guys were, and I was hurting big-time within moments because as people (incorrectly) predicted a drop was imminent, I would shakily pan from a face to the ooze while trying to unzoom manually. I was trying to stay out of the way and get good shots at the same time, not a promising technique.
Alexis grew increasingly irritated and told everyone off hilariously as she and her assistance stretched their considerable imaginations and throwing muscles to commendable extremes, but I don’t know how the story ends. At one point a failed launch left some, um, material on my lens. It had already been 13 hours filming and I was ready to collapse. I took my camera back to the hotel to clean its lens and write this entry. Maybe tomorrow I’ll find out what, well, came of the situation.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Day 2 of shoot: Anyone Know a Camwhore?
Today started with a crisis, handled with aplomb by cast, crew, and producers. One of the key scenes in the movie involves a hot-looking webcam girl on a porn site who tries to seduce one of the male characters, who plays the webmaster of that site. It was one of the scenes to be shot today. Yesterday evening she backed out.
When you make a major investment in something, the question is not if something bad happens, but when. I think the sign of a naïve investor is that only positive outcomes are considered, and that failure is not given its due. The riskier the investment, of course, the more damaging that kind of naïveté can be.
It's not whether something will go wrong. It's how they handle what will go wrong.
You need to run the mental spreadsheet on it by running many scenarios with a multiplicity of outcomes. Not just: could it be a hit? but what if it flops? What if the producer runs off with our money? What if everything looks great but we’re asked for more money two thirds of the way through production? What if the distributor promises us money and goes out of business, leaving the movie in limbo? What if one of the stars decides to leave in the middle of the shoot? I did thought experiments on those and a dozen other possibilities before laying out enough cash to buy my kids’ grandparents in China a damn nice house. I hit Gorman with many of them during my initial interviews with him, and I’m sure I did not come off as the world’s greatest diplomat at that time. I would expect such questions if I were asking someone to hand over that much green, and so did Gorman.
Which is why I wasn’t the least bit disturbed by the time Webcam Girl made her little announcement. I didn’t know how the problem would be solved, but I knew it would be solved with a minimum of drama. And it was, within half an hour. The constraints were simple, if challenging. Beyond the unspoken assumption that Webcam Girl had to work at indie film wages and to be great looking, she had to be reliable, available, and good enough to be able to do the job without an audition. Actors know actors, and the stars who were here hopped on their cellphones and started calling their friends. Gorman remembered that Brendan Bradley had hooked up the production with an actress he had already asked to join the production. She had turned down the opportunity because at the time the role she was considered for would involve nudity. Ironically, the nudity was later written out of the part and, more ironically, the part of Webcam Girl never had any. Problem solved, not even a voice raised.
Note to my 17-year-old self: I’m on set with a bunch of hot women in bathrobes!
There is no justice. My prospects seemed bleak when I was 17. I was a fat, nerdy, socially maladjusted, repressed, lonely, unhappy adolescent in the second year of a college career that seemed pointless and was, in retrospect, an utter waste academically. Now I'm a fat, bald, socially maladjusted businessman & nerd when both are in vogue. But a wealthy fat, bald, nerdy, socially maladjusted businessman. Maybe not as rich as some of my ex-Microsoft friends, but enough that I can join the crew of an indie flick and work 3000 miles from home for the princely sum of... nothing. I often think back to those times when I look around the set of Friends With Benefits. Today another nude scene or three got filmed. Guy with guy, guy with girl, another guy with another girl. Mind you, I’m not around during the filming. The set is just too small. The scenes are shot in quick succession, so actors and actresses both spend a goodly amount of time waiting patiently and in various stages of undress (under comfortable-looking bathrobes) to be called upstairs. I’m sure this would have been titillating and on some level just plain exciting if my adolescent self could have been here.
Where was all that action when I really needed it? This is what goes through my head almost three decades later: these delightful, hardworking, seemingly unspoiled young women could be my daughters. If a bathrobe just happened to fall open while one of them was talking to me, I wouldn’t be thrilled. I wouldn’t even be secretly thrilled. I would be mortified. I would, I’m sure, be more embarrassed than they.
Sigh. These are the good old days. And the old me isn't here to enjoy them!
When you make a major investment in something, the question is not if something bad happens, but when. I think the sign of a naïve investor is that only positive outcomes are considered, and that failure is not given its due. The riskier the investment, of course, the more damaging that kind of naïveté can be.
It's not whether something will go wrong. It's how they handle what will go wrong.
You need to run the mental spreadsheet on it by running many scenarios with a multiplicity of outcomes. Not just: could it be a hit? but what if it flops? What if the producer runs off with our money? What if everything looks great but we’re asked for more money two thirds of the way through production? What if the distributor promises us money and goes out of business, leaving the movie in limbo? What if one of the stars decides to leave in the middle of the shoot? I did thought experiments on those and a dozen other possibilities before laying out enough cash to buy my kids’ grandparents in China a damn nice house. I hit Gorman with many of them during my initial interviews with him, and I’m sure I did not come off as the world’s greatest diplomat at that time. I would expect such questions if I were asking someone to hand over that much green, and so did Gorman.
Which is why I wasn’t the least bit disturbed by the time Webcam Girl made her little announcement. I didn’t know how the problem would be solved, but I knew it would be solved with a minimum of drama. And it was, within half an hour. The constraints were simple, if challenging. Beyond the unspoken assumption that Webcam Girl had to work at indie film wages and to be great looking, she had to be reliable, available, and good enough to be able to do the job without an audition. Actors know actors, and the stars who were here hopped on their cellphones and started calling their friends. Gorman remembered that Brendan Bradley had hooked up the production with an actress he had already asked to join the production. She had turned down the opportunity because at the time the role she was considered for would involve nudity. Ironically, the nudity was later written out of the part and, more ironically, the part of Webcam Girl never had any. Problem solved, not even a voice raised.
Note to my 17-year-old self: I’m on set with a bunch of hot women in bathrobes!
There is no justice. My prospects seemed bleak when I was 17. I was a fat, nerdy, socially maladjusted, repressed, lonely, unhappy adolescent in the second year of a college career that seemed pointless and was, in retrospect, an utter waste academically. Now I'm a fat, bald, socially maladjusted businessman & nerd when both are in vogue. But a wealthy fat, bald, nerdy, socially maladjusted businessman. Maybe not as rich as some of my ex-Microsoft friends, but enough that I can join the crew of an indie flick and work 3000 miles from home for the princely sum of... nothing. I often think back to those times when I look around the set of Friends With Benefits. Today another nude scene or three got filmed. Guy with guy, guy with girl, another guy with another girl. Mind you, I’m not around during the filming. The set is just too small. The scenes are shot in quick succession, so actors and actresses both spend a goodly amount of time waiting patiently and in various stages of undress (under comfortable-looking bathrobes) to be called upstairs. I’m sure this would have been titillating and on some level just plain exciting if my adolescent self could have been here.
Where was all that action when I really needed it? This is what goes through my head almost three decades later: these delightful, hardworking, seemingly unspoiled young women could be my daughters. If a bathrobe just happened to fall open while one of them was talking to me, I wouldn’t be thrilled. I wouldn’t even be secretly thrilled. I would be mortified. I would, I’m sure, be more embarrassed than they.
Sigh. These are the good old days. And the old me isn't here to enjoy them!
Day 1 of shoot: Maybe I'll Take the Factory Job
(Written Wednesday, April 19 2007, but posted the following day) Although it’s my fourth day shooting the behind-the-scenes, today was the first day of filming on Friends With Benefits. Or however you think of it, because no film is involved these days. The traditional terms hold, as do, for example, the words “record” and “album” as used by twentysomething rockers who have never even seen an LP when they get signed to a label.
I was impressed and disappointed both. Impressed because the quality of acting is so high, even in throwaway rehearsals meant to get the blocking, lighting, and camera angles right. Disappointed because the set was so small I couldn’t be there during the filming itself.
The call sheet had everyone meeting at Gorman’s office at 7am. I got there early so I could catch people on their way in. Gorman arrived shortly thereafter and said cheerfully—and knowingly—“So where are all those people who said they’d be early?” But they straggled in reasonably promptly, and we walked a few blocks to the location.
I like getting call sheets, I admit. I admit I think it’s fun to refer to the call sheet, as in “Call sheet says we meet at 959 State Street. Meet at the office first?” I’ll probably never get tired of it. I spent four years at Microsoft. I could never wipe the shit-eating grin off my face when I strode through those wide hallways. Far too often people would stop me and ask why I was smiling. My answers probably did not sound convincing. It seemed so country-bumpkin to blurt out “Dude, I have a great gig at the best company I’ve ever worked for! All my coworkers are brilliant and we’re developing the greatest software tools yet. What’s not to smile about?” I can tell you now. It felt great. I was in management then. It feels great again to be the lowliest member on the crew of an unheralded low-budget movie, because the movie rocks and the people involved are topnotch.
You can’t just saunter in and run your video camera. (Especially when the video camera has the height-and-weight footprint of a refrigerator; more on that in a future post). First the room to be shot has to be made to look like the character’s bedroom. A dusty set of perfume bottles, seemingly from the 1970s, for example, wouldn’t fit with the character’s personality. Those were on a bureau that won’t be filmed, but I was drawn to them. Next to the old perfume bottles was a first-generation Nintendo. Grandparents’ room the grandkids played in during the day, maybe? When did their Nintendo stop being used, if ever? Or did it? It’s an old game yet this one is positioned on the edge of the bureau, as if it might be used tonight after the crew leaves. Everyone has a new flatscreen TV these days. Everyone. Not here. Was the apartment somehow left alone while its owners traveled for a few years? Who were they, anyway? Why weren’t they hanging around to see the filming? (Not that there would have been room for them. But I imagine lots of homeowners whose places are being used in the movies can’t resist seeing how their residence is being violated in the sacrifice to Art.) I found myself making up stories about the people whose apartment is. I still am. Those old perfume bottles haunted me for some reason.
Lights, cameras, cables, cases, gels, and filters were trundled in to the kitchen or directly into the bedroom now being prepared for the shoot. At the same time both rooms to be shot in were being dressed. The set decorator hung a distinctive paisley blanket on the wall over the bed and suddenly the room was transformed. It looked like a different room altogether. I need to ask her if that was the point or merely a side effect. Either way the efficiency amazed me and I made a mental note in case I need a few set decorating tips up my sleeve sometime. Meanwhile the living room was also being readied for the next scene to be shot. An artist sketched a picture of a brain in a prop notebook because one of the characters is studying to be a brain surgeon.
The first scene ever shot in Friends With Benefits, which actually comes late in the movie, starts with Alex Brown as Owen and Margaret Laney as Chloe in bed, having a blowout argument. If you’ve ever read an interview with an actor, you may have heard them say how exhausting both physically and emotionally acting can be. Physically? Really? I once worked a factory job. I remember days when I could barely pick up a drill or a compressor hose by the end of the day, times when I jonesed for a couple in front of the TV like a crackhead wants rock. How bad can it be to be start out a scene in bed with a good-looking member of the opposite sex, scream a bit, rinse, and repeat?
Bad, I can now attest. Neither actor complained even a little, but after that experience I wouldn't blame them. Alex was in every scene shot that day, and on this movie, that doesn’t mean one or two scenes a day as you expect on a big-budget Hollywood flick. He shot something like seven scenes, and the first one must have been a killer. Chloe ends that initial filmed scene screaming and slamming the door shut on her way out. Every time I heard it I had to remind myself it was make-believe. His frustrated shouting and her shattered replies bore more than a an echo from times in my life I’d rather not relive.
Each actor has a different way of getting ready. Alex sits alone, a thousand-yard stare on his face. Margaret rocks out, blasting her iPod so loudly you can hear it a couple feet away. As they left set for their breaks four hours later they seemed perfectly self-contained.
I am constantly surprised at how good the actors are even in a blocking rehearsal, which carries few expectations beyond making sure the actors hit their marks, which can change every time through. My pleasure in their craft amuses Gorman, who seems to expect that kind of quality and who may or may not think of me as a feckless neophyte because of it. Gorman may think I’m easy to please, but I’m not. The script is king, but very close behind is the fidelity of the actors to the material. These actors all have a naturalism so striking the first day of rehearsals I frequently stopped my camera during a scene, thinking they’d stopped acting and just started talking. (Yes, I read the script. Several times. But it changed right up to last night and I’ve got a lot on my plate trying to figure out the damn camera, keep out of everyone’s way, and frame good shots. That and even on a good day I have the memory of a late-stage Alzheimer’s sufferer.) Anyway, this scene, which starts with the two characters having sex and ends with her storming out, was rendered so effectively it gave more than one person shivers. I feel self-conscious writing this, because every time I’ve read this kind of drivel I’ve immediately decided the interviewee was a pompous idiot. But there you have it.
According to tomorrow’s call sheet: another 10 scenes at the office.
I was impressed and disappointed both. Impressed because the quality of acting is so high, even in throwaway rehearsals meant to get the blocking, lighting, and camera angles right. Disappointed because the set was so small I couldn’t be there during the filming itself.
The call sheet had everyone meeting at Gorman’s office at 7am. I got there early so I could catch people on their way in. Gorman arrived shortly thereafter and said cheerfully—and knowingly—“So where are all those people who said they’d be early?” But they straggled in reasonably promptly, and we walked a few blocks to the location.
I like getting call sheets, I admit. I admit I think it’s fun to refer to the call sheet, as in “Call sheet says we meet at 959 State Street. Meet at the office first?” I’ll probably never get tired of it. I spent four years at Microsoft. I could never wipe the shit-eating grin off my face when I strode through those wide hallways. Far too often people would stop me and ask why I was smiling. My answers probably did not sound convincing. It seemed so country-bumpkin to blurt out “Dude, I have a great gig at the best company I’ve ever worked for! All my coworkers are brilliant and we’re developing the greatest software tools yet. What’s not to smile about?” I can tell you now. It felt great. I was in management then. It feels great again to be the lowliest member on the crew of an unheralded low-budget movie, because the movie rocks and the people involved are topnotch.
You can’t just saunter in and run your video camera. (Especially when the video camera has the height-and-weight footprint of a refrigerator; more on that in a future post). First the room to be shot has to be made to look like the character’s bedroom. A dusty set of perfume bottles, seemingly from the 1970s, for example, wouldn’t fit with the character’s personality. Those were on a bureau that won’t be filmed, but I was drawn to them. Next to the old perfume bottles was a first-generation Nintendo. Grandparents’ room the grandkids played in during the day, maybe? When did their Nintendo stop being used, if ever? Or did it? It’s an old game yet this one is positioned on the edge of the bureau, as if it might be used tonight after the crew leaves. Everyone has a new flatscreen TV these days. Everyone. Not here. Was the apartment somehow left alone while its owners traveled for a few years? Who were they, anyway? Why weren’t they hanging around to see the filming? (Not that there would have been room for them. But I imagine lots of homeowners whose places are being used in the movies can’t resist seeing how their residence is being violated in the sacrifice to Art.) I found myself making up stories about the people whose apartment is. I still am. Those old perfume bottles haunted me for some reason.
Lights, cameras, cables, cases, gels, and filters were trundled in to the kitchen or directly into the bedroom now being prepared for the shoot. At the same time both rooms to be shot in were being dressed. The set decorator hung a distinctive paisley blanket on the wall over the bed and suddenly the room was transformed. It looked like a different room altogether. I need to ask her if that was the point or merely a side effect. Either way the efficiency amazed me and I made a mental note in case I need a few set decorating tips up my sleeve sometime. Meanwhile the living room was also being readied for the next scene to be shot. An artist sketched a picture of a brain in a prop notebook because one of the characters is studying to be a brain surgeon.
The first scene ever shot in Friends With Benefits, which actually comes late in the movie, starts with Alex Brown as Owen and Margaret Laney as Chloe in bed, having a blowout argument. If you’ve ever read an interview with an actor, you may have heard them say how exhausting both physically and emotionally acting can be. Physically? Really? I once worked a factory job. I remember days when I could barely pick up a drill or a compressor hose by the end of the day, times when I jonesed for a couple in front of the TV like a crackhead wants rock. How bad can it be to be start out a scene in bed with a good-looking member of the opposite sex, scream a bit, rinse, and repeat?
Bad, I can now attest. Neither actor complained even a little, but after that experience I wouldn't blame them. Alex was in every scene shot that day, and on this movie, that doesn’t mean one or two scenes a day as you expect on a big-budget Hollywood flick. He shot something like seven scenes, and the first one must have been a killer. Chloe ends that initial filmed scene screaming and slamming the door shut on her way out. Every time I heard it I had to remind myself it was make-believe. His frustrated shouting and her shattered replies bore more than a an echo from times in my life I’d rather not relive.
Each actor has a different way of getting ready. Alex sits alone, a thousand-yard stare on his face. Margaret rocks out, blasting her iPod so loudly you can hear it a couple feet away. As they left set for their breaks four hours later they seemed perfectly self-contained.
I am constantly surprised at how good the actors are even in a blocking rehearsal, which carries few expectations beyond making sure the actors hit their marks, which can change every time through. My pleasure in their craft amuses Gorman, who seems to expect that kind of quality and who may or may not think of me as a feckless neophyte because of it. Gorman may think I’m easy to please, but I’m not. The script is king, but very close behind is the fidelity of the actors to the material. These actors all have a naturalism so striking the first day of rehearsals I frequently stopped my camera during a scene, thinking they’d stopped acting and just started talking. (Yes, I read the script. Several times. But it changed right up to last night and I’ve got a lot on my plate trying to figure out the damn camera, keep out of everyone’s way, and frame good shots. That and even on a good day I have the memory of a late-stage Alzheimer’s sufferer.) Anyway, this scene, which starts with the two characters having sex and ends with her storming out, was rendered so effectively it gave more than one person shivers. I feel self-conscious writing this, because every time I’ve read this kind of drivel I’ve immediately decided the interviewee was a pompous idiot. But there you have it.
According to tomorrow’s call sheet: another 10 scenes at the office.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
It's all about the workflow
Today was all about the workflow.
I have learned recently that to people shooting digital video "workflow" is king. Workflow is the presumably orderly progression of laying down images to tape, copying them from tape to the hard drive of your computer (a process called video capture, or just capture), assembling them in an editing program, and rendering to a final image that can be copied to a DVD. Then of course there's backing up the captured data, and the decision whether to reuse tapes. I won't. I want them in case the hard disks don't survive the trip back home, or if they crash.
Today was my third day of shooting (the movie doesn't begin shooting until tomorrow morning but as Behind The Scenes Guy I'm there for a lot of the preparation, too). At the beginning of the day I had a handful tapes to show for it, an editing program (Sony Vegas 7.0) I only used once, on Easter, and a Canon XH A1 (low-end professional camera) I had never completed the capture process. High time I learned, I figured, before the 9pm cast and crew meet-and-greet.
The truth is, I didn't know how the any of the video turned out. It is known that previewing on the camera's LCD screen isn't necessarily what it will look like after a trip through the rendering process, or even what it will look like on your computer screen. My hotel room has a TV but of course it has no external inputs.
I didn't know if the sound worked on any of the recordings because I still haven't figured out how to get sound when I do a tape check. When I pay back a scene on the tape I don't hear the sound, and I haven't had time to figure out why.
My Canon XH A1 is pretty much state of the art for an independent movie. It is a high-definition (HD) camera that works in widescreen, just like real movies. I came within inches of getting a Panasonic DVX100 camera, which Gorman used for the whole of You Are Alone. It is renowned for its low-light performance. My XH A1 is known for its less-than-stellar low-light sensitivity. So far a lot of my shooting has been in underlit places because, well, it's a behind the scenes, and because up to now it's just been rehearsals. Rehearsals don't need film-quality lighting.
So I didn't know what the tape looked like, and I didn't know if it had sound. Other than that I was ready to begin the actual movie.
From what I can tell the capture process works only using a Firewire port. Firewire is sort of like USB but used mostly in the Macintosh world. My way rad 3 lb. Sony G1 laptop was advertised on the dynamism.com website where I bought it as having a Firewire port. I couldn't find the Firewire port. I even put a post on the DVXUser.com website asking about this, and was pointed to the Dynamism spec sheet. Just to be sure I emailed Dynamism. The port does not in fact exist on my version of the G1. They thanked me for pointing out the error and changed their spec sheet.
Which left me with no way to get data into the camera.
There was another problem. If you do the math as to how much data gets crammed into a miniDV tape, it's scary. The tapes I used are a standard 63 minute length. That's 13 gigabytes of data. Now I'm shooting the behind the scenes. Plan is for me to pretty much be rolling all day, from 7am to whever--typically, if I understand it correctly, 7pm. Let's call it 10 tapes a day. That's 130 gigabytes of data. The shoot is 18 days. 18 tapes times 130 gigabytes per tape is 2.3 terabytes of data. Terabytes, not gigabytes. A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes. For that matter I had only brought 20 tapes with me. Last week I ordered 60 more. I've used up five already. Today I got nervous and ordered 100 more. The tapes cost $15 each in Circuit City, but $8 from RecordingStore.com. Who knows--this may be overkill. Maybe I'll only use 5 tapes a day. If it's more than 10, though, I don't want to be stranded in New Haven with a camera hooked to my belt and no tapes.
My laptop had 36 gigabytes free this morning. I barely had enough to run a test.
Now I had sort of anticipated this and had ordered a couple of 250 gig hard drives when I got here five days ago. They hadn't arrived yet. I went to CompUSA and purchased, among other things, a Firewire port built into a card that slips into the laptop, and a couple of 300 GB hard drives.
I got back to the hotel room, plugged in my plug-and-play hard drive... and nothing happened. A quick perusal through the manual mentioned that these drives were set up to work on a Macintosh, then showed how to configure it under Windows, a process I'd never learned before and which did not closely match the hard drive's manual. But it worked after a bit.
Then I got to the heart of the day's work: learning the capture process. The Canon manual is laughably incomplete. It pretty much shows you how to plug the Firewire cable from the camera to the computer, then lists about four reasons why the capture process won't work. Seriously. Not a damn thing about whether, for example, you set the camera to External Control mode, or VCR Mode, or what. I guessed External Control. Wrongly, as it turned out.
But Vegas 7.0 had a terrible time recognizing my camera. I don't know if it's a Windows thing, or a Vegas thing, or what. I followed the directions, looked up the error message on the web ("Microsoft AV/C Tape Subunit Device could not be opened"--makes it totally obvious, right?) to no avail, and finally used the Scientific Method. I rebooted. No luck. I twiddled, fiddled, said unprintable things, and resorted once again to the Scientific Method.
It worked.
The capture process is not like ripping a DVD. You essentially play the tape in real time and it gets copied to the hard disk. I ended up using VCR mode on the XH A1 and it worked, pretty much. Pretty much because something went wrong with the end of the tape. What, I'm not sure, because by this time it was time to leave for the meeting. I can report that sound and video both work on the camera. Low light peformance seems to be excellent.
Digital video experts will observe that I did a no-no. The part most prone to wear on a camcorder is the tape head. The "correct" way to do a capture is through an videotape player called a "deck", or an inexpensive camera. I have a backup camera, the Canon HV20, I intend to use as a deck on this trip. That's putting the cart before the horse at this stage. I just wanted to make sure I could capture at all.
Oh, and it was the first time everyone met
Tonight we met at 9pm in the lobby of the Hotel Duncan. I got there first, and took some establishing shots, then did my best to film people as they straggled in. No one seemed to be bothered, though I'm not sure they were all expecting me. I am getting much better at framing shots, and the gizmo that I use to keep the camera stable, the DVRig Pro, again proved itself to be the best $500 I've spent so far. This was my third day of shooting and the first I started to feel like I knew remotely what I was doing.
Everyone involved is painfully young, Gorman and yours truly excepted. Almost all of them wore black, they all seemed to be cheerful, and as a group they are ridiculously good looking. The makeup people are gorgeous. I must of course, wonder if it's due to genes or makeup...
This was where the full cast and crew all met for the first time. Everyone stepped forward and gave out name, rank, and serial number, then Gorman gave a brief talk about what's expected of cast and crew. It was a good solid talk, in which the chain of command was explained, the way to treat locations was explained (they're people's houses and places of business, so treat them like they're your own), and a lot was said about food. Then the cast was dismissed and we went upstairs to one of the crew's rooms and there was an even longer talk about food, with a few other points tossed in about how to deal with the actors. The whole thing was over by 10 and I felt that not a minute had been wasted. Gorman promised during his speeches that's what he planned for the entire shoot. I think he'll make good on it.
I still haven't seen the rendered test scene, but it's time to go to bed. There is still a possibility the video quality of the stuff I've shot this last week is bad...
I have learned recently that to people shooting digital video "workflow" is king. Workflow is the presumably orderly progression of laying down images to tape, copying them from tape to the hard drive of your computer (a process called video capture, or just capture), assembling them in an editing program, and rendering to a final image that can be copied to a DVD. Then of course there's backing up the captured data, and the decision whether to reuse tapes. I won't. I want them in case the hard disks don't survive the trip back home, or if they crash.
Today was my third day of shooting (the movie doesn't begin shooting until tomorrow morning but as Behind The Scenes Guy I'm there for a lot of the preparation, too). At the beginning of the day I had a handful tapes to show for it, an editing program (Sony Vegas 7.0) I only used once, on Easter, and a Canon XH A1 (low-end professional camera) I had never completed the capture process. High time I learned, I figured, before the 9pm cast and crew meet-and-greet.
The truth is, I didn't know how the any of the video turned out. It is known that previewing on the camera's LCD screen isn't necessarily what it will look like after a trip through the rendering process, or even what it will look like on your computer screen. My hotel room has a TV but of course it has no external inputs.
I didn't know if the sound worked on any of the recordings because I still haven't figured out how to get sound when I do a tape check. When I pay back a scene on the tape I don't hear the sound, and I haven't had time to figure out why.
My Canon XH A1 is pretty much state of the art for an independent movie. It is a high-definition (HD) camera that works in widescreen, just like real movies. I came within inches of getting a Panasonic DVX100 camera, which Gorman used for the whole of You Are Alone. It is renowned for its low-light performance. My XH A1 is known for its less-than-stellar low-light sensitivity. So far a lot of my shooting has been in underlit places because, well, it's a behind the scenes, and because up to now it's just been rehearsals. Rehearsals don't need film-quality lighting.
So I didn't know what the tape looked like, and I didn't know if it had sound. Other than that I was ready to begin the actual movie.
From what I can tell the capture process works only using a Firewire port. Firewire is sort of like USB but used mostly in the Macintosh world. My way rad 3 lb. Sony G1 laptop was advertised on the dynamism.com website where I bought it as having a Firewire port. I couldn't find the Firewire port. I even put a post on the DVXUser.com website asking about this, and was pointed to the Dynamism spec sheet. Just to be sure I emailed Dynamism. The port does not in fact exist on my version of the G1. They thanked me for pointing out the error and changed their spec sheet.
Which left me with no way to get data into the camera.
There was another problem. If you do the math as to how much data gets crammed into a miniDV tape, it's scary. The tapes I used are a standard 63 minute length. That's 13 gigabytes of data. Now I'm shooting the behind the scenes. Plan is for me to pretty much be rolling all day, from 7am to whever--typically, if I understand it correctly, 7pm. Let's call it 10 tapes a day. That's 130 gigabytes of data. The shoot is 18 days. 18 tapes times 130 gigabytes per tape is 2.3 terabytes of data. Terabytes, not gigabytes. A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes. For that matter I had only brought 20 tapes with me. Last week I ordered 60 more. I've used up five already. Today I got nervous and ordered 100 more. The tapes cost $15 each in Circuit City, but $8 from RecordingStore.com. Who knows--this may be overkill. Maybe I'll only use 5 tapes a day. If it's more than 10, though, I don't want to be stranded in New Haven with a camera hooked to my belt and no tapes.
My laptop had 36 gigabytes free this morning. I barely had enough to run a test.
Now I had sort of anticipated this and had ordered a couple of 250 gig hard drives when I got here five days ago. They hadn't arrived yet. I went to CompUSA and purchased, among other things, a Firewire port built into a card that slips into the laptop, and a couple of 300 GB hard drives.
I got back to the hotel room, plugged in my plug-and-play hard drive... and nothing happened. A quick perusal through the manual mentioned that these drives were set up to work on a Macintosh, then showed how to configure it under Windows, a process I'd never learned before and which did not closely match the hard drive's manual. But it worked after a bit.
Then I got to the heart of the day's work: learning the capture process. The Canon manual is laughably incomplete. It pretty much shows you how to plug the Firewire cable from the camera to the computer, then lists about four reasons why the capture process won't work. Seriously. Not a damn thing about whether, for example, you set the camera to External Control mode, or VCR Mode, or what. I guessed External Control. Wrongly, as it turned out.
But Vegas 7.0 had a terrible time recognizing my camera. I don't know if it's a Windows thing, or a Vegas thing, or what. I followed the directions, looked up the error message on the web ("Microsoft AV/C Tape Subunit Device could not be opened"--makes it totally obvious, right?) to no avail, and finally used the Scientific Method. I rebooted. No luck. I twiddled, fiddled, said unprintable things, and resorted once again to the Scientific Method.
It worked.
The capture process is not like ripping a DVD. You essentially play the tape in real time and it gets copied to the hard disk. I ended up using VCR mode on the XH A1 and it worked, pretty much. Pretty much because something went wrong with the end of the tape. What, I'm not sure, because by this time it was time to leave for the meeting. I can report that sound and video both work on the camera. Low light peformance seems to be excellent.
Digital video experts will observe that I did a no-no. The part most prone to wear on a camcorder is the tape head. The "correct" way to do a capture is through an videotape player called a "deck", or an inexpensive camera. I have a backup camera, the Canon HV20, I intend to use as a deck on this trip. That's putting the cart before the horse at this stage. I just wanted to make sure I could capture at all.
Oh, and it was the first time everyone met
Tonight we met at 9pm in the lobby of the Hotel Duncan. I got there first, and took some establishing shots, then did my best to film people as they straggled in. No one seemed to be bothered, though I'm not sure they were all expecting me. I am getting much better at framing shots, and the gizmo that I use to keep the camera stable, the DVRig Pro, again proved itself to be the best $500 I've spent so far. This was my third day of shooting and the first I started to feel like I knew remotely what I was doing.
Everyone involved is painfully young, Gorman and yours truly excepted. Almost all of them wore black, they all seemed to be cheerful, and as a group they are ridiculously good looking. The makeup people are gorgeous. I must of course, wonder if it's due to genes or makeup...
This was where the full cast and crew all met for the first time. Everyone stepped forward and gave out name, rank, and serial number, then Gorman gave a brief talk about what's expected of cast and crew. It was a good solid talk, in which the chain of command was explained, the way to treat locations was explained (they're people's houses and places of business, so treat them like they're your own), and a lot was said about food. Then the cast was dismissed and we went upstairs to one of the crew's rooms and there was an even longer talk about food, with a few other points tossed in about how to deal with the actors. The whole thing was over by 10 and I felt that not a minute had been wasted. Gorman promised during his speeches that's what he planned for the entire shoot. I think he'll make good on it.
I still haven't seen the rendered test scene, but it's time to go to bed. There is still a possibility the video quality of the stuff I've shot this last week is bad...
Thursday, April 12, 2007
That's Mr. Executive Producer to you!
It started at the same place in which concerned many parent find themselves: trying to find a decent DVD for our children. But it ended up here in an Eastern college town filming an R-rated comedy. More precisely, in my case, filming the filming of the comedy. I have gone from devoted family man combing hopelessly through the bins of kid videos at Costco to being the executive producer (read: clueless investor) and behind-the-scenes shooter of Friends With Benefits, a brilliantly written sex comedy by novelist and director Gorman Bechard in what I truly believe will be his breakout film. This blog will be a day-to-day journal of the making of Friends With Benefits, from rehearsal to wrap party. If I survive.
Why Not Pay AND Volunteer a Month of My Life?
Like many parents, I miss the days when certain brands could be relied on to give kids wholesome entertainment an adult could stomach too. I think those brands are largely gone. One can no longer trust any single media company to crank out wholesome, reasonably-high quality pictures so reliably that one doesn’t need to review them for objectionable content first. So, my wife and I reasoned, why not do it ourselves? In a digital age when great cameras can be had for a low price and the high cost of film can be bypassed, it really boils down to a good script. The rest—decent actors, a good editor, lighting rigs and an ace director of photography—can be had on a reasonable budget, union issues notwithstanding (more on that in a future article). Distribution, you ask? We’ve worked it out, we think. That too is a future jumping-off point.
So we decided on an apprenticeship. Learn this business by doing before cutting the check for a full-fledged studio (microstudio?) by latching on to someone else. I could have gone to film school, but I know from experience that school is not perhaps the most complete real-world education for an endeavor as complex as this. We weren’t sure exactly how to initiate said plan, so I went where anyone else would go to buy something you can’t find at the local Wal-Mart. I went to eBay.
Gorman Bechard has been a working novelist since the mid 1990s. He is also a working screenwriter, having optioned several scripts (sold the rights to those scripts for a limited period) to Hollywood studios over the years. He must think in both hemispheres, because he’s also a gifted photographer who somehow manages to stay married while getting great-looking women to take off their clothes for him in the studio. (Note to self: ask Gorman for strategy tips on hobby implementation.) Gorman did not like what happened to his scripts after they were launched into the insatiable foaming maw that is development hell in Hollywood, so he did what any insane screenwriter would do in his position. Gorman Bechard directed the movie himself instead of letting some cokehead former music video director hack his script for The Kiss into little tiny pieces. No, Gorman seized the reins himself and helmed “The Kiss” with a surprisingly sure hand, right up until the movie’s main investor decided to hack Gorman’s movie into little tiny pieces. The investor, you will be surprised to note, was married to one of the costars and had some strong opinions about screen time, lighting, and camera angles in any scene involving his wife.
So Gorman Bechard went back to the drawing board. He sold some novels and cooked up his next script, You Are Alone. You Are Alone is pretty much a one-room, two-person drama so excruciatingly honest about life that I never would have paid money to see it. It is the story of a fortyish family man who crosses that line too many of us fortyish family men have imagined crossing, and decides to hire an “escort” from her Web ad. The escort, he learns too late, is The Girl Next Door, played, and partially scripted, by the estimable Jessica Bohl. What happens next is so painfully close to what I am absolutely sure would happen should I lapse in a moment of similar weakness that I can only tell you… get it off Amazon. It rightfully won its share of festival awards and the striking verisimilitude of the dialog, attributed partly to its young star, guarantees that I cannot watch that movie without thinking way too hard about what I would do in the same position. As powerful a movie as You Are Alone is, I would have quickly skipped over the blurb in a festival review because I get enough real life in real life, thank you very much. I’m a comedy/guys shooting things/helicopter chase kind of guy.
Fortunately for me, Gorman had long been working on the movie now known as Friends With Benefits even as he and producer Frank Loftus shepherded You Are Alone to completion. I will no doubt annoy him by saying that Friends With Benefits is sort of a feature-length R-rated episode of the TV show Friends, but I mean that as the highest compliment. Friends was one of the finest shows in the history of television, and its best episodes rank right up there with the crispest movie comedies. Gorman’s movie, unlike the TV show, manages to keep the audience electrified for two hours. At least the script does, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Gorman had been writing Friends With Benefits on and off for years. He knew he had an eminently commercial property. He had sold scripts before. But he had also directed movies, so in 2006 he found himself at a crossroads. He knew he could sell it in Hollywood and make a shedload of money. He and Frank Loftus had also managed to scrape up the kind of financing needed to make a perfectly credible-looking full-length feature in You Are Alone. Gorman was now a proven director, but he didn’t have the kind of Hollywood clout needed to get full artist control over Friends With Benefits should he sell it to a studio. And he liked the Friends With Benefits script a lot. He decided to make the movie himself, but financing even a small indie film could buy you a house in Southern California. So he went where anyone else would go if they were trying to finance a movie without big-money connections. He went to eBay.
Wait a second... you need a script?
The ad he finally listed was short and to the point. For $9000 you could buy a 2% share of the profits in an independent movie. It was a romantic comedy with a proven writer/director. We decided if the movie looked good we'd go for a bigger chunk, like 20%. For reasons I don’t quite understand it has since become much harder to place such ads on eBay, something about potential problems with securities law. Until 2006, though, there were in fact a goodly number of such listings. Often they went something like this: “I have an idea for a VERY commercial movie! This can make millions! I can’t tell you anything more about it until you invest but IT IS A GUARANTEED HIT!” That’s not a direct quote but I assure you many such listings were that delusional, and I plowed through every one of them, looking for a diamond in the rough. On rare occasion a moderately sane listing would appear, but often I would hear nothing further from the seller when I attempted to make contact. The few times it went much further than that and I saw a script… well, let’s just say they weren’t quite up to the standards I hoped for. Often the very process of communicating with the seller was difficult, thereby ensuring I would never invest in their venture regardless of the quality of the script, because if you’re going to give people enough money to buy a Porsche 911, you expect them to be honest and businesslike at a minimum.
Gorman’s ad was, if anything, understated. He was clearly not trying to hype the potential investor. I contacted him and asked for a script. He sent it with a message I found dismaying, something about how it wasn’t quite polished the way he’d like but that he thought I’d like it. Translation (I thought at the time): it will be yet another steaming dungheap and this time not even a completed, polished dungheap!
I read it as a courtesy, and because hope springs eternal.
I was floored. Not polished? Not polished? It had 42 layers of lacquer, 25 coats of paint, and was buffed to a mirrorlike shine, the likes of which normally appear only in clean rooms at Intel. Polished? Stick a fork in that bad boy. It’s done!
Which is what I said when I called him the first time. That, and a thousand questions aimed not only at learning how he conducted business (how can I trust you? What if I want to look at the books? How will I know how much we make if it gets sold to a distributor? Why do you think yourself qualified to direct this thing? If it’s so good, why not sell it in Tinseltown?) but at how he answered tough questions. Business is all about relationships. If you’re going to plunk enough hard-earned cash down for a director you’ve never heard of to film his own script, you better feel good with him during the honeymoon period, because when it starts to get tight and the movie’s behind it schedule and over budget, you’ll need some reserves from the honeymoon period to keep away from each other’s throats.
Gorman has a great voice, the kind of voice that could get him a radio gig, and his answers were so polished, so knowledgeable, so utterly lacking in defensiveness that I flipped a bit and started to mistrust him because he was such a smooth talker! Sometimes you just can’t win with me. But hey, if I was going to recommend to my wife that we drop $90,000 on an unknown quantity, I was going to dig deep. I couldn’t throw him, though. I started to think he might be the real thing. I had my wife read the script. She approved. Gorman sent me a screener DVD of You Are Alone. I watched it, enthralled, and vowed never to watch it again because it was just too damn effective for its own good. Kind of the same feeling I got from Schindler’s List. A stunning achievement, but real life is painful enough.
Where have all the good scribes gone?
What happened to movie screenwriting, anyway? From about the 30s to the late 70s movies had to start from great scripts. Acting, by the way, was generally not nearly at the caliber it is today. I think today’s actors are on the average phenomenally better than they were 20 years ago and before. Directing seems to be pretty good too, and of course the technical side of movies (lighting, cinematography, special effecs, and so on) is at its peak. But what happened to all the good writers?
They moved to television, Gorman said in one of our marathon conversations. “Writers are king in television”, he said casually. Doh! The Sopranos. Entourage. Friends. ER. Firefly. The Simpsons. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I could list a dozen more without taking a break. It was a bit of a relief, actually, because I was curious whether screenwriting was such a terrible profession that it was no longer attracting people, or if we’re just dumber these days, or what. It was good to know that the the best writers had found shelter somewhere.
I had decided that even if Friends With Benefits was not brilliantly directed, it would still make a splash on the indie soon because, like Clerks or Kissing Jessica Stein it would make its money back on the strength of the script alone. As part of my due diligence I ordered a DVD on Amazon. I thought it might help me determine if, given a somewhat lighter script, Gorman could deliver a correspondingly light feel as a director.
Let me explain something here. I’m a very, very fat bald businessman. I dress in clothes designed for plumbers (no, really—I order most of what I wear from Duluth Trading). I make good money, but to meet me is to know my wife didn’t marry me for my looks. (Or my money, to be honest. I was in debt when we got married. Things are very, very different now.) It is also important to know that I’m madly in love with my wife. However. If Eliza Dushku were to go blind one day, and maybe stinking drunk too, and if she somehow found her way to my front door, I would invite her in and do my damndest to break my wedding vows. Even if it were my wife who answered the door. Anyway, during negotations with Gorman Bechard, I quipped that I’d pay for the whole damn movie if he could get her in it. His response: “Well, she was in one of my movies. Didn’t you know that?”
It was The Kiss, also starring Terence Stamp. The same one that had been commandeered by the third star’s husband. That’s the DVD I ordered on Amazon. And you know what? It’s bright, breezy, and briskly edited. Not a movie I’d save for a kid-free night at home with my lovely wife should The Tinies all go to sleepovers (I’d save a Hugh Grant flick for that) but the movie was at least made by someone who knows how to make a movie. So imagine how well that someone could do if he had it his way? Which would of course mean letting him make the script he had written without telling him how to film it. I’m a CEO. I like telling people what to do. I’m pretty good at it. But I also like to delegate and work Ronald Reagan hours. But damn. Eliza Dushku. He said she was great to work with, which I actually didn't want to hear. I wanted to hear she was difficult, that she was all ego. Then I'd feel like I hadn't missed anything...
There was one more issue. At $90,000 we wanted some love. What I planned to angle for was an Executive Producer credit. I didn’t tell my wife this. For one thing, I might fail. For another, Executive Producer is in large part an inside joke in Hollywood. Unlike, say, gaffer, director of photography, or screenwriter, Executive Producer has no clearly defined role. It is an honorific handed out, for the most part, to the kind of rube who has enough money to help make the movie happen but who is too naïve to know just what a joke the Executive Producer title is. The kind of title, in other words, that would warm the cockles of my egomaniacal, ice-cold executive heart. And give my wife something to brag about on her favorite message boards. But how to approach Gorman? I’m a pretty good negotiator normally. On the one hand, we’re kicking in 20% of the budget, I reasoned. On the other hand, no one likes title-greedy investors making ridiculous demands before the picture even makes it off the ground. Even more important than the title was having a mentor who could someday step me through the making of my own movies, and I didn’t want to burn that bridge at all, much less this early in the game. How could I work it so he didn’t hate me, but so we got the cool title? I didn't want to seem too eager, but on the other hand, ninety thousand bucks. How could I keep a good relationship and grease my giant ego at the same time?
“Oh, by the way,” he said at one point. “With an investment this size we could make you executive producers.”
We cut the check, sent it to Gorman, and never looked back.
Can You Call it Film School if You're Executive Producer?
He’s been a more than capable producer/director up to this point. I have every reason to believe Friends With Benefits will be a success. Maybe even a Wedding Crashers-like success. I think it's at least as good, at least in its current script form. One has to assume realistically that the reverse far more likely to be true. That’s where film school comes in. Film school is a four-year commitment and costs, oh, $25,000/year at a school like USC. That doesn’t include the budget of your final project, a movie you make yourself, and for which you are expected to obtain financing. I had asked Gorman if I could sort of peer over his shoulder, figuratively speaking, as the movie was made. I’m sure he gritted his teeth when he agreed, but he seemed not to mind. I told him I’d like to learn the rudiments of filmmaking, and maybe he could help me on occasion if I got stuck running a camera or learning the editing software. He seemed fine with that. Like film school, but learning it in public. For real.
If Friends With Benefits tanks, I figure he’ll be chagrined enough to let me call him from time to time even after the movie is released, should I get stuck learning the editing software or trying to figure out the settings on my fancy new camera. If the movie’s a hit, we all make money and he never returns my calls, which is fine, because I’ll be phoning from the massage table at my personal trainer’s place, and he'll be getting rubbed down by someone in the executive suites at Sony. To me, the 90 grand is like getting film school at a bargain, and in much less time.
Why Not Pay AND Volunteer a Month of My Life?
At some point I outsmarted myself. I mean, Gorman’s good. He knows this filmmaking (and producing) stuff backwards and forwards. I went into a huddle with my wife, got approval, amazingly, and went to Gorman with a new offer. Let me tag along behind you and film the making of the film. A twofer—you get hard cold cash and a free behind-the-scenes documentarian, all for one low price! He went for it!
So here I am writing on the plane to JFK. I will hit the hotel for cast and crew tonight at about 11pm. Tomorrow the cast reads through the script in its latest form. Ditto for the next day. A few days off, and a week from tomorrow filming begins. I’ll be away from my family 5 times longer than I ever have before, I’m a complete novice with a pro-quality Canon XH A1 camera on board, and my biggest editing job was ever was last Sundays’ Easter home video (not horrible, if I do say so myself). Clearly an auspicious beginning. I plan to blog every day I shoot film, so that’s almost every day for the next four weeks.
With 14-hour shooting schedules, I suspect they won’t end up 3,000 words apiece, so don’t panic.
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