The Shortiest Short

April 5, 2016 by 1 Comment

The Academy Awards were six weeks ago, and already it’s like six years ago. Truth is, I tuned them out this year more than I have in decades, with the exception of one category, for “Best Live Action Short.”

“Six Women,” the short I wrote, was in editing then, and coming in at a frustrating (to me) 20 minutes long. It has since been “picture locked” at exactly that length, after my pleas to speed sequences here, and to trim my own bits of dialogue there, which had long been yielding diminishing returns, started giving the story less feeling. We had a few discussions about the ideal length for a short film, which I was insisting was nine to 12 minutes – inconveniently, since I’d written an 18 page script, and we all knew that a page roughly equals a minute.

I’d settled on that short length from what I knew of film festival programming. The shorter a short is, the more places it can fit into a program: You can always stick an extra six minute film, if it’s at all decent, into a two-hour showcase of shorts. And the best way to see a short is before a feature: A day after seeing a program of, say, ten 10-minute films, they’re mostly a blur in your memory, but if you can see one substantial short before an 80 to 100-minute feature, then it’s probably made an impression, but programmers understandably prefer 10-minute films for coveted slots like these.

The key word, substantial. Short films tend to have narratives like jokes, a short to medium-length preparation for one single punch line. At six minutes that’s literally all you have time for. If you want a character with more than one quality, and to take him or her plausibly to an unexpected place, then you’d better double that time. Much longer than that, and you’re in uncharted territory. The determinant must be the substance.

As with any venture, a maker of a short film must ask, “What are we doing this for?” Is it a widget for a short film program? A piece of art? Or a showpiece to persuade someone to make a full-length feature? I’ve made a case in the past for why some films can’t be made cheaply, but are still worth making, and some stories can’t be told in eight minutes but are still worth telling.

Watching the Oscar-nominated shorts back in February as we were refining ours, I got that strange burst of confidence you get when you see the top-of-the-line material and realize, “This isn’t all that great.” I also found it very reassuring that three of the five Oscar nominees were longer than ours, including the American favorite “Day One,” written and directed by Henry Hughes. That persuaded me to let go and let God, or maybe let go and let Ted (Teddy Schenck, who was directing, and saw the light about the length of “Six Women” weeks before I did).

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From “Shok,” by Jamie Donoughue.

The two other nominees were the Palestinian-European production “Ave Maria” (written by Basil Khalil and Daniel Yáñez Khalil) at 15 minutes and “Stutterer,” a 12-minute short written and directed by the Irishman Benjamin Cleary. My favorite, hands down, was “Shok,” a Kosovar-British production written by Jamie Donoughue, about two boys who were friends during the Balkan war in the ’90s. It was the all around best-realized story, and you simply didn’t want it to end. My friend and fellow cinephile and I left the IFC theater after watching them all and agreed on this, but immediately started speculating that the American film, which had just as grand aspirations but showed no restraint whatsoever in the scope or subtlety of its themes, was probably going to win.

Which brings me to a brief digression, the reason I like to tune out the Oscars. Like American politics, they too quickly become a discussion of why something will win, rather than why something is worthy. You can speculate for months (and we do) about why The Academy or The Electorate or the primary voters of New Hampshire will feel one way or another, but what do you think?

The Academy disagreed with us, it turned out. I liked “Stutterer,” which prevailed. Far from a one-gag joke, in just 12 minutes it shows three very touching scenes: A type-setter, who’s most loquacious in his own head, is having an online romantic relationship via witty instant messages, hiding his stutter. We can tell by one delightful scene with his father, in which he stammers in painfully long real time through a deeply poetic thought, that knowing him would be very rewarding to anyone who has the patience to listen. Then comes the scene in which he overhears a man at a bus stop verbally abusing a woman, but isn’t able to intervene because he can’t get the words – this is where the average short would place the finale. But Cleary brings us to a new place, a meeting with the on-line love interest. The payoff, slightly cheeseball, lands satisfyingly because Cleary has already accomplished what a good story should: Taken you to the place you thought you’d end up, and then gone one step further.

Still, you can’t compare it to “Shok”! That’s just so much better. Ah well. It won’t be the first time The Academy gave preference to an English-language film over a foreign one. Neither was it the first nor last time, I’m assuming, that some members of a film jury took the time to actually watch a 12-minute movie and skimmed the 20+ minute movies any time they lost patience.

That’s the reality I’ll be living with the rest of this year as Teddy and I figure out where to premiere “Six Women,” and where to screen it after that.

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Finding the Least Imperfect Title

February 12, 2016 by 2 Comments

I made the choice a few weeks ago to rename the short film I wrote and produced in the fall. I say, “I made the choice” like my decision was final and unilateral, but really I finally came up with a title my partners could live with.

The story, if you weren’t tuned in in the fall, was about a journalist who goes upstate for an exclusive interview with a Broadway diva who just walked off a hit production of Hamlet. Before he gets one single comment on the record, she sees through him – that he doesn’t know anything about theater – and sends him packing, only for him to discover that her assistant has taken his car to go find some jumper cables. Now he’s stranded .

My original title was “Jumper Cables,” calling attention to the key prop in the story, but my partners strongly preferred “Cell Phone Range.” That, I found, was not well-received, particularly by people over 40, who thought it sounded like a cheap comedy, but we needed to call it something while fund-raising, so we went with it as a working title. Throughout shooting and editing, I came up with some bad alternatives.

One producer and publisher I know who’d read the script, suggested “Caesar’s Wife,” but that would muddy the water. Is it about Hamlet or Julius Caesar or what? I know from my 2003 feature New World Symphony how an off-topic title can handicap a film. That was a pretty straightforward melodrama set in a theater; NWS was misleading. That experience also taught me to listen to feedback.

Watching the the various cuts, it’s more apparent in the film than it was on the page that the essence of the story boils down to one scene. Andy insists he knows something about theater. Holly flips this by challenging him: “Name six women in all of Shakespeare’s plays.” She delivers a test for him to prove himself and links it to his bigger problem, implying that he doesn’t know anything about women.

Hence our new title, “Six Women.”

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The Jansson-Visscher map.

Most of my writing time this winter, truth be told, I’m spending writing a business plan for a bar and restaurant in upstate New York. My fascination with the place is more than passing, more than just this short script.

For relaxation, I’m re-reading The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, and the Founding Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto. No explanation needed, I’m supposing, but one amazing detail from the book is the genesis of  Johannes Jansson’s map of New Netherland, which Adrian van der Donck had him publish when he was back in Holland trying to get a charter for a pubic government in New Amsterdam to replace the West India Company’s autocracy. Van der Donck is the hero of the book; he was fluent in Mohawk and other native languages and, among other things, the first civil rights lawyer in North America.

So many Dutch place names in this region I grew up in, from Schuylkill to Bushwick to Spuyten Duyvil (the Devil’s Spout!), all because a Dutchman was the first to have the motive and the means to record what his friends were calling them, and commit it to paper. Now every spot had a Dutch working title, daring someone else to come up with something better.

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Old Route 22 in Amenia, NY.

Further upstate and east a bit, beyond the reach of the Dutch, I was checking out the Millerton, NY area one day. It’s near the Massachusetts and Connecticut borders, real Yankee country, and I don’t mean the baseball team. One reason I like traveling alone is so I can stop at every historical marker I please.

How sweet that the State Department of Education put up a plaque in 1935, explaining the name of the town, and hastened to add that we have it on good authority, since the Englishman who came up with it also came up with “Vermont.” If I see Dr. Thomas Young in the afterlife I’m going to tell him, “I love your work.”

 

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Losing Light in the Catskills

November 9, 2015 by 2 Comments

“Phoenicia gets dark!” an actor was telling me on the phone a week and a half ago. “The sun goes down over that mountain, and it gets dark!”

“She’s a real Copernicus,” I thought to myself. Of course it gets dark! And of course we had an eye on sunrise and sunset times, and knew what we were facing. I chalked the seriousness in her voice up to nerves. In the weeks before a film shoot, actors start thinking about how to make sense of the details of a script, and their pleas for clarification become more urgent. They are, after all, the ones who risk looking like fools. Very often bad writing or indecisive direction comes across like bad acting to a viewer.

We were planning a three-day shoot a half hour west of Woodstock, New York, around a string of towns along Route 28 and the Esopus Creek, including Phoenicia. When I wrote the first draft of the script back in March, I imagined a June shoot, with 14 hours of daylight, and crew delighted to be outdoors. I also imagined Washington County, the rolling hills and dairy country near the Vermont border.

The story required a sense of isolation and being up a big hill, out of cell phone range. For practical reasons we needed a place with cheap lodging nearby, and within a reasonable drive from New York City. The nearest place we found was around Phoenicia, which is just two and a half hours.

Chris Bolan, foreground, in the short film with the working title "Cell Phone Range."

Chris Bolan, foreground, in the short film with the working title “Cell Phone Range.”

It was gratifying to see my partners working so hard to get details of my script right, even incidental ones such as stone fences in the middle of the woods. The valleys that run into the Hudson are long-trodden places, full of the ruins of obsolete economies: old canal locks and railroad beds, pastures full of trees, ruined barn foundations and resorts, and water-powered mills in improbable places. It’s the first de-industrialized region in North America, and for that reason it feels haunted. Even when you’re alone there, you feel like you’ve gone to a place where generations before you have gone to be alone.

I’m proud to say my partners Teddy Schenck (director) and Matthew Wiesner (producer) and especially the photographer Marco Franzoni seemed to get that atmosphere right. It was a lucky accident that we shot our short there so late in the fall. Summer is the obvious choice, from a production standpoint, on account of those long days, and fall foliage season – though that was our general aim during pre-production – has a garish quality of its own.

Winter comes there about three weeks ahead of the city, and the trees had already lost most of their leaves, leaving a brown palate with rusty reds and golds on the bushes, while the moss and ferns were still a brilliant green. If the story is about a journalist who goes to find a Hollywood star who’s quit the hustle to hide and recharge herself, then we found the right background.

The problem, as I realized on my solo scouting day just three days before the shoot, was that the actor was right. It does get dark in Phoenicia! The Catskill Mountains around the Esopus make an unusually steep valley. The shadows start growing around 1pm, and just six weeks before the solstice the sun “sets” around 3:30, and the crew would start muttering “We’re losing light.”

Strictly speaking there’s a difference between a true sunset and a Phoenicia sunset. The sun didn’t fall past the horizon, it fell past the mountain, and this difference made our film possible. It left us another 90 minutes of twilight. Though we didn’t have the leisurely 14 hours of daylight I imagined when I wrote the first draft, we still had close to nine, and for most of our shoot, we were lucky to have cloud cover, which diffused the light and softened what would have been obvious differences in time.

After two days we realized we had to act like we were losing light while the sun was still rising. The crew responded with big hearts, and most stuck around for a few extra hours of shooting on Sunday morning.

Would some of the scenes, especially the performances, have benefitted from relaxing the schedule and getting more takes? Most definitely. Would I ever make another film in Phoenicia in November again? Only if the story takes place in an empty hotel at night. But this one is shot, thanks to dozens of supporters and the hard work of several artists, and sometime in 2016 it’s going to take viewers to a special place and time of year I love.

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Stella, or The Alternator

November 2, 2015 by Leave a Comment

When coincidences start happening all around you, you’re doing something right. At least that’s the aphorism as I understand it – Carl Jung by way of the astrology freak I had a crush on in my 20s. And I have noticed, when you get deep into something, inexplicable signs give you pats on the shoulder.

Friday was six days before shooting begins on my short film: working title is still “Cell Phone Range.” It’s about a young, ambitious, not particularly soulful guy who drives from the city to a remote, upstate summer house in autumn to interview an actress who just walked off her Broadway show. He gets lost on his way there, and Stella, an octogenarian, asks him if he needs directions. He says, “No.” Then, “Actually, yes.”

Like many men, he hesitates for some reason to admit that he’s lost, or needs help. Or even that there are questions he doesn’t have the answers for.

Six days before shooting, my partners Teddy Scheck and Matt Wiesner had spent the last few days turning big question marks into check marks. Permits? Done. Hair and makeup person? Done. Lodging for the cast? Done.

One little detail we still haven’t pinned down is casting Stella, though we’re looking into options for casting her locally. That way we won’t have to house her, nor have her endure a long ride – something I wouldn’t like to ask a woman Stella’s age to do. It’s the perfect kind of job for me. At a family reunion, I prefer the company of the elders; four-year-olds, I find, are all more or less the same. I’m useless haggling with the checkout guy at the light rental place, but turn me loose in a room full of seniors, and I’ll know everyone’s name in an hour.

So off I went on Friday morning to cast Stella, and do other miscellaneous stuff around our location in Phoenicia, NY. The first sign of trouble was going through the Battery Tunnel. I was using our old car – the ’95 Corolla that sits collecting Rose-of-Sharon droplets except for some neighborhood errands, and the occasional outing away from the city. It doesn’t have EZ-Pass, so I had to go through the toll booth at the battery tunnel: The automatic window didn’t roll down, so I had to open the door.

On my way to find Stella my car died...

On my way to find Stella my car died…

It seemed odd, but a car that old is full of surprises, and I had a noon appointment upstate, so I pressed on. Sitting in worse-than-usual traffic on the West Side Highway, my windshield started bothering me; rose-of-Sharon blossoms look just like bird shit when caked upon a car. I sprayed the washing fluid, and the wipers work at one speed, extra slow. It was an electrical system problem – the only one I’d ever had with this car was the alternator, which recharges the battery while the engine’s running.

I pulled off the highway at 50th Street and drove east till I found a place to legally pull over. By that time the radio had died. Then the car would not restart. I started cancelling my afternoon appointments. The tow truck driver wanted to know my exact location: Was I closer to 10th Avenue or 9th Avenue. “I don’t know,” I said, “near the middle,” and looked at the closest building for an address.

It was a gorgeous old Art Deco building that I’d never heard of but since learned it was originally a telephone company building. Its name, no surprise, is Stella Tower.

There are setbacks in any venture, but most of us have an alternator that automatically recharges that battery that keeps us going. And when that alternator struggles, you do what it takes to get a new one. 3 more days!

...right in front of Stella Tower.

…right in front of Stella Tower.

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Writer On the Set!

April 25, 2013 by 2 Comments

I spent Easter weekend this year helping a short film shoot for a script called “Late Late,” that I had written. What a range of reactions I got as I told friends what I was doing. Many offered congratulations, naturally, but just as many skipped the congrats and went straight for the furrowed eyebrows full of concern.

The writer on the set? To writers it sounds like a punishing experience: Your beautiful, dancing child traumatized, forced to walk a straight line by sadistic kindergarten teachers. To anyone who has directed or worked in film production, it sounds worse: Just being there I had to own up to some culpability for the power struggles that would erupt.

If a film set is the last bastion of fascism in an increasingly democratic world, as Francis Coppola once said, then a writer hanging around the donut table will naturally attract all the ideas that challenge the director’s authority. As if a script is the only higher authority one can appeal to when trying to trim the director’s egotistical overreach. That’s not how it has to be.

I had gotten a phone call asking to help with the script two months before, and wrote and rewrote it around five or six times. I’d attended one production meeting and read-through, so that I could be sure that we all saw eye-to-eye about the meaning of each moment; it being comedy, it’s easy to misinterpret what’s funny from just words on a page. I declined to attend a night of rehearsals, because I was overdue to go see a movie with my wife.

Now that shooting day had come, and I was busy with other projects anyway, it wasn’t clear how much help I could be. I’d taken on casting one of the parts and figured I’d “drop by” the set to make that introduction. I even brought my laptop with me, figuring I might spend half the day working on something else. The story is about a guy who’s chronically late and absolutely has to be on time for a lunch date.

Thirty hours later, with about three hours sleep in between, I’d busted ass all weekend for the short, and I still gave less than the rest of the crew.

There is always some ridiculous problem on shooting day, and ours came because the script calls for a taxi to get stuck in traffic. Finding a traffic jam is never very hard in New York…except for Saturday mornings of holiday weekends! Just a few weeks before, I was in a car on the Lower East Side on a Sunday morning, and we sat for a half hour due to bridge construction, so I figured I’d go find it again. You never feel like quite as big a loser as you do when you’re looking for a traffic jam and can’t find one. Not only was the L.E.S. around the bridges unclogged, and Canal Street moving nicely, but the Holland Tunnel around Broome and Varick, which is always a shitshow, was moving too. I asked a cop. She referred me to 1010 Wins. Finally a taxi driver told me to relax: as the afternoon set in, the tunnel traffic would start to clog up Tribeca, and it did. I guess I was a nervous parent.

I admit I was a little surprised by the broad, cheap laughs in some of the scenes, but it is comedy, and I had been invited to rehearsals and said No. I made sure not to give any unsolicited coaching, and if anything in the performances didn’t seem right, I brought it up to the director out of earshot of any actors. There’s a time for imagination, and there’s a time to make yourself useful.

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