Houston, Here We Come!

 

WorldFest kicked in. Yeehaw! Our movie is going to Texas. And because I have an old friend in Dallas that I haven’t seen forever, I decided to go.

WorldFest was founded 49 years ago as Cinema Arts, an International Film Society in August, 1961. WorldFest became the third competitive international film festival in North America, following San Francisco and New York. WorldFest is the oldest Independent Film & Video Festival in the World. It evolved into a competitive International Film Festival in April, 1968. It was founded by award-winning producer/director Hunter Todd to present a quality film festival for the Independent filmmakers. Hunter Todd has been honored with more than 115 international awards for creative excellence in film production, and he has been the producer, director, writer and/or cameraman on more than 300 motion picture and video productions. The mission/vision statement of WorldFest is “to recognize and honor outstanding creative excellence in film & video, to validate brilliant abilities and to promote cultural tourism for Houston, to develop film production in the region and to add to the rich cultural fabric of the city of Houston. All members of the WorldFest staff are filmmakers.”

While we were there we saw every short we had time for. Some were funny, some dramatic, all filled with the heartbreaking effort a short filmmaker puts into his or her project.

When I entered the theatre where EASY MADE HARD would be projected I stopped in my tracks. The screen was enormous. I know everything is big in Texas, but this was beyond big. At first I was thrilled and then I gulped. What minor indiscretions might show up?

We sat through the first short program. Took a quick break and returned to watch the grouping of films in which EASY MADE HARD was scheduled. The films were shown on a $250,000 20,000 lumen light projector that truly makes the images sing. The first film came up. Then the second. I couldn’t eat even a bite of popcorn. My mouth was dry and my heart beat a little bit faster.

The eerie wail of Eric McFadden’s guitar signaled the beginning. There were the kids jumping rope and soon Rhonnie Washington (Curtis Brown) came around the corner carrying his bag of groceries, his face filling the screen. Beautiful! The film continued into the darkness of the house until that critical moment is reached in which Tyrone (Lloyd Roberson II) offers his manipulative plea for mercy. The shot. The kids stopped jumping rope and then continued. The heartbroken father. The phone call. The explanations cards. Finally the credits rolled.

The humongus screen fell black. And it was over.

The story we had all worked so hard to tell was told on the biggest screen I may ever see.

But there was more. Hunter Todd took the stage to announce the winner of the Gold Remi Award. I busied myself packing up my purse and WorldFest bag preparing to leave the theatre when I heard, “The winner of the Remi Gold Award is EASY MADE HARD.”

What? What did he just say? Winner? The Gold? Easy Made Hard?

A small prayer: Bless WorldFest. Thank you!

We’ll Always Have Cleveland

 

The invitation came in an email: “Congratulations! Easy Made Hard has been selected to screen at the 34^th Annual Cleveland International Film Festival.”

Yes! Yes! Yes! The first invitation requires attendance. Who knows this might be the only festival to which our baby gets invited.

So I wing to Seattle, pick up my oldest daughter, Amy, and together we fly easy to Cleveland. We are met by a film festival representative (one of the 450 volunteers that make this festival run like a Swiss clock,) and are whisked off in a Mercedes SUV to CIFF headquarters. We are warmly greeted and presented with colorful bags filled with programs and vouchers for shirts and caps.

We’d missed the chance to see films that night and we were tired and hungry. So we ventured over to 4^th Street, a colorful alley crisscrossed with strands of lights and lined with chic restaurants and hip bistros. A great dinner and back to the hotel for some rest. It had been a long day.

Up early the next morning, a quick breakfast and by 9AM we’re taxiing our way in pouring rain to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

What a poignant, amazing place filled with memories, struggles, wonderful music… lyrical diaries of not only the musicians’ lives but ours too. For decades so much of the events that went on with all of us are interwoven in the songs of this massive gathering a talent.

A light lunch and then back to the Tower Center for movies. The Center is a huge mall filled with offices and stores ranging from high end to less expensive faire. In the atrium is an enormous reflecting pond with fountains and a large multiplex which, for one week, is the home of the Cleveland International Film Festival. We manage to get in one feature before it is time for the program for which I’ve been anxiously waiting: Indie Shorts.

Amy and I are the first in the theatre. And the ONLY people in the theatre. What if no one else comes? Okay, that’s all right. At least I’ll be able to see the film on a big screen. It doesn’t matter that we’re sitting in a theatre that holds 300 people…all by ourselves…two people…here…alone. Who goes to shorts anyway? Why would they when there are all these features to see? Oh, look. Another person comes in and sits across from us. Okay. Three people. That’s good. Why would I think people would come—look! Over there. Four people. And five stream in. And then ten. In 20 minutes the theatre is full! There’s not one empty seat.

My mouth is dry. I can hardly swallow.

A festival person welcomes the crowd and invites filmmakers who have shorts showing in the program to come down front. There are three of us. We are introduced and then back to our seats.

The lights dim. The first film comes on. The screen now really looks huge. The sound is awesome. The images enormous. I slump down in my chair. Oh, my God…what was I thinking…

Easy Made Hard is sixth in a program of eight. Up it comes. That edgy musical beginning. I stop breathing.

Rhonnie Washington’s million dollar smile lights up the theatre. The kids are spectacular, beautiful and engaging. The action carries us into the darkness of the house. There’s Lloyd Roberson II, the complexity he brings to the character of Tyrone, the boy with the sweet face but the sad internal poison, flooding the screen. The cinematography is striking, editing tight, lighting perfect and the music right on. (Of course these are MY observations!)

12 mintues, 21 seconds the credits roll and I breathe again. There’s hearty applause. During the film the audience doesn’t move. Not a hair, not a clearing of a throat, not a shift in a seat. They are glued. The man sitting next to me whisperes, “Great. Disturbing, but really great!”

The program is over. Lights up. Filmmakers are invited to answer questions. The audience is interested in everything from all of us. They want to know what we shot on, or how the make-up was handled or how we made the fight look so real.

Finally the audience drifts out to a large table where there are ballots for them to vote for their favorites. The winner will be divulged the last night of the festival.

An enthusiastic woman approaches me. She wants to bring the film to the Stark County, Ohio area. Another is interested in getting it into an Ohio classroom. I’d be thrilled to work with her. This is what Easy Made Hard is about. As we say on the web site: “We want to further the conversation.”

Many people congratulate us. One man is in tears. He is experiencing a Tyrone in his life. For me, as a storyteller, I see it as my job to provoke emotion. Happy, sad, angry, disgust…what ever it is, provoke emotion. Clearly we have touched this person and for that I feel satisfied.

Though the cast and crew weren’t able to go with me, their hearts and souls were there on the screen.

We’ll always have Cleveland!

An Invitation Arrives

An invitation arrives in my in box: “Dear Elizabeth, Congratulations! Your film Easy Made Hard the Film has been selected to screen at the 34th Cleveland International Film Festival (March 18-28, 2010).This year, close to 1200 independent short film entries were submitted for review by our Selection Committee and 160 films were chosen. Needless to say, competition was fierce.”
I breathe comfortably for the first time since the day I tucked my DVD screener into its bubble pack envelope and sent our baby winging off to Cleveland. Founded in 1977, the Cleveland Fest has been presented every spring for over three decades. Considered an A List festival, it is Ohio’s premier film event featuring over 240 films originating from 60 countries.
It feels wonderful to think someone else appreciates what I know is special. I suppose I view the film from a bias point of view. But that’s what we creators do. We create a work and to do that we must first fall in love with the vision. Then we must get others to fall in love too.

“I will die if I can’t work on making this story into a film!”

Well, maybe that’s a bit extreme, but plucking an idea out of the ethers, getting it down on paper in a form that stirs the emotional gut of someone else, and then translating it into images requires all involved to be totally dedicated and completely insane.

As somebody said, if you don’t court disaster, you can’t have success. Somebody else said, life expands and contracts in proportion with one’s courage.

It’s a requirement for you to understand if you choose to join the family of artists, whether you’re a filmmaker, a painter, a writer, musician, sculptor, or a composer, you need to know it’s like joining the Mafia. Prepared to be whacked!

And once you’re in the family you’ll soon discover creating ain’t enough. Hell no! We creative types want the world to love our baby. The truth is we want the world to love us. It’s primal.

So I bow to the wonderful people at the Cleveland International Film Festival for recognizing our newbie. Bless you!

Please Take My Baby to the Party

The business of finding your film’s way into the world is a little like trolling for a lover. It’s like looking for someone who will nurture your offspring and properly introduce it to a movie-loving audience.

Hey, there Festival Programmer, take a look at my beauty, EASY MADE HARD. It’s strong, it’s filled with grit, twists and interesting images. Won’t you invite it in?

I’ve done all the matchmaker stuff. I’ve targeted the best lovers that I think will treat the tender newbie with care. Top festivals throughout the world head my list. I’ve carefully filled out applications, written checks or made credit card charges to pay for entry, tucked DVD’s snugly into bubble envelopes, sealed, stamped and sent. Deadlines met.

So, the waiting begins. Will my baby attract an admirer? Will this upstart born of tremendous effort and dedication of cast and crew find a cavalier to escort it to the party?

I trudge into the post office. Tony, the best damn post office clerk on the face of the planet cocks his head. “Heard from anyone yet?”  He presses a metered $1.56 stamp on to another bubble envelope carrying my next submission.

I shake my head. “No. Not yet.”

I know there are thousands of filmmakers wearing their hearts on their sleeves hoping their babies will attract a lover. Sundance has over 9000 submissions and they accept 200. A good percentage of these are short films. The odds aren’t quite that bad for other festivals, but it’s an up hill push. We missed the Sundance deadline as we were still in post.

I peruse the Sundance site lamenting the fact that my baby wasn’t mature enough to go to that party. I click on the videos displayed. “Move over,” I fell like saying. “Make room for my film.”

And then, like magic, I am standing in front of the Mary G. Steiner Egyptian Theatre on Main Street in Park City. Behind me glows the marquee. It reads: EASY MADE HARD. Robert Redford steps up, puts his arm around my shoulder and presents me with a statuette for Best Short Film. See my face. Can you see it? See my ear-to-ear smile. Look at my eyes, bright and filled with tears. I am so happy. So proud. “Thank you, Mr. Redford. And I want to thank my parents for having me, my friends for putting up with–

Wait!  What’s this?

I’m having a delusion?

My computer crashes, but seconds before the screen goes dark, it snickers and these words burn on its face: YOU ARE A LOON! GO TAKE A COLD SHOWER!

I reboot my machine.

The sound of the Microsoft boot up music and it’s back. And I’m back.

“Next year, ” I whisper to my Inspiron 1545. “Next year I’ll find a lover to take my baby to the Sundance party.”

No White Guilt Here

I first wrote the tale of EASY MADE HARD as a short story. From there it morphed into a stage play and finally into the short film shot August 2009.

 I remember sitting in the back of the theatre watching the packed house watch the play. The actors were strong and the audience totally engaged. When the play was over, the director and actors were invited to the stage to answer questions from the audience.

 It was a lively discussion. In fact so lively, at times people were on their feet shouting at each other. Familial power, getting away with murder, DNA of the soul were some of the themes passionately discussed. I thought, if I can bring an audience to this level of emotion, I’ve done my job.

 And then somebody asked the question: “Who wrote this play?” I was invited to join the director and cast on stage. And that’s where the tenor of the conversation changed. No longer was the discussion about the characters and their choices, but it was about a white woman writing a story about black people.

 During the shooting, working with an integrated cast and crew, I heard none of that. Didn’t even get a whiff of that point-of-view. Not until I received the following email from an anonymous crew member responding to my blog about our first day of shooting when we were booted out of a neighborhood by young men who lived in the area.

 The missive went as follows:

 Uhhh… That script does perpetuate stereotypes, is glaringly ethnocentric, and almost erotically leaden with a masturbatory white guilt. It was everything bad about 90′s neo blaxploitation: the hamhanded politics and cheap melodrama of the whole Boyz in Da Hood phenomenon, which was okay then, for it was an exploited but consequently circulated voice from black people expressing black angst, but this … this was a white fetishist borrowing those used-up cliches and stereotypes to … what? To offer an allegory, “a cautionary tale” gifted to needy blacks by a sensitive and enlightened white person.

Those people were right that day. Their anger was palpable, but they weren’t violent, and their arguments about story and character were legit. I can remember one of them, in reference to the stereotypes portrayed by the script, saying, “This neighborhood has a community garden. All organic food, maintained by the residents. Why don’t you guys tell that story?” Also all the dumb shit in the script about “My Jesus is whispering to me,” expressed in a moment of melodrama by the Curtis character (a got a gun to his wayward thug sons head), inspired one of the upset black guys to snigger, “There are black agnostics you know.”

Anyway, I don’t think you meant any ill intent, but you have no moral, experiential, or intellectual authority to properly tell that story. You’re very out of touch and audiences will smell this and cringe. Those people didn’t want their neighborhood used as set dressing for another stupidly righteous act of exploitation. Seriously, I hate to hurt the feelings of a fellow filmmaker trying to create. God knows, we don’t all have to absolutely agree with each others’ work, but it’s my moral obligation to serve you this feedback.

Don’t you know how to write what you know?

 I wonder why this person who was so deeply offended by script, signed on to the project and saw it through? The story I told is based on an actual event that occurred in East Los Angeles. Therefore we cast the film with black actors. But that was the only reason. The power of a father killing a son resonated with such enormity, I felt I had to write it, no matter what color the characters were.

 The script was one of six chosen by the DC Shorts Screenplay Competition. In October I went to Washington to participate in a “table reading.” When no black actors showed up for the audition, I chose two of the strongest white actors to read the parts. True, some of the dialog would not be relevant if the tale was told about white characters, but the deeply felt motivations didn’t change with the change of skin color. An audience of 150 agreed.

 I harbor no white guilt. I only want to tell stories that open hearts and minds. I also feel that tiptoeing around racial themes only deepens the racial divide.

 And as far as writing stories I know, I’ve written ten year-old girls, psychopaths, women in their late seventies, men struggling with latent homosexual tendencies, a macaw and a duck to name a few. Do I have to be these characters and have lived their lives to write them?

 If the film reaches an audience through film festivals, there may be more comments like the ones I received from “Anonymous.” Any time anyone wants to talk about these issues, I’m available, but face to face conversations are preferable to hiding behind an email address I don’t recognize.

The Post Saga

 Okay, the three hundred and sixty minutes of raw footage has been edited down to 12 minutes, 21 seconds, including credits. With editor, Tom Bullock at the helm, director Delphine Suter and I winnowed, massaged, manipulated and honed our “little” movie down until it was mean and lean: every sequence required, every scene important, every word needed.

From the editing room it went into the capable hands of Jeremy Roland who stabilized three of the shots that were hampered by too much camera movement.

Next the files were turned over to Dave Nelson at Outpost Studios. In the dark recesses of his lair on Folsom Street, the sound of the film came to life. Here the Foley artist heightened the sound of footsteps, coffee being poured, a gun being cocked. The term Foley is named after Jack Foley, one of the earliest and best-known Hollywood practitioners of the art.

	How It’s Made
Galloping horses	Banging empty coconut shells together[1]
Kissing	Kissing back of hand
Punching someone	Thumping watermelons
High heels	Artist walks in high heels on wooden platform
Bone-breaking blow	Breaking celery or twisting a head of romaine
Footsteps in snow	Squeezing a box of corn starch
Thunder	Flapping an aluminum sheet
Bird flapping its wings	Flapping a pair of gloves
Fire	Rapid opening and closing of an umbrella along with the crackle of thick cello
Car crash	shaking a metal box filled with wood and metal scraps
Grass or leaves crunching	Balling up audio tape

 We spent two days tweaking original music composed by Sam Bass, Kevin Carnes and Eric McFadden. These talented musicians provided a mysterious and edgy score. Sam’s cello speaks for Curtis Brown, the father. Eric’s guitar speaks for Tyrone, the son. In the sound design, the music was mixed to heighten the emotion.

From Outpost our baby was placed in the sensitive hands of Ed Rudolph at VideoArts, a state-of-the-art post house. If a character gets lost in the shadows, with subtle tweaking by powerful computers, the image can be coaxed out to be clearer. In a surreal moment Tyrone sees himself, a shocking reflection of what he has become. Prior to the color correction he looked like a lost kid desperate for protection. After color correction, the blood on his shirt is evident and the moment reads very differently.

At the end of the session titles are checked and repostioned and the film is complete.

Our movie is finished. 

I took a deep breath as a damn of tears gathered in my throat. This story I’d been told years ago about this boy and his father had finally found its way out. For me it was a profound moment. This is my movie. I wrote it and produced it, but in reality it isn’t mine any more. It belongs to the actors, the director, the cinematographer, the editor. It belongs to the entire crew, every grip, the sound recorder, the caterer. It belongs to the musicians, the Foley artist, the sound mixer, the color corrector. And with a little bit of luck and a whole lot of timing it will soon belong to an audience.

Here you go, world. Take a look at our baby!

If I were to be asked how I want an audience to react, I’d say: I want you to be left breathless.

How Sweet It Is

How sweet it was. Early in the morning, dreams still within my grasp, I opened my email to discover my script was an “Official Selection” of the DC Shorts.

Read on. You, Elizabeth Appell, are invited to Washington, D.C. to oversee a table reading of your short script, Easy Made Hard. AND…AND…if you win the Audience’s Favorite Award, you will collect $2,000 without passing go.

Well, hells bells. I’m on!

I booked a cheap ticket through Hot Wire and on October 15th caught a big bird east. I knew I had a stop in Salt Lake. Never been there. But wait! What’s this? Hot Wire neglected to include in the itinerary that I also would have to stop in Detroit. How lucky could I be?

Finally, after taking off and landing twice, swimming like a salmon up stream through airport crowds and eating dry and tasteless food offered by three or four pathetic choices located in the airport arcade, (no longer do they serve food on the flights,) I arrive cranky and spent in the nation’s capital.

11 PM. I stumble onto a cab and head for the Palomar Hotel. I lean back, close my eyes, take a breath and wait for my atoms, which are strung like Christmas lights across the country, to catch up. When I open my eyes, I gasped.

A glowing beacon hovered across the river in the darkness. The Lincoln Memorial. Tears leapt into my eyes. God Bless America.

For the next four days I operated on Pacific Standard Time, only I was in the East. That meant I went to bed at 1PM THEIR time and woke up 3AM MY time. Brutal. But who needed sleep when you were in the groove.

Well, sort of in the groove.

Jonathan Gann, Founder and Director of DC Shorts had sent headshots of black actors for me to peruse before I left. (My script is written for an all black cast.) I had requested three older men to audition for the father’s part and three younger guys to audition for the son.

Five other writers had also been bestowed the honor, and they too had been sent headshots from which to choose.

On Saturday morning, thirty Thespians arrived to perform monologs. From this pool of talent we were to choose actors for our readings. All shapes and sizes trooped in, with one exception. All shapes and sizes of white people. Only one black actor showed up.

Okay, what now? This is NOT being in the groove.

I felt uncomfortable casting the one young black guy, (although his monolog was beautifully done,) to play opposite a white father. I feared the racial mix would throw an element into the play that would only puzzle the audience and detract from the truth of my story.

So, what’s a writer to do?

This writer chose two white actors, John Bailey, who would read Curtis Brown, the father, and John Robert Kenna, who would read the son, Tyrone. In the first cold reading I knew I’d made the right decision. Within seconds these two talented men checked their whiteness at the door and took on the tragic characters of this father and son and played them with a palpable rawness that was heartbreaking.

We did not win the $2000. This too is a symptom of NOT being in the groove. But we were playing on the hometown field and that’s a tough one to beat. No matter, we got raves, great feedback, and the high of hitting the notes just right. That IS being in the groove.

DC Shorts is now in its 6th year and has been named by MovieMaker Magazine as “one of the nation’s leading short film festivals. They screen 100 movies made by filmmakers from across the U.S. as well as from 10 different countries.
As I bid adieu to the whirl wind, Jon Gann, he hugged me and said he looked forward to seeing Easy Made Hard…as a film. My hope (a four-letter word) is it will be accepted to be screened in 2010 festival.
Thank you, DC Shorts, for the encouragement. Your early morning email spurred me on and the film is quickly becoming a reality.

Next Step: Editing

The shoot is over and the sound and image files are delivered to the editor, Tom Bullock.

 Entering Tom’s world requires a trip to North Beach and a shift in one’s perceptions. His lair consists of four rooms stacked from floor to ceiling with reels and tapes, books and scripts. In one of the back rooms sits an antique Moviola, a gadget deigned for editors to view the film and simultaneously edit. It was invented in 1924 and revolutionized the post production process. Besides editing tables laden with cutting paraphernalia, the walls are plastered with movie posters depicting the projects he has sliced and diced into life. The middle room is where this storyteller spends long hours in the dark holding court over a console of computers and monitors.

Early on in the making of Easy Made Hard, we came to the decision to use the Red Camera. The RED is like a cross between a film camera and a large video camera. It is solidly built, feels and operates like a camera of the highest quality, and works with lenses which would traditionally attach to a 35mm motion picture body. The ability to shoot the same resolution as 35mm film has redefine the digital standard for feature film production, especially for independents.

But it’s new. In order to edit our Red files, Tom had to upgrade his equipment. He’s a quick study and soon the director, Delphine Suter and I were hovering over Tom’s shoulder as he tinkered using his careful and sensitive editor’s eye to the rough cut.  

At the beginning of this first editing session, my stomach lurched. What had happened to the tight, disturbing gem I had envisioned? What I was seeing now was jumpy and awkwardly paced. The sound was tiny and the damn thing was too long. (When you make a short, keep it short.)

But Tom kept working his magic and before I knew it, frames smoothed out and the piece I had seen in my head as I wrote it, began to emerge.

Over and over again as we viewed the film, I watched closely for shifts in the lighting because on the last day of the shoot a heart-stopping revelation raised its nasty little head. We had a continuity problem. A big one.

I whined. “Can’t we fix it in post?”

“No!” was the answer.

Okay, okay. We reshoot. It was 6:30 PM. The sun was sinking and with it my hopes to get this thing shot. We don’t have time unless…

…the crew went into hyper-drive, turned night into day, and the scene was reshot. When we wrapped, tired and relieved that the ordeal was over, I stepped outside. I was shocked. It was dark. Thanks to Mickey Freeman, our talented and unflappable director of photography and his gaffer, Tom Schnitzvil, the light streaming through the windows was so convincing, I had forgotten it was night.

As we watched the rough cut, the snafu was undetectable.

For days Tom continued to toil over the frames. Cut a second here, add three seconds here. I was amazed that these minute edits made significant changes in the flow and the telling of the story.

Today as I write this music is being composed and we move deeper into post production in which frames will be stabilized, color will be corrected, and sound will be mixed.

I yearn for the day I slip a completed DVD into the mail sending it off to the whim of a film festival programmer. That’s the day I will stop breathing as I await on behalf of an amazing crew for their baby to be invited to meet the world.

Part of the Process

My throat tightened and I thought, oh golly gee whiz (Translation: oh shit!) – it’s really going to happen. We’re going to make the movie. Maybe I’m crazy…shouldn’t do this…I should go home…crawl under the covers…was this the right script?…what made me I think I could pull this off…go home…crawl under the covers…are these the right actors…throw up…go home…I need to rewrite the…crawl under the covers…

Due to our auspicious reception in Oakland (see last blog) we had to move our exterior shots to Berkeley.

The crew laid tracks in the street in front of the house we’d scouted for the interior shots. First order of business was to lay a track on which would glide a beautiful piece of equipment called a jimmy jib. It had a long boom and the red camera attached at the end. It seemed like an alien head with one big eye connected to a very long neck. This alien could follow the action of the actors from a variety of positions. It was amazing and made everything feel so…REAL.

The first scene opens with a bunch of kids laughing, jumping rope and generally enjoying being kids. They were excited, a little nervous, but ready to do whatever was asked. Delphine Suter, director, and Mickey Freeman, our director of photography, (he and Delphine were two of the many artists on this shoot) prepared the kids for the first shot.

And then…”ACTION!” We shot many takes of these wonderful young actors whose job it was to set a light tone for a story that would soon turn dark. They worked hard and with enthusiasm. We got wide shots and close ups. And then we pressed on.

“Do you have a permit?” A city bureaucrat pulled out of his city car and straightened up to his full height of about ten feet. Okay, okay, I can handle this, I thought to myself. “You see, here in Berkeley we were going to shoot only inside so I was told I didn’t need a permit, but we had some trouble in Oakland and–”

“What you’re telling me is, you don’t have a permit.” And then a cop arrived. And neighbors gathered. More explanations. Another cop. I was salivating for their black and whites. How great it would be for our last scene to have our two cop actors pull up in a real cop cruiser.

Quick call to the Berkeley Film Commission.

One hour later the Calvary arrived in the form of a blonde bombshell known as Barbara Hillman. She is the director of the Berkeley Film Commission. Not only did Barbara get our permit, but drove over and DELIVERED IT in person!

We moved on to the interior shots which were the majority of the picture. Things went smoothly. A happy crew. Good food. Strong performances. We were bipping along. No under-the-covers time for this first time writer/producer.

Second day the pace continued. Everyone generously working their behinds off. All was well. Better than well. The footage we were getting looked great. Forget that stuff about hiding under the covers. This is fun. This is whoopie. This is…what? WHAT?

6:30PM. We were scheduled to wrap at 7:30. We were tired, hungry. Spent. WHAT? We had a continuity problem. A big one.

“Can’t we cheat it?”
“No.”
“In the edit. Can’t we do something about it in the edit?”
“No.”
Decision: We’d go for it. Reshoot. We were losing our light. Tom Schnitzvil, artist gaffer made night turn into day.

Walking dinner everyone! Pizza, soon cold and slimy, as everyone was working with such dedication they barely noticed the food had arrived.

That night it was close to midnight when I crawled under the covers. Oh, God, I groaned as I pushed as far under as I could get. What made think I could…

Out cold.

First Day of Shooting

The sun rose on August 14. Let’s go make a movie!

 6:30 AM:

 I crossed the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge and headed for west Oakland. We had scouted for weeks for both the exterior location and a house to shoot the interior story.

 The exterior: we knew it when we saw it. A gritty side of Oakland studded with gems of single family homes. Homes that were built in the 1930’s, homes that were bought often by proud blue collar black families, hard working, noble. Homes that had been neglected as some of that pride and nobility had become tarnished by time, by political missteps, by second and third generation entitlements.

 At 11^th and Pine stood a wooden fence painted with a colorful mural depicting the neighborhood as one filled with strong faces and bodies sketched tall. It spoke of a bright, thriving community. It was a perfect background to introduce our main character: Curtis Brown, a fictional man who lived in one of those houses and maybe even lent a hand in painting the mural.

 A crew of 27 plus eight actors, of which six were kids and parents landed at the location. Juliette Blake, herself a black woman and caterer extraordinaire, whipped out a table and began setting up for coffee, juice, and breakfast goodies. Before anyone had taken their first sip of her rich, hot brew, there was trouble.

 A clutch of black men from the neighborhood tromped into our midst. They were angry, breathing heavy, and their eyes flashed with authority and danger. They wanted us to go. They wanted us off their turf. They were adamant and threatening. In language that can’t repeated, they yelled and shouted that the script put them in a bad light, that it “diminished” them (my word) and they were having none of it. We tried to make them understand that EASY MADE HARD is a cautionary tale. Don’t travel the path taken by one of the main characters: Tyrone, the son of Curtis Brown. Hey, guys, we wheedled. We have a permit! None of this mattered and seemed to only fuel their fire.

 The danger became palpable. We had kids that we didn’t want to put at risk. The bro were going to make the shoot impossible by yelling and intruding as much as possible.

 Decision: leave. We lost half a morning’s shooting time, but most of all we lost the rich character of the neighborhood, a place that the viewing audiences would not have derided, but would have appreciated. A loss for the brothers of the neighborhood. A loss for us.

 On to Berkeley.