Bummer!!

Harvard Sq. Cinema to CLOSE! (click here for article)

This is extremely disappointing.  This theater played a major role in my "development" as a cinemaphile and would-be filmmaker -- it's probably the last one left that did, in fact.  

I saw Casablanca from a front row (2nd? 4th?) in this theater because the room was otherwise PACKED.  I saw My Brilliant Career several times here, and King of Hearts (which it used to show annually), and my first John Sayles movies (Lianna and Secaucus Seven - a double feature - with Jack Martin) !!  Not to mention a hundred other movies since it was bought out by AMC-Loews and converted to a mainstream theater. Although it's been a kind of crappy first-run hole for a while, it's still a serious blow to the history of independent exhibition - another nail in the coffin. 

Sad!

I have a faint, faint hope that  another chain (Landmark?) will buy it and fix it up, but this is only wish-based, really.  

Up and Coming

Being done with Scene 28 means that I have made rough cuts of 57 pages, and have 40 pages to go. 

Unfortunately, my all-day sessions have basically come to a close, as I'm running rather low on gelt and will need to start whoring my time and brain Very Soon.  Plus, dont' tell anyone, but I am getting pretty darn sick of this movie.

Anyway...

The scenes yet to come:

• Sarah and Amy argue about the validity of their respective political positions (how do we see each other?  how do we see the world?  what do we believe about what we see?  how connected are we to what we see?  how connected are we to each other?  how do we see each other?)

• Marissa upsets Larry by insisting that they "play the game" even while Larry is clearly unhappy at the prospect and asks her to stop -- discovery of the dinosaur in the piano bench

• Down-and-out man screams at Marissa at the park

• Larry encounters Frank on his lunch break and they discuss "people watching" and being "people people"  and wonder what That Guy (known to us as the "low-fat mayonaise" guy or the "sex with monkeys" guy, depending on the day) is thinking about.  Jack gets his cameo in this scene as "Somebody" who wants to know what time it is.  

• The "frazzled" scene -- Marissa's meltdown -- a tough scene I've mentioned before -- had to shoot it twice.  Fortunately it is six pages, not nine pages.  Six is still a lot, though, what with the crying.

• Marissa walks on the beach and has her "there is love in the world" epiphany, as evidenced by the "montage of humanity," much of which Katelyn is doing.

• Second dinner sequence - 7 pages.  This includes a long stretch of Amy and Sarah reading Marissa's story out loud -- I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that.  Maybe I should go for something like in _Tree of Life_ with dinosaurs and the explosion of the sun?  (ha ha ha!!  I was not a fan of that sequence in Tree of Life, FYI -- I approved of the intention but not the execution).  One of my favorite lines in the script is in this scene.  :)

• The showdown!   Greg's hand-held tour de force.

• The suicide sequence.  With the real-looking blood in way-too-small-and-polite quantities.

• "I'm gay."  "I know."  "You could have told me!"  (this scene will have tone challenges similar to Scene 28's)

• Visiting-Larry-in-the-hospital sequence (a challenge because I'll have to use the DAT for sound as the camera sound cut out in the hallway scene for some reason -- should probably use the DAT for all the sound, actually, but I don't know how to do that in the digital age -- synching mag stock and celluloid on a Steenbeck or Moviola I know how to do, but the 1's and 0's mean nothing to me.  Someone else is going to have to do that).  

And that's basically it!! (i.e., plus a couple long-take transition-insert thingies)  It's a daunting set of intense scenes -- but it WILL GET DONE, by gum!!

We definitely will have some structural challenges because a couple of the transition shots are, er, were not, I mean, were not exactly shot, per se.  Ahem.

La di da, la di da....

Scene 28 Revisited

Yayyy!!!!  Picture for Scene 28 is DONE.  

THAT is a LONG scene, as previously mentioned.  Nine pages.  I did manage to get it to seven minutes, though (and actually, the nine pages/seven minutes includes Scene 27, the "gay comedian" scene with Bill and Marissa eating Chinese crackers on the couch, watching TV, which is a page - these "scenes" really go together, as they follow each other temporally and even share some dialogue as the characters call across the apartment).  It really does contain three distinct parts - the discussion of their lame love lives, the discussion of the nature of attraction, and finally, Marissa's phone call with Larry and Bill's reaction to it. 

Having now spent several days re-familiarizing myself with the countless angles and takes, I have this to say as addendum to the previous post about tone:

In a way that was sometimes funny and sometimes troublesome (both of those things on set, as well, I now recall, prompted by hearing a snippet of between-take dialogue), Kevin (playing "Bill") thought the scene was long and dragging and so spoke his lines with increasing rapidity to try to pick the energy up, but Christine (playing "Marissa") wasn't responding the way he wanted her too, so he - i.e., both Kevin and Bill, are clearly irritated.  In editing, this was a challenge because not all takes are at the same pace or demonstrate the same kind of emotional relationship between the actors.  In the end, I tried to cut this for effect -- to "use it" as actors might say -- to show Bill's enthusiasm for his ideas and Marissa's comfort and familiarity with that enthusiasm.  That is, Bill may grow a little irritated to not be fully understood or appreciated right away, but Marissa remains unfazed by his irritation.

One thing that was hard, though, was to avoid a version where condescension comes into play.  That was unexpected because I didn't really sense any condescension, watching the takes whole, but cut up and re-rhythmed, if you will, it was easy to make either one of them seem sort of belittling of the other, and, indeed, to encourage a feeling in the audience toward belittling one or the other -- which was definitely unwanted.  That was kinda weird - I still don't entirely understand where it came from; I think it probably came from the way I sped up the pace -- the slower pace made them seem more relaxed with each other, or something.  Speeding it up may have looked at times like impatience on the parts of the characters, rather than simply like the "rapid fire" of an interesting conversation.  I hope I managed to keep it at bay.

As to other issues raised in previous post:

The eyelines are not great at times, but I managed to cut around the most serious breaks; it's not too bad.  I wonder, though, why we did it is as we did it.  Why did we not want Bill's "across the room" to be at the counter where he really, non-diagetically, was -- it would have been fine...  ??

Also, now having heard more of the little snippets of between-take comment from me, and seen more closely how the takes change as we go along, I see that I did not lose sight of the desired tone quite as much as I declared in the previous post.  I definitely was not always on top of it, for sure, but I think I was also unsure of how to communicate what I wanted in a way that the actors understood.  I had tried what I knew how to say, and was limited in my ability to get at it another way.  That's one of the things I have really taken away in good supply, editing this movie as a whole:  that I was under-prepared for not being immediately understood.  I hope that teaching has given me more skill in this area since 2002.  ALSO:  I do the slate for 28E, and I'm _clearly_ Very Tired.  When one's brain is not rested, one has fewer good communication skills - No Doubt. 

Tone (Scene 28 "attraction")

Tone is an interesting, tricky thing in filmmaking.

Because you shoot things out of order and over several days -- sometimes weeks -- and because we are, as human animals, prone to moods and "inner tones," if you will -- affected by the weather and how much sleep we've had and what we've eaten last and who we've spoken to about what -- keeping the tone trajectory going in a consistent way is a real challenge.  It's another thing that the director has to be really clear about -- really, specifically, explicit about, i.e., not just to intuit.  One cannot rely on one's "understanding" of the script or the characters in a general way.  One has to be concretely prepared each new shoot day to push aside the influences of the moment (the weather, the food, the latest conversation -- and those things as they influence the actors, as well).

I'm having a hard time editing Scene 28 (Bill and Marissa in the kitchen: "It's the reaction to the attraction that matters"), not just because the DP and I totally screwed up the eyelines, but especially because I failed to keep the tone on track.

There's a little footage between takes of me & the actors talking, and I wasn't struggling; I was satisfied, even quite pleased sometimes.  But having now edited scenes 1-27 and most of 29-37 into their narrative lines, I can see more clearly what 28 was supposed to be doing in the middle there than I did, that July.  Watching the footage now, I can see that on the shoot day, I had lost sight of the role of the scene in the overall arc of the final 90-minute narrative -- understandably, perhaps, given so many variables and my lack of experience, but maddeningly!

We had the kitchen location (Henry and Cynthia Jenkins' house) for a certain number of days; we had the actors for certain hours of those days - some actors at certain times, others at others, with a little overlapping where possible for group scenes.  Accordingly, as is common practice, we therefore shot all the kitchen stuff consecutively, lumping the scenes by actor availability, regardless of how they fell chronologically in the story (though I do try to shoot as close to story chronology as I can).   What's instructive to watch, from here in 2012, is that I was obviously going along with the flow that the actors were taking the scene, instead of guiding them back to the tone that the scene initially - and ultimately - called/s for.  In my appreciation for the honest emotion that was being communicated well, and in my desire to trust them and respect them as artists making choices, I actually let them down by not helping them find their way to what would ultimately have been "better" performances -- because different choices would have fit more smoothly into the flow of the scenes around that one.  I watch this footage now, see the genuine, decent "acting" going on, but am confounded about what takes to choose, because so few of them actually fit the movie _emotionally_.  "Where was the director???!!!" I cry at my computer screen. 

In this scene, the following exchange is written (about Marissa's ex and why they're not together anymore):


BILL
You're always blaming yourself.
He was probably an asshole.

MARISSA
I'm not saying he wasn't an asshole.
But I still freaked him out.  I kept
telling him the truth.

BILL
Oh.  I've told you about that.  It's bad
form.  Freaks people out.

MARISSA
Apparently.  Silly me.  And then, well,
the proof came when... [sic] He never
came to visit me in there.  He called
and left a message once.  Once.

BILL
Fuckin' loser. 

MARISSA
I know it's hard for people, but once?
It would kill you?  I mean, it would
kill you?


If the humor/levity in the tone of this exchange is lost, if earnestness becomes the "interpretation," then the moment becomes doleful -- and it's the start of the scene; doleful to start doesn't really give you anywhere to go.

"I kept telling him the truth" must be meant with a self-aware irony, i.e., said as a joke, not as a straight-forward confession -- even though (if not especially because) it is the truth ("kidding on the square," as my friend Pete Simmons would say).  Go on, try it both ways in your head....

See?  When said earnestly, it sounds self-important.  Then when Bill answers her, there's only so much he can do to lift the humor (let alone the pace) back up again because Bill's role is to be sympathetic.

The other thing I didn't do as director here, re: the actors, was help them the see which lines were the earnest lines that call for emotional investment, and which lines were basically just the route to those important lines, and therefore not requiring much "umph" themselves.  That is one of the tasks of the conversations that should go on between actor and director:  making sure the actor is clear about the arc of the scene and the emotions that the character is having in these moments.  When you have extended rehearsals, as in theater, you have more room to let the actors find the rhythms of the scene together over time, but in film, "we shoot in five." It occurs to me as I write this that maybe because of my background in theater, I was letting the actors feel it out, probe it themselves, at a pace I might use in a theatrical rehearsal... 

Hm.  Well, it didn't work in this case. 

So - as shot, Scene 28 is slow, earnest and at times ponderous (Bill espouses his theories on the nature of attraction while Marissa playfully [or not!] teases him and draws him out), when it should be quick-paced dialogue with flashes of insight and an obviously intimate connection between the friends.  The actors did a really nice job at playing the scene with attention to the content of each line, finding the ways the characters really cared deeply about what they were saying.  Unfortunately, thinking seriously and caring deeply make for  s p e a k i n g   s l o w l y, which is not appropriate to this moment in the 90-minute arc of the final film.  PLUS, because the screenwriter needed another re-write (ahem), the scene is an ASTONISHING NINE PAGES LONG.  Which, as you might gather from my capital letters, is too long. 

So what I will DO now, as editor, with this scene, is search through all the million takes (nine angles!! WTF?? Where was the director???)  (to be fair, it's partly nine angles because they walk around the room, which is also how we lost track of the eyelines - d'oh!) and pick out the little moments here and there, as found, of anything that looks like levity and friendly irony (that is, not sarcasm, which could screw with the fun that they're supposed to be having and threaten to make the discussion look adversarial in some way).  Then I will try to help the tone along by having a lot of cuts -- increasing the pace not only through the rapidity of the cuts, but also cutting out many of the one- and two-second pauses between the lines - which I might actually have wanted to have there, if the scene were supposed to be thoughtful and dramatic.

We'll be going for Tom Stoppard, not Tennessee Williams. 

And it will be hard because the actors are doing "Cat," for sure.

Argh.

Another Good Lesson for Next Time!!

End o' May

All right, well, here we are.

Basically I would like to accomplish in the next five weeks the same amount of editing that I accomplished in the last five months.

Hmmmm...

Five weeks from now is the end of June, at which time I am hoping to pass on the rough cut to someone more skilled, who may be able to clean up the sound, etc. etc. blah blah blah - I'm sure I've said that 100 times.  IF I am _not_ done by then (but  how could I not get done in five weeks what took me five months theretofore??), I do have some room to still get at least the rough cut done in time for the end of July, when I hope to have some kind of reunion and screening.  I need to look up what was our last day of shooting, because that might be a good anniversary date for a reunion -- and I think it was like the 7th of August, which would give me an additional week.  Ahem.

Alas, when I floated this reunion idea to the crew, both of our California people -- and they are not incidental (Marissa AND Larry) -- said they don't have the funds for a summer trip east this year.  SUCK!  Understandable.  I am excited, though, that most of us will be there!!  It will be so neat!  I have not yet been able to track down Greg Dancer, our DP, but, admittedly, I have not tried all avenues yet.  I expect to find him and hope that he will join us. 

More Good News:

A) I found Cynthia Conti!  Yay!  Hi, Cynthia!  Cynthia was involved from the beginning, helping with planning and doing just about anything she was asked, including second camera and sound recording.  She was one of our crew who had actually had some background in film production, so she was invaluable -- not least because her friends made up probably a third of our crew or more; that is, on any given day, there was a friend of Cynthia's there, doing something well needed.  Plus, it was a friend of Cynthia's that supplied the "piano room" location.  So we're happy to get her back into the fold.

B) I have enlisted Katelyn Whitehead, a former student of mine from UMN, to be the "Montage of Humanity" director & editor.  This is a montage of visions that Marissa has as her ESP is increasing in accessibility. I have yet to really know how long it should be, or exactly how it will fit into the final film, precisely, but with Katelyn's formidable smarts and creative instincts, it is sure to be NEAT, regardless.  Hi Katelyn! 

More mixed news:

So - One of the "little" scenes we never shot (I think there are three) was of Marissa waking up at dawn and looking at the clock, seeing her ponytail extension hanging there.  This was supposed to be a little bridge between the night before (first dinner) and the next morning when she and Larry run into each other on the beach.  The audience got to see that her long hair is fake, so that when she is short-haired on the beach, they don't think she cut all her hair off -- only to be confused when, a few hours later at meeting for worship, she has long hair again.  Hm. 

Well, I was in communication last week with Christine/Marissa, and she agreed to try to film herself in bed, waking up and looking off -- then I would shoot a shot of a ponytail (yet to be purchased) and intercut them.  Christine then very promptly did this (yay!) but unfortunately, though her camera claimed it was 16x9, it is _fake_ 16x9 -- 620x480 or something -- i.e., it's 16x9 including the black pillar-box bars on the sides!  Duh.  Plus, it doesn't seem to play at the right speed, though I might be able to fix this.  The issue is that she doesn't have or know anyone with an actual video camera (oh, how times have changed in ten years!), so she had to use her still cam.  Poop.  But I think I will keep the weird footage in there, anyway, because I think it will be better to have the scene than not have the scene, and it's only like two 15-second shots around the 5-second shot of the pony-tail or so.  So it's Really Cool!! that we now have this scene - new footage!! - but a bit of a bummer that it won't match.  The thing is, it's not like we're expecting a theatrical release anyway, so this is just one more *lesson* for us all (or me?) on our journey of learning about RIDICULOUS ICE CREAM.

Now -
Today I will clean up scene 30 (skipped 28 & 29 because I had some old 30 that was already done), and then go back to 28.  I am >>resisting<< the urge to re-cut the parts of 30 and 28 that I did YEARS AGO.  "Rough cut, rough cut, rough cut rough cut" I keep telling myself.  Right?????

I wish someone were actually reading this blog (besides Diane!  Who posted a comment last time!  Yayy!!!).  But oh well, whaddaya do?  As I head into the next five weeks, I think I will try to write more often, keeping all of you theoretical readers apprised of how ridiculous or not it is of me to try to get so much done in that amount of time.  If you ARE there, it would really help me to know it.  But I know you're not because I see how many pageviews I've had.

Sigh.

ONWARD!

Love,
Rachel