Cinemad

New Interviews

2008-07-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

New interviews and an article I wrote,
that are on other websites:

Interview with Daft Punk
for Filmmaker mag, about their film ELECTROMA, now out on dvd

Drawing on Inspiration
article on DIY no-budget animation done for Film In Focus

and my interview with Don Hertzfeldt was in the Feb 08 issue of The Believer

see the side links here for older interviews.
Upcoming interviews with Peter Hutton and Leighton Pierce.

Working on a Cinemad Anthology and short film DVD, this is my 10th year of "publishing."

WENDELL B. HARRIS JR.

2007-12-22T23:25:00.000-08:00

In the film CHAMELEON STREET (1989), the enigmatic Doug Street goes through a series of cons, sometimes to make money, sometimes to prove he can do more than what the world expects of him. In short time he goes from a simple extortion plot to complex impersonations, including as a reporter from Time, a Yale student, a lawyer and even a surgeon. Yes, a surgeon.

The point of the film is not just to tell a story of a con man, but asks what a black man is expected to do to make a living in this modern world. Based mostly on the true story of super-con-man William Douglas Street, Jr. the film is written and directed by Wendell B. Harris, Jr. who also turns in an uncanny performance as the lead character.

The film existed in the burgeoning indie cinema of the early 90s. Unlike most of the films around him though, Harris provided a complicated character and not a simple genre drama or comedy. The extremely intelligent Street has great ideas to fight the system, but is constantly stumped by tiny details he cannot control. It’s a drama and you root for Street to win but feel sorry for the people getting conned as well. And it’s bittersweet funny, as the sardonic humor in the film rings all too true. Above all, you feel the frustration that leads to fighting back against the grain.

The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1990. But that didn’t lead to distribution. Rather, the prize led to many meetings in Hollywood, the insult of a possible remake rather than a distribution deal, some deals for writing scripts, and a brutal joke. CHAMELEON STREET did get a forgettable theatrical release and Wendell was able to write some scripts. Only now at the end of 2007 does the film finally get a DVD release.

CINEMAD: I’m glad the film is finally coming out to DVD.

WENDELL HARRIS: My DVD distributor told me, “Please understand that CHAMELEON STREET is being perceived as an ‘art-house’ film by retailers. This will affect their initial buy.”

I’ve always had a really big problem with understanding what the word art-house film means. What is an art-house film? To me, it always has a connotation that, from a marketing standpoint, it means that not much of an effort is going to be made.

I would agree with that.

That may not be the case with Image. I think John Powers [marketing Vice President, Image Entertainment] knows what he is doing. What is your take on that phrase?

The art-house tag? That does mean that they will not put as much effort into it as they would toward a bad movie with a famous actor. I don’t necessarily think an art-house film has to make you think, but for the most part, it’s a film that’s not escapist.

It’s not TRANSFORMERS (2007).

No. You’re not going to be thinking while you’re watching TRANSFORMERS.

There are films from all over the world that are called art-house. But when I hear the words ‘art-house’, for some reason, it’s genetically speared into my DNA: I always think of EL TOPO (1970). And I haven’t even seen EL TOPO. But I think about this film! I’ve heard that the director lined up a million lizards and shot them on camera.

Frogs. [Actually, the famous frog scene is in the follow-up film to EL TOPO, called HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973).]

OK, frogs then. But that’s what comes to my mind whenever I hear that art-house tag. Shooting a million frogs. Something accomplished on a very low budget that very few people want to see. I have never fought people who call [CHAMELEON STREET] an ‘art film’ or a ‘black film’ or an ‘avant-garde’ film. To me, an art-house film is an un-marketed film.

CHAMELEON STREET has never been marketed aggressively. Up until this point, this is the most exposure it has ever received. The only reason you’ve ever heard of the film is because some film critics from 1990, 1991 and 1992 … they would not let it die.

The first time I heard about your film was because of the controversy of it not getting distribution. I don’t know what the show was, but you were being interviewed on a PBS show. It was specifically about how no one would distribute it even though it won at Sundance. Only Will Smith wanted to buy it so that he can make a remake.

That’s partially true. It went through four permutations. It was Arsenio Hall. Then Will Smith, then Sinbad. Between 1990 and 1993 I was totally focused on getting through the gauntlet. You know. You’re running through this gauntlet trying to reach a distributor. I never said Hollywood suppressed CHAMELEON STREET until around the mid-90s.

I remember when Elvis Mitchell came with the BBC to interview me at my apartment in Burbank. At one point Elvis Mitchell says to me, “Sorry for your film being suppressed.”

I said, “ Uh – what do you mean? Why do you think that?”

He said, “Well, why do you think Warner Brothers has paid you a quarter of a million dollars for the remake rights? Yet they refuse to distribute your film.”

The camera’s running and I’m going , “Aaaaaaaah…er, ah…” Robert Krulwich made the same point a year later on an ABC special. Now it’s 2007 and I can tell you: yeah, it was suppressed, all right.

How do those discussions with distributors go? “We really love your film and we think it’d be better if we make it again?” It’s purely business for them to buy a good idea and put someone famous in it.

That’s true. If you make the money, you’ll be promoted. If you don’t make the money, you won’t be. But as Orson Welles said, “There’s something more important in Hollywood than money. What vision is being promoted? ” In other words, what are the ideas being promoted in the film? Ideas get demoted and suppressed. Money is not the final arbiter. Content is king. It is what’s going to be given / fed to the American public and to the world.

The ideas in CHAMELEON STREET have always threatened the status quo. I was essentially paid a quarter of a million dollars to . . . it almost feels like bribe money, or hush money. I was told repeatedly by every distributor in Hollywood, “It’s a wonderful film! We just don’t know what to do with it.” But they knew exactly what to do with it. Suppress it.

I forgot to mention it was also being considered for Wesley Snipes as well. Each time it was given to a different person, it was given a different ambience. For Wesley Snipes, it was changed into a kind of car chase movie. For Sinbad, it was changed into a kind of goof-ball character. For Arsenio, it was a hybrid of the two.

Wendell B. Harris, Jr. as Doug Street.

Did they tell you what other titles they were going to call it?

No, they were going to keep it CHAMELEON STREET. By the way, when this went down, I was also given an associate producer credit, so that when the film was remade, I would be consulted.

Did winning Sundance not pack enough punch?

The prize of winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance is a 14” crystal obelisk. But that’s not the real prize. The real prize is that you get immediate access to every major production house in Hollywood. You get 25 meetings with all the top people. I could take the next three hours and tell you about my meetings with Jane Fonda’s company, Robert Redford’s company, Barry Levinson, Ed Pressman, Irving Azoff, Steven Spielberg, whoever! That’s the real prize.

If you were alive at the time you’ll recall I’m sure that 1989, 1990, 1991- that was the epoch of the black director. That was when being black was such a wonderful plus and you could actually get a good deal. After Sundance, I went to Hollywood in 1990, got an apartment in Burbank. I told myself that I was going to make myself as available as possible for the next three years.

But by 1993, after being there for three years, working to get work, I was sitting in Musso and Frank’s. A friend of mine who worked over at Paramount came over to my table and said, “Guess what I just heard?”

I said, “What?”

She said, “Well, it goes like this ….. All you have to do to get a production deal in Hollywood today is be black, male and NOT Wendell Harris.”

(Laughs) I said, “Thanks a lot!”

That sucks.

It makes a great anecdotal story. But man, when you actually go through it, it’s like going through hell.

I heard of one project called NEGROPOLIS.

That was one of my projects that I was pushing. I pushed to get that made for about four years. That was my satire comedy. I did get a bite in 1992 from Spike Lee’s production company but the deal fell apart. I pitched NEGROPOLIS all over Glib Town. In retrospect, I think some people in Hollywood were perhaps disturbed by the premise of NEGROPOLIS. You know, you walk into these meetings in Hollywood and say, “Okay, the whole movie takes place in ancient Rome except the emperor and ruling elite are all black and all the slaves are white. Isn’t that hilarious?” The response would always be, “Isn’t that amusing - ? Yes, what a novel approach. Do you see that novel door over there? Go make a novel exit.” I guess white people don’t want to be slaves. Who knew? Oh well ….. But the Senate is mixed. There are a few white senators. Koreans, too .

But there is so much hilarious stuff in NEGROPOLIS. Like I said, ancient Rome is being run by a black emperor named Canigula. Not Caligula -- Canigula. I wrote some great roles for several great artists: Shirley Caesar, Aimee Mann, Dom Irrera, Stephanie Miller, Aretha Franklin, Leah Krinsky and Chris Tucker…. This was before Chris Tucker started making 50 million per pic. One of the characters I loved was the Middle-Aged Hercules. He’s still strong but he wears a truss. Wanted Bill Murray for that. Then there is Alexander the Great who happens to be Jewish. Very Kosher but he’s got this long flaxen waxen blond hair which he is totally obsessed about… constantly combing his hair. I wrote that part for Howard Stern. You have to remember back in 1990 Howard Stern looked like he was about to assume the mantles of Groucho Marx, Pigmeat Markham, Jack Carter and Don Rickles. So, I wrote this great role for him. Also wrote a phenomenal role for Oprah Winfrey…. Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile and Cosmetology. Cleopatra runs this global corporation called Cleo’s Cosmetics, Inc. whose main product is beauty makeup for women. You would have seen facets of Oprah that have never been seen on film. That woman is a great actor. But they always stick her in these stolid, rustic, turgid, bucolic, Jemima matron roles. She has so many nuances but you never…. Well , anyway --- She was born to play Cleopatra. Then there was “Canigula.” That’s the part I wanted to play.

We should talk about something positive around the film. Was this your first feature?

I had experience with 8mm back when I was 9. But, yes -- it was my first feature on 35mm. Prior to that, it was short films in 8mm, super 8, 16mm and super-16. Working for years at Prismatic Images…. our audio/video studio in Flint, Michigan, which was incorporated in 1979. The end goal was always to make feature films. But to get to that end goal, there were 8 or 9 years shooting weddings, commercials, state lotto ads, making dubs for people of their VHS and beta tapes. It all built up to the making of CHAMELEON STREET.

It was obviously friends and people from around the city, everything coming together to help.

You got that right. Two-thirds of the investments for the $1.5 million budget came from my parents, Helen and Wendell B.Harris, Sr. that was $740,000. The remainder of the budget came from other investors. It took 4 years to get essentially a quarter of a million dollars from investors. It was like scraping dried blood off the sidewalk. You make hundreds of presentations to potential investors and only a handful come through.

But then it did.

It did. I’ve always said that CHAMELEON STREET is like the emblematic independent production. Everything about it is from the independent world and that experience.

Did you already know about the subjects that made the main character? It was essentially based off two scam artists, correct?

Certainly 90% of it is Doug Street’s story. The section where he impersonates the foreign exchange student from France comes principally out of Erik Dupin’s experience. Although, I have to add, Doug Street has a hot and heavy foreign film addiction. He loves German and French films.

You heard their story and were taken by it?

In 1983, I read a Detroit Free Press article on Doug Street. He had just been incarcerated in upper state Michigan for his impostor activities. In the article, they ran through what he had done during the 70’s and early 80’s. The moment I read the article, I said ‘Ah! What a fantastic film!’ I walked into the kitchen and told my parents. That’s how it all began. That was May of 1983. Took a year and a half before I went up to Kinross Correctional Facility in upper-state Michigan to interview Doug Street on three-quarter inch video. That began a prolonged period of research, which continued for the next 3 years, using letters mostly. I visited him a few times after he got transferred to Jackson Prison.

When you take this movie around the world, it’s amazing how some people respond. After screenings there would always be a question and answer session. You’re standing up there answering questions. It was like people were talking to Doug Street and not me! They got angry with Doug for treating this woman like that or using this kind of language, or whatever! If I ever saw the power of media, it was then. I would be answering questions at the end of the screening and people would be talking to me as if I were Doug Street …. completely oblivious to the fact that I’m just the actor. It was his life’s story that had been painstakingly researched. There were 36 versions of the screenplay written over 4 years. Doug Street wrote innumerable letters and everything in the film comes out of his experience.

That’s a good acting job too.

You hear about these people who are on soap operas, you know --- they’re walking through the grocery store and someone reprimands them for doing something to someone’s husband on the show. It’s very interesting.

Doug Street (Harris) makes a black Barbie for his daughter.

Did you understand his motivation? Is he nuts or is he somebody who just got so frustrated with society that this seemed like the thing to do?

I wouldn’t call him nuts. You used the word frustration, which is the illegitimate brother of anger. I know that Doug is angry. He told me one time, “I’ve got anger that goes back to kindergarten. Anger is my best friend.” It goes back to things that happened in his childhood which he continued to fester over as the years went on.

The anger that is present in Doug Street is present in 99.99% of black males in America. Every black male in America has been touched by this anger. Sometimes it feels like you’re being marinated in anger. Why? The playing field of this country is not only uneven --- it has potholes. And some of these potholes have signs that say, “For Colored Only.”

I’m not necessarily leaving out black women either. I’ve been black for 53 years now. Certainly, I’ve never met a black male who’s happy with the way black people are regarded and treated in the United States.

Does he have a wall that is missing that enabled him to take the steps to do things he knew he would get caught and put in jail for?

On the back of the DVD of CHAMELEON STREET, there’s a small little blurb that reads:

CHAMELEON STREET IS A FILM BASED ON THE TRUE STORY OF AN AMAZING CONMAN FROM MICHIGAN WHO EXCHANGES HIS DEAD END LIFE FOR A BRAND NEW IDENTITY. IN FACT, MANY NEW IDENTITIES ARE ASSUMED: REPORTER, DOCTOR, LAWYER, DETROIT TIGER AND MORE.

For Doug to actually take his bit of black anger and channel it into these various roles, I feel that there are so many things at play here. The effects of racism really boil down to personal experiences. You talk about ‘Oh, I went over here and this happened to me, the next minute that happened to me’. People who are constantly railing on ‘black people really need to pull themselves up by their own boot straps, get on with their lives, stop playing the blame game, stop playing the race card’ have not only missed the point … they have also missed the past. And they have also missed the elliptical nature of racism. Racism insists that your Present, Past, and Future are all identical. Playing the race card …. ! What a canard. The moment you are born into this country they hand you a race card. It’s a color-coded society. It would certainly be hypocritical to deny that. When Doug Street takes his experiences and says ‘I’m not going to play this game the way they are hypocritically laying it out for me. Instead, I’m going to go through these permutations that reveal how hollow and shallow the game really is.’ Then he proceeds to perform 36 hysterectomies at a Chicago hospital without getting past high school, let alone medical school.

He’s showing that society is ready to bow down at what you’re wearing, or what you say your degree is. All of that does work on a thematic level. But when you sit the real Doug Street down, you look into Doug’s face, you hear him talk about what he did, when he did it, who he did it to….. you can see he gets a real charge out of making this society dance to his tune.

Which is incredible.

People are amazing. People can do so much! The people who actually make the decisions for the masses in this country and in this world, they are very aware of ‘the power’ of the people, and how important it is to keep people thinking: Keep quiet, pay your taxes, just shut up and shut down, keep on keeping on and keep off the lawn while you’re doing it.

Don’t think about how we are raping you physically, spiritually, medically, financially, culturally. Don’t think about any of that. That’s partially why I think the whole undercurrent of Doug Street’s life and what he has attempted to do, really does expose this hypocritical , harsh life we’re living in, in high relief.

Did he enjoy the process of the film being made, something being done with his life? After he was caught, what was his mood?

He was only caught the two times. He was incarcerated not because somebody found out he had been impersonating someone, but because he was turned in by his wife. Another time he was caught because he had used someone else’s credit card, using too many charges. The point is that he wasn’t caught because of trip ups in his impersonations, but because of what he regarded as betrayal by his ex-wife.
He really is one of the most incredible con men that lived because he didn’t get caught.

That’s true. That’s true. We didn’t tell the whole story. I’ll tell you something I haven’t told a lot of people. The screenplay that we shot was a 274-page screenplay. That’s longer than LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962), along with half of GONE WITH THE WIND (1939). We shot an amazing story. I could make another two CHAMELEON STREETs with the footage left over!

Production still: Incarcerated in Jackson Prison, Street (Harris, left) listens to fellow inmate Eugene Raymond (Henri Watkins) explain why he killed his mother over comic books.

I take it he was smart enough to know that sooner or later, if you’re not playing by the rules, you’re going to go to prison.

One word you have not used in this interview that usually crops up is ‘compulsion’. He’s been incarcerated on more than one occasion for living this kind of lifestyle of impersonation. I don’t want to, in 2007, make any kind of equivocal statements based on where Doug’s head is at now. But I will say that between 1983 and ending with our joint appearance on the Geraldo show in 1990, my impression of Doug was that he felt it was his duty to continue with this lifestyle. He would make an effort to shore up or eliminate those aspects of his life that ended up always getting him in jail. Like bad credit card debt, or a woman.

The existence of racism … in so many words, this seems to be his take on it. As long as he is living in a society that promotes inequity, where a Katrina can take place at the drop of a hat, he is going to continue his crusade which other people have labeled (usually white people) a criminal compulsion. Racism is a criminal compulsion. Nothing good comes out of it. It triggers all kinds of angst and emotional abortion. Things happen. Things don’t happen. Some people weep, some people wail, some people work and some people impersonate other characters, like Doug.

It’s not done in a way where he’s ashamed of who he is, he wants to be someone else. That’s more like giving up. It’s different to say, I want to be a doctor so badly that I’ll just do it. That’s almost more of a psychotic thing where you’re trying to erase your identity. Instead, he was more like ‘look asshole, I can do this.’

When I’m standing in front of an audience after CHAMELEON STREET, I often end up mentioning that Doug literally performed 36 hysterectomies. There is always this gasp of horror that comes from the audience. Mostly from women. And I agree … it’s worth a couple good gasps. But Doug would say it’s also worth gasping at the way doctors are treated like demi-gods in this country. Not just doctors but anybody with a degree. And it really bugs him that our society kow-tows to an idea of professionalism … not the real thing. Cutting a woman open without a medical degree is an extremely disturbing aspect of how far he was willing to take this thing. I hasten to add that every one of those 36 hysterectomies was blatantly successful. But it’s small consolation to those women who scream at me, “HOW DARE HE!”

Production still: Street (Harris, center) removes uterus of female patient without a medical degree, high school diploma or GED. Dr. Wendell B. Harris, Sr. hovers in the background serving as medical consultant for this scene.

It’s hard enough to make a film about somebody and their life, which you also want to make a film in which their condition exists in. At what point in your editing or your shooting, do you think, ‘Ok, this is going to be my comment.’ When there’ll be other times that reflect what happened exactly.

I did not see CHAMELEON STREET as an opportunity for Wendell Harris to start editorializing or adding to this or that experience. When I get a response from an audience member who acts like this entire thing came out of my experience, it is disheartening because I have to go back five steps and explain that this was a well-researched film. It was Doug Street’s life story, not mine. I did not spend four and a half years on that script so that I could get my take or slant grafted in. When we were shooting the film I would always tell the crew, ‘Look …. What we’re doing is, we’re putting Doug Street alone, naked, on top of a large Formica table. We’re putting these klieg lights on him and we’re going to shoot him from every angle.’ That’s what we did. One thing you haven’t quite asked me yet is, ‘What was Doug Street’s reaction to the film?’

Yeah that was coming.

There’s a famous registered letter that Doug wrote and sent to my mother, the executive producer, Helen Harris in 1989, hours after he first saw CHAMELEON STREET. He sent a brief one-page letter … very succinct, very pithy, very to the point. Doug was very disappointed. He felt exposed, that liberties had been taken with his life story. He was most upset with the slogan on the poster we used in our first campaign: I think therefore I scam.

He was very offended about that. He forgets that I got that line from him. One thing he was very pleased about was getting any revenue from the film. Through contractual agreement he did get a cut of the film’s revenue. He never turned down any of the checks.

What’d your parents think?

They liked it. My mother is very much alive but my father died in 2000. But they both liked it. They would have liked it even more if it had made a profit for the Harris family. I was just thinking earlier this morning that the film was released 17 years ago. The only thing that has gotten me through the last 17 years, other than the Lord Jesus Christ, are the memories of watching CHAMELEON STREET with audiences in Italy, Germany, and America. That as well as the reviews critics have written. I mean – I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve spent the last 17 years sitting in a corner fondling reviews of CHAMELEON STREET. But an odd thing happens when you spend the family’s fortune on an independent film that sinks, not without a trace but certainly without a profit. Some people kind of look sideways at “artists” anyway. But when the artist doesn’t make any money they go from looking sideways to looking down, avoiding eye contact. And if you don’t make money for a very long time they stop looking altogether.

But the memory of seeing audiences in Germany, Italy, Atlanta, Georgia, almost falling out of their chairs laughing…. That helped sustain me.

Did you always act in your films growing up?

Yes. Acting is always #1. Everybody has three aspects of genius…. Everybody has three talents – three areas of expertise in which they can perform at genius level. But one of these talents is your main root and the other two branch out from it. For me, it’s acting. Acting is my main root. Writing and directing came from my desire to act back when I was four or five years old. That’s when I told my Mom, “I think I need to start directing and writing my own films. That way, I’ll always get the part.”

That makes sense. After the three years in Burbank, did you think wanted to try acting instead?

I had a development deal with Jerry Weintraub, Cary Granit and Matt Leipzig at Warner Bros. for an alien / UFO movie. I was contracted to write the screenplay in 1991. I stayed in that development posture for about a year before everything evaporated into the ether. It’s called ‘turnaround’. I then moved back to Michigan with my research that I had done. Took all that research into a different direction, for a film called ARBITER ROSWELL. I started writing that script in 1993. I was writing other scripts for Hollywood and Showtime at the time. All the money I was making was being funneled back into ARBITER ROSWELL, which we started shooting in 1997. Steven Soderbergh was one of the actors we shot with. Also Ed Lawrence, Joel Weiss, Denice Marcel and Serena Roney-Dougal. Began making trips to Roswell with film crews …. Interviewing most of the major participants including Walter Haut, Glenn Dennis, Phillip Corso, and Carl Vick. Extensive interviews with the crème de la crème of ufology: Stanton Friedman, Linda Moulton- Howe and Michael Hesemann. We also interviewed counter-intelligence agent Frank Joseph Kaufmann on multiple occasions. There is no doubt that Frank Kaufmann is the most important witness / percipient of the Roswell incident --- period. The actual process of shooting and editing ARBITER ROSWELL extended over the next 10 years. There’s a trailer for ARBITER ROSWELL on the DVD of CHAMELEON STREET, which will give you an indication of what that film is all about.

The bottom line is: What’s great about being an independent is that you get to do it your way. I spent three years in Hollywood writing scripts for people and got a very good taste of what it’s like when you have a committee of six people giving you notes about the screenplay and screwing it nine ways to hell.

Absolutely.

It doesn’t work, but it does pay the bills. It doesn’t get the film made with the vision intact. 13 years have been spent on ARBITER ROSWELL – that’s three times as much time spent on making CHAMELEON STREET. You lose all kinds of things when it takes 13 years to make a film. You lose the respect of most of your family and friends. People don’t return your phone calls. But here’s the plus. At the end of the process, you get what you want. I was spoiled by CHAMELEON STREET where 99.9% of what’s on screen is what I wanted. The exact same thing is the case for ARBITER ROSWELL.

That’s great. Do you see the end coming? The finished product? Or do you see that some things still need to fall in place first?

The trailer for ARBITER ROSWELL is a 33-minute trailer. The finished film is a three-hour film. All the footage has been shot, but it is not completely edited yet. This 33-minute trailer gives a very good taste of what the finished film is all about. Many people have told me that once the DVD gets released, it’ll be much easier to find investors to help complete ARBITER ROSWELL. To be finished after 13 years…..

You started it with Jerry Weintraub, but do you actually own it?

The screenplay I wrote for Weintraub was called UNTITLED UFO STORY. That was just a generic title. That screenplay is still owned by Warner Brothers and Jerry Weintraub and has nothing to do with ARBITER ROSWELL. With Jerry Weintraub, a very funny guy, by the way, he gave me complete ownership over all the books his production company purchased to research UNTITLED UFO STORY. It was almost like $3,000 worth of research material. But I have to make clear that there’s no relation between ARBITER ROSWELL and UNTITLED UFO STORY.

You made a friendship with Steven Soderbergh from meeting at Sundance. Weren’t you there before his film was?

Here’s how the world perceives it. SHE’S GOT TO HAVE IT (1986) by Spike Lee and SEX, LIES & VIDEOTAPE (1989) were both released before CHAMELEON STREET. Steven had won [the Audience Award at] Sundance for SEX, LIES. Even though CHAMELEON STREET was actually shot and completed before [either film]. I took 11 months editing CHAMELEON STREET. That’s what, like four times as long as the guys who edited GONE WITH THE WIND ---? That’s about a year. That was brutal. Spike and Steven had both gotten out of the box with their films.

By 1990, Steven was one of the judges [at Sundance] along with Wim Wenders. The first time I ever met Steven was at a CHAMELEON STREET screening. The lights come up; we go up on stage and answer questions. Somebody from the back asked me a question that was so erudite and on the money, that I said, “Who are you? Are you a filmmaker?”

This voice in the back mumbles “Um, yes.” That was Steven, that’s how I first met him.

When you win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance ---- that is not an automatic distribution deal.

Or even a job.

Although it did transpire into three development deals. Steven kept saying “Don’t worry, it’ll come through. It’s going to come through!” This is in 1991. When a joke starts going around Hollywood that all you have to do to get a production deal is be a black male director and not Wendell Harris, I finally got hip to what was happening. Shame on me spending three years trying to work with them. I should have moved back to Michigan, worked up my company and gone on to the next film. But, I could not believe you could win the Grand Jury prize and not get some kind of deal.

What Hollywood cares about is money.

You said a mouthful there. I went to a million of these meetings. I pitched and I pitched until I was hoarse. I remember belly aching to Soderbergh, “I’m pitching and pitching and they’re nodding and showing me the door.”

He said, “You know what I do when I go to these meetings, I don’t talk. They think I’m extremely profound. You might want to try that.”

I wish I had now. All that talking I did was so much lost carbon monoxide.

Doug Street (Harris) refuses to pose seriously for his mug shot.

The film wouldn't be the same if made by a studio.

I’m sure you’re aware of how many of your decisions, as an independent, are made by how much money you have. If I ever sat down and went through CHAMELEON STREET and said ‘I wanted to do this, but I had to do this’ because you are limited with money. All of that means nothing when you can actually put your product on the table, go to bed at night and not lose sleep over, ‘I wish I had done that, I wish I had this or shot this’. Being an independent is glorious.

Will Smith has apparently copied your scene about solving the Rubik’s Cube to get respect. Do you have any idea of what that was?

I don’t necessarily blame Will Smith for the impression of CHAMELEON STREET. He was smart enough to marry Jada Pinkett Smith. If I have a problem at all, it’s this: I feel that CHAMELEON STREET deserves as much distribution as --- uh …. what’s the film with the dead guy on the beach?

WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S (1989).

WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S! If I were to walk through the country and ask people about the two films, people would recognize WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S immediately. Then they would ask me, ‘Where is CHAMELEON STREET?’

BETZY BROMBERG.

2007-07-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

Betzy Bromberg has been independently making films since 1976, which have screened all over the world in festivals, one-woman retrospectives and group shows. She has a true talent for working images and sound together, constructing films that continue to grow in a category of their own. She meticulously feeds emotional experience into her work, giving new life to the experience of memory, leaving nostalgia out of the picture. Her large body of work has continued to vary with every film, straying away from style and repetition.

DIVINITY GRATIS (1996) deals with the struggle between ever-advancing technologies and the preservation natural history. BODY POLITIC (GOD MELTS BAD MEAT) (1988) focuses around the mechanics of the body as it evolves with and without the blankets of religion and science. Her latest work, A DARKNESS SWALLOWED (2005), is an astrological exploration of the mind and what we call “memory” as we gradually experience a slow fall, into a funnel. Using primarily close-up imagery that seems abstract at first, Bromberg creates an overall experience of distorted enclosure that lasts for days.

Using abstraction, photography, documentary, distinct optical effects, 3-dimensional textures and ferociously edited sound design, Bromberg has been able to create films that have so much depth to them, it’s hard to articulate what you comprehend, but yet so easy to articulate the experience. She often provokes curiosities surrounding the ever-developing cyclonic future, mortality and the way we (as humans) evolve throughout time.

She has been working special effects (as well as optical visual effects) in the film industry for over 20 years. As the director of the Film/ Video program at California Institute of the Arts, she continues to teach several classes during the fall and spring.

Interview by Nick Murray.

Most filmmakers I know have certain films that inspired them to make films themselves. Is there a film that inspired you to jump into certain angles of film work?

I really got into filmmaking through photography. I had taken film classes but not with the initiative of going into film. Really, I saw myself as a photographer.

Originally I studied journalism, and then photography. When I transferred schools, I went looking for a photography class, got bumped into an experimental film class instead. So basically I came in the back door, not a direct route.

When I ended up taking an experimental film class by accident, it was really eye-opening. The first experimental film I had ever seen was in high school was Norman McLaren’s PAS DE DEUX. I remember seeing that in the gymnasium, coming out and going “Wow, that was really wild with the trails and everything.”

So, in some ways, the background was always photography.
After making films for a while that I started to notice filmmakers.
And that was sort of mind blowing to me. That was a moment that woke me up in a different way.

I remember in one class we had a couple years ago where you had us listen to Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. Does music influence your films before you make them? Is there a driving within the texture, an emotion, part of a ventilation that leads to inspire certain ideas?

It’s all of it. Music is time-based. Where actually, films have a parallel structure with image-making. When you listen to a piece of music, it’s not that you’re corresponding an image to a specific sound; but there’s an essence of movement, an essence of texture, that you can somehow parallel with film - so you can feel how it builds, how it connects, how it dissolves.
All of that is structure for film.

For instance, with Bitches Brew, you can listen to it and have a complete correlation, yet never see an image. I don’t mean it literally translates in a visual way. But to it is a time-based medium, which may have the structure or feel of the a film. I think when I listen to music, or when I’m inspired by music, a lot of the time I’m relating to it in a filmic way. You know, it’s not about images, and I’m not about seeing the images for the music.

It’s also about the way things interact in music.

How they collide, how they disperse. But it’s really a parallel.
Any art form, I guess can be a parallel.

Literature, in a way, does the same thing, only you’re walking through it in a different way. We’re trained early on how to take in literature- to read every word in a literal way - where as in music, you move through its passages, and it moves you through phrases and passages as well. It’s just a different type of literature.

Bitches Brew. People ask me that all the time! It’s great because I took time to think about it, and really, it was listening to Bitches Brew . . .

The only thing I can clearly remember being life-changing to me in terms of an experience- in understanding how far you can go with an idea, taking it to its limit, further and further. There can be incredible results if you keep going and can do it well.

You pick up where you left off and transition into the next place.
Bitches Brew, the actual piece, is only 25 minutes! From start to finish, it’s an incredible album.

A DARKNESS SWALLOWED.

There’s also a correspondence to film, in that there’s something living, breathing, interacting such as the movement within it.

Film also has that, it works in that way. A narrative doesn’t usually work in that way, as it ends up being about story line.

Narrative is a hard word to describe. I picture a swinging door that opens and closes. It’s hard to find out where that definition lies in filmmaking, it’s a gray area. In A DARKNESS SWALLOWED and specifically DIVINITY GRATIS, there’s a pacing and timing in the structure that all evolve. There’s an ongoing theme of evolution throughout your films.

And technology. Our civilization moving forward at an incomprehensible speed, looking at technology and WHAT DO WE DO WITH IT? Having choices with that technology.

Evolution is just fascinating to witness- how we evolve as people. But in terms of individuals, even politically, in terms of companies. That’s the moment where you get to see this flux in movement of how we evolve as individuals politically and psychologically.
It’s fascinating.
It’s really hard not to make a judgement about it.

Especially, like you and I, living day to day. But if you remove yourself and enter into that of an entire species, how we are part of a species and how we evolve is actually really fascinating. Once the emotional quality is removed, humanity is really interesting to see.

We don’t think of ourselves as species, when in actuality, we’re just another kind of species trying to survive, so that many of our choices are probably based not on the intellectual voices that we think, but very simple choices:
What do we do in order to continue to procreate, you know? (Laughs)

To think that all the specific things are really minor in comparison. But there’s never any perspective to how specific that is as it relates to an evolutionary process. When it comes to filmmaking, do you try to make your work present a theme of pacing?

You mean like how the world moves?

The way you can give life to the pacing.

I think a lot of the life in a film is that a lot of the visuals and the camerawork is really the living and the breathing, like that of a performer. In the same way you see the film process. It’s almost like a travel through (in a strange way, to live and breathe in the mind at the same time of the exposure) a visual landscape, or whatever. I think the feeling of life behind it is because of this exploration that’s happening.

You never set out in the beginning to say look, a film’s going to be an exact length. Basically, you watch the shots over and over again, to determine when the right moment to cut is; how it unveils itself, how it builds pressure, how it releases pressure.

DIVINITY GRATIS.

To me it’s really an organic process where you have your own time to work out how and when you’re going to use a shot. And of course that really depends on the shooting. Because that’s where you’re setting the pacing, to a certain extent.

I think it’s in the shooting where you’re setting the overall pacing for the whole film, establishing time.

A DARKNESS SWALLOWED took you 6 years to make and was an emotional trip for you. Was there a certain idea you tried to keep in your mind while editing it? Trying to keep outside influences away from the editing, or did you just let it all go and keep at it?

Really, just going at it. It was 3 years of shooting and that pacing was established by a lot of things.
You’re shooting with an intervelometer.
You’re adaptive to the sun movement, you’re shooting over time.
There’s no way that you’re not.
In a different way that you are when there’s light that just comes out. You’re really following the direction of the sun; how it moves, for me, how it was reflecting in the water.

So the pacing was established in terms of how the sun moves. I made sure I shot the intervelometer footage over a full year, so I would capture the entire different movement of the sun over a year.

The distinctions, the differences, the shortening and the lengthening of the days. All of that established the pacing in some ways. All of that footage has a quality of reality to it.
It’s very graceful in how the sun moves through the days.

You’re recording that, but you can’t see that when you’re shooting. You’re not hooked into knowing what that’s going to look like, but the footage that comes out has a definite rhythm to it. It’s not like any other kind of rhythm I’ve shot.

Shooting with the macro lens determined how a lot of it had to be cut.
I had to learn how to shoot properly with the tripod, how to shoot to look like it was handheld, because I don’t like stiff tripod shots.
That took a long time to learn how to move and breathe.
When you’re shooting with a macro lens, it’s easy to blow a show because you’re shooting such a tiny area.
You can’t move very well, you can’t breathe wrong, or your breath is going to blow the shot! You have to get your whole body positioning together.

I was getting to a point in my filmmaking where I knew how to shoot in a way that I was good at.
It meant that it was time to move on to a different plane.
It was time to shift gears and head into a new way of shooting. Capturing the small moments took a while to learn.

The simple things you learn along the way; which never, of course, seem that important. one of them is that when you're shooting with the tripod, you always go to your last position first, and then you back up to your first position. That way, you can comfortably move around to your last position. You become more comfortable with the way you're shooting, as opposed to the other way around.
End position first, back out of it. That way you’re starting in an uncomfortable position, but you get to become more comfortable with as the shot progresses.

Such basic things; such as taking your time with the shot. You know how filmmakers are always rushing because the sun is going down, your actors are waiting for you because you only have 2 hours to shoot in the space. That was something I really enjoyed about shooting A DARKNESS SWALLOWED.

A DARKNESS SWALLOWED.

You never had a time limit.

Most of the film was shot in my back yard on my own time. It was really luxurious. I had time, I could take a break, go relax for a while, come back and shoot. It’s always a stress to get a shot and you know the clocks ticking and you stress out.

Do you normally give yourself plenty of time without the constraints?

Yea! I like to finish work because you don’t get to the next place until you complete something. But honestly, when I was younger I wanted to make films faster. I think now about “God, wouldn’t it be great to be able to knock out films every two years?” to keep people present with your work. But honestly, it’s really about the process. It you want to make long films, that process takes longer. I’ve never pressured myself that way. I’ve never rushed a film out to make a screening or a deadline. It takes as long as it takes, as long as you can stay with that process.

Sometimes certain filmmakers will base the speed of the process based on a deadline or a grant.

Some people need that motivation. I see that in students too. A deadline is a great thing because it motivates them to get it done. I believe that staying on something for a long period of time actually deepens the experience of making it.

There’s some sort of great adrenaline rush to watch the visuals rush in when you’re making a film.

It’s such a great process. It’s wonderful to have this thing in your mind working all the time. Even when you’re not working on the film. You know, driving, for instance and you’re still thinking about it. I like being in that process.

It feels good.

And the between film doesn’t feel that good.
You put so much life into making them, you finish a film and then you crash. Then you get all antsy because you know you need to start something.
For me, the comfort is knowing that you’re working on a film, just working on it, staying in that space is great.
And then, of course, you have to finish. I mean, you can’t let it go on eternally.

All filmmakers have different approaches to how they make films. But when it comes to style, there is concern for being more distinct as you continue making films. This can be daunting unless you can get past that aspect make the film you want to make.

But that’s something I’m completely over. I can’t say that it was never one of my concerns. But now, I look forward to the moment where there’s some clear thread that’s exciting enough for me- to feel like it’s the journey I want to go on now. That’s the film I want to pursue.

Sometimes I’ll get a big old color scheme for a film. Something specific will come in.

Usually it’s a certain subject matter, a certain amount of structure that helps devise some kind of project.

I’m much more interested in working different kinds of ideas.
How it evolves and what that looks like.

It’s interesting to see a body of work. You know, style does change.
I was always under the belief system that somehow it’s intrinsically through everything. But that’s not really true. You never control the change in a body of work.

DIVINITY GRATIS.

The word NARRATIVE versus the word EXPERIMENTAL; I feel that people are often afraid to use the word NARRATIVE around experimental work. EXPERIMENTAL is already a really strange word to use when describing a film, and seems senseless to use -

But which is better?

They’re both derogatory-

Right, but that’s the problem.

Experimental isn’t really a good terminology. I think every film is a narrative. From someone who is completely non-narrative, that may sound strange to say. But I really do think that if you’ve got a piece that’s really time-based, it moves over time, there’s some element of narrative to it. Even for films that never move. There’s still a beginning.

The experience of starting from one place and ending in another. I think that all films are narrative to some degree.

The words definitely become derogatory, especially the way people often describe your work and you as an artist. I’m sure you brush it off-

I brush it off because there’s just so much academia and discussion about films, as much as I’ve done, there’s a simpler way to understand a piece.

Most experimental films provoke some kind of radical experience. That’s what is interesting to me. The language surrounding it doesn’t do too much for me. The experience of watching a film, what that will do to me. What I learn from that.

I’ve always been interested in the way film works on people’s perceptions and the different ways you see a piece. You can be sad, get upset or feel good. One of the most interesting things is when you come out from seeing a film, you see the world differently for a half an hour or a day. When you finish a film, after months or years of looking at it, can you look at it in any other way as your piece of work, or can you try and conceive what kinds of perceptions people are going to have afterwards? You can’t control how people are going to feel after watching a film, but in your recent work, have there been any kinds of feelings you were driving toward people having?

When I’m making it, I’m not thinking about ‘This is how people are going to feel’, I mean I do have certain things in my mind where I want them to feel a certain way internally.
Within the interior, close, intimate space that feels familiar, but if not, there will be holes within the interior that you can try and fill in, or trigger.
I have specific things that I’m after, but when you come out of it in the end, you’re curious to find out how people really are responding.
I think that with my work, I like when people go into sort of a dreamy state, for maybe two days sometimes. Just kind of walking through in different ways, I love that. That makes me happy, when their unconscious is conjuring up all of these images again, and they’re entering in. They have a lingering effect in that sort of way.

You can feel when someone really connects with your work. It’s not necessarily from something that they say. It doesn’t have to be verbally conveyed to you. But you can see the person if they’re looking at you and your eyes make contact. They, on some level, got the work on this deep level and you know it. To me, that’s the best. When I can make that sort of human connection. When those moments happen. If you can’t exactly say what it is they experienced, it’s just created this circuit that’s lively. You can really feel it. That’s a great up.
I feel at certain times, that’s the best way to decide.

The majority of your films show in the theater. In Los Angeles, people are able to see a lot more independent work without going to a multiplex. When you make your films, you always hope for an audience to see the films in a theater. Are you ever curious about opening a wider audience toward your films? I was wondering your thoughts about ever placing the films on DVD or anywhere else but festivals? Festivals-

Are very selective. I mean how many festivals can you screen your film at? I’ve gone through this.
You’re always evolving with the changing technology.
Recently, I’ve had a problem with a lot of experimental filmmakers packaging their films in a box that are going for $29.95. There are a lot of filmmakers who all of the sudden, their films are on DVD and you can buy them.
I mean, I think that’s great. I don't have a judgment value on them making those decisions, but I felt really uncomfortable about it. This has been a long, interesting journey trying to figure out what actually makes me feel uncomfortable about it.

I love the idea that its got greater accessibility. I talked to Deborah Stratman, I said
“How do you feel about putting your work on DVD and selling it?”

She said “Well, if it reaches a wider audience, that’s great! I’d love people to see my work. I feel a bit odd, but it’s such a great thing.”

I totally understand that, but for myself, there’s something I still feel uncomfortable about it. Part of it is the amount of work, time, money, expense and everything that’s put into work that’s all of a sudden selling for $29.95, YOU CAN GET THE BOX SET!

I was just in Buenos Aires, Argentina showing work and it was a greta experience on so many different levels. I did transfer all my films to HI-DEF and onto DVD, for preview and not for sale in any way.
Anyway, I had a few extra copies with me, there were people that I met and I ended up giving them copies of the film.

I realized, that’s the ticket! I don’t want to sell them! It’s not about selling them!

But it’s really nice to be able to give somebody a piece of work who might never be able to see it again. It probably seems very simple to someone who’s already grown up in the modern technical age, but for me that was a revelation that - it doesn’t have to be about the selling of it. There’s sort of this great thing that comes out of the digital medium that makes it possible for people who never, ever would be able to see the work. I was just so happy to be able to personally give them a DVD of it. It was really cool.

It’s a very tricky question either way. Because economically, and universally appealing. However the piece becomes sort of a copy. It becomes disposable when you sell it/market it. You’re disposing of the work.

That’s a great way of putting it.

The work into a film becomes the work of a product-

It just completely changes the exchange.
It’s not like I walk around chanting. But when I had the DVD’s made, I had them very professionally done in a way that makes them secure in terms of quality. It was expensively done. But it’s just my new revelation, this type of exchange.

And, of course, it has to do with the way it’s shown.

I’m adamant my work is shown on 16mm. In Buenos Aires, it was all shown on 16mm, which was fantastic. People were seeing it properly. That’s the only way I really want people to see my work, but there is a reality check. 16mm is becoming less and less viable for print and exhibition. It is what it is. Maybe we’ll have a nice little turnaround, where all kinds of 16mm will come back to life. But it seems fairly evident that it’s become harder and harder to show these films on film.

It’s just a shift you have to do as a filmmaker. It’s the same thing with shooting, when will you have to start shooting on video. I’ve seen so many experimental filmmakers having this anxiety for so many years that FILM IS DYING! DO WE DO THE SWITCH! DO WE START SHOOTING ON VIDEO?

There’s this whole anxiety around the subject matter. Finally I became so exhausted with the anxiety, I’m just going to keep shooting 16mm as long as I can.
What can I do? I love it!

It’s doable for me, 35mm is too expensive and honestly, the equipment is just too heavy for me to be able to shoot myself.

I’m going to stick with 16mm for as long as I can; on the shooting side, the exhibition side, finish-to-print side. And there’s nothing wrong with changing when it’s done. I’m just going to have to respond to that moment, and I will.

I don’t mind moving to different technology if it’s as good or better. For instance; sound. Working with mag sound and then switching to PROTOOLS. No issue. PROTOOLS is a fabulous program. It’s incredibly pleasurable to be able to have that kind of control over the work. It’s way better then MAG. That wasn’t an issue.

Just get on board, because it’s all changing. You have to work with it. What else can you do? Or you stop making art. And I don’t want to do that.

I want to go back to sound. In A DARKNESS SWALLOWED, the soundtrack is almost all percussion. It’s so meticulously done. You’ve got these great metallic scraping sounds and textures. I’m curious of your approach to the sound design, how you composed it, how the sound production correlated to the images when you were putting the soundtrack together.

It’s dissonant. It’s a raw sound and it is forceful. It’s not quite ambient sound in the background of the image in any way. People can either tolerate it or they can’t. People who are adventuresome in music, I find, are enthusiastic about the sound. But there are people who find the sound to be very claustrophobic for them and find it to be difficult. The soundtrack is probably the most controversial aspect of that film for an audience.

DIVINITY GRATIS.

When I was shooting, I went to a Metal Supply concert, which is Jean-Pierre Bedoyan and Paul Cutler. It’s all very spontaneous percussive sound. I heard them play at The Troubador. Listening to them, it was almost like going down a rabbit hole. It went into this weird, dark, space. I had never heard their music before. I remember being mesmerized by it and being in that space for two days following; which is what I love about music. You go through all of the emotional, psychological spaces of the experience.

So I was working on my film and I had a moment when I realized, that was what the film was doing in certain ways; going down a rabbit hole. I wanted to go ahead and get some of their music to accompany it. Luckily, knowing how to get in touch with Jean-Pierre, he was open to working on the soundtrack. He is someone who has constructed soundtracks from beginning to end and has worked in sound for films.

I was very careful because I like to have a lot of control with the sound. I was a bit concerned about positions of control. But I was also totally open to what might work.

I got the film edited, silent. He came over, I projected it, he watched it and thought about it. He knew how I wanted it to work, which was to give me a bunch of sound and I would work with that sound.

So he would do the sound while watching it?

It ended up being a live thing. A live accompaniment to the film. Because they put contact mics up to their instruments, it was no problem to record with a noisy projector in the space. I picked the middle section of the film, which was a half hour section, we went over to Jean-Pierre’s house and set up the equipment and basically ran it. We did three takes. It was a great rush.

Each run was completely different in terms of texture and space, and where they went in the film. They provided me with an hour and a half of amazing music, which I then edited to the picture. There were so many interesting connections. At times, the sound was much more textural than the visual, and then at other times, it was the opposite- so there’s a constant dialogue.

There’s a constant interplay. It’s really intense. Sometimes the sound looks like the visual. Sometimes, the opposite. The visual will look like a frozen, still image and yet the sound will be a constant swirling, percussive phrase. But they work with each other in really interesting ways. Certain moments where the sound and image link up are my favorite moments in the film.

That’s how you edited it I assume, shot by shot. Which phrases worked well with each other.

I was also working in sound with Zach Settel, a composer who lives in Canada. Every couple of years, he’ll drop off cassettes and CDs at my house. Sometimes he’ll come and dump off a bunch of his pieces from his hard drive and say, “Do what ever you want with these!”

Also I work with Pam Aronoff, who I also worked with on DIVINITY GRATIS, which had so many specific pieces. She composes to the image. I gave her a specific section to work on and all this raw sound material from NASA and she constructed tracks from that. For A DARKNESS SWALLOWED, she actually constructed a track from ultrasounds- sounds from within the body. She used the raw material of her own ultrasounds, and constructed a brilliant spooky composition from that. It’s a strange section.

I’m lucky - the composers I work with give me amazing material and allow me to sculpt with it.

That’s the way I like to work if I can. I’ll cut the film silently and then adapt the sound afterwards.

BODY POLITIC had a lot of sync sound and sound I had constructed before I began shooting. Sometimes sound can come first. There are all sorts of strange things happening. Things you never imagined, where the results end up with a construct of the mind- new spacial dimensions that result as an answer to combining sound and image. It’s really fun!

I’m always trying to have the maximum amount of enjoyment while making a film. It’s always great if you can figure out a structure that will allow you to enjoy the process.

That’s part of the ticket. If you can pull that off, you’re in good shape. Not that there aren’t many torturous moments. (laughs)

What are you considering doing now with your films?

I’m taking it easy on myself. I have a lot of amazing outtakes FROM A DARKNESS SWALLOWED. Usually when I make a film, I use all of my good footage. Occasionally I have extra shots left over. But in A DARKNESS SWALLOWED, I have a lot of amazing water shots that I never ended up using.

So I have decided to make an 8 to 20 minute water film. I have a whole concept about what the water’s about in my mind. It’ll be a shorter film comprised of those shots. I haven’t spent any time on the sound yet. And I still have a lot of editing to do. I can’t wait to go back to the flatbed right now.

When school’s out.

When school’s out! (laughs)

I don’t want to have any downtime. I want to go straight to the flatbed and start cutting right where I left it. I hadn’t constructed a lot yet, I had only used a couple of shots.
I used to feel strict about the idea of using any shots that remotely resembled those in A DARKNESS SWALLOWED, but now I’m actually feeling not that strict about it.
I mean, how many people really have seen A DARKNESS SWALLOWED? Honestly, how much of a problem is that? It’s really not!

It’s hard to describe. I was sitting on the floor in the very front because it was beyond sold out. I was really close to the huge screen, so these large images began to take on an even more surreal 3-dimensional quality. You stare into these long images, by the end of the film, you remember the film as a whole and not every single shot. The images were different from each other, but the impact of going into this different space-

The film is strangely minimal. It’s so rich and there’s so much color, so much texture. But honestly, in terms of how many different types of footage there are, it’s minimal in a strange way. I would imagine that in some ways they sort of blend into the space of that exact moment. The beginning of the film had photographs and narration. Completely different from the rest of the film.

The photographs and the narration give you a context for the entire film. In a way, the two photographs; child there, child not there. The film lives in the territory between being and not being.

The last shot of those photographs actually pans up - you’re catching the borders and the edges of those shots, but you’re actually looking at the black space in between.
That’s where the whole film is lives.

Which all fits into the context of the vortex, the spiraling rabbit hole.

Lost Pet: APART FROM THAT

2007-06-03T19:33:00.001-07:00

For the Wholphin blog I'm starting a column about Lost Pets - great films that are lost, not from 100 years ago, but just the last decade....

Read it here.

TV Sheriff and the Trailbuddies.

2007-03-18T22:01:00.000-07:00

"Not 4 $ale: A Vidjoe Rodeoe"

The Westworld robot, a video ape and Don Knotts started a pirate TV station. Not a metaphor, this is science fact. They have the finest video switching equipment but only cable TV footage and disco technique. All hail TV Sheriff and the Trailbuddies, a 'video band' who mine old VHS tapes and make golden nuggets.

More realistically, the Sheriff is a guy in LA who takes tons of found footage, from commercials to rare TV to Arnold to music videos and mashes them together to make new crunchy vids. His live shows at Star Shoes in Hollywood made him an underground legend, and this DVD collection of 30 videos is pretty killer.

TV Sheriff’s style is reminiscent of Animal Charm’s transgressive feel with more recognizable sources, and with the speed and techno vibe of EBN (Emergency Broadcast Network – remember them??) and even some of their politics. If Vice magazine’s TV Carnage wasn’t laid up in the hospital, but religiously healed by E, you would get TV Sheriff. Is there a name for this genre yet? Can I make one? Channel Knobs. No that sucks. Knob Surfers? Toaster Heads?

Because, there used to be this primitive home video switcher thing called Video Toaster and…screw it. See – its hard to mash ideas together. But the Sheriff pulls it together in a funny way, always entertaining but also with some social and political observations in there. YES, it is easy to say TV is twisted and sick and the evil tool of rich people. But it’s hard to show that and not be condescending. All hail TV Sheriff and the Trailbuddies.

Slick DVD production is great, easy to navigate and tons of extras, include “collaborations” with Coldcut, DJ Q-Bert and VJ V2, and an introductory essay by Gerry Casale (from Devo), which is like a blessing down from the heavens.

www.othercinemadvd.com

CAM ARCHER.

2007-02-26T19:36:00.000-08:00

This interview originally appeared in Filmmaker magazine, much thanks to them. Cam's feature WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN is being released Feb 28 in NYC.

24-year-old Cam Archer was born and raised, and still lives today, in Santa Cruz, California. Archer’s short films, including BOBBYCRUSH and AMERICAN FAME 1: DROWNING RIVER PHOENIX have played many film festivals, including Sundance, CineVegas, AFI, Outfest and Tribeca. His first feature script, WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN, was accepted into Sundance’s January Screenwriting lab in 2005 and the finished film (well, read on) premiered at the 2006 Sundance Festival, before playing New Directors/New Films and the Locarno Film Festival.

With a kind but unabridged eye, Archer portrays the lives of teenagers in awkward gay love in most of his films, with vibrant color photography and constructed soundtracks of stylized dialogue, ambient sounds and music. The films are not showing an adult’s view of a kid’s world, but try to see it from the subject’s fantasy. TIGERS follows Logan (Malcolm Stumpf) and his naïve pursuit of a cool, older teen, Rodeo (Patrick White).

Your short films are all 16mm, and your feature is HD. What do you think of HD?
For the longest time we had it written into our budget that we’d be shooting on film and ultimately we could not afford it. Everyone wants to shoot their movies on film, or at least I still do. The HD is still a really big camera, you’re not going to be able to shoot even in a little store and not be noticed unless you're shooting with those really small DV cameras. We probably shot too much footage, that’s the thing with film we would just buy a certain amount. It’s not like we had more sitting in the freezer in case we needed it. We bought all that we could afford and that was all we got. We had to really be careful. But with the video we shoot around sixty plus hours I think. For my short BOBBYCRUSH, the shooting ratio I believe was 1.5 to 1. It was interesting to have the ability to shoot more.

BOBBYCRUSH.

You ended up reshooting stuff too, right?
We did last December. It was crazy, with the whole house arrest thing.

Can you talk about that at all?
We wanted to do re-shoots but then it wasn't as simple as just calling up the kids and getting them to do it because one of the actors was under house arrest. We weren’t allowed to go inside unless we were a family member, so we were going to have one of his family members go in and run sound inside the house while we shoot from outside, through the windows at him. Finally I was leaving messages for his parole officer. I guess it finally worked out - he was able to take a couple days away from his house arrest. I don't remember how that worked out.

I wonder if parole officers in California have established guidelines for working with actors and film productions.
Right??? I think he was pleading his case to them simultaneously with me, saying how important it was to him to be a part of the film. I think that they saw it as being a positive influence. They weren’t asking to see the movie, thank god.

WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN.

How do you even go about casting kids? Especially when you want real kids, not “professionals.”
Kids aren’t really actors, you know. They’re told there actors when they’re young. Things like, “Oh you are such a performer.” It comes from an outside source, maybe it's a parent, maybe its a casting director spots them on their looks. Then next thing you know they’re working and are an actor and they know about getting into a part. There are just so few kids that can actually become someone else the way that adults can. So what Aaron [Platt, longtime friend and cinematographer] and I have always done is just kind of wait for moments where either the kids are being themselves - that’ll work and then that becomes part of the character - or you shoot endless amounts of takes trying to get the right performance. I think the kids do a great job in the movie definitely, but one of the things I was always stressing to them is to listen to what the other actor in the scene was saying. They’re [often] not listening, they're just waiting for their line. They just want to get through the scene to prove that they’ve memorized it, so a lot of the most powerful moments are when the actors are just standing out in nature, looking into the camera. The viewer can get their own meaning out of it. I don't know, what does Larry Clark do? (laughs)

In your shorts you used friends as actors. With the feature you got kids that want to act. How does the vibe on the set change when the parents are there?
The energy changed. There were so many people working on this film, to go from working with Aaron, myself and Stephanie [Volkmar, his costume designer], to having a team of people crowding around a monitor and we have the parents sitting on the couch with us, doing a scene about how big is your penis? Everybody is watching you as the writer/director. “Okay, let’s just get through this scene.” It was changing the way I would have gone about it had it been just a couple kids and us. If the actor’s mom is in the other room and they’re doing a scene where they’re masturbating… Nobody masturbates in a another room while their mom is in the other room.

Safe to say some of the controversial subject matter got into the finished film.
I think I toned it down for the most part. The script was a lot more explicit and I was working out scenes and totally changing scenes. There was one scene where the Logan character puts on lipstick and then he kisses Joey on the hand. When I told the actors I took that out they were so excited. Yes, they did sign on and they read the script and knew what it was, but I found myself almost censoring parts. Was that a good idea in the end? I don't know. Did it have something to do with the parents and the large crew? I don't know. As we went along everything was changing. Looking back I realize I shouldn't have given up on things that maybe could have worked or we should have at least tried.

The images are heavily stylized. Was your goal to see the kids own viewpoints?
I think it comes from my days at UC Santa Cruz, where very early on they encouraged us not to rely on, or use at all, any sort of sync sound. I hated them for pushing that on us, but then I grew to love it. It forced us, Aaron and I, to come up with a new, original way of telling the not so new, or original, stories we wanted to tell. The characters in my films are rather conventional, they want things that other people want, but in their minds, and in the world of the film, things are all but conventional, which I love. Because there's such a diverse palette of costumes, sets, props and colors, people always want to know what time period the film is supposed to be set in. To me it doesn't really matter. Whenever you want it to have taken place, I guess. And...why not let it be sort of 'timeless'? There's nothing historical here, no truths. It's about emotion, style and the search for identity. I mean, it's a film about a kid's first crush, which is a very emotional, visual time. It’s an experimental time. So why not let the film be something of an experiment? Aren't people sick of the same old indies, with their handheld cameras and reality TV acting? I sure am. I like filmmakers like Jodorowsky. I'll watch one of his films and there will be stuff I don't get, and maybe he doesn't get it either, but it really doesn't matter. I'll create my own meaning, and if it doesn't appeal to me, I'll wait for the next thing that does. Independent films are losing their edge. They are all kind of starting to look the same to me. We need more films that confuse us. And I'm not talking about twists. Kyle Henry's ROOM is such a great example of the type of independent film that is, sadly, becoming extinct. Kyle is clearly a filmmaker who does what he wants. He takes a simple story and makes it his own, with the camera, the sets and with his characters. He’s challenging the audience to keep up with him, which is great. I feel like I do the same in TIGERS. Like, did you catch that Fleetwood Mac lyric I just used as Logan’s voiceover? What the fuck? Films that challenge their audience are what I look to for inspiration.

Wait, kids viewpoints? Yeah, that's why I did it too.

Are you using mountain lions to repesent something like the horrible ages of puberty coming for the characters? Or is a lion just a lion?
Puberty is a lion, I like that. Originally, the lion was supposed to represent the outcast, or the thing thing we know nothing about, but are told to despise and want dead. So Logan identifies with the lion, feels surrounded by the 'tigers' at his school, and wants nothing more than to be left alone, living independently of the madness, the close mindedness and the hatred. I don't know, it made sense when I wrote it. Puberty is a fucking beast, isn't it? It's just a question of when that beast's going to visit you and then when it's going to be done with you.

WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN.

Audiences who see your films always want to know if they are autobiographical.
I think more than anything I was a kid that an uneventful childhood and was staying at home writing little stories, reading books and nerding out and watching too much television. I was very much like my older brother, who ended up doing the sound for all my films. He was just old enough that he was starting to do things before me, of course, and getting into trouble. I would see how that affected my parents so then that kind of made me shut down in a way and just be this kid that would rather sit around and daydream than go out and actually create things. So I think that part from me is definitely in Logan. He basically gets what he wants for a time being then ultimately gets rejected or whatever or shut out from the world that he thinks he wants to be a part of. But I wasn't hanging out with mountain lions as a kid either.

How did the Sundance lab affect the script? There’s always the two schools of thought where it is great to get help, and then some people think the script is yours and now a bunch of people are working on it.
This is the first film project I was planning to do where I had a script. Everything before was all notes or I would come up with a shot or we had these actors and then that would determine what the movie would be. I wrote the script and I went to the lab thinking, “Oh, this is going to be weird. People don't know how I work…” Maybe I wouldn’t even use the script, this will be a really rough blueprint. I kind of realized in the lab that it is important to have a really tight script. I honestly think that the script really did help it. I’m proud of the script, it really does make a lot of sense and it does work and there are character arcs and everything. The movie is a big mess and I’m proud of that mess as well, but it’s totally different. So, yes, the lab definitely helped because it helped me learn how to write a story. As far as how to tell that story visually – I’m still learning that one. Maybe it had to do with having short days and having to rush through scenes and not liking those scenes in the editing room, I don't know.

What kind of discussions were there in the lab?
Working on story, concentrating on what was at stake for Logan, the main character, and working on that character arc and the idea of plot point and climax. Stuff you learned in classes that you take, but then here you have these pros. I actually didn't take notes every meeting. We’d meet and then I’d go back to my little cabinet and just write down the stuff that I remembered. I think it was Frank Pierson who was talking about, you're only going to use the stuff you remember. I thought well if that’s true I’ll try that out. I’ll just write down what kind of bothered me or what is a good idea or what I should concentrate on. [After the lab] I took time off and then I came back to it and started to rewrite everything.

And that felt like it worked?
I think it worked. It’s really hard to get honest feedback about a script especially if you’re sending it to friends. That’s the great thing about the lab is that not only do you have experienced people but they don't give a shit about hurting your feelings. Its not as if they’re ripping apart pages in front of your face.

But they’ve got that distance to where they can see. Unlike, “Oh man, we’ve got the same shift Saturday night and I’ve got to work with him.”
Yeah…. “I read it.” “Did you like it?” “No I didn't - what do we tell him?” “Just tell him you read it and it was good.” You know. That’s what you constantly have to seek out as an artist. I think that as you get more and more established or as you create more - I don't know if the two are necessarily the same - it just becomes harder and harder to find that honesty. I’ve actually been sending out scripts to people I’ve had as mentors in that lab because they’re open to reading it, which is awesome. Hopefully they will still be honest.

You’ve been a volunteer at Sundance, then got your shorts in, then the lab and the feature. Very few people have experienced Sundance on as many levels as you have.
There’s a bunch of people that diss it. Especially lately, I read a lot about how Sundance is corporate, Sundance is this or that…. But I still think hands down the best American films are there every year in my opinion, especially independent films. I’ve been going there for about seven or eight years. It’s been interesting to see it change, because it is changing, but independent film is changing. What, ten years ago, maybe we would have been all the rage for everyone hating it or loving it. It would have been a bigger film at the festival. But at the same time the festival is showing it, so it’s not as though the small films are completely shut out. It’s just that you now have to have a different approach to getting people to see it. Obviously everyone wants to show their movie at Sundance. Everybody knows what it is; it’s a very weird phenomenon. I read something online that said the only reason I get my stuff shown there is because I used to work there. I never got to meet anybody that would have anything to do with programming film. Never. It’s just such an odd thing to read but I could understand how some people might think that. Sundance has a strange energy, there’s a weird energy there especially between filmmakers who are showing their films there or not. Filmmakers are so competitive! I know a lot of people that would say that they’re not but man I feel like they are.

After your shorts played Sundance and you were in the lab, did producers or financiers offer to fund the feature?
Yeah. I turned down Bunim-Murray. They’re the producers from The Real World. I’ve spoken about this in nearly every interview and nobody has printed it.

Really?
Yeah, they were going to give us five hundred thousand dollars, which, at the time, was ten times the amount I thought that we needed to make TIGERS. Nobody believed me when I told them that we needed that little - and they were right because we spent seventy thousand. Bunim-Murray wanted to have a say in casting, they wanted final cut, the typical story, and then I thought about Real World… MTV misrepresenting youth culture for the past twenty years? Um, okay, should I jump on that boat too? I thought, we’ll just find another way to get the money. Also they were going to delay it so that we would maaaaybe be shooting it this summer, and that was going to be maybe. They wanted to do some rewrites. My producer at the time was saying I don't think the movie is going to make that much money back and [Bunim-Murray] said they were prepared to take this as a loss.

So what’s the point of making it for them?
I was already a loss in their eyes, which is kind of comforting because then you don't have to let anybody down. (laughs) Ultimately, it would probably be a very similar film, we just would have been able to pay everyone. But I would have been attached to that company. I made the film the way I wanted to, it turned out the way it did and that’s something to be stoked on.

So now IFC is going to release it to theaters?
Yeah, and Wellspring is going to do the DVD. After Sundance, and after having several months 'away' from the project, I went back into the editing room to swap out music I knew I (the project) couldn't afford. What was supposed to take only a few days, and only have to do with the music, turned into a three week, scene by scene re-edit. A total re-structuring of the film. I hadn't really watched the film since just before Sundance, when I had to approve the master, so it was like everything was fresh and new to me. I literally was in there re-loading tapes, using alternate takes, putting in new footage, new scenes and then deleting about 20 minutes from the Sundance cut. I was working by myself, no one giving me advice, so there were times when I really questioned whether or not what I was doing was good for the film. I was taking yet another risk on what had already been a risky project. At the time, we had just been told that IFC/Wellspring wanted to release the film and then here I was tinkering away, changing the film, its tone, its scenes, dramatically. I remember sending IFC the new cut and practically holding my breath until they told me they were cool with it. It was a total relief. Because really, I'm so much happier with the new cut, and it's like the Sundance, New Directors/New Films version never existed.

Are you going to move on to adult actors after this?
It was more that I was trying to figure this story out. It’s just taken me this many films to figure out what I’m trying to say and I think they were all leading up to TIGERS. If you look at the shorts its obvious, the progression is obvious. So it just made sense to make a movie about kids. Everyone wants to compare you to someone else so you can never be really thought of as original anymore.

WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN.

There are adults in there. I was happy to see Fairuza Balk.
I think what it shows you is getting her, getting Kim Dickens from Deadwood, is that maybe the bigger budgeted films aren’t that rewarding [for actors], or maybe it had to do with [previously] being in Sundance. Who knows, but what’s nice is there’s a collaborative effort. The scene with Fairuza when Logan drops the grocery bag is mostly improvisation. Originally there was only one line which was, “You know everything you touch turns to shit.” The rest was purely Fairuza improvising lines, it was great. Everyone has a fair say in these smaller films, I’m not opposed to hearing suggestions and being open.

WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN.

It played Locarno in August. Have you heard feedback?
No. It would be nice to see what the European audience thinks of it. No offense to Sundance but what kid or teenager can afford to go out there? I feel that the film has still yet to play to what I believe will be its biggest audience - teenagers.

How do you think teenagers will see the film differently from adults?
I just think young people will have an easier time identifying with the film and that they won't be alienated by the style. The few teens that have seen it, seem to really dig it, and that couldn't make me happier. Some old guy watched my film and told me afterwards that I should go see THE DA VINCI CODE (2006) to learn how to write a proper story. Shit. I would never see that film, and I hope anyone who digs my film would never see it either. The kids out there want something to shake them up, I know I did when I was a teenager, but I'd have to go back in time, to the 60s and 70s to see what I call 'progressive' films, films that make you think. Even if kids hate TIGERS, at least they're thinking about it. Movies like TIGERS and MYSTERIOUS SKIN (2004, Gregg Araki), which I love, come from a very young, punk sensibility, and not the type you can buy in the mall. And really, how many times can a kid watch a Wes Anderson film?

Is there a specific way coming-of-age films succeed or fail in their portrayals of kids?
Sure. You've seen TIGERS, right? We failed! Kids are all over the place. Some act like adults, some act like infants. It's tough to say that anyone's really getting it 'wrong' in movies. Are filmmakers sugar-coating their characters? Well, yeah, that seems to happen a lot.

What happened to you as a kid to end up making these films? Your answer can be mundane, fake or both.
Actually my parents and brothers are very supportive. Oh, I know – I had fainting spells.

When you were a kid?
Like from ages 10-12. I would just faint. It used to happen a lot.

www.camarcher.com

Confessions of a Short Film Programmer.

2007-02-24T21:41:00.000-08:00

I was one of two short film programmers for Sundance from 2002-6, and a short and feature film programmer for CineVegas from 2002 to now.

In 2004 I wrote about watching thousands of short films and crap I noticed. Waking up to an alarm clock in the first shot - drinking from the Jack Daniels bottle - hot sex with no nudity - changing clothes montage in front of the mirror... I'm sorry, its time for some new ideas.

Find the article here at Filmmaker magazine, one of the last mainstream mags with quality writing.

One of the things I did not mention in the article: why do film schools try to teach students by showing them features and then expecting them to emulate what they have learned inside of a short?

As you can guess, it is quite hard to tell a deep story, to establish characters, to create a world within 5 to 15 minutes. And once you go over 15, it had better be amazing or audiences will start to drift. There are shorts that succeed in all these ways, but not many.

Yet students are not watching amazing shorts by filmmakers who may have been on the same level with similar resources, or more importantly, at the same creative stage. At age 18 or 21 or 25, you may be able to recognize the talent behind Ford and Hitchcock, but how can you possibly translate similar film structure and metaphor into a short when you are learning? It would be better to simply watch certain scenes and learn editing and composing shots, using sound and pacing, for example.

At the end of the day, students are spending time and money at schools in order to learn how to be a filmmaker. How many are going to be successful, or are even talented? 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? And with the wisdom of someone at 21? Just teach them the tools. The Cassavetes are going to create themselves.

Regardless of that, universities should serve all students equally. Let them rent the famous shit on their own. Show them short films because that is what they are required to make at their level. And pay the filmmakers of the shorts some rental fees, as they may have learned from a school and are now making it on their own. Let me know if you need the names of some good films.