By John McLean
August 4, 2005
Part Ten: Ground Control to Major Tom...
If you're new to our saga, we're following the adventures of independent filmmaker John McLean in Austin, TX as he leads his band of Merry Pranksters into the dark and dangerous Fire Swamp to create the feature-length Z: A ZOMBIE MUSICAL. After months of pre-production and audio recording sessions for the 12 songs, Principal Photography on Z is now in full swing.
LIFT OFF...
Houston, we've achieved Lift-Off...making a smooth transition from talking about everything we were gonna do on Z to actually doing it! Yeah, yeah, a few thermal tiles fell off the booster rockets along the way, but that's an ordinary part of the process. Every movie production has its share of Apollo 13-esque mishaps along the way. What matters is to keep your spacecraft more or less intact and continue zooming inexorably towards your destination in the stars.
Case in point: one thermal tile that fell off not once, but several times, was the small, yet pivotal, role of the Honorary Mayor's Wife.
Towards the middle of Act I, our Heroine chances upon a community of modern-day Zombies living in the suburban utopia of Zomburbia. Their leader is the self-appointed Honorary Mayor of Zomburbia, played with boyish élan by rock & roll genius Joe King Carrasco. His wife--called, simply enough, The Honorary Mayor's Wife--was always meant to have a bit of a wandering eye, flirting shamelessly with male Zombies just outside the notice of her doting husband. The Honorary Mayor's Wife has a nice amount of screen time and numerous comic bits, and she also plays major roles in a couple of major song/dance numbers.
This plum part was originally offered to a Statuesque Actress who loved the script (how could she not?!) and enthusiastically accepted the gig. However, soon thereafter she consulted her Acting Teacher about the role and he strongly advised her to back out of Z. And in the long tradition of actors everywhere doing whatever fool thing they're told by their Acting Teachers--whether it be good or bad for their careers--the Statuesque Actress did just that. She dropped out.
FOOTNOTE: her Acting Teacher had once upon a time been MY Acting Teacher...and creative mentor...and good friend. But subsequent to the exeunt stage left by the Statuesque Actress, he took me aside, denounced Z as "exploitative" and banned me from approaching any of the students at his local acting studio about performing in the picture. (Clearly something in Z touched a serious Hot Button in his psyche. Hell, I'm almost flattered that my little picture could stir up such inflammatory emotions within him!)
The delightful upside to this surreally sordid experience--you know, I've never had anybody actually denounce my Art before!--is that some time later my Executive Producer, Cheryl Adendorff, off-handedly suggested filling the role of the Honorary Mayor's Wife with a man in a dress. I at once found her suggestion inspired. And what kind of filmmaker would I be if I missed the opportunity to put a man in a dress in my picture?!
Of such moments, from all quarters of the cast and crew, come those silly ideas and bits that can make your comic movie that much richer and funnier. But you gotta remain open to 'em, you dig?
Armed with this silly new agenda, we had some near misses in casting a couple of different actors for the role--this time not for any nudity issues, since the Honorary Mayor's Wife never comes close to being naked...unless, of course, the Wrap Party gets totally out of hand!--but rather for scheduling reasons. Finally, the ubiquitous Dan Eggleston--who has more credits (and deservedly so) on this picture than any three crewmembers combined, myself included-- discovered a real pro, David Precopia. Monsieur Precopia is as talented as he is easy to work with. And he GOT the role right away--that the idea was to play the Honorary Mayor's Wife "straight", as your average suburban housewife who just happens to be an average man. In a dress. With a goatee.
INTO THE WOODS...
Our first full weekend of Principal Photography found us toiling in the 90-Acre Woods that borders our little homestead. The nice thing about this arrangement is that you can walk out our back door and within a few minutes find yourself in what passes for a forest in this corner of the world. The not-so-nice thing is that this few minute walk seems infinitely longer when you're Sherpa-ing hundreds of pounds of movie production equipment. ("Next time we'll have more money and we'll shoot in an air-conditioned studio", was the mantra I repeated often to my sweating cast and crew.)
Shooting in the woods LOOKS cool on screen...but it ain't all that much fun in the offing. First, you're exposed to the elements. (We'd even lost our first planned day of shooting in the woods the weekend before to heavy rains.) Second, you're at the mercy of the insect kingdom--with all manner of flying, crawling and leaping bugs who wait their entire, miserable little lives just for you to come along so they can bite, suck, sting or infect you. The kind of bugs that no bug spray will deter. The kind of bugs that, once you set up base camp, they send out little bug signals to several thousand of their closest relatives that Lunch Is Served! Third, Fourth and Fifth...only a moron would shoot OUTDOORS in the middle of the relentlessly hot and humid summer of Central Texas!
BRING A TARP...
Here's the most significant lesson I learned about shooting in the woods: bring a tarp!
Fuck it, bring 2 or 3 or more tarps, or however many you can get your hands on! One tarp to stage your gear on while getting set up. Another for your active production equipment (i.e., the tripod and camera and sound equipment). And another to sit on or put miscellaneous shit on while shooting.
We lugged all 9 pieces of our dolly track out into the woods. Since we didn't bring enough tarps, we had to lay the track directly on the ground. Despite taking pains to clear the area of sticks and rocks, we constantly found the dolly track snagged during traveling shots by twigs and long blades of grass and all the other miscellaneous forest gunk that gravitates towards movie equipment like pancakes to Andy Milonakis' face.
SHOW FRIENDS...
Making movies can take its toll on relationships, as in the nutty story above about the Acting Teacher. (In my perfect vision of Hell, all the Acting Teachers would be assigned to the same fiery level of the underworld as Movie Critics...that seems reasonable enough, don't you think?!) But movie making is more often a fantastical opportunity to make new friendships and build relationships. Shooting a picture is the ultimate social event, an invitation-only party of creative folk that keeps going for the entire duration of production.
It's fascinating to watch cast and crewmembers come together, meeting each other for the first time, or reacquainting themselves after having worked together on something else a few months or a few years earlier...watching fast friendships ebb and flow, as well as speculating on who's getting with who, or who WANTS to get with who, if the opportunity ever presented itself. (And sooner or later, when you're making a movie, the opportunity DOES present itself!)
Some of these Show Friendships will sputter and die once the picture is in the can. But others will endure and could even lead to collaborations and machinations and even the creation of other movies that otherwise would never have seen the light of day. And didn't Shakespeare say, "Movie making is a macrocosm of the whole world writ small"?
FOUR MORE SECONDS IN THE CAN...
As mentioned in earlier installments of "Lights! Camera! Zombies!", one of the upshots of deciding to make a movie musical is that it takes a shitload more time and effort to create than your standard picture. Our biggest song/dance number--well over 5 minutes in length!--features the denizens of Zomburbia being introduced in ones and twos during the early verses of the song, and then they all congregate at the Honorary Mayor's house for a big barbeque.
These introductory snippets of singing/dancing by individual townspeople can be little bitches to shoot, with two or more hours of set-up and Zombie make-up and costuming and lighting and blocking out the shot, all for a snatch of lip-synching that will last every bit of four seconds in the finished project! But that's the way you build up a big musical number, one freaking piece at a time.
PICTURE'S UP...
Although this is my second independent feature, I still have much to learn. Shit, there's always gonna be more to learn...that's the beauty and challenge of filmmaking, not to mention life its own damn self!
Following the example of fellow Austinite Robert Rodriguez, I'm also taking on more responsibilities with each picture. In this case, I've largely assumed the duties of the Director of Photography--though I'm getting excellent help from a couple of highly capable crewmembers, especially during scenes when I'm actually on camera.
The position of DP presents so many opportunities to be creative and have fun, while also offering numerous perils to be avoided. To start with, you (duh!) want an appropriate amount of light for each scene. Not too little, but also not too much. And you want that light to be aesthetically pleasing while still being appropriate for the material at hand. Early on in this process--with our very first pre-release trailer, "To Z or Not to Z"--I decided to play with a colorful light scheme, deliberately going for a slightly stylized, quasi-theatrical look. And we're doing just that in the photography, with the primary additional color of light being red. In a couple of scenes, we're lighting almost exclusively with red, which gives a creepy, dangerous glow to everything. But, even there, one must constantly resist the temptation to overdo it.
At the same time, you want your lighting to be thematically consistent throughout the picture, so that "matching" scenes evoke the same mood and emotions, rather than jumping around all over the place. Z is almost entirely a comedy and has very few "horror" elements to it, but our goal is still to light it much more in the mood of a scary movie than your typical comedy.
One of the (many) problems with contemporary film comedies is that they regularly abandon all sense of style or emotion in the photography. Most big budget comedies feature bright, perfect, shadow-less light--ripped directly from the set of Name Your Sitcom.
I've never come across a plausible explanation for the bland, overly lit look of contemporary comedies. Comedy expresses our deepest fears no less than any horror story, so why shellac over everything and dumb it down with normal-ass, flat, white lighting that keeps us emotionally distant from what we're experiencing on screen?! I mean, think back to the days when Woody Allen still made funny, watchable movies. Think back to his masterful MANHATTAN, with handsome Black & White cinematography by Gordon Willis that practically dripped with darkness and shadows, giving the picture a much deeper subtext than it would otherwise have had.
COMING UP...
Now that our Recording Engineer, Ben Blank, has returned from his 2-week vacation in the wilds of Colorado, this Saturday we'll be back in the studio recording more vocals for more songs...a process that seemingly never ends. (I'm thinking it wasn't so much that Sisyphus had to keep rolling some boulder up a hill as he had to continuously record vocal tracks for dozens of characters in dozens of songs, never quite getting them right ...which would be more than enough to drive any sane person beyond the pale of reason. Hell, that's almost enough to drive them to check out of life altogether and wile away their days as--egads!--an Acting Teacher!)
NEXT: more up-dates from the front lines of production, as well as a discussion of the unique challenges presented by being both a filmmaker and a parent. In the meantime, if you have any questions or if you happen to be a Pirate and wanna buy any of my children for a few doubloons--or less...hell, we'll take any reasonable offer!--by all means drop me a damn noteas soon as possible!
Until then...
Release Your Inner Zombie!
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