By John McLean
September 29, 2005
Part Twelve: The Cutting Room Floor...
If you write a column like this, peeking behind-the-scenes at the creation of a low-budget feature, you can go one of two ways...either you can treat the entire experience as an opportunity to slickly market yourself and your project in the phony fashion of Hollywood Studios, ladling a thick gloss of sha-la-la over everything, sunny skies and schpedoinkel days for all concerned in this, the best of all possible worlds...OR you can belly up to the bar with a slightly soiled shot glass like a world-weary seasonal worker in Skagway, Alaska and tell it like it is, so your fellow filmmakers and craftspeople can profit from both the good times and the bad.
Should you choose the road less traveled, as we've done here, then part and parcel of telling the truth about making a movie is being brutally honest about the various travails that beset the course of the production--and your own life--during its creation.
Because shit happens when you make movies. The once-famous actor gets stoned in his trailer and doesn't bother to learn his lines. The entire crew goes on strike at the insistence of the local union reps. The Director of Photography loads the film the wrong way around in the Arri 16mm camera not once, but twice, and the production ends up losing two full shooting days. Yup, I was part of the cast or crew for all these delightful experiences, and more.
Or consider these examples:
1) The lead actress in a low-budget picture suddenly shows up one day, well into production, having proudly cut off most of her hair and dyed it a different color...utterly oblivious to the fact that her hairstyle needs to MATCH throughout the entire movie.
2) One of the principal actresses in a feature studiously avoids drinking and driving. Then one night, during the middle of the shoot, she's struck by a drunk driver and killed while getting into her parked car on Melrose Blvd.
3) A producer and director, both long-time friends and collaborators, quarrel near the end of production on a movie. The producer ends up stealing the negative and driving from LA back to Texas, where he hides out and refuses to return the film. Lawyers get involved. Nearly a year later, the director finally gets the negative back, but the movie is never finished.
Here's the tragic punchline to the three examples above--all of them happened on the SAME picture, which was being directed by one of by best pals. His spirit was so broken by these (and many lesser) setbacks that he subsequently gave up his life-long dream of being a director, and in the decade since has never directed again.
I should jump in here and now to point out that nothing at all bad has happened on the production of Z: A ZOMBIE MUSICAL of late. Nobody's died or quit the show or stolen our footage (or our souls) or anything at all like that.
On the contrary, the cast and crew are gelling more than ever before. We've recently come off our most productive weekend to date, successfully shooting the longest scene in the movie--fully 9 pages in length and containing an elaborate Song & Dance number right in the middle called "Zombie Walk".
But SOMETHING must've gone wrong somewhere, otherwise why all the big wind-up about shit happening during the course of a movie and all?!
ALL RIGHT, LET'S TALK...
Back in early May, in the sixth iteration of my "Lights! Camera! Zombies!" column, I quite publicly (and quite cleverly, in my own non-humble estimation) asked my girlfriend, Shawn O'Connell to marry me. Although she never particularly appreciated my quite public (and clever, need I add?!) method of popping the question by creating an audio-video proposal, Shawn was ultimately inclined to acquiesce to my request, to paraphrase Captain Barbaro.
I'm sure it all seemed like fun and games to get involved with a filmmaker--in the beginning, at least. But making a feature, on any level, is not nearly so glamorous as it may seem from the outside. It's mostly hard work and attention to detail and hours and hours and hours devoted to its creation, day after day.
And if you're in a relationship, you're ALSO supposed to spend lots of quality time with your partner. Or so I'm told.
Until Finnish scientists successfully invent additional hours in the course of each day, we're still stuck with the 24 we've got now and all too often these ran out before I tended to the home fires, if you will. Shawn ultimately came to resent all the time I spent working on Z. When she and I WERE able to spend a few moments together, the picture was virtually my only topic of conversation.
She also began to despair about the locust-like intrusions of cast and crew on her home turf, since we very often used the house as a staging point for scenes shot in the woods or country roads nearby. I mean, the first time or three we shot in the woods behind the house, Shawn had great fun. This was a whole new world for her. The cast and crew were intriguing, creative people.
Then the charm wore off, as it often does. There were days recently when we had 25 or more cast and crewmembers in and around the house at one time--leaving a trail of script pages and cigarettes and half-finished sodas and miscellaneous detritus to rival the destructive advance of Napoleon's Army through Russia in the winter of 1812.
Quite understandably, my fiancée grew increasingly frustrated that most of my energy and creativity went into Z, leaving little or nothing left over for our relationship.
SOMETHING HAD TO GIVE...
To Shawn's credit, she never actually made me choose between her and Z. In her heart, she didn't want me to give up making this--or the next or the one after that--picture. But she also felt like she was just a mistress on the side and the picture was, in reality, my primary relationship.
So last week, after tempestuous conversations dating back for months, we finally broke off our engagement and ended our nearly 1 1/2 year relationship. She got her life back. I got the dog. Since then, I've relocated my life and possessions and the mountain of movie-making gear, props and costumes into the home of a friend for the time being.
In the process, I've discovered it's not just deleted scenes that end up on the Cutting Room floor...but also significant parts of your life. Could our relationship have worked if I wasn't a filmmaker? We'll never know, since I naturally wouldn't be the same person if weren't a filmmaker. All I know is this: we were engaged for five months. Which doesn't seem like much, but it IS one month longer than the entire marriage lasted between Renee Zellwegger and that Kenny Chesney dude. So that's something, right?!
Ours was not the first relationship to crash and burn on the shoals of some artistic pursuit, nor will it be the last. But that doesn't make it any less painful to experience. Shawn and I remain friends...in fact, we've probably become better friends since I exeunted stage left than we were in the several months previous. She's even more willing to continue helping in various ways on Z now that the pressure's off and she doesn't actually HAVE to help if she doesn't want to.
Having shipwrecked the second-longest relationship of my life on the shoals of this picture, I'm now in the process of constructing a raft from the chunks of timber left over and continuing on with my journey. The show, as they say, must go on.
And so it did, this past weekend. Actually, we only skedded one shooting day, since we were concerned about the effects of Hurricane Rita and didn't wanna book anything out of doors, in case of rain and whatnot.
Damn, you shoulda seen Austin last Friday, while Rita approached landfall--whole aisles in grocery stores were cleaned out as people horded bottled water and band-aids and baby food like Armageddon itself was about to descend on our otherwise quiet village. Despite the fact that Texas is so fucking huge that we're, I don't know, something like 1500 miles and two time zones away from the Gulf, many Austinites worked themselves into a panic over the approaching meteorological havoc.
Well, Friday passed and then Saturday and then Sunday. All the while, NOTHING. Not only did we not get an Inland Hurricane, nor even a good thunderstorm, we didn't get a single drop of anything resembling water out of the sky! Instead, it's been brutally sunny and brutally hot every day--with temps reaching a record-breaking 108 degrees and more, with no end to the blistering heat in sight and still no rain on the horizon. (So much for "planning" a Rain Day into the weekend schedule!)
As if failed relationships and threats of hurricane weren't enough to keep us busy enough, now we've also got the threat of the Law breathing down our necks.
A couple of week-ends ago we 're shooting introductory scenes in a park right around the corner from my then-residence in woodsy South Austin. We've got a crew of about eight, plus three actors in full Zombie make-up--with two of us dressed as former Circus performers fallen on hard times from the fictitious Eastern European country of Slutvonia. And who should pull up and park not 40 feet away but two Austin Police Department cruisers?
Now this wouldn't ordinarily be that big a deal. True, probably half of our number have unpaid parking tickets and unpaid library fines--nothing serious, you dig, but enough to get your full legal name typed onto a warrant if you let it go long enough. Which, as I say, probably half of us have done.
But that ain't even the worst of it. Just that morning we'd discovered that sometime in the past year Austin has implemented a policy requiring Shooting Permits for any and all movie production done within City Limits, no matter how large or small. And getting a permit isn't so simple as dropping a dime to the Austin Film Office. Nope, the filmic bureaucrats require all kinds of paperwork and forms and even a $500,000 insurance policy, with The City of Austin listed as the payee...and which we couldn't remotely afford to purchase.
And there are even more Kafkaesque hoops to jump through! If you apply for a shooting permit and, for example, you're just gonna shoot a little scene in your own front yard, you're also required to submit a "Traffic Plan", describing how the traffic that passes by your house will be affected. At their own discretion, the Austin Film Office can assign one or more off-duty APD officers (at--what?--$65-70 per hour?) to monitor the traffic while you get your shot. (Hey, I've always been perfectly fine with the Universal Independent Film Traffic Plan, which consists simply of waiting for any passing cars to finish driving by before calling "Action!") In addition, you have to submit written permission from ALL of your contiguous neighbors to shoot your little scene. To top it off, they warn you on their web-site that receiving all of the necessary permissions and the final Permit could take 6-8 WEEKS! Now that's just for ONE little scene in one location. This process has to be repeated from scratch for EACH additional location. And it doesn't matter if it's a low-budget or even no-budget shoot, the Austin Film Nazis want their cut of the action.
Perhaps the fact that the Texas Legislature has long since ceased to take any action to attract major film productions to Austin--allowing one big shoot after another to set up shop in neighboring states--has emboldened the Austin Film Nazis to attempt to drive out the independent filmmakers as well. (I can imagine the meetings now in Gov. Rick Perry's office: "Let's get rid of all these liberal artists and return the city to good, tax-paying citizens who won't challenge the status quo and do anything dangerous like make movies or nothing." "Sounds great...can we also get rid of the queers while we're at it?!")
Yeah, like we're gonna ask Permission from ANYBODY to make our picture! Hey, we're making a goddamn Zombie Musical here and we 're gonna keep making it, whether they want us to or not. We're now operating, a la Col. Kurtz in APOCALYPSE NOW, outside the "Chain of Command." If they want some bullshit paperwork and fees paid, they can send some putz up river in a patrol boat and if they can find us, well then they can go toe-to-toe with our horde of Singing Zombies!
Fuck, it ain't independent cinema unless you're breaking SOME law or another, right?!
Still, it was more than a little unnerving to go about our business on that day a few weekends ago while the two APD cruisers sat there sixty-nining as the officers spoke to each other through their driver's side window. I had visions of getting hauled off to jail in full Zombie make-up and my outrageous costume. Try explaining to your cell-mates why you've been locked up. ("Uhhh, see, we got talking Zombies and, uhh....") Shit, we'd all still be walking bow-legged after that little contre-temps.
But they ain't caught us yet, so we're pressing on with our picture. We've got more singing, more dancing, more naked Zombies just ahead on the schedule. We're also getting close to finishing all the "daytime" portions of the show and then will shift over to evening and nights for the "nighttime" sections...which shoots are sure to bring challenges and adventures of their own.
In the meantime, check out the online interview I did about Z with the excellent film fan website, www.livingcorpse.com. (The link to the interview is right at the top of the main page.) At the very end of the interview on LivingCorpse.com, you'll find a link to the first "official" review of my first feature, the nutty mockumentary, THE PERFECT MAN CONTEST, or you can click here to be transported directly to it.
If you have any questions or comments--or just wanna find out where we're shooting over the weekends ahead so you can turn us in to the Austin Film Nazis--please don't hesitate to drop me a note anytime.
Until then...
Release Your Inner Zombie!
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