By John McLean
March 3, 2005
John McLean will be back live with Part Three on Thursday, March 24
Part Two: De-Composing!
Welcome back to a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the comic, independent Zombie musical, Z--featuring singing/dancing Zombies, pointless nakedness, Zombie nuns and priests on roller skates, and, of course, a Zombie Dog!
One Dark and Stormy Night...
So I'm tooling through a drab industrial sector in south Austin on a rainy-ass night recently, trying to find some place called the Music Lab where a band I really like, Born To Suffer, are apparently rehearsing. The streets I'm driving down are dark and deserted. Not a tree to be seen, just industrial signage and chain-link fences topped with barb wire. Most of the buildings in this desolate part of town look like those warehouses where serial killers store their body parts.
Suddenly I come upon a structure bathed in lights and surrounded by cars and swarming with activity, despite the late hour. It's the Music Lab, where musicians can rent sound-proofed rooms to rehearse, where they can buy guitar strings and have their equipment tweaked and do whatever it is that musicians do to make their music.
This is a whole other world for me. I primarily travel in the filmmaking and acting circles here in Austin. Sure we have our own little rehearsal spaces and equipment rental outlets and casting offices, but none of them are open at this time of night...unless, of course, you've jimmied the lock and backed up the pick-up truck to help yourself to whatever's inside!
Yet there's practically a line to get in the door at the Music Lab, with musicians hauling instruments and amps and mysterious cases to and fro. I wander from one floor to the next, past door after door with muted sounds of music behind each, until I finally locate the appointed room.
This will be my first meeting with Born To Suffer, an eclectic, high-energy rock group who I want to be the "House Band" for Z...performing many of the songs in the picture and even doing an on-screen cameo during one of the numbers. Through the sound-proof double doors, I can vaguely hear the band rehearsing a number, so I chill for a bit, marveling at how far this project has already come, on little more than a wing and a prayer, really.
Our Story Thus Far...
Keep in mind we're making a musical here, something that ain't done very much no more, no sir...which is a large part of the impetus behind these chronicles, to help YOU make a musical some day, if you feel like that's the best way to tell your story.
There are 12 different songs in Z, which are being composed by 7 different musicians. Now if you have a kazillion dollars for your picture, you can just write one big check to a single A-List composer and six months or a year later you'll have your songs. But if you have only a few dollars for your picture, instead you ask a bunch of different people if they wouldn't horribly mind devoting a night or two--or a week or two, as the case may be--to writing the music for some songs. So that's what we've done, asked a variety of local composers to create the music for the show.
Enter the Music Coordinator
I say "we", but I personally never did any of the asking. The first crewmember I signed on for the picture was the Music Coordinator, and he's the one who's been doing all that. This role has been ably filled by Dan Eggleston, a near-legendary character (and character actor) here in Austin--one of these people who knows everybody...and, if he doesn't, he makes it his business to meet them. He's got his finger in every pie and works tirelessly to promote the creation of local movies and theatre, no matter the budget.
Dan Eggleston is best known for creating and maintaining the AFC (Austin Film Chat) mailing list--which goes out to upwards of 4500 actors, filmmakers and crew people of every stripe in central Texas. It's an invaluable tool for putting artists in touch with whomever they might need to make their art.
It's All About Connections
Say you're casting a short and need an actress in her 20s for a role. You drop an e-mail to Dan and he forwards your note to the entire AFC list and within 24 hours, no lie, you'll have 40-60 headshots/resumes of interested, qualified actresses. Ditto if you're looking for a DP or an obscure location or wanna borrow a boom for a weekend shoot or whatnot.
Dan has organized similar lists in Dallas, Houston, and Los Angeles. If you don't happen to live in any of these locales and want to discover how to create a mailing list to serve your own artistic needs in whatever Godforsaken hell-hole you're currently stuck in, feel free to drop Dan Eggleston a note and I'm sure he'll be glad to walk you through the process.
Just Add Music
So, wearing his hat as Music Coordinator of Z, Dan has ferreted out all manner of musicians, each of whom already have styles appropriate to a particular song or two. Typically I arrange an initial meeting and sit down at local coffee house with a prospective composer, just to chat a bit about the show and get to know one another. Sometimes I sing (not very well, mind you) the tune I have in mind. In other cases, I primarily give notes on the emotion and mood I'm trying to communicate in a song.
To hear some of the previous musical stylings of Z composers--or if you're looking for a composer for your own project--check out Jan Seides, Joe King Carrasco, Marilyn Rucker, Troupe Gammage, Adam Sultan and Stewart Cochran. (The great Arthur Sullivan, who composed the music for "The Mikado" which I've appropriated for the first song, unfortunately passed away long before Al Gore created the Internet and thus doesn't have his own personal site.)
Then these good people trundle off and do that thing they do. Composers seem to be the ultimate hermits, holing up at home or in garage studios, making their music far beyond the prying eyes of the rest of the world. Later they deliver a draft of the music, usually both in instrumental form and with "reference lyrics" sung by the composer, so I'll have a better idea of how the ultimate song will really sound.
Of course, the finished song will be usually be played by someone else--a band like Born To Suffer or a string sextet or whomever--and also sung by someone else--either the person cast in the role or a "real" singer who provides the singing voice for them. (You know, like Debbie Reynolds singing for Jean Hagen in the greatest original movie musical of all time, "Singin' In The Rain". Ahhh, those were the days, eh?!)
House Calls!
Hell, in rare cases the composer will actually come to me. We had contacted the celebrated Joe King Carrasco--a tremendous musician who's been rocking and/or rolling from his base in central Texas for over two decades now--about trying his hand at a flippant little number that's meant to play on the radio while the heroine, Faith, is driving around early in Act II.
Because of conflicting skeds, Joe King agrees to stop by my place late one night--again with the nutty hours and these nocturnal musicians!--to show me what he's come up with for "Zomboy", the ditty in question. Dude arrives well after midnight on a school night and we step over and around the Pod People-esque bodies of my kids and my ex-wife's kids, who are sleeping (or molting into alien entities, more likely) on the living room floor in front of the TV.
We repair to a bedroom upstairs and Joe King busts out his guitar and plays this jammin' country-western rendition of the fake radio ad that is "Zomboy". It's cool stuff, just what I wanted, and I record it with a low-end digital video camera, so I'll have a reference later for the song. Naturally I'll still have to cajole Joe King Carrasco to come into a proper studio down the road and lay down clean guitar licks and vocals for the final soundtrack.
And yet again I'm struck by how willing people are to share their talents with you if just ask them. Even if you have more passion for your show than money, others will often feed on that passion and bring their A-Game just for the fun of playing and not merely to collect another check.
Meeting The Band
Back in the Music Lab on that rainy night, I can hear through the padded doors that Born to Suffer has finally finished up the number they were rehearsing, so I plunge inside to meet the members of the band...Todd Moore, Dionne Deville, Wayne Stegall and Ken Huncovsky. (Is there gonna be a test? Am I supposed to remember all their names when I leave?!) They seem pretty keen to work on my Zombie Musical and even play one of their standards for me while riffing some faux Zombie lyrics throughout, just so I can get a feel for their sound. They're perfect for what I want and I'm falling all over myself thanking them for their desire to come play on Z.
So that's how you compose the music for your musical. Mostly it starts with asking people. And mostly they say yes, even if there's no money involved. In Austin, at least.
As I leave the Music Lab--people are still just now ARRIVING for what will surely be hours and hours of work on their music!--I'm struck by how this is a Tale of Two Cities.
Austin's long been known for the quality and quantity of its musicians--which probably outnumber the film folk by a good 10-1. Most of the musicians, I'd wager, are only vaguely aware of the bustling film community here. For the majority of local musicians, SXSW is only a MUSIC festival--and getting booked at a primo venue during that week makes or breaks their entire year.
A Finger In Every Pie
Whereas filmmakers know that SXSW is a Music AND Film festival. We gotta have our fingers everywhere, our noses in everything. At its best, filmmaking involves all the arts...and the more you know about music and dance and costuming and physics and women and the current price of tea in China, the better.
In the end, every picture is about building a community of talent in front of and behind the camera to get it done. And the Z community is growing daily.
No doubt it helps when you live within a larger artistic community like Austin, where people are willing to roll up their sleeves and lend a hand. Of course, YOU gotta be willing to do the same for them, to help other people make their art when you're not actively making your own.
Wrapping Up
We've now got all the songs composed for Z and most of the bands/musicians who will perform them lined up. The next step is to go into a recording studio and get everything down in a polished format so we can start shooting and match the picture to the music and lyrics.
NEXT: we'll focus on Crewing Up for a musical...and also feature the shooting of our first trailer for Z, starring Hamlet and a cute Zombie chick!
As always, if you have any questions or feedback--or if you run a recording studio in the central Texas area and are willing to let us take it over for mostly free to record the music and vocals for Z--feel free to drop me a note.
Until next time...
Release Your Inner Zombie!
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