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Monday, March 1, 2010
For director Poyser, a bittersweet week
In a one-week stretch, Bryan Poyser got one of the best phone calls he’s ever received and one of the worst.
His phone rang on the Monday before Thanksgiving. The Austin filmmaker was at work at the Austin Film Society, where he is the group’s director of artist services. He was typing the final few words in a blog entry, a sentence, he says, that read something to the effect of “I don’t want to say anything about what I’ve really been thinking about the past couple of weeks, other than to say that I wish I didn’t want it so much.”
Phone rings.
“I was just about to post the blog when I get this call from California from a number I didn’t recognize,” Poyser says. “It was Trevor Groth, head programmer of the Sundance Film Festival, telling me they really loved my movie and that they want to play it in the competition.”
This was exactly what he wanted so much.
“I was running around the office as he was talking to me and I wasn’t really hearing what he was saying and I was pointing at my phone to my co-workers, whispering ‘It’s Sundance!’”
Poyser’s low-budget dark comedy “Lovers of Hate” had beat out more than 1,000 feature films to land in Sundance’s prestigious Dramatic Competition.
During the festival, Jan. 21-31 in Park City, Utah, the movie will vie with 15 other titles, some starring bona fide stars Mary-Louise Parker, James Franco, Natalie Portman, Orlando Bloom, James Gandolfini and Laura Linney. Poyser’s movie stars relative unknowns: Austin actors Chris Doubek and Heather Kafka and New Yorker Alex Karpovsky (who was last seen in Andrew Bujalski’s Austin-made “Beeswax,” as was Poyser in a small part).
It was one of those nirvana moments that burgeoning filmmakers twist themselves up for, a godsend as coveted as it is elusive. Sundance’s tradition of introducing fresh independent cinema to world audiences - “Slacker,” “Reservoir Dogs,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” this year’s “Precious” - is legend.
A week after that phone call, almost to the hour, Poyser was again finishing up work at the Austin Film Society. Phone rings. It’s his sister, who informs him that their father has died of a heart attack.
The double-whammy of news, an irreconcilable knot of jubilation and sorrow, has thrown things into perspective. “It hasn’t knocked the wind out of my sails, but it’s made me recognize what an amazing opportunity (the festival) is for me and everyone involved,” Poyser says. “Still, my life changed a hell of a lot when I got the call about my dad. I’m going to be dealing with not having him around for the rest of my life. It would have been great for him to see this.”
In its way, this is a story about death and rebirth. “Lovers of Hate” marks Poyser’s return to making a feature film to his personal specifications. He has made several shorts and two features, 2004’s “Dear Pillow” and 2006’s “The Cassidy Kids,” which he produced and co-wrote. (“Cassidy Kids” was directed by Poyser’s former collaborator Jacob Vaughan.)
While “Dear Pillow” emerged how he envisioned it, earning festival awards and an Independent Spirit Award nomination, “Cassidy Kids” was a demonstration of how the vaunted collaborative nature of filmmaking can turn to sour compromise. Poyser and Vaughan joined forces with the University of Texas Film Institute and the now-defunct Burnt Orange Productions to make “Cassidy Kids,” but, Poyser says, “There were too many cooks in the kitchen. ” It didn’t go very well.”
After the $4,000 “Dear Pillow,” which Vaughan shot and edited, Poyser and Vaughan leaped at the chance to make a half-million-dollar feature with Burnt Orange. They soon realized part of their job description was to serve the ideas of other people, not necessarily their own.
Though the movie premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival and aired on the Independent Film Channel, “It didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to,” Poyser says over coffee. “I was trying to please all these different constituencies, changing the script to something I thought other people would like.”
Poyser was left mulling if he even wanted to keep making movies. He felt chastened. “The effort required is so high and the potential payback is so low,” he says.
If he did, he was certain that he would do it on a smaller scale. He shot a couple of short films and wrote a feature script.
But it was while he was at Sundance in 2008 that he struck upon the idea for “Lovers of Hate.” In Park City, he was staying in a gigantic four-story, six-bedroom chateau-style home co-owned by Deborah Green, an Austin Film Society board member. He had already wanted to write a script as a vehicle for friend Chris Doubek, but now he had a setting: this massive edifice that could serve as a character.
“I liked the idea that someone could hide in there without anybody else inside knowing it. It’s so big,” Poyser says.
He used the conceit to develop a grimly comic story about a warped love triangle between two brothers and the estranged wife of one of them.
The brother played by Doubek hides in the house only to witness his brother (Karpovsky) moving in on Doubek’s willing wife (Kafka). The movie explores the psychological dynamics of watching the one you love in the arms of another who happens to be your brother.
Doubek’s character “decides to get his revenge by sabotaging the couple from the shadows, playing little tricks on them, trying to split them apart,” Poyser says. Elements of bedroom farce mingle with “uncomfortable humor.”
With a five-figure budget, “Lovers of Hate” was shot on high-definition video by Austin cinematographer David Lowery in 19 days in Park City and Austin. (It’s produced by Megan Gilbride, and its executive producers include filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass.)
“I wanted to make sure that the logistical challenges were manageable enough that they wouldn’t keep me from making the movie I wanted,” Poyser, 34, says.
“I thought that if I’m going to go through all the effort, time and expense of making a tiny-budget movie, it better be something that I give 110 percent to and that I don’t shoot myself in the foot by trying to do something too ambitious.”
About the felicity of making a film in Sundance’s hometown only to have it accepted to the festival the following year?
“Of course we hoped that it might happen,” Poyser says. “Hey, here we are in Park City, shooting a movie. Wouldn’t it be awesome if one year later we could come back with the film in the festival? But I really tried to keep my expectations very low and just concentrate on the work and making it good.”
He’s still keeping his expectations low. Poyser, who graduated with a film degree from the University of Texas, realizes that film distribution has contracted in recent years and that the chance of getting one’s film into theaters is slighter than ever.
“We knew we weren’t making a movie that we’d be selling to Miramax for a million bucks,” he says. “We’re willing to recoup its cost by selling DVDs one at a time at film festivals.”
The hard facts of the film business and the hard blow of losing a family member have placed Poyser in a contemplative mood that you might call humbly realistic.
“It’s been such a weird time for me. It’s all made me grateful for this and not to expect everything to change after this moment. And to recognize that we got lucky.”
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Lessons from the set:
Originally published in the Statesman on August 8, 2008.It’s a sticky summer day on a film set in East Austin. On movie shoots, time is everything, haste mandatory.
“Go, go, right now!” director Mike Dolan shouts to a small group of young actors on a covered outdoor basketball court.
“Rolling!” a crew member barks.
Nature has other plans. A hissy, rattling thrum fills the air, growing louder and more piercing by the second.
“Stop the cicadas!” someone hollers.
A guy dashes to the tree from which the offending bugs are performing their noxious chorale. He hurls twigs and stones into the branches.
The sound promptly stops.
“He’s amazing,” production designer Yvonne Boudreaux quips, watching the heroic cicada silencer.
It’s always something. Just moments before, two gardeners on a John Deere casually spluttered through the scene. “What are they doing here?” someone wondered.
Making a movie is a drill in taming mayhem, especially on location. Especially here, in Edward Rendon Park on Chicon Street, where the cast and crew of the film “Dance With the One” are a mostly untested lot, coming together with raw talent and adrenalized dedication to produce a full-length feature for the University of Texas Film Institute.
In a way, it’s a glorified student film. Save for two crew members, some of the actors and the film’s producers - Tom Schatz, UT film professor and UTFI executive producer; Alex Smith, UT film lecturer and UTFI creative director; and Bryan Sebok, UT film lecturer and UTFI academic coordinator - the 40 or so people working on “Dance With the One” are UT undergraduate and graduate students from several departments, as well as institute alums. Only some on the production are earning paychecks. Students receive course credit.
More than a sizable crew and a healthy 22-day shooting schedule sets the production apart from a scruffy DIY student movie. “Dance With the One” boasts a professionally vetted script, a cherry-picked top-line crew - director, cinematographer, editor and others - and a $200,000 budget funded through UT, grants and outside donors.
“There’s no way you can do a movie like this and not spend a couple hundred thousand dollars in hard money,” Schatz says. “This is a movie that would cost at least three quarters of a million dollars in the real world.”
Even with all that, the movie is a nonprofit venture. It doesn’t have to sell, no one has to see it. A theatrical run would be great, but it’s not compulsory. As the institute’s Sebok puts it, “There’s no commercial imperative on this.”
The point is in the practice: exposing students to hands-on, real-scale filmmaking. Smith and his brother Andrew went through the Sundance Institute Writer’s Workshop with their 2002 drama “The Slaughter Rule,” a small indie hit starring Ryan Gosling. He’s partly modeled the UT institute on that celebrated program, where “students are making a feature film that they’ve created in a professional manner.”
“The film school at UT is fantastic at what it does, but sometimes the students get out without the ability to get hired on a real film, because they’ve been focused on creating their own personal work,” Smith says. “None of that will help them get work on a feature in the real world. UTFI is a way to bridge the gap between film school and the professional film world. So it’s a hybrid of a student film and a professional film. It’s student-made, but without the pressures of the marketplace.”
The institute is what remains of the for-profit partnership between UTFI and Burnt Orange Productions, which, from 2003 to 2007, made four feature films, including “The Quiet” and “Homo Erectus,” on a for-profit basis. But Burnt Orange, which raised millions for the films, went on indefinite hiatus last year, a victim of rough times in an independent movie market that’s witnessed the death of numerous indie outlets, such as Warner Independent and, just last month, Netflix’s Red Envelope Entertainment.
Theatrical releases are ceding to new media models such as direct-to-DVD sales and Internet downloads. The old business model, which Burnt Orange followed, doesn’t work anymore, Schatz says.
For the institute’s feature, “there’s no reason to do theatrical,” he says. “It’s a loss-leader for the big guys, but you can’t do a loss-leader this low.”
Written by Smith Henderson, a graduate of UT’s Michener Center for Writers, and his writing partner Jon Marc Smith, “Dance With the One” is an Austin-set family melodrama mixed with piquant doses of young love and crime thrills. Gabriel Luna, a theater student at St. Edward’s University, plays Nate, a young man wishing to leave his troubled home life with his girlfriend Nikki, played by UT graduate theater student Xotchil Romero. After their mother died of a drug overdose, Nate is helping to raise his teenaged brother alongside their wastrel, party-addled father. When Nate agrees to hide a hefty stash of drugs for a shady player, the story shifts to dark shades of noir.
Henderson and Smith based the screenplay on a novel by Smith. Henderson worked closely with author and Michener professor Stephen Harrigan to prepare the script for the institute. From there it was intensely vetted, line by line, for six weeks by Alex Smith, Dolan, Schatz, several industry pros and other UT instructors.
“We went on a crash course in how to get a script from a bad shape into something they could shoot today,” Henderson says.
Choosing a shootable screenplay is part of the two-year, five-semester UTFI process. During the semester-long screenplay workshop, six to eight scripts are developed by their authors with professional guidance. Several considerations go into choosing the final work, budget and practicality being paramount.
Once Dolan was chosen as the film’s director - itself a rigorous vetting process - he helped rework the script.
“Our challenge is to make the script we’re given as good as it can be,” Dolan says. “(Henderson and Smith) wrote a film that I thought was fractured between a family drama and a crime-thriller in the second half. And I said the only way it would work is if those parts were blended, which is hard to do.”
Dolan is a former actor who played major roles in the 1980s movies “Light of Day” (directed by Paul Schrader), “Hamburger Hill” (John Irvin), “Biloxi Blues” ( Mike Nichols), as well as episodes of television’s “I’ll Fly Away” directed by David Chase. He also wrote and directed the short film “Arrow Shot,” which enjoyed spectacular festival and cable runs.
His experience with actors and directors and an impressive understanding of the story in “Dance With the One” earned him the directing chair.
“This is an extraordinary learning experience,” he says. “I’m learning so much and I’m giving it everything I possibly have. I have certain skills, but I’m aware of others I don’t have.”
Excitement whirls across the film set in East Austin. People look happy and glad to be there, despite the blistering heat. A huddle of crew-mates keeps eyes peeled on a small video monitor as skinny, shirtless performers shoot hoops during a scene. Perched on bleachers nearby, Schatz glances at the script as the scene plays out. Someone yells, “Cut!”
Later, like a proud uncle, Schatz points out the film’s director of photography, UT graduate student Marcel Rodriguez, who happens to be the brother of Robert Rodriguez. (Speaking of Rodriguez, the two Sony high-definition cameras used on the movie were donated by the filmmaker’s Troublemaker Studios - the same cameras he used to shoot “Sin City.”)
“Every time I go to the set it’s like a dream realized,” Alex Smith says. “I love the energy there. A lot of the crew were students of mine over the years, so it’s really rewarding to see them working together on a real feature film with a real schedule and real call sheets and a caterer.”
From shooting and editing to scoring and marketing - the extent of the UTFI program - “Dance With the One” is at least a year from completion. After that, producers say, it will embark on the festival circuit, aiming for distribution, be it theatrical, DVD or download. Hopes are high.
“This better be a good little movie,” Schatz says. “And I expect it will be.”
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With ‘Dance With the One,’ a step toward mainstream
The independent film scene is awash in grainy, small-scale personal movies tracing the romantic foibles of the post-collegiate crowd and the existential crises of the disaffected. From “The Puffy Chair” and “Beeswax” to “Frownland” and “Goliath,” they are microbudget movies featuring nonprofessional actors and a semi-improvised approach whose antecedents include the do-it-yourself films of John Cassavetes and Richard Linklater’s “Slacker.”
The modest success of these films - they’re more culturally influential than lucrative - has shaped what the educated viewer looks for at indie-oriented film festivals. They seek the offbeat and unpredictable, almost anything that flouts Hollywood molds, even at the expense of conventional visual “beauty.”
Despite this climate, the producers of the low-budget crime thriller “Dance With the One” aspired to make a more traditional picture, a straight-faced genre film with love, drugs and guns set in contemporary Austin. Shot in the summer of 2008 and now being submitted to film festivals, “Dance With the One” is the first feature by the University of Texas Film Institute since ending its four-year partnership with the now-defunct Burnt Orange Productions. (As partners, the institute and Burnt Orange produced such films as “The Quiet” and “The Cassidy Kids.”)
“We didn’t want to make a mumblecore movie,” director Mike Dolan says. “We wanted to make a movie that looked like a movie, with production design and lighting and the works. I wanted to make a movie that I’d like to see.”
Dolan, who as an actor co-starred in the feature films “Hamburger Hill” and “Biloxi Blues,” claims the neo-noirs “At Close Range” and “One False Move” and the unvarnished realism of the Ken Loach oeuvre as influences - “low-budget, hard-driving narratives that have a truthful and emotional heart … (and) a stripped-down, muscular vibe,” he says.
“Dance With the One” was rejected by this year’s Sundance Film Festival, though the festival programmer noted that the film’s “execution was exceptional.” Alex Smith, the institute’s creative director, surmises the movie was turned down “because it is more ‘earnest’ than ‘hip.’” The filmmakers are awaiting word if it will play South by Southwest in March.
Based on a script by Smith Henderson, a graduate of UT’s Michener Center for Writers, and his writing partner Jon Marc Smith, “Dance With the One” stars a mix of non-professional (UT graduate theater student Xotchil Romero ) and professional actors (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson of “Friday Night Lights”) to tell the story of a young man (piercing newcomer Gabriel Luna) whose dreams of escape from a troubled family are violently complicated by drugs and thugs. The twang-tinged score was produced by Austin musicians Bukka Allen and Brian Standefer, and the soundtrack features songs by the Black Angels, the Damnations, Doug Sahm and Roky Erickson.
“The story has a ton of heart and true Austin grit,” Smith says. “It has outstanding Austin talent, in front of the camera and behind it. I’m particularly proud that every key creative choice was made by a UT student or recent alum - from script to direction to cinematography to editing to the score to casting - yet never once does it feel like a student film.”
On the set of the film in the summer of 2008, Smith explained to me, “UTFI is a way to bridge the gap between film school and the professional film world. So this is a hybrid of a student film and a professional film. It’s student-made, but without the pressures of the marketplace.”
“Dance With the One” was shot in 22 days with a roughly $200,000 budget funded by UT, grants and outside donors, with no promise to make the money back. Some on the production were paid; students received course credit. The producers - Smith, the institute’s executive producer Tom Schatz and the institute’s academic coordinator Bryan Sebok - say the film won’t get a theatrical release, opting for new distribution models of cable, video on demand and DVD.
The institute’s program is on hiatus until it finds money to finance another feature, Schatz says. They are considering several “promising” scripts, says Smith, including a “rock ‘n’ roll horror comedy musical and a modern, urban Bonnie and Clyde dark comedy.”
While partnered with the for-profit fund-raising arm Burnt Orange Productions, the institute produced four features, none of which found much commercial traction, contributing to the demise of Burnt Orange. Only “The Quiet” was theatrically released. Met with scathing reviews, it made but a third of its estimated $900,000 budget. “The Cassidy Kids,” “Homo Erectus” and “Elvis and Anabelle” were never released theatrically and have effectively vanished into VOD and DVD obscurity.
The filmmakers have higher commercial hopes for “Dance With the One.”
“It doesn’t pull its punches, yet it’s very moving and never over-the-top,” Smith says. And the fact that it lacks the trappings of the contempo indie “will make it a film with a long shelf life.”
“Maybe the programmers at some festivals aren’t going to like it,” Dolan says. But he’s sure the typical moviegoer will.
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A Coffee With … Geoff Marslett
This story originally appeared in the Statesman on September 3, 2009.
Geoff Marslett, an Austin filmmaker and film lecturer at the University of Texas, knows how hard it is to make a movie, and he wants his students to know, too. That’s why, on the first page of the syllabus for his fall class, Marslett puts down a litany of reasons one shouldn’t try to make films, a short dissertation of discouragement taken from personal experience.
“Filmmaking is frustrating because you’re never going to be able to make the film you thought you were going to make,” Marslett explains over a frozen limeade at Dominican Joe Coffee Shop. “It’s fraught with disappointment and you’re going to put all your money and hard work into it and it’s not going to work out as you hoped.
“So Page One of my syllabus is reasons why they should just drop the class,” he says with a laugh.
But if students flip to the second page, they will discover glimmers of hope. There, Marslett details why he loves making films and why it’s an art worth pursuing.
“While there’s a lot of terrible stuff in trying to make a film, you have to remember why you’re doing it in spite of that,” he says.
Right now, Marslett knows why he’s doing it. He’s close to wrapping his first feature-length film, the animated science-fiction romantic-comedy “Mars,” and in July he was declared one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine.
“This year’s crop of 25 New Faces consists, as always, of new film artists whose work we feel passionately about but also, in this year of change, people who are redefining the notion of a career in film,” wrote the magazine’s editor Scott Macaulay.
Marslett isn’t sure how he was selected as one of the 25, but he says it shows that doing what you love and doing it well has it rewards.
“Any kind of honor feels great, because you go through long periods of misery,” Marslett, 35, says. “I’m loving my film (‘Mars’), but there are still those days when you wonder why you even thought you’d try to make it. Then you get something like this and you think that someone might actually appreciate your movie.”
Since the article appeared, film festivals and agents have contacted Marslett, asking when they can see “Mars.” Marslett doesn’t have an answer quite yet, but he says he’s hoping to get the completed film into the Sundance and South by Southwest film festivals early next year.
A native of Garland (“It’s where LeAnn Rimes is from, not much else,” he laughs), Marslett can be brutally frank about filmmaking, but he’s far from dour. He wears a perma-smile and exudes joviality and optimism. He’s boyish and lanky, with a luxuriant Wolverine beard. Marslett wrote “Mars” in the summer of 2007 and shot it entirely at Austin Studios that September. He describes it as a sci-fi adventure with heart. “It’s a romantic comedy about astronauts falling in love on their way to Mars. I wanted to show what it would be like to be locked in a little metal box and spending those nine months with just two other people.” Marslett and his crew shot with actors, including Mark Duplass, Paul Gordon and Zoe Simpson, in an all-green screen environment that required the performers to imagine everything around them. They would have to gaze out of non-existent windows at a non-existent Mars, for example, all of it a blazing neon green.
“Afterward, you really hate the color green. It burns into your retinas,” Marslett says. Marslett and nine other animators then took the footage and painted over it with 3-D computer animation - similar to the process Richard Linklater used in “Waking Life” and Robert Rodriguez used in “Sin City” - to create environments and landscapes.
“When I first wrote ‘Mars’ I thought I’d try to make something really cheap and fast and easy,” recalls Marslett, who has made several short films, including the acclaimed “Monkey vs. Robot.” “For some reason I wrote a sci-fi movie about flying to Mars. That’s not cheap! What was I thinking? Suddenly it involved space ships and robots and aliens.”
After flirting with film studies at the University of Southern California, Marslett earned twin bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and mathematics from St. John’s College in New Mexico. He earned a master’s degree in film at UT and started teaching there in 2001. All his studies came into play making “Mars.”
“In a lot of my work, from ‘Monkey vs. Robot’ onward, I deal with that conflict between science and philosophy and what we do as people,” he says. “What is love? What is life? are some of the questions in the movie. And how love and life are reflected in relationships between anything.”
It’s been an arduous journey from shooting two years ago to applying the final touches in post-production, all for less than $1 million. Marslett, who is used to making short films, didn’t expect making a 90-minute feature to be as demanding as it’s been, and he says he might not have written that first chilling page of his class syllabus if he hadn’t made “Mars.” Yet it’s been worth it. “There’s a huge amount of satisfaction,” Marslett says. “I’m so happy I made this film. Finishing a movie like this makes you not want to give up.”
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Happily, horror brings Aussie, Brit to town to shoot Alamo Drafthouse owner helps cast, crew settle in
Noah Taylor has been practicing his redneck.
In the film he just wrapped in Austin, the violent small-budget thriller “Red, White and Blue,” the Australian actor plays “a bit of a mystery man and backwoods hick,” Taylor says. “I mean, look at my teeth!” Taylor flashes a rack of crooked, tobacco-stained choppers and issues a self-deprecating laugh.
Later in the day he’s going to shop at Allens Boots on South Congress Avenue for some Western-style threads. Meanwhile, to efface his Aussie accent and locate some kind of American South drawl, Taylor says, “I’ve been on a steady diet of ‘King of the Hill,’ Alex Jones and Tommy Lee Jones.”
Taylor, known for his roles in “Shine” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” was handpicked by British director Simon Rumley, who’s been a fan of Taylor’s since seeing him in the Australian films “The Year My Voice Broke” and “Flirting.”
” Noah’s proved himself to be an incredibly versatile and entertaining actor, at times quite dark and quirky and at other times very sweet and tender,” Rumley says. “His performance here is incredibly strong.”
“It’s probably the project I’ve enjoyed most in the last 15 years, and it’s one of the best scripts I’ve read in years and years,” says Taylor, whose voice work as the March Hare is featured in Tim Burton’s upcoming “Alice in Wonderland.”
“A lot of low-budget stuff is a bit dodgy, but I watched (Rumley’s previous feature) ‘The Living and the Dead’ and was blown away by it and immediately wanted to work with Simon.”
Although its writer-director is British and its leading man is Australian (though Taylor lives in England), “Red, White and Blue” is an Austin affair through and through. It’s the first movie Tim League - the co-founder of the Alamo Drafthouse theaters and co-founder of Fantastic Fest - has had a hand in making. League is the film’s executive producer, and while this sounds like a plunge into feature filmmaking, a natural extension of his free-floating movie love, League is quick to caution that production will not become a habit.
“It will not. And people shouldn’t send me blind e-mails, which I’ve already started to receive, pitching multimillion-dollar film productions. I’m not going to do it,” League says. “I don’t have any plans of getting into the industry. It was fun, but I’ve got the day job and all.”
He decided to try production this time because he’s friends with Rumley, who wrote the script expressly for an Austin shoot. League and Rumley met in 2006 at Fantastic Fest, where Rumley’s horror film “The Living and the Dead” swept the festival, winning five major awards, including best film and best director. Since then, the two have run into each other at various film festivals around the world.
About a year ago Rumley told League he was setting his next film in Austin. Six months later he sent League a finished script. League read it and offered some ideas for changes, but creatively, that’s where League’s input stops, he says.
Because of his wealth of local film connections, from catering to crew, “I’m uniquely positioned to help out a production like this,” League says.
“For a relatively low-budget film, it’s imperative to have someone who can call in a lot of favors, and Tim most certainly did this,” Rumley says. “And an integral part of the story is set in and amongst a thriving bar and music scene, which also suits Austin perfectly.”
League invited the cast, including Taylor, Amanda Fuller and Marc Senter, and Rumley, cinematographer Milton Kam and producer Bob Portal to stay at his and wife Karrie League’s West Campus home during the tight three-week shoot. Their spacious house became the “command center for the production,” League says. (A crucial, violent scene in a basement was filmed there, but Karrie wasn’t told beforehand and came home to an alarming sight, Tim relates with a chuckle.)
Finding locations and extras was a cinch for the $1 million movie, which is not applying for Texas film tax incentives. League put out calls on Fantastic Fest’s Twitter and Facebook accounts and fans lined up to offer places and bodies. About 10 people volunteered their homes for shooting and about 100 people volunteered as extras.
“A driving force of the film is the fandom that’s particular to horror films,” Taylor says. “It’s really extraordinary.”
Some 30 locations were used for what’s described as a “slacker revenge movie,” including Emo’s, the Broken Spoke and Austin Diner. With 50 to 60 setups a day, the movie was shot with extreme speed.
“They’re an incredibly efficient team,” League says. “Even the local crew was amazed at how many shots they were able to do at so many locations with a three-week shooting schedule.”
Facilitating the pace was the use of the relatively new Red One digital cameras, which can capture shots in high-resolution with dim lighting and a naturalistic feel. The filmmakers don’t want to reveal too much about “Red, White and Blue,” though a press release breathlessly describes it as a “fearlessly frank, gut-wrenching romance and a merciless exploration of the futility of violence. ” With its casual nudity and scenes of extreme violence, (it’s) no doubt destined for controversy.”
Rumley calls it “social drama meets tragedy cum horror. I always strive to do something slightly different, and I like the idea of taking a central conceit of horror - the murderer and the victim - and throwing it on its head.”
Taylor compares it to 1970s horror-thrillers such as Wes Craven’s “The Last House on the Left.”
“It’s a tough film with integrity and social realism. Any horror that comes out of it is necessary to the story,” Taylor says.
“Ours is ultimately a revenge film and a really tragic love story. The three main characters do some pretty bad things, but you wouldn’t necessarily call them bad people. They make some wrongheaded decisions.”
“Red, White and Blue” likely won’t be ready for Fantastic Fest; the celebration of horror, fantasy, action and other genre films runs Sept. 24 through Oct. 1 at the Alamo South. But League won’t rule out a sneak peek of footage during the annual bash - a nice full-circle touch for a film that sprang from a friendship born there.
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Landmark pulling out of Dobie
Photos: Scenes from the Dobie Theatre through the years
Landmark Theaters is leaving the Dobie, where Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” premiered and two film festivals were born. But the center’s landlord is talking to potential operators to take over the four-screen arthouse and return it to its tradition as an independent film space with a strong local flavor.
Long regarded as a mecca for indie, foreign, art house and speciality films, the Dobie “has a rich history and a special place in Austin, and we want to get back to its roots and work with that,” said Noah Davis, an asset manager with New York-based Carlton Strategic Ventures of the Carlton Group, an international real estate investment bank that owns Dobie Center, on Guadalupe Street across from the University of Texas campus.
“Austin has a very unique brand and local feel to it, and while we’re not local ownership, we’re very committed to the local concept. … We want to go with the grain.”
Davis said Landmark Theaters won’t be renewing its 10,000-square-foot lease at the Dobie. Davis said it is his understanding that Landmark’s decision to leave the Dobie is part of a strategy to focus more on its theaters in other areas, including Boston and California.
In an e-mail, Ted Mundorff, CEO of Landmark Theatres, said: “We do not comment on the status of lease negotiations. However, we can confirm that our current lease expires in the fall of this year.”
Davis said that Carlton is in ongoing talks with “a half dozen to a dozen” prospective operators “to see who is the best fit to bring (the Dobie) back to where it was and ought to be.” However, he declined to identify any of them, citing the “sensitive nature” of the discussions. While the search for a replacement tenant has been an “ongoing” process, it “definitely heated up” in the new year, Davis said.
Davis said Carlton’s goal for the Dobie is to have it feature “more film-festival style films,” as well as artsy and foreign films, “things that appeal to Austin and the UT market,” he said.
“We want to get back to its heyday,” Davis said, which in the latter 1990s included director Quentin Tarantino launching his famous QT film festivals, in which he showed his personal collection of movies and held question-and-answer sessions with audiences.
In the mid-1980s, the Dobie became the first home for Austin Film Society screenings, organized by filmmakers Linklater and Lee Daniel. In 1990, the Dobie premiered Richard Linklater’s Austin-made cult classic “Slacker.”
The theater also is the place where its former owner, Scott Dinger, founded the Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival in 1987.
Davis said he is optimistic that Carlton will be able to bring in a new operator that will allow the Dobie to remain a theater. He said an “internal frontrunner” has emerged, but added that “we have to see how things play out,” adding that Carlton needs to weigh the suitors’ individual financial packages and also determine which of them would be in keeping with “the best interests of the property and the community.”
Davis did not give a timetable for when Carlton expects to make a decision. The company wants to make the decision as quickly as possible, Davis said, while also giving it “the due diligence it deserves.”
Additional material from Chris Garcia.
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Noteworthy DVDs released 3/02/10
PICK OF THE WEEK
“The T.A.M.I. Show” (Shout! Factory): Everybody from James Brown to Gerry and the Pacemakers take the stage in one of the most famous, and most star-studded, concert films ever.
OTHER TOP PICKS
“Clash of the Titans” (1981) (Warner Bros.): Cutting-edge home video meets the finest old-school tech in this timely reissue of Ray Harryhausen’s classic stop-motion-meets-live-action fantasy.
“Elvis” (1979) (Shout! Factory): If John Carpenter set sci-fi aside to make a movie about Elvis, you know Kurt Russell played the King.
“Ponyo” & “Where the Wild Things Are” (Warner Bros.): Two extremely unconventional stories about kids — one who falls in love with a fish, one who becomes the kind of the monsters before bedtime.
NEW ON BLU-RAY
“The NeverEnding Story” (Warner Bros.)
FRESH FROM THE MULTIPLEX
“2012” (Sony); “Cold Souls,” “Gentlemen Broncos” (Fox)
FROM THE VAULTS
“Frances,” “Plenty,” “The Wraith” (Lions Gate)
DOCUMENTARIES
“Lodz Ghetto” (Passion River); “We Live In Public” (Indiepix)
BEST OF TV
”Alice” (2009 Miniseries) (Lions Gate); The Beiderbecke Connection,” “Poldark” Series 1, “The Road from Coorain” (Acorn Media); “Bollywood Hero” (Anchor Bay); “Dalziel and Pascoe” Season 1, “Doctor Who: Dalek War” (BBC); “Designing Women” Season 3 (Shout!
Factory); “Have Gun Will Travel” Season 4, Vol. 1, “Matlock” Season 4 (Paramount); “Hell’s Kitchen” Season 2 (First Look); “X-Men” Vol. 5 (Walt Disney); “Yozakura Quartet” Complete Collection (Section23)
REISSUE/REPACKAGE
“Castle in the Sky,” “KiKi’s Delivery Service,” “My Neighbor Totoro” (Walt Disney)
STRAIGHT(ISH) TO VIDEO: “Wushu Warrior” (Phase 4)
KIDS’ STUFF
“Strawberry Shortcake: Berryfest Princess” (Fox); “Super Why! Peter Rabbit and Other Fairytale Adventures” (Nickelodeon); “Thomas & Friends: Thomas & The Runaway Kite” (Lions Gate)
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Two SXSW films go straight to VOD
Scottish thriller “Crying with Laughter” and the doc “Erasing David” are getting day and date releases at the iTunes Movie Store and Amazon VOD alongside their North American premieres at SXSW this month.
“Erasing David” premieres March 12. “Crying” premieres March 14. Both movies will be available on demand through Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon and Cox cable providers starting April 1. (Video-on-demand distributor FilmBuff is handling the deal.)
‘Crying with Laughter’
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5 Questions With … Meredith Danluck, director of ‘The Ride’
Using a five-question format, we’re interviewing South by Southwest filmmakers about their movies before and during the festival, which runs March 12 through 20.
We talk to Meredith Danluck, director of the documentary “The Ride,” a caring, handsomely filmed snapshot of the Professional Bull Riding circuit and the people who produce and participate in the twangy subculture. More character study than bucking ringside thriller, the movie dwells on the personal lives of those who love the sport, deep in the heart of rural America.
“The Ride” screens at 7 p.m. March 17 at the Austin Convention Center.
- What in the world attracted you to the realm of cowboys, country and clowns?
Meredith Danluck: I went to a Professional Bull Riding event in Nashville, and after 24 hours of honky-tonking with cowboys, I was sold. How could I not be? They were all like characters out of a movie so I just figured, why not make a movie?
- What preconceived ideas did you enter the project with and how quickly were they shaken? Did you get infected by the ‘romance of the cowboy’ mentioned in the film?
It’s funny; at first I wanted to play down all the modernization of the PBR, the pyro, the money, the fame. But then I realized that was kind of the most interesting aspect of this scene. There’s an idea you have of the cowboy out on the range, and then there’s the PBR cowboy, who embodies all of that in spirit, but takes home a wad of cash and signs autographs on his way out the door. The collision of those seemingly contradictory ideas makes it super interesting.
- What type of guy or gal gets into bull riding? They seem to be fun-loving, risk-embracing youngsters, but also polite and well-bred.
Everyone I’ve ever brought to the PBR has gotten into it. It’s just so much fun. I mean, I guess there’s a core audience which is, as you would expect, big hats, big boots, big buckles and big beers. As far as polite, let’s just say that I heard a lot of yes ma’ams and never once had to open a door when in the company of a cowboy.
- Who’s one of your favorite characters in the movie?
Tom Teague. He’s a big-time bull breeder, almost as famous as the cowboys. He’s got an incredible sense of humor and because of the great way he talks he became this narrative voice for us, kind of like in the movie “Big Fish.” He’s got these funny ways of putting things, like “I got an ulcer the size of a hen egg” or “I need a mule like a hog needs rollerskates.” Not only is he one of my favorite characters, he’s one of my favorite people.
- How fitting is it that your movie is having its world premiere in Texas?
Back when we finished the film, we talked about what would be the perfect festival to premiere at. We all agreed SXSW would be the one. Just being in Austin gives everything this good-time feeling. Our film fits in perfectly; it’s a good time.
More about “The Ride” HERE.
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