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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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