MOVIES

A very Austin movie: cheap, fast, funny, with heart

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM WRITER
Thursday, May 08, 2008

The day before Kevin Ford was to begin shooting "When is Tomorrow," a micro-budget buddy dramedy that feels quintessentially Austin, Richard Linklater pulled him aside with pointed advice. Look, he told Ford, who was expressing anxiety about starring in the movie with his close friend Eddie Steeples, you guys have been friends for 10 years. Mine the organic chemistry between you to focus your performance and, most importantly, keep it real and true.

"Connect on a gut level with him and that's what is going to come across on screen," Ford recalls the "Dazed and Confused" director telling him. "Your real friendship is going to inform all these little jokes and gags."

"It kind of blew me away," Ford says now, almost two years later. "It was a way for me to relax into the character. It totally helped."

This is evident in the loose, wiry give and take between Ford and Steeples in "When is Tomorrow," which has its local premiere Saturday and Sunday at the Alamo Ritz. Steeples, a Texas native who plays "Crabman" Darnell Turner on television's "My Name Is Earl," will perform stand-up comedy before each show. (The film then moves to the Alamo South for a short run next week.)

The screenings are partly the upshot of Linklater's encouragement. Ford showed him the movie. Linklater liked it and said that it needs to somehow be seen in theaters, garner word of mouth, then spread like a contagion. It's an old trick Linklater learned with his second feature, "Slacker," which debuted at Austin's Dobie before mushrooming into an indie-movie phenom.

Scrappy, talky-funny and crackling with DIY energy, "When is Tomorrow" is lo-fi and low-concept at its most honest and best. It's an intimate, offbeat relationship comedy that happily evokes the unforced brotherly friction between Luke and Owen Wilson in "Bottle Rocket." Two friends at odds, a camera and a microphone seem to be all it took, but that of course omits the tubs of sweat and volts of passion that make small movies happen.

A story helps, and Ford looked into his heart and saw one. He realized that he was outgrowing many of the friends he'd consorted with through his 20s, and it was tearing him up.

"I was trying to let go of friends who I knew were pulling me down," says Ford, who turned 33 on Wednesday. "I loved them, but I started to have these issues that I didn't understand. I would hang out with them like old times, but I would end up feeling really bad. That's what I was trying to figure out when I wrote this movie."

Ford assumes the role of his collective friends in "When is Tomorrow," while Steeples, whom Ford roomed with in New York, portrays Ron, a stylish young man who's found his calling and footing in life. Ford is Jake, a stunted slacker whose jittery existence is a treadmill of self-delusion and backward propulsion. When Ron visits Jake in Austin, cracks in their relationship expand to a chasm. Jake's unarticulated resentment for his successful pal manifests in childish basketball and table tennis contests. But his quiet hostility becomes too much, bringing the friends to an emotionally raw climax.

"I was heartbroken when I wrote it," Ford says. "It was like a love letter. I was writing it to all those people that I knew I was about to break away from. I knew who I was trying to become, which was this more responsible, focused and productive person."

"When is Tomorrow" emanates Austinness. More than the familiar locations and the palpable summer swelter — and the fact that it was shot in a jaw-dropping three days — the movie embraces its gritty intimacy the way some of the most accomplished Austin-generated movies have, from Linklater's "Waking Life" and Andrew Bujalski's Austin-written "Funny Ha Ha" to the Duplass brothers' "Baghead" and the Zellner brothers' "Goliath."

Ford's own narrative bears the classic contours of the indie Austin filmmaker. The Northern California native spent his 20s between Los Angeles and New York scraping for film work. He formed a production outfit, Mo-Freek, and made several features, shorts and documentaries, including the Jane's Addiction backstage rock-doc "Three Days" and "The Manufacturing of 'Fast Food Nation,' " a making-of feature about Linklater's "Fast Food Nation," which is how he met the director.

(The relationship continues: Ford shot footage for Linklater's "Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach," a biography of legendary University of Texas baseball coach Augie Garrido, which will have its premiere June 3 at the Paramount Theatre.)

But it wasn't just film that brought Ford to Austin. It was also a woman. While working in Los Angeles on his high-school pal Lucky McKee's horror-thriller "May," Ford befriended the film's star, Austin native Angela Bettis. Love bloomed and, after a visit to Austin that left Ford almost as smitten with the city as he was with Bettis, the couple moved here and married. Bettis co-stars, co-produced and even shot some of Ford's film.

"My feelings about life started to change," he says. "Part of it was living here and just calming down in general. I was no longer feeling bad that I didn't have an agent."

In this mode of reconciliation, Ford began writing "When is Tomorrow." He and Steeples doodled on the script through e-mail from 2005 to 2006. When Steeples, taking a break from his TV show, came to visit Ford in Austin, Ford saw a chance.

"I was like, 'Come on, if you're coming down here we can probably knock this little movie out,' " Ford says.

With Ford, Steeples, Bettis and cameraman Christopher Morse, the byword was "cheap."

"Why do you need a costume assistant?" Ford says. "We just went to the Goodwill store on Lake Austin Boulevard and picked out clothes right for Steeples' character."

What proved golden, and furnishes the movie its persuasive heart, was Linklater's advice to Ford before shooting.

"The thing we had that was priceless were the years Steeples and I had cultivated a friendship, our communication together," Ford says. "That made it possible not to spend money."

Then he laughs. "I scratch my head sometimes wondering how we did it with just four people."