How To Make An Indie Feature aka Shooting Roadkill
a thinly fictionalized version of the saga of Pitstop (here called Roadkill), an actual feature completed in 2002 (started in 1996).
Currently on Amazon, as both kindle e-book and hard copy.
www.amazon.com/How-Make-Indie-Feature-Shooting/dp/1505425611/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1582769911&sr=8-1
How to Make an Indie Feature:
When filmmaker Victor Gaines has his script rejected for the umpteenth time, he decides to make his film ROADKILL on his own. In this memoir about his ensuing trials and triumphs, he has his negative stolen, finds himself lied to by a wide assortment of unscrupulous producers, and forges a family enterprise of actors and crew, all working for nothing, on a noirish tale about two men who are doubles: one a murderer, running from the law; the other a history teacher, running from his wife with a student lover.
Sample chapter below:
Chapter 7
WINTER IN BEANTOWN
Three months later, I have, as agreed, rejoined my family in chilly Boston, Roadkill clutched firmly in my bosom and balls and mind. If nothing else, having a goal to hang my hat on has made the retreat from California more palatable. Again I’ve put an ad in a local independent filmmaker’s rag, still searching, like Diogenes questing for an honest man, for producers.
Beck Grammon and I meet for the first time at a Starbucks in the theatre district, Eliot Street. It’s February and bitter cold, close to zero. High piles of fresh snow line the curbs. The passageway outside the busy shop bustles with a mix of government workers, business professionals, Emerson students, and the odd tourist. I am dressed in professorial tweed and corduroy, defended under a heavy parka, shivering. Beck, in contrast, is dressed for early spring, and entirely in black: black jeans, black T-shirt, black motorcycle jacket, black sneakers. Black tightly cropped hair. Black sideburns. Dark wraparound shades. He declines a coffee. I sip my blackeye, a tall black dark roast with two shots of espresso on top. This always impresses the folks behind the counter. Though it may be trendy, my goal is modest: staying awake at classroom lecterns, in meetings, and at encounters like this. I’ve been in Boston only four weeks, and already consumed gallons of coffee. No dosage seems to bring me around.
Mid-life narcolepsy? Or culture shock?
I describe my project to Grammon. “It’s an ensemble piece that’s a bedroom farce, but also a thriller, a kind of noir. Midsummer night’s dream in a trashy motel. But at Christmas. Funny, but with a bittersweet undertone. A fatal case of mistaken identity. Philandering teacher and innocent murderer confused.”
He makes a sour face.
“Been done,” he mutters dourly. “But we can do it again.”
“What do you mean?” I protest. “I’ve hardly told you anything yet.” I slide the eggshell-blue-bound manuscript down to him along the counter where we sit, squirming on stools, directly facing the busy entrance to the Massachusetts Transportation Building.
“Read the script.”
While he cracks the front cover and peruses the first paragraph, the closing scene, the last page number, all that ritual stuff, I gaze out at the nine-to-fivers, the working stiffs, streaming from the Transportation Building atrium, hotfooting it home in the winter twilight. Why couldn’t I have turned out more like them, less obsessed, less delirious with ambition?
“What do you bring to the party?” Beck asks, finally, his lip curling up.
“What?”
“I think you heard me.”
“That’s my script,” I say evenly. “What do you bring to the party?”
“I can get you money, if I like the script. And I can get you people. Cast and crew. If you don’t act like an asshole amateur. If you don’t step in and co-produce. If we do it my way.”
I know this guy five minutes and he’s threatening me. I miss Southern California. At least bullshit has a shape out there. A bit of courtly style.
Beck came highly recommended by Lorraine Venuti, a woman with an “L.A. history” (in Boston, that can mean almost anything – or, rather, nothing) who now administrated The Boston Film and Video Foundation, down the block from the Berklee School of Music. It was a place where independents of every stripe might feel at home, and find the community, the inspiration, and the facilities necessary to the making of movies. Her windows looked out on the Mass Pike, where it launches its westward march, all the way back to the Oakland Bridge or LA, or Seattle, depending on which interstate you eventually chose, though it was late afternoon when we spoke, and all the traffic seemed headed the other way, a mile or so eastward, throwing long boxy SUV-shaped shadows towards the Atlantic. “This Beck Grammon. He’s one of the few local feature makers,” she told me. “Someone who gets results.”
Back in Starbucks, I’ve been forced – or is it tricked? -- into a blow-by-blow espresso-fueled march through Roadkill’s complex storyline. Something I’d hoped to avoid, but a challenge that, I feel, rightly or wrongly, must be met on request. Judging by the puckered and humorless expression blooming on Beck’s face -- like someone anticipating a fart -- things have not gone well.
“You get the irony?” I try. “The tone is specific. Like I said, it’s kind of a bedroom-farce-murder-mystery-thriller-case-of-mistaken-identity ensemble-piece kind of hyphenate-genre thing…”
“We can do some trimming,” he says.
Lorraine’s Local Hero adds, rising. “I’m running out of patience with this whole indie thing. Know what I mean? Everyone and anyone these days thinks he can make a movie. Throw a bunch of characters into a pot. Add a murder. Gives me a cold.”
“Beck. Relax. Read the script.”
“Oh I will,” he says, biting out his words, spreading his slender feminine hands. “To me it’s simple, Victor. If we take this film on –if, because if you ask me, the story’s a mess-- we’ll make it happen. We always do our job. You just do yours. I’ve worked with too many writer-directors without a clue.”
“Really. Like who?”
“Well, you wouldn’t have heard of them, would you?”
He stares at me fixedly until I have to look away, then twists on his heel to grin at the cashier -- a Goth with nose and eyelid rings, all hair and black lipstick, pale as death – as though they’ve been accomplices all along in some an elaborate sting. She deadpans back.
“Look,” I suggest philosophically. “I didn’t do the story justice. Let’s talk again if you’re interested. OK?”
There’s a final unnecessary silence, broken by the sputtering din of espresso machines, crowd walla, the crash of cups, and the heavy traffic out on Eliot.
“Fair enough” he says at last.
“I’ll call you,” is his exit line.
Beck liked the script better than my pitch, or, rather, begrudgingly accepted it as a project, and we began to meet, like spies, in bars (he’d have one bottle of Evian, and insist on paying his way), inside and outside the public library, in downtown hotel lobbies, once on a bench in the Boston Common, once on the steps of his tenement. Though we both lugged around paperwork, there was never a question, a hope, of my being invited into his chambers, though I’d met his pretty blonde Midwestern wife Amy and their new baby on the landing. Mother and child, for all their fresh looks, had been leaving to grocery shop at 11PM on a Friday night. These people – the three of them – seemed to wake when darkness fell. Like vampires.
Beck began our collaboration by promoting the idea of a funding package, a document for investors which would describe the film, contain bios of the filmmakers, and project a best-case financial scenario without really saying as much. A business plan. To a novice investor looking at these figures, it had to seem like a sure thing. One hundred twenty percent was promised to shareholders in our little LLC, Highway Five Productions, before a penny was taken in profit, before any deferments were paid. And this was the downside. The timeline promised completion and a festival run within a year. Toronto! Cannes! Sundance! Mega-deals with Harvey Weinstein! Roadkill’s first investors climbed aboard: Uncle John and Aunt Emma (who had already verbally committed). Joined by Jim Myer, franchise owner of the local Store 24. Cousin Danny. And my mother.
Heavy hitters.
Three weeks later, a miracle occurred: the film stock I needed to go with my free Panavision camera appeared. I’d been filling in at Boston University for a professor afflicted with liver cancer. It was a fulltime job, just one term’s worth, but by my standards a decent transition to a new home. I’d met my predecessor, Hal Harris, in LA. He’d been kind enough to offer encouragement, tidbits of advice, books and syllabi. He was an actor and filmmaker, no dreary academic clone. I drove over to his place near Fairfax with my friend Mandy, and we both found him gracious and generous to a fault; he served us tea and rugalah, and talked at length about his students and colleagues. His body was already ravaged by illness, his hands shaking as he set down the cups, his features drawn with fatigue from a recent session of chemo. His young wife, an actress, arrived mid-visit. It was clear she adored him, and that his illness terrified her far more than it did him.
In the months that followed, they would search at first for a holistic cure, journeying from pioneer doctor to New Age diet to Southwest shaman; and resign themselves, in the end, to waiting for an organ donor, racing against time.
But the film stock. My teaching assistant let slip one day that Lauren Schuler Donner, an alumna, had donated some stock to the school. Short ends and extra rolls from Free Willy 2. Students weren’t shooting this Free Willy stock. It was expensive to print. It was unrefrigerated, and getting old. It scared them.
But it didn’t scare me. I stood in the doorway of the storage room and saw with the eyes of the world.
The biggest initial expense for a no-budget indie film, before these days of digital, was the stock itself, especially if the plan was to shoot in 35mm. I’d been granted a 35mm camera package. 35mm is what they project in theatres. Vanity whispered that 35mm was the way to go. Super-16 cost as much to rent, and didn’t mesh with any standard edit and projection equipment. Standard 16mm, which I’d grown up with, lacked the aspect ratio, and looked like lentil soup on blowup to 35mm. Anyway, 1:1.85, that original 35mm oblong “letterbox” had enormous symbolic, and seductive, value for me. Shooting this stuff meant playing hardball with the Big Guys. Striving for a more mature aesthetic. And graduating, finally, from a film school of the mind. After 25 years rutting around endlessly in one school system or another, I was eager to move on. That mountain of cardboard boxes in the basement of BU told me I could. With the free 35mm stock and free 35mm camera in hand, the consensus with myself (a consensus absent any of those producing partners I’d sought and so far failed to find) was “shoot it now!”
Don’t fuss later with a blowup from 16mm. Shoot. What. You. Have. Now.
At the time I visited his Fairfax bungalow, Hal didn’t actually know he was dying. He expected to live. He was confident. Proactive. At last, his new liver arrived, against odds, and was installed. But soon it ran riot in his body. Ordinarily there’s the danger of an organism rejecting a replacement organ. In Hal’s case, the organ rejected the body instead, irradiating it with overheated, proliferating, infuriated cells. In the end, he literally burned alive.
While he was losing his battle, I was winning – a roomful of film! A chance. From floor to ceiling, and at the cost, somehow, of this poor man’s health and future, I had what I thought I needed.
The raw materials.
If not the vision.
At the lab, they told me the stock was passable, but getting older by the second. They elaborated on density curves and shelf life. “Keep it cool, around 50 degrees, and don’t wait too long to shoot it out.”
Happily it was winter, by fortune a cold one. On two consecutive trips, I single-handedly hauled fifty-eight large cardboard boxes in the cargo area of my Escort between Boston University and my unheated basement. The temperature was perfect down there, 50 on the nose. Over the next months, sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep at night, I would throw on a bathrobe, sneak down the back stairs, past the overflowing garbage bags, to stand quietly and admire my stash.
On a gray afternoon in late February, after picking up Maya and her first grade friend Crystal, and their poster maps of the world, I return home to find a message on the machine from another would-be producer: Bob Mendoza. “Let’s talk,” he says. I call him, and the next day, we connect at a nearby Friendly’s. Bob Mendoza has a face like a dull hatchet. Lean but not that dangerous. He owns several dry cleaning stores. “They run themselves,” he tells me over coffee. He has time on his hands. He’s ready to get into “show business.” He found my ad for a line producer on the Massachusetts Film Office hotline. He tells me he’s a self-starter like I wouldn’t believe. Produced two student films as “shakedown cruises.” Got fire trucks, police cruisers, the works. Has a partner, a lawyer, well connected, who is about to take the leap and move out to L.A. His partner knows some “real players,” though I don’t catch any names.
I inform Bob about the free camera and the recent discovery of the free film stock. He nods. The nod suggests approval. I like that glass-half-full approach. I need someone who will accept this wacky idea of the found stock, of a film put together heroically from the scrap heap. Beck certainly doesn’t seem to accept it. Beck doesn’t seem to accept anything. In fact, I haven’t even told him yet about the stock. I’m afraid of what he might have to say.
Bob and I agree to meet again soon. He’ll bring his partner. He lifts the receipt for the two coffees, examines it carefully, and then stammers. Hesitates.
“Oh, what the hell,” he mutters, digging down into his jeans. “It’s on me.”
In a few days time, when Beck learns of my association with Bob, Beck will refer to Bob as the “cleaning guy slash actor slash producer” because, it’s true, Bob also has thespian ambitions, which he practices using unusual accents on his answering machine. Already Beck refers to Anderson, my other chosen associate (the kid I’ve picked to do the voluminous paperwork of preproduction – breakdown sheets, schedule, budget, days of days, etc.) as the “craft service slash student slash producer guy.” Why? Because Anderson, in order to pay his rent, has been reduced to running juice and rolls for film crews.
No shame in that. We all have to make a living.
I reach Beck by telephone. I can’t hold back the welcome news any longer.
“Not on the phone,” he snaps. “We have to meet.”
Two days later, we’re sitting on the wall outside the Boston Public Library. It’s about eighteen degrees, warm for this winter, though even in my ski parka, I’m shivering, blood still thin from that balmy Southern California clime. But for Beck (chain-smoking his filterless Gauloises) there’s not so much as a single goose bump on his skinny T-shirt-clad body. He exudes a strange, almost reptilian energy, not merely in the metabolic sense, but in the way he stares at me, cobra-like, whenever I ask a question, as though I should not only have the answer myself, but had better find it quickly before he strikes.
I want to shout out, jubilantly, high on the sheer possibility of it all: we have camera and film, we have cast, and a guy out in L.A. putting together a crew. We have cousins and aunts and a few legitimate business people on board with cash. This film is happening! But instead I say, humbly, “Can you take this the rest of the way?”
“Take this the rest of the way,” he asks, quietly mimicking me.
“Yeah…is that a problem?”
“Which way?”
“What do you mean?”
“Which. Way.”
In both directions, office workers spin past in winter overcoats. Taxis spatter slush on a few hapless souls who, undeterred and docile, soldier on. Everyone has real business to do, a genuine destination, a specific and immediate task to complete. Under a clear blue frozen sky, all is cold and sober purpose.
But we are playing games.
“Well OK, Beck, let me try to make it clear. We have no money. We’re trying to make a film. Now, with the stock, we’re that much closer! Now, it’s that much more possible! This is good. Don’t you agree?”
He exhales, a sigh, familiar recycling of regret and stale nicotine. And when he speaks, finally, it is as though to an idiot. “So you want this line producer you have, with his powerful background in craft services, to pull together a crew of desperate wannabes working for nothing, so they can shoot your movie with a union cast, also working for nothing--”
His voice rises--
“—which is against union rules and will bring you nothing but grief!! You want to put THIS crackerjack-box toy and THAT greasy sack of shit together and shoot a film just because you can? You’re like all the rest of them. Worse. At least they’re creaming in their pants dreaming about Academy Awards. You, you’re just dreaming about – NOTHING !! A ROOMFUL OF ROTTEN STOCK!!”
“I’ve checked it out. It’s not rotten,” I explain.
“BULLSHIT!”
He stands, flicks his cigarette butt hard against the curb, and disappears, long-legged, satanic, into the traffic. A spasm of honking and cursing breaks out, almost as though he’s somehow….caused it. I’m left behind – such a bright day -- playing The Fool in a nasty fable. The part where the hero wanders about in a swamp for forty years.
Beck and I meet twice more. Once, in the lobby of the Hotel Tremont, in overstuffed armchairs, with Bob and his lawyer friend Adam Fish. Adam, caught in Beck’s evil eye, is a deer in the headlights, blinking rapidly behind thick horn-rim glasses, mumbling nonsense phrases about “heavy hitters” at Sony, wearing a studied look of aloof bemusement, which translates not into the worldliness he imagines, but into something raw and clueless instead.
Even I can see that.
Beck shakes his head sadly, right in Adam’s face. Bob pulls a folded up piece of paper out of his coat, and starts indiscriminately waving it around. It lists the five key attributes of selling a project. They spell the acronym F-O-C-U-S: Financing, Organization, Communication, Upside, and Salesmanship. Something he acquired at a local producing seminar. But this moment of sharing has an opposite effect to the one intended, because Beck is now rising without warning and striding furiously toward the revolving doors. I hustle after him, abandoning Bob in the soft glow of the imitation gas lamps that bathe the lobby in old-world charm.
“Sorry it didn’t work out,” I start to say, out again with Beck in the cold and the city traffic.
“By the way--” he interrupts.
His narrow eyes hold me.
“—Yeah?”
“These guys are assholes.”
Well for that and two bucks, or whatever it is now after the fare hike, I could get on the IRT.
“You’ve got to know, Beck. I have no problem working with assholes.”
“Do you have a choice?” he sneers.
I have to laugh. If he laughs with me, I’m thinking, he’s my man…
He doesn’t. He stalks off, onto Tremont Street, and I walk back through the revolving doors, and make arrangements with Bob to work together on a new budget, and with Adam to send him materials as soon as he gets to L.A. I thank them, pick up the tab, and drift off into the night.
The last time I meet Beck we’ve agreed to get together in the usual neutral location, this time a picnic table in the Mass Transportation Building atrium. I’m meeting Beck’s line producer, Chris Mahoney. We’ve all agreed to demote Anderson, from “craft service slash producer guy” to Production Manager, and work with Beck’s “person” (Chris) instead. Despite the abuse, the spells of dry mouth, and the struggle to sleep at night, I can’t bring myself to let Beck go. I know I’m out of my range trying to bring this project off. I feel I need Beck’s assistance, his guidance, and I seem to be willing to abandon faithful Anderson to get it. Beck’s run a set, shepherded (more likely bludgeoned) a project to completion, fired people, juggled telephone calls, done deals. I haven’t. Not like that.
So I’ve compromised.
I’m compromising.
Chris is from Boston’s Southie, shoulder length dirty blonde hair, eyes like drills, mouth mean as a pirate’s, but with a million dollar smile. We skip the preliminaries and start right in, talking about L.A. Everyone here wants to be in Los Angeles. Instead, for a variety of reasons, they’re here, feeling like second-class citizens. Chris assures me he knows the scene. I have no reason to doubt him. I believe he knows how to make and keep a schedule, put a crew together, work with cast. I’m buying. But then he tells me:
“We need to make a change in our approach.”
“How’s that?”
His voice hardens.
“Dump your stock, forget your camera, and let’s start raising money for this sucker right away.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my stock,” I insist.
He smiles his pirate smile. “Sleep with your fucking stock then, if it’s so fucking important to you. We’re starting over. Get used to the idea,” he says.
Beck removes his shades and leans in, honing his gaze. I shift my eyes out of range and focus on Mahoney instead; he’s less intimidating. Mahoney, too, though, is leaning close, spewing a little breeze of nicotine.
“That’s our deal,” they whisper, seemingly in unison. “Make up your mind.”
Coming home on the T, I struggle hard with their ultimatum. It’s understandable to want control, to start with a clean slate, ground up; but how could I work with these two? How could I forgive myself if I put myself in their hands, and the money never materialized? Or they fired me, somehow, on my own project? Or forced me to work with people I had no rapport with? Or started messing with the script?
At home, dinner’s waiting. Maya wants to know if we can rent Babe again. I take to my bed without eating a bite, head ringing, and sleep through Babe as she watches, twice. I stay under the covers for nearly twenty-four hours, half the weekend.
When I get out of bed it’s dark again. I crawl to the kitchen.
Holly glares at me.
“I can’t help you,” she says. “Don’t ask. It’s your call.”
“You’d have an opinion.”
“It’s your call.”
So, desperate, not yet fully awake, I go looking for my daughter. I find her playing with an American Girl Doll. Felicity. This doll thing, it’s a phase that, for a time, has briefly interrupted a much richer fantasy life shared with a menagerie of well-battered stuffed animals. Felicity comes from the Civil War. She wears a stripe of embroidered roses down each side of an ankle-length dress.
“Maya, honey,” I say. “I need your help.”
“OK, Daddy.”
“There’s a man daddy’s trying to decide to work with or not to work with. I just don’t know. What do you think?”
She lifts her face from Felicity solemnly. We stare at one other, puzzled, for what feels like minutes. Then she turns back to confer with the doll, in whispers.
“Felicity wants to know, ‘Is he fun’?” she asks.
“Fun?”
“Is he fun?”
“No. He’s not fun. He’s not fun at all.”
She leans an ear to Felicity. I don’t hear it, but Felicity must have whispered back.
“Then why do you want to work with him?”
About ten days after I fire Beck, I receive a three-page letter outlining what we’d done, and why he’d terminated the agreement (though strictly speaking, I had). That letter ends with this:
The following includes strategies proposed by you which we feel are inadvisable:
· Beginning production without full financing in place.
· Hiring and booking crew without payroll financing in place.
· Utilizing SAG actors without an independent producers agreement, considering you have engaged us to attach “name” talent to the project.
· Engaging and rehearsing SAG actors while simultaneously engaging us to replace them with “name” actors.
· Placing unqualified/inexperienced persons in key crew positions such as the line producer/craft services guy, the cleaning guy/actor/ production manager person, assistant director types, and others.
· Obtaining production financing from investors based on a false outline of strategies, which imply a level of professionalism in producing the film which does not exist.
We shall retain and destroy all materials prepared by us that will not be used. Please do not use the name of Beck Grammon or the Boston Film Collective in any connection with your project.
It is apparent to us that you lack sufficient understanding of the business and logistics of motion picture production to make sound informed decisions regarding this film. We find that we must withdraw our services to avoid becoming party to irresponsible practices.
Thank you for considering the services of the Boston Film Collective.
Beck was neither wrong nor right. As my daughter pointed out with clarity -- it was a chemistry problem.
Hal Harris died, by coincidence, on the morning we finally turned the first shot. Several weeks earlier I’d asked him to act in Roadkill, but he was too ill, though that’s not what he’d said. He said he was recovering more slowly than expected, but he’d offered his wife. “She’s a fine actress,” he said. “She needs to be working.” In his last hours, Hal was seeing angels, dwarves in pin striped suits and fedoras, with Brooklyn accents, smoking cigars. I know this from his wife’s film about his death, which I saw years later.
At the event of his own death, Hal was heroically present, reporting back from his bedside like Nic Robertson from Baghdad during the latest Gulf War.
“Not what you’d expect,” he murmured, and passed to the other side.
WINTER IN BEANTOWN
Three months later, I have, as agreed, rejoined my family in chilly Boston, Roadkill clutched firmly in my bosom and balls and mind. If nothing else, having a goal to hang my hat on has made the retreat from California more palatable. Again I’ve put an ad in a local independent filmmaker’s rag, still searching, like Diogenes questing for an honest man, for producers.
Beck Grammon and I meet for the first time at a Starbucks in the theatre district, Eliot Street. It’s February and bitter cold, close to zero. High piles of fresh snow line the curbs. The passageway outside the busy shop bustles with a mix of government workers, business professionals, Emerson students, and the odd tourist. I am dressed in professorial tweed and corduroy, defended under a heavy parka, shivering. Beck, in contrast, is dressed for early spring, and entirely in black: black jeans, black T-shirt, black motorcycle jacket, black sneakers. Black tightly cropped hair. Black sideburns. Dark wraparound shades. He declines a coffee. I sip my blackeye, a tall black dark roast with two shots of espresso on top. This always impresses the folks behind the counter. Though it may be trendy, my goal is modest: staying awake at classroom lecterns, in meetings, and at encounters like this. I’ve been in Boston only four weeks, and already consumed gallons of coffee. No dosage seems to bring me around.
Mid-life narcolepsy? Or culture shock?
I describe my project to Grammon. “It’s an ensemble piece that’s a bedroom farce, but also a thriller, a kind of noir. Midsummer night’s dream in a trashy motel. But at Christmas. Funny, but with a bittersweet undertone. A fatal case of mistaken identity. Philandering teacher and innocent murderer confused.”
He makes a sour face.
“Been done,” he mutters dourly. “But we can do it again.”
“What do you mean?” I protest. “I’ve hardly told you anything yet.” I slide the eggshell-blue-bound manuscript down to him along the counter where we sit, squirming on stools, directly facing the busy entrance to the Massachusetts Transportation Building.
“Read the script.”
While he cracks the front cover and peruses the first paragraph, the closing scene, the last page number, all that ritual stuff, I gaze out at the nine-to-fivers, the working stiffs, streaming from the Transportation Building atrium, hotfooting it home in the winter twilight. Why couldn’t I have turned out more like them, less obsessed, less delirious with ambition?
“What do you bring to the party?” Beck asks, finally, his lip curling up.
“What?”
“I think you heard me.”
“That’s my script,” I say evenly. “What do you bring to the party?”
“I can get you money, if I like the script. And I can get you people. Cast and crew. If you don’t act like an asshole amateur. If you don’t step in and co-produce. If we do it my way.”
I know this guy five minutes and he’s threatening me. I miss Southern California. At least bullshit has a shape out there. A bit of courtly style.
Beck came highly recommended by Lorraine Venuti, a woman with an “L.A. history” (in Boston, that can mean almost anything – or, rather, nothing) who now administrated The Boston Film and Video Foundation, down the block from the Berklee School of Music. It was a place where independents of every stripe might feel at home, and find the community, the inspiration, and the facilities necessary to the making of movies. Her windows looked out on the Mass Pike, where it launches its westward march, all the way back to the Oakland Bridge or LA, or Seattle, depending on which interstate you eventually chose, though it was late afternoon when we spoke, and all the traffic seemed headed the other way, a mile or so eastward, throwing long boxy SUV-shaped shadows towards the Atlantic. “This Beck Grammon. He’s one of the few local feature makers,” she told me. “Someone who gets results.”
Back in Starbucks, I’ve been forced – or is it tricked? -- into a blow-by-blow espresso-fueled march through Roadkill’s complex storyline. Something I’d hoped to avoid, but a challenge that, I feel, rightly or wrongly, must be met on request. Judging by the puckered and humorless expression blooming on Beck’s face -- like someone anticipating a fart -- things have not gone well.
“You get the irony?” I try. “The tone is specific. Like I said, it’s kind of a bedroom-farce-murder-mystery-thriller-case-of-mistaken-identity ensemble-piece kind of hyphenate-genre thing…”
“We can do some trimming,” he says.
Lorraine’s Local Hero adds, rising. “I’m running out of patience with this whole indie thing. Know what I mean? Everyone and anyone these days thinks he can make a movie. Throw a bunch of characters into a pot. Add a murder. Gives me a cold.”
“Beck. Relax. Read the script.”
“Oh I will,” he says, biting out his words, spreading his slender feminine hands. “To me it’s simple, Victor. If we take this film on –if, because if you ask me, the story’s a mess-- we’ll make it happen. We always do our job. You just do yours. I’ve worked with too many writer-directors without a clue.”
“Really. Like who?”
“Well, you wouldn’t have heard of them, would you?”
He stares at me fixedly until I have to look away, then twists on his heel to grin at the cashier -- a Goth with nose and eyelid rings, all hair and black lipstick, pale as death – as though they’ve been accomplices all along in some an elaborate sting. She deadpans back.
“Look,” I suggest philosophically. “I didn’t do the story justice. Let’s talk again if you’re interested. OK?”
There’s a final unnecessary silence, broken by the sputtering din of espresso machines, crowd walla, the crash of cups, and the heavy traffic out on Eliot.
“Fair enough” he says at last.
“I’ll call you,” is his exit line.
Beck liked the script better than my pitch, or, rather, begrudgingly accepted it as a project, and we began to meet, like spies, in bars (he’d have one bottle of Evian, and insist on paying his way), inside and outside the public library, in downtown hotel lobbies, once on a bench in the Boston Common, once on the steps of his tenement. Though we both lugged around paperwork, there was never a question, a hope, of my being invited into his chambers, though I’d met his pretty blonde Midwestern wife Amy and their new baby on the landing. Mother and child, for all their fresh looks, had been leaving to grocery shop at 11PM on a Friday night. These people – the three of them – seemed to wake when darkness fell. Like vampires.
Beck began our collaboration by promoting the idea of a funding package, a document for investors which would describe the film, contain bios of the filmmakers, and project a best-case financial scenario without really saying as much. A business plan. To a novice investor looking at these figures, it had to seem like a sure thing. One hundred twenty percent was promised to shareholders in our little LLC, Highway Five Productions, before a penny was taken in profit, before any deferments were paid. And this was the downside. The timeline promised completion and a festival run within a year. Toronto! Cannes! Sundance! Mega-deals with Harvey Weinstein! Roadkill’s first investors climbed aboard: Uncle John and Aunt Emma (who had already verbally committed). Joined by Jim Myer, franchise owner of the local Store 24. Cousin Danny. And my mother.
Heavy hitters.
Three weeks later, a miracle occurred: the film stock I needed to go with my free Panavision camera appeared. I’d been filling in at Boston University for a professor afflicted with liver cancer. It was a fulltime job, just one term’s worth, but by my standards a decent transition to a new home. I’d met my predecessor, Hal Harris, in LA. He’d been kind enough to offer encouragement, tidbits of advice, books and syllabi. He was an actor and filmmaker, no dreary academic clone. I drove over to his place near Fairfax with my friend Mandy, and we both found him gracious and generous to a fault; he served us tea and rugalah, and talked at length about his students and colleagues. His body was already ravaged by illness, his hands shaking as he set down the cups, his features drawn with fatigue from a recent session of chemo. His young wife, an actress, arrived mid-visit. It was clear she adored him, and that his illness terrified her far more than it did him.
In the months that followed, they would search at first for a holistic cure, journeying from pioneer doctor to New Age diet to Southwest shaman; and resign themselves, in the end, to waiting for an organ donor, racing against time.
But the film stock. My teaching assistant let slip one day that Lauren Schuler Donner, an alumna, had donated some stock to the school. Short ends and extra rolls from Free Willy 2. Students weren’t shooting this Free Willy stock. It was expensive to print. It was unrefrigerated, and getting old. It scared them.
But it didn’t scare me. I stood in the doorway of the storage room and saw with the eyes of the world.
The biggest initial expense for a no-budget indie film, before these days of digital, was the stock itself, especially if the plan was to shoot in 35mm. I’d been granted a 35mm camera package. 35mm is what they project in theatres. Vanity whispered that 35mm was the way to go. Super-16 cost as much to rent, and didn’t mesh with any standard edit and projection equipment. Standard 16mm, which I’d grown up with, lacked the aspect ratio, and looked like lentil soup on blowup to 35mm. Anyway, 1:1.85, that original 35mm oblong “letterbox” had enormous symbolic, and seductive, value for me. Shooting this stuff meant playing hardball with the Big Guys. Striving for a more mature aesthetic. And graduating, finally, from a film school of the mind. After 25 years rutting around endlessly in one school system or another, I was eager to move on. That mountain of cardboard boxes in the basement of BU told me I could. With the free 35mm stock and free 35mm camera in hand, the consensus with myself (a consensus absent any of those producing partners I’d sought and so far failed to find) was “shoot it now!”
Don’t fuss later with a blowup from 16mm. Shoot. What. You. Have. Now.
At the time I visited his Fairfax bungalow, Hal didn’t actually know he was dying. He expected to live. He was confident. Proactive. At last, his new liver arrived, against odds, and was installed. But soon it ran riot in his body. Ordinarily there’s the danger of an organism rejecting a replacement organ. In Hal’s case, the organ rejected the body instead, irradiating it with overheated, proliferating, infuriated cells. In the end, he literally burned alive.
While he was losing his battle, I was winning – a roomful of film! A chance. From floor to ceiling, and at the cost, somehow, of this poor man’s health and future, I had what I thought I needed.
The raw materials.
If not the vision.
At the lab, they told me the stock was passable, but getting older by the second. They elaborated on density curves and shelf life. “Keep it cool, around 50 degrees, and don’t wait too long to shoot it out.”
Happily it was winter, by fortune a cold one. On two consecutive trips, I single-handedly hauled fifty-eight large cardboard boxes in the cargo area of my Escort between Boston University and my unheated basement. The temperature was perfect down there, 50 on the nose. Over the next months, sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep at night, I would throw on a bathrobe, sneak down the back stairs, past the overflowing garbage bags, to stand quietly and admire my stash.
On a gray afternoon in late February, after picking up Maya and her first grade friend Crystal, and their poster maps of the world, I return home to find a message on the machine from another would-be producer: Bob Mendoza. “Let’s talk,” he says. I call him, and the next day, we connect at a nearby Friendly’s. Bob Mendoza has a face like a dull hatchet. Lean but not that dangerous. He owns several dry cleaning stores. “They run themselves,” he tells me over coffee. He has time on his hands. He’s ready to get into “show business.” He found my ad for a line producer on the Massachusetts Film Office hotline. He tells me he’s a self-starter like I wouldn’t believe. Produced two student films as “shakedown cruises.” Got fire trucks, police cruisers, the works. Has a partner, a lawyer, well connected, who is about to take the leap and move out to L.A. His partner knows some “real players,” though I don’t catch any names.
I inform Bob about the free camera and the recent discovery of the free film stock. He nods. The nod suggests approval. I like that glass-half-full approach. I need someone who will accept this wacky idea of the found stock, of a film put together heroically from the scrap heap. Beck certainly doesn’t seem to accept it. Beck doesn’t seem to accept anything. In fact, I haven’t even told him yet about the stock. I’m afraid of what he might have to say.
Bob and I agree to meet again soon. He’ll bring his partner. He lifts the receipt for the two coffees, examines it carefully, and then stammers. Hesitates.
“Oh, what the hell,” he mutters, digging down into his jeans. “It’s on me.”
In a few days time, when Beck learns of my association with Bob, Beck will refer to Bob as the “cleaning guy slash actor slash producer” because, it’s true, Bob also has thespian ambitions, which he practices using unusual accents on his answering machine. Already Beck refers to Anderson, my other chosen associate (the kid I’ve picked to do the voluminous paperwork of preproduction – breakdown sheets, schedule, budget, days of days, etc.) as the “craft service slash student slash producer guy.” Why? Because Anderson, in order to pay his rent, has been reduced to running juice and rolls for film crews.
No shame in that. We all have to make a living.
I reach Beck by telephone. I can’t hold back the welcome news any longer.
“Not on the phone,” he snaps. “We have to meet.”
Two days later, we’re sitting on the wall outside the Boston Public Library. It’s about eighteen degrees, warm for this winter, though even in my ski parka, I’m shivering, blood still thin from that balmy Southern California clime. But for Beck (chain-smoking his filterless Gauloises) there’s not so much as a single goose bump on his skinny T-shirt-clad body. He exudes a strange, almost reptilian energy, not merely in the metabolic sense, but in the way he stares at me, cobra-like, whenever I ask a question, as though I should not only have the answer myself, but had better find it quickly before he strikes.
I want to shout out, jubilantly, high on the sheer possibility of it all: we have camera and film, we have cast, and a guy out in L.A. putting together a crew. We have cousins and aunts and a few legitimate business people on board with cash. This film is happening! But instead I say, humbly, “Can you take this the rest of the way?”
“Take this the rest of the way,” he asks, quietly mimicking me.
“Yeah…is that a problem?”
“Which way?”
“What do you mean?”
“Which. Way.”
In both directions, office workers spin past in winter overcoats. Taxis spatter slush on a few hapless souls who, undeterred and docile, soldier on. Everyone has real business to do, a genuine destination, a specific and immediate task to complete. Under a clear blue frozen sky, all is cold and sober purpose.
But we are playing games.
“Well OK, Beck, let me try to make it clear. We have no money. We’re trying to make a film. Now, with the stock, we’re that much closer! Now, it’s that much more possible! This is good. Don’t you agree?”
He exhales, a sigh, familiar recycling of regret and stale nicotine. And when he speaks, finally, it is as though to an idiot. “So you want this line producer you have, with his powerful background in craft services, to pull together a crew of desperate wannabes working for nothing, so they can shoot your movie with a union cast, also working for nothing--”
His voice rises--
“—which is against union rules and will bring you nothing but grief!! You want to put THIS crackerjack-box toy and THAT greasy sack of shit together and shoot a film just because you can? You’re like all the rest of them. Worse. At least they’re creaming in their pants dreaming about Academy Awards. You, you’re just dreaming about – NOTHING !! A ROOMFUL OF ROTTEN STOCK!!”
“I’ve checked it out. It’s not rotten,” I explain.
“BULLSHIT!”
He stands, flicks his cigarette butt hard against the curb, and disappears, long-legged, satanic, into the traffic. A spasm of honking and cursing breaks out, almost as though he’s somehow….caused it. I’m left behind – such a bright day -- playing The Fool in a nasty fable. The part where the hero wanders about in a swamp for forty years.
Beck and I meet twice more. Once, in the lobby of the Hotel Tremont, in overstuffed armchairs, with Bob and his lawyer friend Adam Fish. Adam, caught in Beck’s evil eye, is a deer in the headlights, blinking rapidly behind thick horn-rim glasses, mumbling nonsense phrases about “heavy hitters” at Sony, wearing a studied look of aloof bemusement, which translates not into the worldliness he imagines, but into something raw and clueless instead.
Even I can see that.
Beck shakes his head sadly, right in Adam’s face. Bob pulls a folded up piece of paper out of his coat, and starts indiscriminately waving it around. It lists the five key attributes of selling a project. They spell the acronym F-O-C-U-S: Financing, Organization, Communication, Upside, and Salesmanship. Something he acquired at a local producing seminar. But this moment of sharing has an opposite effect to the one intended, because Beck is now rising without warning and striding furiously toward the revolving doors. I hustle after him, abandoning Bob in the soft glow of the imitation gas lamps that bathe the lobby in old-world charm.
“Sorry it didn’t work out,” I start to say, out again with Beck in the cold and the city traffic.
“By the way--” he interrupts.
His narrow eyes hold me.
“—Yeah?”
“These guys are assholes.”
Well for that and two bucks, or whatever it is now after the fare hike, I could get on the IRT.
“You’ve got to know, Beck. I have no problem working with assholes.”
“Do you have a choice?” he sneers.
I have to laugh. If he laughs with me, I’m thinking, he’s my man…
He doesn’t. He stalks off, onto Tremont Street, and I walk back through the revolving doors, and make arrangements with Bob to work together on a new budget, and with Adam to send him materials as soon as he gets to L.A. I thank them, pick up the tab, and drift off into the night.
The last time I meet Beck we’ve agreed to get together in the usual neutral location, this time a picnic table in the Mass Transportation Building atrium. I’m meeting Beck’s line producer, Chris Mahoney. We’ve all agreed to demote Anderson, from “craft service slash producer guy” to Production Manager, and work with Beck’s “person” (Chris) instead. Despite the abuse, the spells of dry mouth, and the struggle to sleep at night, I can’t bring myself to let Beck go. I know I’m out of my range trying to bring this project off. I feel I need Beck’s assistance, his guidance, and I seem to be willing to abandon faithful Anderson to get it. Beck’s run a set, shepherded (more likely bludgeoned) a project to completion, fired people, juggled telephone calls, done deals. I haven’t. Not like that.
So I’ve compromised.
I’m compromising.
Chris is from Boston’s Southie, shoulder length dirty blonde hair, eyes like drills, mouth mean as a pirate’s, but with a million dollar smile. We skip the preliminaries and start right in, talking about L.A. Everyone here wants to be in Los Angeles. Instead, for a variety of reasons, they’re here, feeling like second-class citizens. Chris assures me he knows the scene. I have no reason to doubt him. I believe he knows how to make and keep a schedule, put a crew together, work with cast. I’m buying. But then he tells me:
“We need to make a change in our approach.”
“How’s that?”
His voice hardens.
“Dump your stock, forget your camera, and let’s start raising money for this sucker right away.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my stock,” I insist.
He smiles his pirate smile. “Sleep with your fucking stock then, if it’s so fucking important to you. We’re starting over. Get used to the idea,” he says.
Beck removes his shades and leans in, honing his gaze. I shift my eyes out of range and focus on Mahoney instead; he’s less intimidating. Mahoney, too, though, is leaning close, spewing a little breeze of nicotine.
“That’s our deal,” they whisper, seemingly in unison. “Make up your mind.”
Coming home on the T, I struggle hard with their ultimatum. It’s understandable to want control, to start with a clean slate, ground up; but how could I work with these two? How could I forgive myself if I put myself in their hands, and the money never materialized? Or they fired me, somehow, on my own project? Or forced me to work with people I had no rapport with? Or started messing with the script?
At home, dinner’s waiting. Maya wants to know if we can rent Babe again. I take to my bed without eating a bite, head ringing, and sleep through Babe as she watches, twice. I stay under the covers for nearly twenty-four hours, half the weekend.
When I get out of bed it’s dark again. I crawl to the kitchen.
Holly glares at me.
“I can’t help you,” she says. “Don’t ask. It’s your call.”
“You’d have an opinion.”
“It’s your call.”
So, desperate, not yet fully awake, I go looking for my daughter. I find her playing with an American Girl Doll. Felicity. This doll thing, it’s a phase that, for a time, has briefly interrupted a much richer fantasy life shared with a menagerie of well-battered stuffed animals. Felicity comes from the Civil War. She wears a stripe of embroidered roses down each side of an ankle-length dress.
“Maya, honey,” I say. “I need your help.”
“OK, Daddy.”
“There’s a man daddy’s trying to decide to work with or not to work with. I just don’t know. What do you think?”
She lifts her face from Felicity solemnly. We stare at one other, puzzled, for what feels like minutes. Then she turns back to confer with the doll, in whispers.
“Felicity wants to know, ‘Is he fun’?” she asks.
“Fun?”
“Is he fun?”
“No. He’s not fun. He’s not fun at all.”
She leans an ear to Felicity. I don’t hear it, but Felicity must have whispered back.
“Then why do you want to work with him?”
About ten days after I fire Beck, I receive a three-page letter outlining what we’d done, and why he’d terminated the agreement (though strictly speaking, I had). That letter ends with this:
The following includes strategies proposed by you which we feel are inadvisable:
· Beginning production without full financing in place.
· Hiring and booking crew without payroll financing in place.
· Utilizing SAG actors without an independent producers agreement, considering you have engaged us to attach “name” talent to the project.
· Engaging and rehearsing SAG actors while simultaneously engaging us to replace them with “name” actors.
· Placing unqualified/inexperienced persons in key crew positions such as the line producer/craft services guy, the cleaning guy/actor/ production manager person, assistant director types, and others.
· Obtaining production financing from investors based on a false outline of strategies, which imply a level of professionalism in producing the film which does not exist.
We shall retain and destroy all materials prepared by us that will not be used. Please do not use the name of Beck Grammon or the Boston Film Collective in any connection with your project.
It is apparent to us that you lack sufficient understanding of the business and logistics of motion picture production to make sound informed decisions regarding this film. We find that we must withdraw our services to avoid becoming party to irresponsible practices.
Thank you for considering the services of the Boston Film Collective.
Beck was neither wrong nor right. As my daughter pointed out with clarity -- it was a chemistry problem.
Hal Harris died, by coincidence, on the morning we finally turned the first shot. Several weeks earlier I’d asked him to act in Roadkill, but he was too ill, though that’s not what he’d said. He said he was recovering more slowly than expected, but he’d offered his wife. “She’s a fine actress,” he said. “She needs to be working.” In his last hours, Hal was seeing angels, dwarves in pin striped suits and fedoras, with Brooklyn accents, smoking cigars. I know this from his wife’s film about his death, which I saw years later.
At the event of his own death, Hal was heroically present, reporting back from his bedside like Nic Robertson from Baghdad during the latest Gulf War.
“Not what you’d expect,” he murmured, and passed to the other side.