New Shoot: "The Night We Didn't Read Myra Breckenridge"

Once again, my body has taken it upon itself to remind me that I’m not as young as I used to be. All because I had the audacity to shoot a short movie. Lousy body.

A quick little “prequel” to Demon Divas has been in the works since our first screening of the feature at Cinema Wasteland. While the movie went over better than we’d hoped, the majority of the audience really responded to the Book Club characters played by Gwendolyn, Stacy Bartlebaugh-Gmys and, especially, Bill Homan as the bizarre and flamboyant Max. Knowing that we wanted to do a few things to round out the inevitable DVD, we started kicking around ideas for a companion film. Things gelled for me, storywise, with a visit to Scarehouse in Etna.

As we’ve long espoused, Scarehouse is an awesome haunted attraction outside of Pittsburgh. I’ve championed this haunt for years, not just because the owners, Scott and Barb and Wayne Simmons are good friends of ours, but because it’s just quite simply an awesome and elaborately-put together experience. One room in particular caught my imagination: a library being slowly demolished by some Elder God—tentacles bursting through the book shelves and a giant mechanized eye peering through a gaping hole in the wall. I love this room. By the time we finished our trip through the rest of the haunt, I had a skeleton of a story in mind.

Obviously, I don’t want to give too much away… so I won’t. Suffice to say we designed a script that could be shot in a maximum of two days, in two locations, with a minimum of characters and crew. It would be a down-to-the-basics shoot—short, quick and funny. What made this movie different for us is that it would be the first time we’d shoot a sequel/prequel with characters we’d used before. We’ve done little Necro-Phil promos, of course, and I’ve done continuations of things in different mediums (the upcoming Severe Injuries follow-up graphic novel, for instance), but I saw this is a new little challenge to see if we could reproduce some of the magic from Demon Divas in a new setting. Albeit goofy and way more over-the-top.

The Simmonses were already onboard and would provide anything we needed, including a trio of really talented make-up artists (Chris, Dejah and Dale), and since their pre-production prior to the Halloween season lasts pretty much from February to September, they’d be at the site anyway, so long as we didn’t mind a little hammering and sawing while we worked. Since that was something we’d gotten used to while shooting Splatter Movie at the Hundred Acres Manor, we were completely in our element. We’ve also gotten pretty good at ADR over the years, so even if that proved to be a necessity (and it did) it wouldn’t be a problem.

The short, under the working title of “The Night We Didn’t Read Myra Breckenridge”, really harkened back to our salad days—bringing our friends together for a quick shoot in exchange for gas money and doughnuts, after weeks of emails trying to nail down a day when six people would actually be available at the same time (with varying time-limitations), everyone chipping in to wear multiple hats as cast and crew, and making-it-up-as-you-go style of filming utilizing the limitations of the environment to our advantage.

The main drawback came on Monday, however, when I failed to reach Tonerwoods’ Jason Thompson in time to utilize him as DP. Selfish bastard decided to take a paying job instead! So I was more or less on my own as my own DP and camera. Now, as I’ve whined ad nauseum, I’ve studied cinematography, I know the principals of good lighting, I even have a decent lighting kit, I just hate doing it. There’s no joy comparable to having a lighting crew at your disposal to make everything pretty. My lighting style can be summed up by “enough light to get an exposure, preferably with proper shadows”. But, fortunately, I wasn’t alone. In addition to Gwen, Stacy (but not Gwen Stacy) and Bill, Amy was doing her usual acting and producing and crewing, Michael Varrati and Mike and Carolyn Haushalter were all available to make the requisite magic.

Another drawback, however, was shooting HD to P2 cards. I am not an expert at this. In fact, the only other times I’ve worked with this type of technology were when shooting other Demon Divas inserts. In those cases, I was dealing with seconds-long inserts, and nothing of real length or involvement. When the Diggerfilms hommes shot DD for us, they had two cameras and card-readers at their disposal. There was no loss of productivity during footage capture. I had only our HVX, a laptop and hard drive. So every fifteen minutes’ worth of footage required a real-time dump accompanied by panic. I had redundancies in place—after transferring, I burned the shots to DVD as a back-up, in case the hard drive decided to fail on the way home, but it was still nerve wracking to the extreme. As Bill and I discussed, even back in our film days, if a roll got damaged or came back out of focus, at least we still had it. The damaged reel still existed. A failed hard drive after a wiped card eliminates all proof that we did anything at all. And since I seem to be an enemy of all technology, these possibilities weighed heavily on my mind throughout.

On the happiness side, though, we had awesome sets to run amok on (even with the added joy of trying to find the hidden outlets to tie into with lights), outstanding make-up effects and cool-as-hell mechanical coolness providing coolitude. The coolness level was upped even higher due to the presence of our star, courtesy of Tom Sullivan and Pat Reese, one of the original Evil Dead Necronomicons (which should give you a hint of the plot).

But the nice thing was the feeling that we were back to the basics, doing something for fun. It’s been more than a year since we shot anything substantial and since we have a big project a ‘brewin’ for the fall, it was essential to get back into practice, particularly as the new project will have to be professionally structured and regimented. This short was loose and collaborative—everyone tossed out ideas, making the scenes the best they could be under the restraints we had (space for people, lights, choreography—everything had to be done right then on the spot).

This required forcing my body into odd positions to get the best angles. Rolling on the floor, using the Bill-built steadicam when possible, balancing, crouching, using my back to boom and tilt. By the end of the shoot, I wanted to curl up and die but my spine wouldn’t allow it. But we finished on schedule and the footage really does look terrific. As much as I hate production, it was definitely a satisfying experience.

We have one short day of pick-ups ahead of us to shoot Bill’s character’s wrap-around, but once that’s done, the Demon Divas project will be complete and the official DVD will likely see a release at October’s Cinema Wasteland. By then, we’ll hopefully be neck-deep in the next feature and starting forward on Happy Cloud Pictures’ second thirteen years. 

 Photo by Carolyn Haushalter

The Map of Your Life

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind. The highlight was a 7000 mile (round trip) excursion to the Redwood Forest in California to witness the wedding of Bill Homan and Gwendolyn. As Bill has been one of my closest friends for more than 15 years, there was no way we were going to miss it. Plus, we had the opportunity to test drive a Prius, got 400 miles to the tank, saw trees that predated Charlemagne, had rocks thrown at me by the Pacific Ocean (I'm not kidding! The fucking ocean threw rocks at me!), drove through a tree (it had a tunnel cut through it) and got to witness the "Bay to Breakers" parade in San Francisco. Now, granted, half a million drunk people in and out of various costumes looked less like a parade and more like an evacuation, but it was still pretty amazing to see.

You can check out pictures of this adventure over at Amy's blog.

And this past weekend, we celebrated Memorial Day like consummate Americans: we drank heavily, consumed our collective weight in meat and fired off countless rounds of ammo (courtesy of the great Don Bumgarner's most recent additions to his arsenal, including a 12-gauge shotgun nicknamed "Thumper", two sweet little 9mm pistols and a friggin' AR-15 – not to mention Amy's .22 Henry Golden Boy rifle, which is literally the only gun I can hit anything with). We had a few people up who had never been to the house before, including our dear friendsTara and David and Splatter Movie's Aaron Bernard and Nikki McCrea. Also in attendance were the Haushalters; Sirens of Cinema's own Rhonda Baughman and her beau, Kyle; and the always-impressive make-up team of Eric and Lorena. Everyone showed up with embarrassing amounts of food and completely freaked out our trio of misfit dogs, who hadn't seen another soul save Amy and I since the beginning of the year. So they expressed their excitement by being insane. At one point, I had to lock them in our bed room with soup bones and a bowl of beer.

(Aside 1: I'm not a beer drinker. The only thing I actually like is Guinness on draft and only because of my Irish DNA. My drink of choice, aside from hard liquor, is the fruity girl malts like Mike's Hard Lemonade or Smirnoff Ice. But we live mere minutes from West Virginia, in a county known as the "Seventh Most Inbred North of the Appalachians" (true!). So buying my beloved girly malts always elicits disdainful stares from the toothy proprietors. They with their John Deere baseball caps and Pittsburgh sports team jerseys. Still, with Mike's Hard Lemonade in hand, I needed a beer selection and wasn't sure what to get. "Need anything else?" asked the banjo playing mouth breather behind the counter. "Yeah," I said. "I need a beer recommendation."

"Okay, what do you want?"

"I don't know," I said. "What do fags drink?"

I walked out with my Mike's and a case of Yuengling. The counter guy even carried it out to the car for me. Apologies to any Yuengling drinkers out there who are offended by the above. Your beer is delicious.)

(Aside 2: Don Bumgarner is another one of my close and very respected colleagues. But he possesses a political philosophy that can be best summed up as "bizarre". He's not a liberal by any stretch, but he's not a pure conservative, either. If this were the Revolution, he'd probably be a Minuteman. And a Whig. But he's patriotic to a fault and when we called him from San Francisco to inform him where we were and what we were driving, his later voice mail asked: "Were you also wiping your ass with the Bible and spitting on soldiers?"

To which, I replied, "I wanted to, but I was too busy sodomizing members of Greenpeace.")

Now, though a great amount of fun was had and it was thoroughly one of the best days I've had in a long time (watching city folk around our horses was particularly entertaining – "Don't they have really big teeth with which to eat you better?" Rhonda asked), I was still plagued by stuff weighing me down for the past several weeks now.

I go through cycles of not-quite-depression. It's more a mixture of self-doubt, insecurity and paranoia. Beside my constant Fear of the Big White X that keeps me from enjoying good fortune of any kind, this malaise of self-worth tends to lurk just under my consciousness for long periods of time. It's usually accompanied by my old friends Insomnia and Tension Headache, which, now that I'm old, also brings on Upper and Lower Back Pain and Restless Leg Syndrome. The only thing missing for me is Dutch Elm Disease and gout.

Basically, this malaise occurs when I look back at my career and notice that, if it were a hurtling meteor, it would simply burn up entering the atmosphere and not make the tiniest impression on the culture of the Earth. I feel very much like my ten years as a professional writer and semi-professional filmmaker has made no impact. Not that, in the giant scheme of things, any of our culture really amounts to a hill of beans, but still. I long for longevity.

Add to this my almost constant struggle with agnosticism and I feel quite lost in my own skin.

It's not something I intentionally dwell on, but it does scream at me during the long, dark nights. And there's no bit of self-cheerleading I can do to get rid of it.

So Sunday night, after our ATF party (alcohol, tobacco and firearms), after an evening of Tenebre, Slither and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, Amy and I collapsed into bed, pulled the dogs up to our chins and settled for a long evening's unconsciousness.

And my subconscious decided to deal with my insecurity very directly.

My dreams are usually very cinematic. I dream in cuts and bright Technicolor. There are usually guest-stars in my dreams. Generally, they're either action packed or one of two different scenarios: 1) I'm searching for something that I know is in the room somewhere and I can't locate it; 2) I'm trying desperately to get somewhere and either make wrong turns or am delayed by one thing after another. Usually, these last two are extremely frustrating, allowing me to wake up on edge and irritable for the rest of the day. The action-packed ones, I prefer.

This Sunday night dream, as I mentioned, was very direct. I don't know who I was talking to, but it was just the two of us in a hotel lobby. I was bitching to this other person about my feelings of inadequacy. "I've made no difference in the world," I say. "I haven't changed a thing or made a single lasting contribution."

And this other person, whose face I cannot for the life of me remember, so it was likely an amalgam of dream faces, replied, without irritation but also without affection: "You can't see the map of your life because you're at ground level. All you see is what's around you. You can only see what is laid out before and behind you from above, and you can't rise above your own life. Only other people can, and they can't always explain to you what they see."

The scene actually repeated, with a variation of that speech coming again, and again, a dispassionate tone, but very firm. And "the map of your life" was repeated distinctly.

Now, I know where a lot of it came from. You don't have to be Freud. I'd just seen Indy IV (and loved it, thank you) and the scene where Indy describes the Mayan pictographs carved into the ground, meant to be seen from the air, reminded me that I used to study that stuff in high school, fascinated with the idea that the Mayans were in tune to something greater than themselves. So the "map of your life" idea definitely came from there. The rest of it was just my subconscious getting frustrated with my constant phobia.

But I like that phrase, "The Map of Your Life". And since that dream, I've really relaxed – as much as I'm ever able to, that is. I'm not pre-occupied with the idea of leaving a mark on the world. Because I will never get to see "the map of my life". I won't know what impact I'm making—I may never know. And knowing that I may never know something is actually kind of liberating.

(Hey, everyone deals with their shit in different ways. It was either this literal-as-hell dream, or Don's AR-15 and a water tower. Which would you prefer?)