As is so often the case, reading one thing will spur on an idea about something else, and so I felt compelled to write about it here. In talking about writing and structure and editing and feeling, I came to a neat conclusion, that maybe one of the things I love about making films is the ability to combine the two very different parts of myself – the cerebral and the emotional.

When writing and figuring out plot and character, I tend to work from the logical side of myself, making sure everything is motivated, making things pay off and ensuring they’re set up properly. Thinking endlessly about options and permutations, learning what is wrong and what is right and why. These are the times of notes and index cards and charts and graphs.

Then there’s shooting where you deal with the actors and the shots, it becomes a blend of the plan and the feeling. you know what you’re looking for from a literal point of view (walk from here to there and say the line) but you’re also looking for something instinctual, something that gives you a definite feeling that THIS is right, that look the actor gave gives you chills, the sort of thing that you can’t plan with logic – but that all your thought and preparation prepares you to recognize.

Then there’s the cutting, and you begin to segue away from logic and into feeling. You’ve got the thing so deeply ingrained in your head now that you dream about it, and your subconscious mind gives you marvelous solutions to problems you didn’t even know you had. You hopefully can throw the script away now and work with what you HAVE not with what you hoped to get. You succeed by dealing with the picture on its own terms, and you see new and wonderful things you never intended. You don’t cut with charts and graphs but with instinct and feeling. You watch a cut and you just feel like it has to be 3 frames shorter, you do it and you watch it again and it’s somehow now right - how could 1/8 of a second even matter your literal mind says, but the evidence is there in front of you – it works. You cut things that shouldn’t make literal sense (lighting a match over a cut, and it actually strikes twice – but if it doesn’t it doesn’t feel right) but they have to be wrong to feel right. You have to relinquish your logic now and trust your feelings.

And this thing, this film, that results, the marraige of the skills of both sides of yourself has perhaps made both halves of you understand each other a little better.

Fuck, that sounds pretentious, doesn’t it?

My new job is going well enough, due to some people leaving I’m going to get the full time overnight hours I want which should help on this front (this is my first post from work…)  I’ve got the next two days off and I’m going to finish up reel 5, which is about halfway done, and that’s where I’m going to be at the “deadline” I self imposed about 2 weeks ago. Considering these factors, I’m gong to convert that into a “Reel 5 deadline” and then 3 more weeks to finish up (I’m going on a family reunion so that weekend is lost for working on the cut) that puts the new deadline out to : August 10.

And I know I would have made that deadline of July 20 if I wasn’t working too.

Now, as I typed I realized the perfect thing to talk about today – The new releases for this Friday, July 18, 2008.

The Dark Knight

Now this isn’t really Heath’s last performance – that will be in the upcomming 2009 Terry Gilliam film “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus” but I guess I can’t begrudge them trying to hype it as such. One thing I reccommend to all and sundry – go see this film in an IMAX theater if you at all can. Christopher Nolan has done something that is almost unique. If you’ve seen regular movies at IMAX before, you know it’s a neat experience, but the film doesn’t use the whole screen. That’s because IMAX is such a huge negative that to fill the screen they’d have to blow up the 35mm so much (and crop the sides off) that just running it across the bottom is all they can really do. The sound systems there are amazing too. But Nolan this time has taken 4 scenes in the film and used IMAX cameras so that at those moments the film will become even more giganticer and fill the screen. 35mm anamorphic is squeezed onto film and is 4 sprocket holes tall. IMAX film is 70mm film, twice as large, but also run SIDEWAYS and covers 15 70mm sprocket holes – to give you a difference in the size of film and quality that that allows when thrown up on that massive screen.

Now remember how I said this is almost unique? Like everything – it’s been done before. In 1926.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017226/trivia

Magnascope was a process that allowed the size of the image to become huge for climactic sequences, first used for “Old Ironsides”, and it was a sensation, as I’m sure these IMAX screenings will be. I can’t wait to go myself.

Mamma Mia

I’m a massive ABBA fan, and yet I’ve never gone to see this musical. I guess I just wanted to hear the music done by ABBA and not random people on stage, and I’m not a big stage person to begin with. But the movie, I’m there. The story is tissue thin, but I’ve known that for 10 years (yeah it’s been around that long) and this is a chance to hear Benny Andersson going back to these songs and reproducing them, so they’ll be like reinterpretations by the original artist – that interests me. Also Meryl Streep is a really great singer (see Postcards From The Edge if you don’t believe me) My Mom and I were supposed to go see this today, but she forgot about this and is already heading down to Missouri and the reunion. I’m not so sure I want to see it in the crappy theater there, but I think this is a movie I’ll enjoy anywhere – unlike Dark Knight which I know I want to see in IMAX for the first time at least.

OK, time to get some work done…

2 days til Reel 5 Deadline

23 days til Reel 6 Deadline

The same way too – 2 hours before the shoot the actor cancelled. So I called my mom and told her she was going to have to be an actor, because there’s no way in hell I’m rescheduling this a 5th time. So aside from that it went well. Mom was better than I’d hoped, and since it’s a standard shooting pattern of closeups and a 2 shot I can cut the performance together and make her look even better.

It’s going to be really weird seeing this in the movie after all this time.

So we’re done with every scene we’re shooting now, but we do have a day of pickups we’ll shoot in August, just little pieces to make a few scenes work better, then also our dubbing to make certain scenes audible due to wind on location.

I’m really glad that Mom got to be in the movie, she’s done a lot to make it happen, just in a general sense, but also being so supportive once she saw a bit of footage and realized that this was a real thing. From helping out with money to making food for us and letting us invade her house several times (and delaying her redecorating) I gave her an EP credit which I feel is very deserved.

Now I just have to edit this scene. Overall I have half of reel 5 finished, so about 30 minutes or so to edit and about an hour 25 finished.

6 days to deadline.

When I work I need to get into that groove so its a matter of being in the right headspace and having the time to dive in and really go until I’m spent. I played around with the ending though last night and tried some new ideas for weaving in the other threads of resolution. When you want to play around with things like that you have to be open to all possibilities. I ended up finding a place for one bit where I never imagined a cut to another scene, but it works, and gives an amazing dissolve to boot.

Today I have to get the camera from Casey so I can shoot scene 22 tomorrow, but his phone is off. This means I have no idea where he is. I had also planned to spend time with my friend from out of town, and was going to combine going to get the camera with that, but hard to do it when you can’t get started, and I don’t want to start cutting if it’s going to get interrupted. But maybe I’m just whining, let’s ask Phil Gramm.

I’ve sent off Reel 4 just now to everyone, and Reel 2 will go out again with scene 22 added, probably Tuesday, which will be 2/3 of the film set. The last two reels have the tricky stuff, especially something I remembered when screening it last week, there’s a big plot hole due to a change I made during shooting. I have no idea how to cover this – but I’ll think of something. I pretty much always do.

I’m hoping that when I finish training, and I can settle in on a schedule my time will open up a bit, I’ve been on all three shifts this week which screws up your sleep patterns. OK this is officially the most boring post you’ll ever read here (until the next one).

7 Days to Deadline

We’d resolved to move scene 22 to the post-production reshoot for convenience, but the actress that is required is getting married the week we’d planned to do that. So that led us to move our plans slightly. So I guess in a sense this will be the official end of principal photography. We will end the way we began, with just 2 crew.

We shot the first image of the film the last week of December, 2007. It was a cameo shot for Tom, the star of the original version. We had to film it before he went back to New York where he goes to school. We hadn’t yet engaged Tom our soundman (different Tom) and so it was just me and Casey. This time around Casey has a music video he’s shooting but our camera is now his second camera so he’s letting me take it to shoot the scene, Tom will do the sound, and so now I’ll have every scene shot that’s going to be shot.

It’s quite odd to be going back into filming a scene while having 2/3 of the movie in final cut, but then again it’s a simple shoot, three setups (2 closeups and a two-shot) so there’s nothing to plan really. I’m more concerned with the August reshoot, because that will be essentially the bandaids to solve all the little problems that I didn’t figure out until we were cutting.  Going back to the golden age of Hollywood, reshoots have been a key thing. The legendary Irving Thalberg remarked that films aren’t made, they’re remade. Steven Soderburgh always builds in a reshoot for every picture, and I know I’ll always plan for it as well. There are ALWAYS things you can’t forsee, so worst case you use your reshoot to fix problems, and I imagine if I don’t have problems then I can use a reshoot to make something even better or shoot a new scene or something that had to be cut.

But back to my actual point, scene 22. I’ve been all over the place, it involves Stephanie and a publisher who is agreeing to publish her book. I think I’ve offered this part to 7 people, and all have either turned it down for whatever reason or agreed then backed out at the last moment. I’ve asked men and women, young and old, and there semed to be a hex on it. We’ve also had it scheduled to shoot 3 times, the last time the actor backed out an hour before the shoot. I was originally going to play this part myself, but I ended up in another scene and so I couldn’t.  I thought really hard about cutting it but I think it’s important for her character to have this beat, and it’s not a long scene. I timed it out for the reel 2 edit with cards for the dialogue and it was about a minute and 45 seconds.

But I guess its the simplest things that can be the most trouble. I’ve finally found an actor at my new job, so perhaps it was fate to do it now.

On a side note, the new job and sleeping schedule has been murder on me after all that time off, In addition I’ve had some people in from out of town to spend the rest of my time with, so I’ve not posted as I planned and I haven’t even opened Vegas, but the deadline still holds:

9 Days to deadline

(and while yes it’s after midnight it counts as Friday since I haven’t been to bed yet, my blog my rules)

I havent seen the film, but I thought I might glean some fun things from it and I got sucked into looking at a few pages at the store so I got it. I came across something in it that really made me think. He talks about learning to be economical with shooting because of the way you used to have to edit – deck to deck on VCRs. And I had a flash, this has to be a big reason that I work the way I do. I was making these little things before we had NLEs. You had to pre-edit the film because if you changed something earlier it meant changing everything afterwards.

I cut everything I ever made deck to deck up until the first edit of Departure. I had a swank Sony with flying erase heads (which got rid of that weird rainbow effect when you made a cut) and audio dub which let you put new soundtrack onto the mono track (the stereo tracks on VHS are recorded underneath the picture so you can’t change those without also changing the image) I got to be pretty damn fast with that machine.

It had the jog/shuttle, and I’d sit there and crank it to exactly the frame I had to hit for REC/PAUSE and get ready for my next shot, I knew how many seconds I had to wait to start the machines to get the exact frame I wanted, looking back it was almost an art to cut like that well. By the end of those days, I was able to take 5 hours of raw footage for Departure and edit that into a 22 minute rough edit in 12 hours. No dissolves, no fancy tricks, but I still have that cut on a VHS tape, and that’s what I brought with me to the friend of a friend who had a mac and Final Cut 4 where we would make the “real” cut. They asked how I’d made that edit and when I told them they seemed amazed that anyone would bother to do that. We spent about 6 16 hour days over the next two months rebuilding a cut and ending up about 4 minutes shorter and a whole lot fancicer.

And now looking back, and I’m as fast with Vegas as I ever was with the Flying Erase Heads, I know that I could never work like that again, but the lessons that method taught me were worth all the hassle, not that we had any better way back then. I think about all the kids (I’m 28, I’m old) now that had Final Cut or Premiere or Vegas since they started making films and I wonder, will they have a chance to learn those skills that the VCR taught us, just like we never had the chance to learn with a Moviola, or a KEM, the challenges inherent to working with film. I think all those challenges is what make us better editors, and maybe you’ll get there in the end but I wouldn’t trade my experiences. But on the other hand, now you’d have to pry my Vegas out of my cold dead hands.

12 Days to Deadline

I was planning to have lunch with my Mom, then edit all day. Just before she got here, however, I got a call from the hotel I’d interviewed with asking me to come in to talk with the owner. This wasn’t supposed to go down before Wednesday, so Mom and I instead ran around while I picked up a dress shirt (mine all need to go to the drycleaners) and had a quick lunch. They’d wanted me to come right then but I managed to stall a few hours.

It was one of those great interviews where you can tell right away that you already have the job so long as you don’t say anything stupid. I had to argue a bit to get the money I wanted, but it wasn’t a huge deal. The annoying part is I’m starting tomorrow morning at 7. Ugh. Usually 7am is bedtime not wakey time. But I need the money so I smiled and nodded.

So I went home to get started, a few hours late, but time enough to finish, then I get a phone call. My very good friend’s boyfriend is in town for a few weeks on business and we’d meant to get together – so it’s to be tonight. So there went editing. He came by and I showed him the film (the finished part and the assembly for the ending) I was glad to hear he thought it was far more polished than he was expecting. He has an interesting idea for a feature that we’re planning to collaborate on sometime in the next few years when we get a script figured and the logistical challenges worked out.

So all in all, a really good day. I just don’t have reel 4 finished yet… Maybe after I get home from work tomorrow if I’m not wiped out. Can you see that 2 week deadline slipping away too?

13 days til deadline.

Once I get going, it should be pretty easy work to do, there’s just the one tricky section, right before the montage begins where I have angles on about 5 things that have to go together in just the right way over about 2 minutes, but aside from that it’s all cut in camera up to where I think the reel break will go.

As some of you may know, I lost my PCs motherboard to an electrical storm about a month ago, and I was able to use my tax refund to build a bigger better computer with the parts that were still working and some new ones, a consequence of this was that when reinstalling Vista I had to format the C: drive which for some dumb reason had some captured footage on it. (The reason was; when I installed Vegas 8, I neglected to redirect it to the larger internal drives before I captured the first time) I had lent my camera to Dave so he could do capturing when his was making funny noises (and you never want to put your film’s master footage into a capture camera making funny noises) and so I had to wait until I had that back to begin searching through my unlabeled master tapes for this one particular shoot, probably about 20 minutes of raw footage.

You may be asking yourself (and rightly so) ‘why is this person that seems so organized not labeling his master tapes – aren’t they, like, important?’ And you would be right, dear, smart reader. They ARE important. and some of us just get a bit lazy in the middle of long shoots and forget to label things. When you’re being your own editor, and you’re capturing the entire tape immediately after you shoot labeling seems less important. Though I must say half my tapes are labeled, its just the 20 that weren’t or just had “Accidents” written on them that I had to check. So that took a few hours because I had to end up watching many of them because I didn’t luck into any of them being cued to a scene I knew was from that day. The tapes are also all labeled now too.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh, the mind needs time to ruminate, I’ve already cut the entire film the “fast” way, I’m trying to do it the “good” way, so we’re operating on the “good, fast, cheap : pick any two” philosophy here. Also I’ve managed to get the first three reels to Leo and Tom so I’m not hindering their work any longer.

I think deadlines are good so I’m going to publicly state a deadline of July 20 to finish the last two and a half reels. Let’s see if I can make it…

14 Days to deadline.

The way I shoot is 90% cut in the camera, meaning that I shoot one shot that’s meant to cover one part of the scene and then make a new shot for another area (or just have one shot for a scene) It’s been described as a courageous or foolhardy way to work, but I like that it forces you to really consider how you’re using the camera and blocking to tell the story before you begin. The balance I’m looking for now is how to work in this style and still leave options in the editing. I love the way David O. Selznick described this method when working with Hitchcock – “Hitch’s goddamn jigsaw cutting!” Selznick loved to make his pictures in editing, obsessively so. Hitch knew how to thwart this, by not giving DOS any choices…

Someone who most definitely didn’t cut in camera was Stanley Kubrick. He was of the Selznick philosophy. Kubrick took endless takes and options in scenes, he was meticulous. He didn’t always know what he wanted but he made sure he had every possible choice. Barry Lyndon is my favorite work of his, but it’s something you have to watch many times to absorb, and I think become hypnotized by. I also love The Killing which was a great examination of structure in the 50s. And in my top three is also The Shining. Stephen King called it “A great big Cadillac of a horror film with no engine” but Kubrick isn’t the sort to make your traditional horror film. He unnerves you with subtle things, and if you aren’t paying attention sure you could be bored. He creates tension with little things – notice when Shelley Duvall is talking to the psychiatrist. She doesn’t flick the ash off her cigarrette – things like that make you uncomfortable but on a sub-consicous level. The Shining is riddled with such things.

The folks in the UK that are so great at inventive promos (remember the live-action version of The Simpsons opening? not that this is them, but it seems a home of great ideas like this) Have come up with a doozy – a recreation of the behind the scenes of The Shining. It must be seen to be believed:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/03/channel4.kubrick

In that I found this article. It sums up a lot of the process I’ve had considering Kubrick over the years. I’ve gone on long enough, so I’ll let you enjoy. Share your thoughts in the comments and I’ll be sure to comment back:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1177734,00.html

Then I realized – it’s July 4! I have to write about 1776! This is going to be long, but it’s my blog so I’ll make it as long as I want. So there.

1776 is the film that changed my life more than any other. It’s as much for the film itself as everything that it’s done for my life, well not really the film itself but the people I’ve met and the opportunities I’ve had because of its existance. Not too shabby for a 1972 musical, eh?

It started in school, 7th grade. We were in history class and my teacher decided that if she showed us a movie that she could coast for a week, and so on came 1776. I liked it, I picked up the VHS, made people watch it with me, and that was sort of it. Then I got into Laserdiscs. And I found out that there was ANOTHER version of the movie…

A version of the film 40 minutes longer… with commentary… and in widescreen. It had come out 4 years earlier and as such was impossible to find to buy, and considering it would have cost about $100 even if I found it for the original price this would have been major begging. I found a place that RENTED it, about a 40 minute drive away. It was a revalation. All the new footage was poor quality since it was thought destroyed – you instantly knew when you were seeing new footage even if you hadn’t seen the movie dozens of times.

Why is that important? Well for a budding film student you can begin to think about how editing can effect a film, which cuts hurt and which helped (here not many helped) how were they made? Some of the cuts in this film, while diabolical are genius, seeing what is possible, what you can get away with helps me to this day. And widescreen, if ever a film needed it, it’s this one. The director, Peter Hunt, tells the story of 40 men in a room with his framing and blocking, seeing the relationship of the characters as the camera moves allows the story to be told without constant cutting from one to the next which would have been excruciating over a three hour film. Instead the director mastefully does a dance with the cast and the camera that is only fully revealed when you can see all of it. And then the commentary, learning about the stories, the wonderful stories of how all this had come to be.

There are more than a few films that I find interesting due to how they came about or their story, moreso than the actual film. Heaven’s Gate is a great story, but I’ve never managed to actually finish watching it. The Abyss documentary I watched probably 20 times, the film maybe twice. Blade Runner – I read a 500 page book about with rapt attention, yet I don’t really like the film. 1776, even if you didn’t like the movie, would be worthy of this attention, all the machinations and the  trials to get it to stage and then screen. But loving the movie as well is a perfect storm.

After this high I decided that well of course I have to write a book about this. Being 15 I didn’t see that there was any problem with that and I started figuring out people to interview. I talked to several people, as I’m good at research and actually got Peter Hunt’s number and flat called him out of nowhere. And he talked to me, at length. He sent me scenes that had been cut from the play, and I interviewed him, it was surreal but wonderful. I also talked at length with the man who had produced the laserdisc and took a trip to LA and stayed with him and got a treasure trove of 1776 materials, things he’d used to reconstruct the film and other materials. Due to schedules I didn’t get to meet Peter on that trip which was about the only disappointment.

Of course I didn’t end up getting too far with the book at that age, but the film stayed with me, and I kept up my friendship with Peter, I’d call him a few times a year to check in, see what he was up to professionally so I could keep up with him.

This turned out to be a good thing for the film. In 2000 I was writing a DVD column and would see about DVDs that were coming, 1776 was announced! I of course decided to call Sony for details, and found myself talking to people that didn’t know there was a long version… So of course I had to fill them in, and I got them in touch with Peter and Joe so they could make sure that the 180 minute cut could be used rather than the theatrical cut. They ended up halting what they were doing, and bringing in Peter and doing a full restoration. Best phone call I ever made. I even got to have a meeting on the Sony lot which is the old MGM lot in Culver City. I was on my way to college in Sydney, Australia in January 2001, and I brought them my collection of stills and posters and this was what was used to make the DVD art and booklet (if you have the DVD you’ll see my name in there)

During all this, even better and more amazing, the original negative was found. Thought destroyed (and ordered to be destroyed by the producer) this footage allowed the cut material to be reinstated and look identical to the rest of the film. So it was in a way bittersweet, that great gift of seeing the deleted footage stand out would be lost, but people would be able to experience it as a film and not as a learning tool, which is of course more important! And we still had our laserdiscs for that. (In the interim I’d found a copy for sale and bought it immediately. Begging was required) Peter took the chance to reedit the film as well, taking out about 4 minutes of material (the rest of the difference in the running time between the Director’s Cut and the LD is the removal of the overture and intermission music, which was an addition for the LD). So I’ll always be grateful that I had the chance to give back to a film that has meant so much to me over the years.

In 2004 I decided that I had to move to LA if I wanted to pursue this film thing and finally Peter and I were in the same city. I imagine he didn’t know what to make of me, after all the years of phone calls, but finally he invited me over to his house, and it was perfect that we’d waited a few months after I’d gotten to town. I went to meet him four years ago today, July 4, 2004.

And in that time he’s become my film mentor. I’ve had the opportunity to read scripts he’s working on and comment, help out (but mostly watch) with a benefit show he directed, review footage and work on putting a reel of his work together, and he helped me when I was editing my first short film, reviewing cuts with me and making suggestions. This friendship has been yet another priceless gift that the film has given me.

In all the time I’d loved this film the one thing I’d never done was see it in the theater. I didn’t think I’d ever have that chance, I was born 7 years after it first came out after all. My first chance ended up coming when Chapman University arranged to have a screening followed by a talk from Peter. He was teaching there and so it was a natural sort of thing. During the screening he was having dinner with all the bigwigs from the school and as I watched the film spool out on a massive screen for the first time I had a sickening revelation: THIS WAS THE SHORT VERSION.

Ordinarially this wouldn’t be a big problem, but there were actually two big problems. Sony was supposed to send the NEW restored print but there had obviously been a mixup, and we had this horribly faded print of the theatrical cut. Which was going to end about 30 minutes before they thought it would. And Peter was going to come on and talk about things this audience hadn’t actually SEEN.

So I busted out of there and tried to find them, I managed to track down Ashleigh, Peter’s assistant, and we found him and subtly interrupted the big-wig dinner and told him the situation. So that ended up going ok. But I still hadn’t seen the new restored version on screen. That came later, and I flew in for it.

Of course Peter was there, but so were Ken Howard who played Jefferson and William Daniels who played Adams. It was amazing to meet them and get to actually talk with them. Of course Bill and Ken were mobbed for autographs and I was out in the lobby with Bill when the movie was starting. They had marked off a row for us and everyone else was down there already. Bill decided he didn’t want to go all the way down there and instead sit in the back since we were going in late. I asked if I could join him, and so I sat and watched 1776 next to John Adams. After the movie was going a while, he said to me that he’d never seen this long version before, which just made this that much more special.

I have some sort of 1776 reference in every film I make. In Departure I have a copy of the published script in Brandon’s things as he packs. In Accidents I have one of my posters prominently displayed in two scenes, as well as one line of the film that I stole, keep an eye out when you see Accidents.

Thank you for reading all 1776 words of this post.

And now that you’ve read all that, you’ll get a fun article about Kubrick tomorrow…