..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

The Bakesale of the Vanities

I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts on the current state of IndieNet filmmaking for a while. But as my head’s been so consumed with taking part in all that mini-DV nonsense, it’s been a struggle to shift mental gears from the visual to the literary.

By my estimation, we’re inching toward five years into this consumer revolution. Although the wheels had been spinning in a mud pit for at least 2-3 years prior, I date the movement to roughly 2001, when bootlegs of Final Cut Pro 2 started to trickle into the clutches of aspiring filmmakers. It was this development more than anything else that shifted the playing field for a lot of wannabe’s, myself included. I believe my experience and progression with these tools has in many respects mirrored the movement as a whole.

2001 was a long way from the indie gangbang of the mid-‘90s. All of the filmmakers weaned on the era of D.I.Y., credit cards and film festivals were finding that nobody gave a crap anymore. The hype still existed, for sure, but the idea that an enterprising filmmaker could emerge from nowhere and achieve success through that system was nothing more than mirror masturbation. True independent filmmakers were now competing at film festivals with $15-million films starring established actors.

The situation wasn’t unlike the early 1980s, when the studios moved away from director-driven films (torpedoed in great part by the directors themselves) to concentrate on FX blockbusters in the mold of Star Wars and Indiana Jones (which I was proudly raised on). It was this environment that gave birth to the initial indie movement with filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, the Coen Brothers, Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh leading the way. The Sundance Film Festival (United States Film Festival) also emerged to help promote this movement.

The 2001 situation was compounded by several factors. First, technology was evolving from analog to digital. Second, just as “alternative” was co-opted by the record labels, “independent” was co-opted by the studios. In both cases, what began as a movement to contrast what was considered popular devolved to nothing more than a style catchphrase.

Another major problem was that success bred imitation. So approaches to filmmaking and music that once seemed original and daring triggered a bandwagon effect. For the film world, in particular, this was exacerbated by the rush to film schools where groupthink and industry-grooming flourished.

It was around 1999, when the first tub bubbles of mini-DV rose to establish a new possible format. The first semi-professional camera most people became aware of was the Canon XL-1 (Sony’s PD-150 was popular too). But most serious filmmakers were unimpressed. Serious filmmakers shot on film not video.

Working (if you can call it that) as an illustrator, I was among those who refused to accept this change – though I was very aware of what was going on. My friends at the time, mostly graphic designers, had been taught how to cut and paste in college and then, as soon as they hit the professional world, they had to relearn everything using Photoshop, Quark, HTML, etc.

When I finally succumbed to digital, it was not a choice based on preference, but necessity. The illustrator gig wasn’t something I’d aspired to, but the result of family connections – and I only did it
with the hope that I’d be able to earn enough to put towards a movie. And I hadn’t earned so much as a handful of dust. As a result, despite having written eight original feature-length scripts by the age of 21, and directing several shorts (I was among the earliest students at NYFA, in 1993, and, at the time, right out of high school, I believe the youngest), I was suffering through a 5-year drought in filmmaking. It was agonizing. Like Gary Glitter stuck in a room filled with mature women.

I spent 2001 working as Jami Bernard’s research assistant – the result of an e-mail exchange a few years earlier in which we debated the finer points of Fight Club. By hiring me, Jami effectively allowed me to begin crafting my own path. The only other opportunities I had at the time were through friends, and that meant either selling drugs or taking internships under the shadow of whoever hooked me up. Within a month of being hired, she gave me her ticket to the Lincoln Center premiere of Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures – and I got to shake hands with both Jan Harlan and Christiane Kubrick! A month after that, I was sitting in Sound One watching a press screening of Apocalypse Now Redux in 3-strip Technicolor! I’ll always be grateful to Jami for taking the chance on a scrawny guy with a nose ring and a fedora on his head.

As the year wound on, I decided it was time to dig up a short that I’d storyboarded and partially shot in 1997. It centered around a slacker who scrounges enough change to make himself a hamburger for lunch, then selflessly gives the lunch to his pet cat and iguana when he sees they’re stressing too. He subsequently winds up at the park where, after a series of misfortunes, he’s corrupted and turns on his ideals: he steals a cup of change from a bum.

The short had been designed as a purely visual experience without any dialogue. Set to "The Goldberg Variations," by Bach, the language – the shot-for-shot juxtaposition of images – needed to be damn-near perfect otherwise it would fall apart. It was, for all intents and purposes, a silent film. This was made even more complex by the free form nature of the narrative – it maintained forward motion through a series of random events that snowballed in corkscrew fashion to an unpredictable conclusion. It was a minor high-wire act. I’d designed the short to play like the guerrilla cousin of a cutting-edge commercial, inspired in part by David Fincher’s late ’80s/early-‘90s music videos. Now, 5 years later, it was time to see if the visual theory would hold together – or seem musty and outdated.

I immediately began the process of applying to the AFI. It wasn’t really a serious move, more the use of leverage to get my family to invest $1500 in the project – though I certainly would’ve gone if I’d been accepted. (I wasn’t.)

Principal photography began a week after 9/11. I was shooting with a rented Arriflex BL-16, working in 16mm monochrome. The shoot was scheduled to last from Friday through Sunday, with 2 days of interiors and a final day to cover the exteriors. Once shooting was completed, the plan was to edit on a flatbed Steenbeck – not only would it be cheaper than renting an Avid suite, but I wanted to prove that it could still be done.

First day went fine. Second day went fine. Third day didn’t.

An hour into shooting the exteriors it started to rain. And we had to call it quits. I made everybody promise that they’d return first chance to finish it. As it turned out, the AFI leverage worked here as well. Since nobody was getting paid and nobody really gave a damn, they only agreed to finish it because I was applying to school.

Three months passed before I accepted that I wouldn’t be able to complete the short as intended. Besides not having the money to cover shooting on celluloid, the guy who owned the Arri BL went and sold it. If I wanted to finish Triumph of the Will, Part II, as it was now called, in a sardonic reference to the lengths people will go to achieve greatness, it was going to have to come about digitally.

With only twoweeks remaining until the AFI deadline, I borrowed a friend’s cheap Sony camcorder and we reconvened at Hell Gate Bridge, in Astoria, to shoot the conclusion of TOTW2. What would’ve taken an entire day to shoot on celluloid – between changing mags of film and tape-measuring focuses – was completed in 2 hours on a freezing morning in December, with a bunch of hungover actors. For a 6-pack of Guinness, I convinced somebody at a post house to transfer the film from the first shoot to mini-DV. Then I scammed a bootleg copy of Final Cut Pro 2 for my PowerBook.

I had never edited digitally before, so this was going to be a serious crash course. It took me an entire day to digitize all of the footage – all 200 shots of it. I then spent 2 days over Christmas doing nothing but editing. And this was before I started drinking coffee. Lucky for me, Final Cut Pro was intuitive enough that I was able to apply the same basic editing concepts from traditional cutting and splicing.

To my surprise, and relief, when those two days were up, I was blessed with a short film that had not only held up after 5 years, but also through the mingling of two different mediums. Ultimately, it didn’t matter whether I was shooting on film or video because the shots had been designed well enough that they cut together regardless. (See for yourself. )

In an ironic twist on the short’s ending, I spent the next six months technically homeless – pulling all-nighters, squatting, sleeping on floors. In the middle of this shit festival I experienced a night that irrevocably altered my life forever. (This part doesn’t mirror the rise of mini-DV.) Jami decided to go on vacation and gave me her ticket to the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. That night, I casually approached and had in-depth conversations with Todd Field (In the Bedroom) and David Lynch (Mulholland Drive), both of whom were unbelievably courteous with their time and advice. I also met Robert Altman (Gosford Park) in the stairwell and, upon telling him I was an aspiring filmmaker, he placed his hand on my shoulder for the duration of the flight down. The apex, however, was when I somehow managed the chutzpah to approach the inimitable Naomi Watts, sitting beside Lynch afterward, and we bantered fast back and forth for a few minutes like something out of a Preston Sturges movie. I walked away feeling champagne dizzy. This was the first time in my life that I’d felt accepted. I went back to my friend’s apartment and slept on the floor for two days straight.

By the end of 2002, I had fully converted to digital: I was operating the website MovieNavigator.org with my friend Shaun Sages, and I was in production on a 20-minute mini-DV short called 3200k. MovieNavigator allowed me a forum to experiment with different digital forms, predominantly the process of doing photography by shooting live-action DV, then picking the perfect stills from the footage. (A good example here.) In contrast to the $1500 spent on TOTW2, 3200k cost an entirety of $50 – including ten tracks of stereo sound and an original score by my roommate Mario Mazzoli.

I only misused my press access once, I think. At the end of 2002, I wrote a short script called Coppola. It was a satire that played on the size and influence of the Coppola family (the main character, a struggling filmmaker, changes his last name to Coppola on his Sundance application and is subsequently accepted). My transgression occurred when I handed a copy to Jason Schwartzman at the press day for Spun. Looking at the nom de plum printed on the title page, he asked incredulously: "Jamie Coppola? Is that your real name?" Five months later, at the press day for Lost In Translation, I pulled out a copy for Sofia Coppola. She took one look at it, and to my surprise, reacted: "Oh, I know that. Wait. You did that? You gave a copy to Jason Schwartzman, right?"

When MovieNavigator finished at the end of 2003, I took the jump and decided to pursue filmmaking head-on full-time. Without a back-up. Without a temp job. I wanted every waking moment to be available. Even if that meant being completely broke. And that was very much the case indeed. (I’ve slept on a bed no longer than one week out of the last two years.)

Technology kept advancing. Final Cut Pro 3 came and went. Then Final Cut Pro 4 arrived, followed by Final Cut Pro HD. Meanwhile, the cameras evolved too – models that featured mock HD and 24p hit the marketplace.

During this period, a few mini-DV features by established directors came out. InDigEnt served as a home for some of these. But they were few and far between – and as directed by people like Richard Linklater and Rebecca Miller, the pictures seemed more like the elite trying to be experimental than anything else. The only exception was Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, which I raved about to anybody who’d listen.

Simultaneously, film festivals began overflowing with cheaply produced mini-DV movies that probably did more harm to the movement than good (if mini-DV features were going to maintain the grainy handheld aesthetic of the initial offerings, nobody was going to take the medium seriously as a substitute for film).

I had been fairly aggressive making contacts during the MovieNavigator period, taking full advantage of my access. About sixmonths after the plunge, I convinced a high-profile two-time Oscar-nominated producer to take a look at one of my feature projects. He liked what he saw, but advised me in no uncertain terms that if I wanted to get anywhere, I needed to go out and make as many contacts on as many fronts as I could.

The next step was to form an alliance with some friends. We bought a Panasonic DVX-100A, got an iMac G4 which through a fluke was replaced for free by Apple with a dual 1.8 GHz G5 tower, and established a website (crossoverfollowing.com) to act as a means of exposure.

With a stash of screenplays at my disposal, I wore out my Adidas to convince another high-profile New York-based producer to look at one of my projects. After two drafts, he passed. But I was continuing to make contacts.

I knew that if I was going to work in mini-DV, and be taken seriously, I needed to change the image of the medium. I needed to prove that mini-DV could be shot using the same principles that applied to traditional motion pictures: good compositions, steady images, dolly shots, etc. While it was never my intention to cover as many bases as I’ve done – shooting, editing, producing, writing, directing – I developed these skills (once again) out of necessity. I learned years earlier that when you’re starting out as a director the technicians you could afford were usually either not skilled enough to give you what you wanted or, in a display of arrogance, would do what they wanted instead of what they were asked to do. Although I wasn’t trained as a photographer or editor per se, I knew well enough the desired effects I hoped to achieve. I also noticed that having familiarized myself with both Photoshop and FCP, the same basic operating concepts applied to other programs like Flash (animation) and After Effects (compositing). And with a background in illustration I took to them very quickly.

Working in digital requires a different mindset than traditional analog thinking. And this affects your general thought process - not just the art. Digital means working in easily accessible layers – layers than can be altered and manipulated in real time as often as you wish. The entire process becomes more malleable. If you mess up, hit “undo.” It’s not like traditional media where you’re working with physical elements that can be permanently ruined. This newfound ease has filtered into every aspect of creative thinking on movies, and can be considered responsible in large part for the elasticity of modern narratives. As the tools have become more and more non-linear, so has the process of creating. And in turn the process of thinking.

The whole festival circuit seemed broken to me. There weren’t any indies breaking through to the mainstream. And application costs ranged from $20-50 a pop. The idea of paying that much for multiple applications, with exposure limited to a single location, assuming my short was selected, didn’t seem like a wise investment. Not that I had the money to throw at that anyhow.

I also wasn’t in the mood to focus on one short each year, as most aspiring filmmakers had become accustomed to, due to resources and the festival circuit.

October 2004, offered me the opportunity to experiment with the template for what eventually became Mutiny City News. For my third year covering the New York Film Festival, Graham Leggat and the Film Society of Lincoln Center allowed me the freedom to create a daily video diary. Nobody thought I’d cover all 14 days of the critic screenings. With virtually no sleep and an entire budget of $250 (food, transportation) I completed what I’d set out to do. And Movie City News was gracious enough to run links to each episode as it appeared. This project allowed me to experiment with different forms (P.O.V., animation, black & white), and I came out the other end a lot more confident and mature in my understanding of what was possible for mini-DV.

Another six months of making contacts went by. Then, out of the blue, David Poland offered me a slot on Movie City News, via e-mail: “Well, if you want any kind of consistent place in the industry eye, we would love to run your stuff on a regular basis. We don’t have money, but you can build your name and rep in the business.” (It should be noted that I’d never actually met David. And still haven’t.)

I’d been reluctant to go digital in the first place. And I was reluctant here as well. I didn’t want to do more press – I wanted to get a feature going. But it wasn’t going. I sat on the offer for a few weeks.

Then, one night, while I was sucking down red Thai curry, it suddenly hit me pretty full blown. It would be called Mutiny City News, combining my tag The Mutiny Company with Movie City News. It would feature reviews of bootleg DVDs (Bootleg Barry), complaints about how bad the top box office hits are (Box Off!), a Beavis and Butt-head duo with 2 characters I’d previously created (Ratings Bored), and eccentric junket pieces in the style of the NYFF series (Radio Mutiny). We hired our great free cast: Daniel Scott, Lauren Currie Lewis, Eric Ludwig, John Hannigan, and Shea Davies. Then we killed ourselves to improvise each episode shot for shot without so much as an outline. In one memorably exhausting run, we improvised an episode of Ratings Bored from 2 am to 7 am in the basement of Nobu’s building in Queens (when we knew nobody would be around), then shot from 10:30 am till noon on Box Off! at Shaun’s apartment in midtown Manhattan, then I had to go back to Queens and edit Box Off! that night because it had to run the next day, then edit Ratings Bored the next day for its run.

The series became my life for the first six weeks. Either I was shooting or editing. Often doing both the same day. The most time I ever spent in post on a single episode was one full day.

Mutiny City News ran for 4 1/2 months and contained 30 episodes. It helped to further the idea that the internet is now going to be the premiere forum for independent filmmakers to get their work seen. The big screw up was that everybody rushed to make features out of the box, since the prices were so low. And this resulted in the initial wave of dismissed product and bankrupt filmmakers. For $100 a year or less, a filmmaker can create his/her own exposure. It’ll also give that filmmaker time to develop and master the tools so easily at their disposal. Then, with a bit of exposure and possibly some contacts, they can go make that feature debut.

In the last couple of months alone, a series of websites have popped up with the sole purpose of exposing aspiring filmmakers (in addition to older sits like iFilm or Trigger Street). Also, in case anybody had their head up their butt and hadn’t heard, iTunes began offering video content. One of the first acts to take advantage of this development was the duo of Arin Crumley and Susan Buice, directors of the unreleased feature Four Eyed Monsters. We’ve even begun uploading some of the Mutiny catalog to iTunes (Click here.)

The thing that's interesting about the work I did on Mutiny City News was how unlike it is from my feature designs. My feature projects, while maintaining a certain humor, are usually pretty dark -- I like the idea of taking provocative ideas and putting them to work within the confines of an entertainment (Apocalypse Now, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 8 1/2, Manhattan, Dr. Strangelove, Minority Report). I'm also very meticulous, storyboarding the entire script shot-for-shot (The All-Nighter just clocked in at 720 shots over 189 pages). When Mutiny arrived, I had enough experience to know that since web episodes needed to be pretty short, keeping them bouncy was essential. The other major decision was -- based on the sheer bulk of episodes -- to improvise each piece without any pre-planning. It was tonally and procedurally antithetical to my normal approach. And I'm glad I was forced to do that, to have had that experience. Because having to find shots fast on the spot, and having to make up the story or concept on the spot required me to sharpen skills I might not have ever considered utilizing. Nowhere was this more evident than in the junket episodes. There's nothing more difficult than being forced to shoot an interview in the "TV room" with somebody else's lighting and a very defined setup. Some of the episodes were obvious expressions of my displeasure at the imposed limitations: I made sure to keep the audience aware that I was in a room with fake lighting and publicists for my Werner Herzog interview, I shot The Artistocrats handheld, and at Junebug, I let Amy Adams take the camera and interview me.

Thinking on the spot required basically a 3-D model of the action and setting in your head. I never relied on any specific shots from other films. Not intentionally. I'm not somebody who's interested in a shot for the sake of a shot. Filmmakers I normally respond to have good grammar: Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, and especially Steven Spielberg. (If you want to learn how to put pictures together to tell a story, you start with Spielberg. Period. He'll teach you anything you need to know.) Having studied enough music videos, I understood not only how to break a story down to small elements, but also how to quickly find an image to further that story. I would find myself gravitating toward minor editing flourishes that Mark Romanek occasionally displays (wide to close jumps cuts on various inanimate objects), and it was nice that he appeared in the final Radio Mutiny episode. But mostly, it was about breaking down space. Finding the best location to maximize energy and spatial relation. Improvising also meant not lighting. With the exception of replacing a few lamps with 100 watt bulbs. Which I was quite content with, as I've always preferred the natural looks of Kubrick and Terrence Malick. I also like the aesthetic of combining a real "look" with slightly heightened compositions; I find it helps to ground the viewer in a realistic setting that you can then begin to manipulate.

Mutiny City News, to me, at least, kind of served as a State of the Union for the IndieNet generation. And this isn’t an opinion regarding its quality – people could’ve hated it, farted at it, fallen asleep during it – but simply a statement that this CAN BE DONE. I always claim that Mutiny City News (though we spent about $150 on tapes) had an entire shooting budget of $0. It featured intricate photography with lots of dolly shots, tight editing, cartoon animation, green screen FX, and in some cases original music. Our silly 2-part 4th of July spectacular Thumbs Up! epitomized this approach. Prior to mini-DV and consumer equipment that 15-minute farce would’ve cost at least mid-5 figures. Now, if you can muster a budget in the mid-5 figures you can approximate the qualities of a celluloid film made for low-7 figures. If you know what you’re doing.

What’s going to separate the handheld mini-DV features that gave the movement a bad reputation from the ones that break through will be the level at which the filmmakers can create high production values on a limited budget. As filmmakers better learn the tools now at their disposal, we’ll start to see films featuring special FX and innovative craft. And this is going to be exciting to audiences. It will. For however long the boom lasts, audiences are going to marvel that these great films were made by the guy sitting next to them at Starbucks working on his laptop. It’ll be a breath of fresh air for people feeling smothered by $200-million extravaganzas.

Don’t believe me? Whoever would’ve thought that in 1994, only a year after Jurassic Park became the highest grossing film of all time and invented the modern FX blockbuster, that an $8-million crime flick named Pulp Fiction would explode and usher in the indies the same way that Nirvana’s Nevermind usurped Michael Jackson three years earlier?

The time is coming. We needed these last half dozen years for the next generation to develop and begin fighting its way from the underground. Once theatrical projection goes digital, mini-DV will quickly supplant 16mm as the low-budget format of choice. What needs to be corrected, and I said this earlier, is the idea that since it doesn’t “look” like film there’s no reason to shoot it like film. That’s a cop-out. For me, working in mini-DV has been freedom. Pick up a $200 semi-professional 3-wheel dolly and you can cruise like Scorsese or P.T. Anderson. Grab a green screen for the same price (or, for less, green paper or even green paint) and you can start doing special FX. It’s all available at reasonable prices. If you have the determination to seek it out.

I don’t have any illusions that this trend will last. There’ll be a boom followed by dryness, as is always the case. But I would consider it of benefit to the industry to start the process of cultivating some of the talent out there.

Further down the line, we’ll start seeing kids raised on consumer equipment entering college at the same level most people are graduating at today.

For me, I have no intention of staying with mini-DV forever – it’s a stepping-stone. I’m now preparing to finally get that feature debut going. I’m aiming to begin shooting The All-Nighter, best described as a paranoid thriller set in post-9/11 N.Y., in late winter. It was initially written 3 1/2 years ago as a way to deal with my homeless stint. Rather than write something that was straight autobiography, I took the basic setting and applied it to the narrative of a dark bit of pulp. Very ambiguous, in some respects it's reminiscent of films like The Conversation, The Third Man or Taxi Driver -- both in the use of an isolated protagonist, in over his head, and the way in which they were able to reflect the societies of their times without direct confrontation. I think the reason so many filmmakers start with noir-inspired features is that it offers a very visual palette to work with -- and since the material is designed to create suspense and action, you can be creative and get away with it (The Killing, Reservoir Dogs, Memento, even something like Pi). I'm going to put this DV thing through its paces. There are sequences in this film that will be created in the computer. I'll be green-screening and compositing an entire chase sequence. In some cases I'll shoot background plates. In others, I'll build very small portions of sets and digitally combine it with manufactured or previously shot elements. Although I've been using the Panasonic DVX100A, in 24p, the post-production requirements here will force me to upgrade to the new HVX200 HD. The mock HD will offer a higher resolution for the compositing work, and it will still be 24p to help with any film transfers. (24p looks better than 29.97 anyhow.)

Since Mutiny City News wrapped in October, I’ve nearly murdered myself several times over polishing the script and storyboarding it shot-for-shot. Time to raise the funding. Perhaps, I’ll hold a bake sale.

- Email Jamie Stuart

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