True Lies And Non-Fiction Fiction

I'm sure you've heard the phrase, "film is a lie at 24 frames per second."  Well, that's true, of course, because a film is not life, it's a construction.  Even a documentary cannot be anything other than a construction.  But in openly-admitted fiction that is in no way trying to be True, how much is true by necessity?

A common debate you'll hear throughout the humanities centers on how much of the artist is evident in the art.  How much of what's written is the writer?  There are whole schools of criticism that take up variations of that one question.  You can build a whole career in critical studies just exploring auteur theory.  Way back when, one of my professors (also a novelist) was deeply annoyed we (his idiot students) kept making assumptions about an author based a novel he wrote.  For instance, one of the characters was quite perverse which prompted our creative interpretations of what the author believed about sex and women and sundry accoutrements.  The discussion got pretty detailed, and gross, and my professor ended up throwing a chair to get our attention back.  

I had yet to brave the admission I was, myself, a writer.  Publishing cartoons and writing all the time were my hobbies and side-lines, things I knew I would do for the rest of my life, but only in addition to a real career.  Because no-one writes books or draws cartoons for a living.  Those rare exceptions I saw in the newspaper or magazines or bookstore were freaks of nature or products of nepotism or luck.  They were not regular, real people from no-where like me.  Regular, real people from no-where go into law or medicine or other linear careers of easily measured success (apologies to the lawyers, doctors, and others laughing at me right now, but  these were the assumptions of my juvenile mind).  I had not yet faced the fact that I was headed for a creative career, so I didn't yet realize having any sort of audience meant I, too, was going to have to brave being exposed.  As a multi-panel cartoonist, I joked I was a "stripper" by trade.  I didn't realize at the time how very accurate that would be.

Creating anything--even if you couch it in lies and call it fiction--is a kind of personal striptease.  Naturally, everything we "create" on some level reflects who and what we are.  Even intentionally avoiding subjects, settings, events, or characters from personal history is revealing.  No wonder it's such a daring and nerve-wracking thing to do.  I get nervous as bathing-suit weather approaches, I certainly don't feel any more confident showing my insides as well as my outsides.  When I started considering a creative career, I engaged in ridiculous fantasies to keep myself hidden.  I'd write under pseudonyms, use caricatures instead of photos of myself, hire an actor to stand in for me at public functions:

"And the award goes to...Jody Lindke.  Playing Jody this evening and accepting on her behalf, please welcome Vin Diesel." 

What's almost worse than feeling so self-conscious is the counter-impulse of feeling supremely vain.  Creative expression strikes the insecure me as a narcissistic act of screaming on paper, "look at me!"  My inner-critic is fat and happy as it goes to town mixing low-self-exteme with guilt-generating shame, and the result, I've discovered (as it was recently pointed out to me again) is I chronically hold back in my work.  


I'd been dealing with rejections and couldn't help asking myself over and over "what do they want?"--they in this case being publishers and producers and agents and readers and every level of gate-keeping in between--and I did this within hearing of a friend who reminded me, "what they want, really, is a piece of your soul."  Did you feel a chill?  'Cause I sure did.  If I didn't want to share my visage with others, I certainly didn't feel any more confident exposing any fraction of my soul to derision.  I wasn't gonna do it.  There had to be a way out.  I had to be able to pretend convincingly enough to keep myself separate--and safe--and still create compelling fiction and films.

Not so.  

Looking at the stories I revisit most, the shows and films and books I turn to, I realized it's not only true, that bit about the soul, it's right that it's true.  It is just.  It is good.  


It's also really, really, really intimidating...

Whether you're consuming art or creating it, you're engaged in an act of sharing, and what you're sharing is yourself, your humanity--y'know, that thing supernatural or immortal creatures always envy in us, that thing we always recognize in friendly aliens from other worlds and never find in the ones who want to eat us.  That thing is what makes a good story great, that makes us laugh and cry and feel we not just engaged with art but experienced it.

I thought I was done with a particular bit of fiction.  It does all the things it needs to do.  It's funny, it's moving, it's got a plot, plants have pay-offs...but some parts feel clipped, some opportunities lost, because I'd approached it as a story about "those people" in "that place," and kept myself away from it.  So what could be great is only good.  If I dig in and let that bit of soul I've been hoarding show, if I scrape down to expose the raw, real emotion and pain of what I'm writing about, it could be one of those stories you can't look away from or forget, the kind of story that becomes as real and personal as lived memory.  Drama is action driven by feeling, and I hadn't wanted to feel what drove the actions I'd written about.  I'd written about death and fear and lust and love and joy, but I'd protected myself, kept my clothes on, kept my humanity to myself.  It's intimidating to think of an audience seeing this and saying, "this is Jody's fear and lust and love and joy," reducing me to what fragments of myself slipped through.  I don't want the censure or humiliation.  If I invest myself and the work is rejected, I lose the self-soothing, "well, that wasn't really me."  However much I give any piece of writing, it is by nature a construction, but if I only ever play it safe, my work can never be more than artifice.  

Striptease may be an art, but making art is a striptease.  You can't hide and create. 

I often say story lets us live surrogate lives, but I realize now that's only possible when the teller is courageous enough to give real life to it.  That bit of soul they want is where Truth with the capital "T" resides.  Art doesn't give us feelings of strength or courage or empathy or solidarity or love or loss or hope.  Art stimulates real feelings because real feelings were put into that art. Feeling is the heart (note the phrase) of story.  That's what gives it the power to teach, to reveal our humanity, to cement our connectedness and acknowledge our fragility.  Dismissing it by calling it "fiction" is kind of naive.

Casting Vampires & Other Film School Cliches

It's awards season.  Festivals, viewer and professional award nominations are flooding the industry news, getting everyone excited and anxious to do new business.  For those in the rapids, congratulations and hang on tight!  For those on the shore, use the lull to gear up for next time.  And for those in between, do your best to stay afloat.  When it comes to scripted entertainment, sometimes just not going under deserves recognition and applause.

This season is always bitter sweet for me.  It brings to mind past projects:  the surprise when something you didn't realize was kinda good got some recognition, the suffocating silence when something you thought would do better isn't noticed at all.  It's a funny business.  

I had the great privilege of screening short films I worked on at festivals, at school, and at the DGA.  Like with writing anything, when you're involved in the making of a film, it's difficult to get the perspective and distance you need to actually see the film.  It's tough to see the edit for what it is when you're bogged down by memories of the making of the thing.  Maybe you can't see past the actor who seemed fine until he got drunk on set and felt-up half of your some-still-slightly-under-age, all-volunteer crew.  Or maybe you're stuck staring at the actress who swore she'd cut her hair to get the part but then refused half-way through production so the final third of the film doesn't make any sense.  Or the scene that should have had the hunky guy you already filmed for the plant scene but who didn't show up to shoot the pay-off, and you couldn't afford re-shoots so you never re-cast and what should have been a comedy isn't funny or even all that dramatic, so you're generally screwed.  Yeah, sometimes it's like that.


Like every department or component in any scripted entertainment, casting is crucial.  I won't say "casting is king" because we've all seen counter-examples and scripted entertainment, whether for the stage or the screen (of any size), is a team sport.  Quarterbacks and pitchers can't win by themselves, and a cast is nothing without a crew is nothing without a writer is nothing without a financier is nothing without...  Well, if financiers find themselves without, at least they have the means to buy it.  But I stand by the rest.  Back to casting.

It's a strange thing to be on the choosing side of casting.  I feel a little unambitious admitting I never used the "casting couch" as an opportunity to fleece someone for money or favors or to solicit border-line illegal "personal contact."  Talk about lost opportunities, right?  I found it challenge enough to just be at that table because I know what it's like to be on the other side.

There are many, many, many reasons I'm not an actor.  One biggie, I took theater in high school, where I learned that the anxieties typically associated with the audition side of a casting session pretty far exceed my anxiety threshold.  I'm always impressed when I meet (I'll add sane or happy) actors because what they do is really, really hard, and I don't mean performing.  Performing is an entirely different brand of difficult.  I mean auditioning, walking in cold, doing your thing (or their thing if there are sides), and walking out with no expectation of hearing from anyone, ever, about how you did or why you didn't get the job when you later see the film or show or program or commercial or print-ad or whatever.  That's really tough, and I find the people who can embrace that life and stress and remain whole with family and sanity intact are beyond remarkable.  Kudos. 

Though it is really important in film school to work on as many of your classmates projects as you can (every project is a massive learning experience and every crew position, no matter how unglamorous or seemingly unimportant, will teach you buckets about producing and getting the most from yourself and your work), one of the best things about film school was the push to make us cast real actors.  "Don't rely just on your classmates," soon became, "you will post ads, you will audition, you will cast real actors, or you will fail this class," and thank goodness it did, because nothing less would have gotten me to do it. 

There are several things you can expect to see in indie- and student films that scream cheap and cliche but which can be great if done with some exceptional flare or skill:  major scenes shot entirely on a couch, games of chess or prominently featured chess boards and pieces (often to indicate intelligence otherwise lacking in the character, writing, and film), protagonists running alone in metaphoric pursuit or metaphoric flight, over-use of close-ups, flat space, ridiculously severe stripy lighting justified by window blinds, no apparent ceilings coupled with obvious set-seams, twinkle-lights and generic neon signs...  Actually, it's a pretty long list and probably deserves a post unto itself.  Anyway, one of my shorts (prominently featuring too much flat-space, too many close-ups, and no ceilings whatsoever) embraced the reformed vampire cliche.  It's one of my favorites.  I don't like bullies or human predators, but I love a good redemption tale, and vamps typically have a lot to answer for.  

My film was about a latch-key kid who finds a vampire, knows what it is, and adopts him.  It doesn't end well.  Subtle, right?  Since vampires are heart-and-hand with sex and violence, I wanted to cast a very attractive grown man as my predator and a bright-eyed, prepubescent girl for my latch-key kid for added yet subtle tension.  Sh'yeah.  Okay, not subtle at all, but that's what I was looking for, and I tried to keep an open mind, and I found it!  The girl was terrific, inside and out, with a wonderful "stage mom" whose first and only priority was her daughter (not always the case with child performers and their moms).  For the vampire, I was torn between two actors.  One was fair, the other dark, one lanky the other beefy.  How to decide? 

When you're casting, you try to keep an open mind, partly because what you think you're looking for might not exist, and partly because preconceived tunnel-vision can blind you to discovering something great yet unexpected that an actor might bring to the role.  Every project lives for those moments, those hidden and inspired opportunities, and as a filmmaker and story-teller you struggle to keep yourself open enough to recognize them.  Both actors were easy on the eyes and willing to commit the significant time for rehearsals, shooting, sitting for mouth-molds so I could get prosthetic fangs made.  But one just had more of a "killer" vibe.  The other was a good actor, very personable, kind, smart, funny, with a terrific, easy-going smile that just lit up the room and made me (and by extension, would make my audience) want to know him more--a very charming guy.  I knew at once he'd be easy to work with even on long, long shooting days.  But the other guy--and it's magical when this happens in casting, when you stumble on that "it" factor, that "wow" moment where an actor just becomes or is exactly what you're looking for even though you didn't know until that very moment that's what you needed and wanted and can't do without--he just had this perfect and ominous je ne sais quoi that screamed "I'm a predator."  He was perfect. 

But when I prompted him later to improvise a scene where he's "cheering up a sad child" at, say, an airport or doctor's office, his same je ne sais quoi also whispered, "I might gut you between takes just to see the color of your insides."  And that was for "cheering up a child."

I cast the smiling Mr. Personable.  I was instantly rewarded by my instincts being confirmed.  He took the job seriously, was prompt and punctual and we got the prosthetic teeth molds and he was really supportive and friendly in the best possible way with the ten-year-old on set.  The prosthetic fangs were perfect and very believable in proportion, color and size.  Mr. Personable was so great, I was able to focus exclusively on the billion other problems that is shooting a student film, including re-writing the script almost from scratch mid-way through shooting because between lost locations and time there was no way what I wrote could be shot.  

Through it all, Mr. Personable smiled beautifully.  Because he couldn't not smile.  

Not even when he wanted to. 


This discovery was not made until dailies, which for this project meant half-way through production.  We'd shot the "temptation" scene, a dirty close-up of our killer face-to-face with the vampire-buffet that is a healthy little girl's pulsing throat.  He played it well, all in the eyes, and we could even see the flutter of her artery -- the shot really worked -- as his lips part and we see...no fangs.  Couldn't see the teeth.  Over and over, close-up after close-up, all burned film, all losses from budget and time, weeks of time and money in the one and only custom-prop, but not one shot, not once were the fangs visible.  Something I hadn't noticed about Mr. Personable until dailies was his mouth had a naturally smiling shape to it, lifting quite pleasantly at the corners, but also dipping slightly more than I anticipated from the corner to the mid-quarter of the lip, a dip perfectly suited not only to completely cover his incisors, but the extended fake fangs as well.

Back to set we went knowing what we had to do--maximize exposure of those fangs.  Without fangs, the character just looked like some creepy, pale guy following a ten year old girl home.  Without fangs, the tension was less predator vs. meal and more imminent child-rape, which is still evil vs. good in theme, but a noir of an entirely different shade and one I had no intention of re-writing to accommodate.  So, I laid it out, and he agreed -- we had to see the fangs!  

That's when we discovered he couldn't grimace.  The particular shape of his mouth and the development of his facial muscles which made him look so pleasant meant he could not sneer or snarl or bare his teeth in any menacing way to save his life.  And he tried.  He really worked at it.  Dude was totally committed to the role (and only working for copy and credit!  God, I love actors!), but he couldn't not smile, and teeth-gnashing of any kind was impossible.


Back went the fangs, priority rush, for modification.  Back to the edit bay, emergency panic, to figure out what was usable and what wasn't.  Back to the computer, frantic revision, because the film we started shooting wasn't possible, even with the changes we made to deal with the lost locations and time remaining.  Duly regrouped, we completed production...by embracing additional student-film cliches:  ridiculous make-up, over-use of music for lacking transitions, reveal-it-was-all-a-dream plot re-shuffle, and the classic we-can't-resolve-this-story-in-a-satisfying-way suicide ending.  

Obvious block-buster material.  It's how I made my first million.  [insert laughter here]

We finished it, the culmination of half a semester of overwhelming amounts of work and a life-threatening lack of sleep.  I think it's six minutes long.  Including the credits.   

Two years later, having finally saved up enough money to have my "negative cut" (this sucker was shot on real, physical film, mixed and screened off a telecined work-print), I enjoyed one final surprise student-film cliche:  lost negative.  Somewhere between the school and the film development house, exactly one reel of my film negative was misplaced, making it impossible to cut the negative and produce a finished film complete with (drum roll, please) optical mono-track sound transferred from hand-cut magnetic film!  Yeah!  

Personable as ever, Mr. Personable would've done re-shoots in a heartbeat -- a consummate worker and just that kind of guy.  But my latch-key kid went from ten to twelve, and in girl terms that's something like six inches taller, plus braces on her teeth--no way new footage would cut.  There ended any possibility of a formal screening, of festival submission, of cutting DVDs.  Not my favorite take-away from the student film-making experience, but a valuable lesson in blind trust, film storage and archiving.    
  
Aside from some seriously bitter disappointment at not being able to "time" and complete a finished print, I've never once looked back on this project and been sorry, especially about my cast and crew.  I got to shoot some stuff I'm really, really proud of, even if almost no-one will ever see it.  When I say I learned, I say it with major italics.  Ultimately filmmakers are just viewers who also happen to make films, so it's no surprise that what makes for a great movie or show viewing experience also makes for a terrific production experience.  Writers sometimes like to say, "it's an important story," or a "valuable tale," but good stories really boil down to the people in 'em, whether they're part of the action or the telling.  It's the people involved that make a story meaningful and the time communicating it well spent.  

I've gotten to work with some supremely kind and diligent people who gave their absolute all.  In this case, it was just to help tell a six-minute story pre-loaded with problems and cliches.  And it's still one of my favorites. 

What Goes Up...Keeps Going Up...

Why is it there's always some mean-spirited smarty-pants on any given set ready to mock the deeply-indebted for attending film school?  

"Film school?!  What a waste!  Shoulda just made your own film--costs the same and you'd learn more!"

Well, if you could borrow federal financial aid to make a movie, that might be true, but for me and most of my classmates "just doin' it" was never an option.  And actually runaway amateur productions can cost a lot more than a good film school, especially considering projects that fail to get proper insurance and lock up in litigation for property damage or on-set injuries.  And unless you're already stacked with industry connections, going it alone doesn't give you any particular access to the experience, advice and equipment film schools offer.  But on every set I've worked on, there was always at least one meanie eager to knock me down for believing in myself enough to take the leap and the monumental debt of film school.

It's not easy to work without sleep for "copy and credit" (and craft service meals, though they can sometimes be more threat than incentive), harder yet with people lining up to rub it in.  But every new business tends to lose money in its fledgling years, right?  So really, my 25 year mortgage with no home to show for it is a mark of professionalism.  A colorful aside for my 15-year "overnight success" story.


Boy, I'm looking forward to telling that in total!

They'll Get You!

I love horror stories – in theory.  Like in thumbnail form, interrupted by commercials on a muted TV during the day with at least four hours between final credits and sun-down. 

It’s not entirely my fault.  Fear and self-doubt are kind of constants with me.  Boost either one, I’m hyperventilating under the covers (because if even a toe is exposed, THEY’LL GET YOU!).  I know it’s ridiculous, but it feels true.  I guess I’m “highly impressionable” when it comes to horror.  Example?  The Original Star Trek episode “The Man Trap” had me leaping from my door to my bed at night throughout junior high lest the suction-cup-fingered, salt-sucking, shape-changer “get me.”  The first time I tried to read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I freaked out and threw the book under the bathroom vanity, where it remained for over three years before I forced myself to retrieve and read it.  Great book, but human malice, even fictionalized, really disturbs me.  In high school I wept uncontrollably through The Shining and spontaneously burst into traumatized tears again years later when I glimpsed a tiny fraction of The Shining embedded in the movie Twister – it’s what’s playing on the drive-in theater screen as the “finger of God” level five tornado rip the scene and screen apart.  Tornadoes, straight-forwardly threatening and therefore not scary.  Fathers carving up their families?  Simply terrifying.

But strip away the tension and gore, I love the genre.  Horror is rich in extreme characters and story lines and plot twists.  There’s little I enjoy more than a good horror-story re-cap.  As a kid, I did a lot of eavesdropping on the bus or quizzing friends to get the gist what horror movies or shows were out.  My husband often indulges me by re-telling the stories he knows I’ll otherwise avoid.  He doesn’t seem to view my shying from horror as a weakness.  But I do.

In film school, I stupidly decided to “push” myself instead of focusing on my strengths.  I shot a horror short film about a woman finding a dead body in her trunk only to realize she’d opened the wrong car…and the killer was still there!  It wasn’t very good, or subtle, and since what little horror experience I do have was viewed on “mute,” I didn’t realize until my classmates burst out laughing that I’d chosen the very distinctive score from Halloween, so it played like a parody.  The smart play would have been to pretend it was always a comedy, but I’m a terrible liar.  Instead, I accepted that horror was not my strength and chose a dramatic scene with an element of horror for a directing class.  Because practice makes improvement at least, right? 

Stupid, stupid, stupid me…

It didn’t help that without time to audition I went begging for actors, so the guys I cast had less than no respect for me and sort of resented the time-commitment.  The scene was one guy intimidating the other with status, which turns as the other offers a bodily threat of imminent, extreme harm while the dialog remains pleasant-sounding.  I loved the writing – tense, packed with subtext, rich language – plenty of room for an actor to play, I thought.  But my guys were grumps and I was beginning to think the whole thing was a wash when one got annoyed enough to do exactly what I’d been trying to get him to do.

Except he did it to me. 

Right in my face, a foot or more taller than me and something like fifty pounds bigger than I am (and all muscle in his case – ah, actors).  I don’t think his anger was real.  I’d pushed him and he was pushing me back.  But he could tear my arms from their sockets, and for a good 30 seconds, he made me believe he might.  He stirred all the fear I could ask for, and he knew it, and he smirked about it. 

As if scaring me instead of effectively performing with his scene partner proved he’s a better actor than I am a director.

Well, obviously he’s a better actor than I was a director, especially then!  The scene was for a class, and it was only my second directing effort EVER.  While he was supporting himself as professional actor and had been for a couple years already.  So when that merry Andrews had the gall to ask me if I was scared, I barked, “Who cares?  It’s easy to scare me!  Anyone can scare me!  Salt-sucking, shape-changers on Star Trek scare me.  I’m not in the scene, dumb-ass!”

Okay, I didn’t really say “dumb-ass” at the time.  Sometimes I think I’d really like to be one of those fearsome forces on a set who can do things like call big guys dumb-ass and reign them in with a blood-congealing glance, but that’s not me.  Thumper’s parental mantra “if you can’t say something nice—” rings like tinnitus in my ears.  But I did say the other parts, and he kind of listened and we finished rehearsing. 

I didn’t flunk the class, so I call it a success.  And actually, I didn’t cry in front of that guy.  I didn’t cry until I got all the way home.  So in that case, it was.  

Does it Really Matter That...?

 

When the just-right-and-conveniently-available actor 

who has a fan-base and flare enough

to generate the buzz you need

to get a meeting

to pitch and sell

your sweated-blood-to-write original TV pilot

suddenly

lands a re-occurring role on some other show,

does it really matter that, 

"if water was whiskey and I was a duck,

I'd swim to the bottom and drink my way up" 

doesn't actually rhyme?