I Don’t Go to Church, I Go to the Movies.

I have a problem. I like going out to see movies. This is the first step of my recovery: my acknowledgment that I am powerless over cinema…

I believe it started with Aladdin. That’s the first memory I have – well, my first memory is almost drowning in the Pacific, somewhere along the Northern California coast – so, I ought to clarify. That is my first memory of going to the cinema. It was Armistice Day, 1992. It had been a dry November, but it was still cold. I was five and had recently discovered watching my breath condense into vapor. I recall watching this phenomenon many times while I waited for my father to unlock the car.  I was sure this breath-fog was the most amazing thing that I would witness that day.

We get in the old Vista Colt, cruise north on Blackstone Avenue, probably hit every red on the way there (those lights have always been poorly timed). We turn in to the lot of the long since torn down Broadway Six Cinema. My father parks the car in the first spot he sees and we begin what seems like a half-mile walk to the theater entrance. This hasn’t changed. My dad will still park further than necessary from any destination (and when someone pointed this out as a habit of mine was my initiation into the timeless “I’m becoming my father” drama that man has observed since that one Australopithecus used an underhand grip on a primitive knife it was using to eviscerate a prehistoric leopard and mused, “My dad used to hold it this way…”). I didn’t mind the walk. He was the one carrying my sister, so it was no burden on me. And this gave me more time to exaggeratedly exhale and ponder.

Cut to: Int. Theatre. Later. On the screen, Aladdin is warning Abu not to touch anything. Then Abu swipes a ruby. Then shit gets real. (I was looking for this scene and found this. C’mon dude. Stop cluttering the internet.) By this point, my then one-year-old sister had begun to cry hysterically and my father had to take her to the lobby. I was alone in a new place, seeing something I had never scene. It was like a waking dream, these images on the screen. I got up and ran to claim a seat in the front row and proceeded to have my mind blown for the next eighty-five minutes.

The next theatrical experiences of merit are Jurassic Park in 1993, which I convinced five different adults to take me to (JP ties with Fellowship of the Ring, Jaws, and Alien for movies seen the most times in theaters. No. Wait. If we’re counting revival nights then Jurassic Park gets two more tallies), and Stargate in 1994. The initial time I saw Jurassic Park, I drew my feet up onto my chair when the velociraptor jumped at Lex’s dangling legs. My memory of Stargate is making myself vomit by overindulging in candy and soda pop. I had to see the rest of that film the following day.

These were all fantastical films. In three years, a habit had developed that has lasted me to this present day. I have kicked it a few times when I was too broke or too busy, but I always come back. I like to sit in the dark with strangers and watch larger-than-life images flicker on a screen. I prefer my projectors to be film rather than digital, and for my seating to me flat rather than stadium, but sometimes the need for the score outweighs my tastes. This goes for the movies as well. Sometimes I find myself seeing something I have no interest in. I find myself squirming in the seat, my brain talking over the film:

“This isn’t right, man. Calm down. No. This doesn’t feel right. We’re only three minutes in. Why is everyone wearing suits and talking about pop culture? If I wanted to see Reservoir Dogs I would have fucking rented Reservoir Dogs. We own Reservoir Dogs. It’s in a box in your mom’s garage, bro. Probably melted into a puddle by now. What’re you talking about? Fresno summers. Be quiet. I’m trying to – You fool! You fool! They got you with a decent trailer. Go get your money back now. Before it’s too late. It’s my day off. I wanted to see a movie today. Then sneak into the next theater, man. This is all cutter, no pure. You’re gonna leave worse than you came. We’re being hunted. In the bushes. Straight ahead. I’ve got her. Go! Run! Now!”

I’m going to cut this short. I need to plug JanJag and review a list of equipment for rent. Let it be known: I like my theaters. I like them dingy. I like their content eclectic. I like their patrons old. Or at least dedicated to watching whatever film is showing. These dirty venues feed something in me that I haven’t been able to kick for the streaming home experience that so many of my contemporaries are fine with.  I like to stare at a large image and feel committed to experiencing it. It feels sacred to me. And a good screenplay does more for me than a sermon.

JanJag. Check it out. We’re at fifteen percent. We need your contributions and visits and shares ( igg.me/at/janjagfilm ) to keep this dream afloat. Cassani is a sweetheart. A dreamer. He likes to tell stories. This one is good. Let’s make this story into a thing. Then we can put it out there. And it might be playing on a big screen. And I can go see it. And, for its running time, be a guileless little five-year-old again.

Better Late Than Never

“We should not look down on work nor look down on [our early works] as failures. To fail is to give up. But you are in the midst of a moving process. Nothing fails then. All goes on. Work is done. If good, you learn from it. If bad, you learn even more. Work done and behind you is a lesson to be studied. There is no failure unless one stops. Not to work is to cease, tighten up, become nervous and therefore destructive of the creative process.”

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Yesterday was August 22nd. And it would have come and gone without celebration, like many of the other August 22nd’s of my life. However, it was brought to my attention that August 22nd is the birthday of the late Ray Douglas Bradbury.  I did not learn this because of a Google doodle. I happened to be reading about Ray Harryhausen (Matt Cassani had just hired a clay-motion artist to do the animated sequences in January Jaguar, and that got me thinking about some of the great old films I recalled renting from the library, or seeing projected onto the back of the Tower Theatre. What was that artist’s name… Oh, yes. Ray Harryhausen.) and it turns out that Harryhausen and Bradbury were good friends from way back. So, I got into a Wiki-Tunnel and started searching things and I stumbled upon an article about Bradbury in Maria Popova’s wonderfully inspiring blog. It is there that I read the above quote.

I should say, I haven’t read the entire Bradbury catalogue. I definitely was reading Something Wicked This Way Comes at some point. I remember enjoying it, quite a lot actually. I was older than most kids for whom that was a seminal novel – although, in this day and age when the majority of reading adults are consuming series of books intended for fifth graders, and most adults aren’t reading at all, I suppose the age at which I discovered Bradbury is a moot point. Anyway, it was a fun read. I remember the language jumping out at me. The plot I had already picked up from somewhere, but the prose, man! That first bit about how bizarre October is, followed by that opener about the storm coming. Bradbury’s words grabbed hold of me and kept me turning page after page late into a summer’s night.

I did not finish Something Wicked. I still haven’t. I took the book the read during a long drive. At some point, I grew tired, and I rested the book on the plateau between the back seat and the rear windshield of my mother’s car. After a brief nap, I awoke. It was stuffy in the car and my face was swollen with that heavy, day-nap feel, so I lowered the window. We were on the freeway, probably going 80mph or so. The air rushed into the car with such force that it caught that book, an old, hand-me-down paperback, and blew it into a storm of loose pages. I recall the bursting pop and then the pages swirling and fluttering like mad gulls all around the backseat and streaming from the window. C’est la vent.

During my internet digging, I came upon this video of Bradbury talking about Harryhausen. It’s under four minutes, and charming and worth watching, but if you don’t have the time, I will mention my favorite moment. Bradbury is describing his first meeting with Harryhausen at a mutual friend’s house. They are in their teens and have been introduced as both being lovers of King Kong. The young men get to talking and Harryhousen mentions that he has been making stop-motion films in his garage on 5mm film. Bradbury’s recollection is as follows:

“I said, you are? He said, yes. Would you like to come over and meet my dinosaurs? I said, oh God, yes. I Would love to do that.”

Bradbury is an old, old man in the video. He is an old man who has accomplished much in his life. Yet you can hear the enthusiasm of his voice cutting through the years and bringing him back to this day when he first went to someone’s garage to meet their model dinosaurs. It’s wonderful to witness. That enthusiasm – that desire to share a passion – is what has driven me to create. It’s a passion to actualize a flicker in my mind, to bring it before myself and to behold it and say, “Oh. There you are. You are what has kept me up these nights.” Or, like Bradbury’s, it’s a passion to share something you’re curious about with others. To connect to someone upon a subject that others might find completely useless, and to be validated in a community.

Perhaps it is this passion to share that keeps us from quitting. I certainly had this notion in mind when shaping January, the heroine of our film. She has that post-grad uncertainty that has plagued me and so many of my colleagues, on and off for years. Do we stay in our field? Do we go corporate? Do we watch Reality Bites again? (Just today, in fact, someone I have collaborated with and whose work I admire reached out because they were struggling to stay inspired. Which, confirms that we’re making the right movie for this period, I guess.) She has that spark inside her that she isn’t sure how to express. She shuts it away and tries to bury it with consuming products, media, and people’s attention. With Bradbury, it was this discovery, that there were kindred souls out there who really liked dinosaurs and monsters and the components that would become science fiction, which lead him to create with all his energy. With January it’s the discovery that perhaps she has jokes inside of her that resonate with her community. And although she spends much of the film struggling to find a balance and purity in her passions, we get the sense at the end of the film that she is on the right track.

The campaign is moving along. We’re on day eight and we’ve hit fifteen percent of our desired budget. We have some cool new perks that we will be unveiling in the days ahead. Please visit the campaign and share the link igg.me/at/janjagfilm to help spread the word about Team JanJag.

And… here. Let’s stay inspired. Let’s not lose our dinosaur, guys.

-WB

That Longhorned Devil and I

“I don’t care if it makes it in the movie or not. I need to ride the bull.”

I said that. Last night. In a dream. And I know This American Life producer Sarah Koenig’s mother would be appalled with me for starting today’s post off with a dream quote, but I’m going for it anyway. It’s on my mind. Or was in my mind.

I dreamt last night about the first day of principal photography for January Jaguar – which may be a good sign. The crew and I were on location in what appeared to be a dream distorted version of Fresno, California’s Old Fig District, which I know fairly well (a childhood friend lived within its perimeter, and later, when biking around town, I often cut through Old Fig because it had four-way stop signs and little traffic) and whose characteristics, I can say, this dream location greatly exaggerated. The gardens between the houses stretched out far greater, their roses even more vibrant and well tended. The eucalyptus and pines towered seemingly up into the clouds.

And I was speeding in a production vehicle because I was late to set (five minutes until call time, but you know how the business works) after getting caught up in some argument between 90’s Travolta and present day Liam Neeson regarding satanic practices. The details of the satanism that these two men were performing will have to wait for another day, but suffice it to say that I was very late due to my mediating of their case.

I zoom the car down Van Ness Ave., drift it onto a street that doesn’t really exist, brake suddenly for a group of crossing children, wave an apology to the crossing guard, rev the car back up to a dangerous speed, and then ease on the brakes delicately two houses from the location in case sound is speeding. I grab my bag and my clipboard and walk around this large, plantation-style estate into the backyard, which is…

A full-sized rodeo facility which includes, a five-thousand seat arena with handicap capabilities, a canopied dining area, a western-style facaded skybox for an announcer and press, locker rooms with showers, a stable area and holding pens for the animals, and – naturally – a dance tent. For this giant place to exist in the backyard of a house in Fresno ought to have surprised me, however, in the dream I had already scouted this location prior to booking and scheduling, so I just fell into a good step and made my way over to video village. Our director, Matthew Cassani, was already comparing the monitor with the scene in front of him, pointing something out to our DP, Mel Martinez. Mel nodded and whispered something to her assistant who passed that information along to a gaffer, etc. And as I watched all this I barked my shin on a prop.

The shoot moves along smoothly. We get some shots in the can. I find myself in the bull pens. And suddenly I am face to face with a magnificent, black, ton-and-a-half Brahman/Longhorn. Staring into the eyes of this beast, it becomes absolutely clear to me that what this film is missing is me riding him.

I key my com, “Sterling for Matt.”

“Go for Matt.”

“Meet me over in the bull pen.”

“Is there a problem?”

“Meet me by the bull pen, please. Over.”

“Copy that.”

Matt enters the bull pen.

“What’s going on?”

“If we move this set-up for tomorrow and get rid of the balloon scene, we can gets some great shots of me riding this bull.”

“I’m sorry. What?”

“We’re here at this big ranch, man. And we haven’t scheduled any time for shots of people riding the bulls.”

“I know that. We don’t need it. It’s an abandoned ranch. You co-wrote the script.”

“Maybe there is one person on a bull. Like one guy left.”

“No. This is stupid. I’m going back to video village.”

“Matt. Maybe it’s a dream sequence, or a ghost! It could be a ghost. I already talked to costume. They’re gonna fit me in some cowboy gear. We’ll shoot available light. We just need -”

“Look. Even if we shoot it, it’s not going in the movie.”

“I don’t care if it makes it into the movie or not. I need to ride this bull!”

Why was I so obsessed with this black Plummer? I can’t say. Perhaps it had something to do with the satanic practices of Liam Neeson and 90’s Travolta. Maybe the bull was Satan. Maybe I wanted to dance with the devil, because the devil is in the details, and the details of the film are my life right now, and I need to dance with them, or master them… What I can say is that need was very real. I woke up shrouded in this dream. Updated the facebook page, added a sweet picture to our campaign page, responded to emails. All the while, that dream and those bull’s eyes have stayed with me.

As I’ve mentioned, sharing the link igg.me/at/janjagfilm really helps us out. We’re on day seven and we’re at thirteen percent of our ask. Not the landslide I hoped for, but a steady progress. Thank you to all the contributors and those spreading the word.

-WB

Note: There is no rodeo scene anywhere in JanJag. But that’s my new stretch goal. If we make $25K, I’ll film a bull-riding sequence. And it will work in the movie because the bull and rider are ghosts!

“If We Don’t Save the Wee Turtles, Who Will?”

Again, not a line from JanJag. Instead, a line from The Simpsons.

It is difficult to hear the news about turtle egg poaching in Mexico and not be reminded of Groundskeeper Willie’s declaration that it is up to him to save the “wee turtles” from  a schoolhouse fire. He kicks down the door to the Science Room and rushes inside, only to emerge covered in young, biting turtles. He falls to the ground, but as evidenced by the video, Stop-Drop-and-Roll does not work against wee turtles – or “tortuguitas” in spanish.

This is a clip from an animated television show that I watched as a boy. We were still calling them “cartoons” then. And I saw it probably a hundred times between fourth grade and high school. The local Fox station played two Simpsons episodes per day, and sometimes by mistake would repeat an episode block the following day or week, so seeing the same moment play out in a relatively short amount of time was not uncommon.

Perhaps that segues back into the recent news about Mexican egg poachers (and if you’ve been following this story you’ll now see that drones are being deployed to combat these poachers); The War on Drugs has been responsible for channeling military and police forces – and precious funds and tax dollars – to wherever there is drug crime. Often, a vacuum is left from where the money and manpower had been and non-drug related crime is able to grow and flourish. That is what we are seeing here with the escalation in turtle poaching, a crime of opportunity.

Going back to The Simpsons, perhaps it could be reasoned that the schoolhouse fire there is Drug Use. Groundskeeper Willie is the well-intentioned War on Drugs, running into the burning building, past all of the fleeing children (perhaps the children here are the Millennials who are more-and-more coming to terms with our failed drug policy), and storming into the science room. Then the turtles, who in this analogous scenario turn out to be the villains, snapping and biting him are the surprise that our DOJ finds at every turn: that the War isn’t working and it creates avenues for other crimes to blossom.

Whoa, dude.

Turning to January Jaguar. I have been having fun posting music on our page.  The campaign is on day six. We’re moving along, having raised twelve percent of our funds with just under forty days to go. I’m getting that feeling in my gut that a Line-Producer gets when the horse has been placed before the carrot and he has to try and construct a budget with a non-concrete budget, but we’ll see how it goes. R-O-L-A-I-D-S will spell relief from my stomach, and M-O-N-E-Y will spell relief for my budget.

Perhaps the burning schoolhouse is crowdfunding and – no. I won’t put you through that again.

Check out our campaign page and feel free to spread the link http://igg.me/at/janjagfilm if you’d like. We’ve got a post up on Reddit if that’s your cup of tea.

In the meantime, let’s save the wee turtles.

-WB

Jazz Drums and Vibraphone

“Now there’s two, kinds of people, in the world, I can’t stand,” he croaks from his gut. “That’s a lying woman, and a, monkey man.”

I wish this were a line from  January Jaguar, but alas. This is taken from an old ragtime single performed by Blind Boy Fuller. Perhaps we can work it in somewhere…

I’m not going to sit here and say that old records sound better than what technology can put out now. Without argument, the fidelity in a modern studio far surpasses the old gramopohone techniques. However, in the old recordings, you capture more than just the music. You capture the process.

You can hear the wailing voice funneling down the horn and working on the diaphragm. You can hear the stylus cutting into the wax. You can hear the size of the room and where everyone has been shuffled to by the time this record was cut. “Come now. We need to get the rhythm section in closer. Closer now. Yes. We still can’t hear the bassist. Yes. Well, that’s alright. He’s really just here for the band… You, young man. You with the trumpet and the lungs of god. Go stand in the corner. Go on. It’s either play softer or play in the corner. I prefer the corner option.”*  And the result isn’t perfect, but the life is in there. The whole recording has a light, aural strobe caused by whatever fluctuations were inherent in the sensitivity of the recording instruments. And that strobe and pop and hiss are probably the main delights of listening to these old records.

It’s the same with film. Celluloid. Thirty-five. Sixteen. Eight. Those old movies that you find clips of on YouTube now (if you’re lucky, you’ve caught some high-res scans of them at some exhibition) which flicker on the screen because the guy turning the crank never quite got the rhythm perfect thus giving the cells varying lengths of exposure. You’re not only seeing the stream billowing from the horses’ nostrils, you’re also seeing (somewhere in the mind’s eye) the tendonitis forming within the wrist of this poor camera operator, who is long since gone. Having the opportunity to see Vertigo at the Castro Theatre, projected in 75mm, was one of the most humbling experiences of my life…

For anyone who has had the pleasure to shoot film, it can feel so cold sometimes to work in a digital format. I started shooting on MiniDV. Some old JVC camera that I traded my skateboard for. And that camera took me all sorts of places and the freedom of having a little monitor on the side and a tiny microphone near the front allowed me to have a certain confidence in what I was capturing and to focus on other things – usually lighting, composition, the performance of the actors. But I will never forget the strange bond I felt with that film when I had to load a Bolex in a lightproof bag for the first time.

The campaign is moving forward. We’re on day five and we’re at about eleven percent of our ask. I am grateful to our contributors. If we had the budget or schedule, we’d love to be shooting this on Super 16. Alas. We will move forward and happily shoot in 4K. Please visit the page and share the link igg.me/at/janjagfilm.

Until tomorrow,

-WB

*This tangent reminds me of the day I had to pleasure of sitting in on a recording for the final track on an early James Rabbit album, but I’ll develop that another time.

The Fourth Day of the Rest of Our Lives

That harsh LA sun bleeds through the blinds of the south-facing window and casts its light upon the ceiling. Wait. If that window faces south, why is the portrait of Francisco Villa in the kitchen? Ill get back to that. That’s for another time. Meanwhile, the industrial fan in the doorway drones as it circulates the air and helps us forget it may be the hottest summer on record. Maybe. We’ll see. It’s almost 2PM. The emails are sent. The yoga got handled. Breakfast was there somewhere. And I can’t clear my mind enough to write a blog…

A friend recently told me, “Crowdfunding is a full-time job.” I nodded in agreement, although at that point our campaign for January Jaguar hand’t launched. I thought I understood. I had worked on many shots for campaign videos while up in San Francisco, mentoring with a “crowdfund guru” and producing videos for all of his clients. I was freshly graduated, had just formed a business, was able to give many friends and colleagues their first paid gigs. It was a great summer. Then autumn came and my guru skipped town with the funds and left me in debt. C’est la guerre.

Back to the words from the friend via a phone call which I took on headphones while I added sausage to kidney beans and pretended that I had graduated from the VanCamp days. “Yes. It sure is a full-time job,” I said. He lent me some anecdotes from his campaign for a paranormal-gore short called Better The Devil. We laughed about Tim De Zarn’s warning to me on set about drinking Muscle Milk (the very next shooting day Tim brandished an article in the Chronicle about a class action lawsuit against CytoSport). Then I hung up. It was after midnight. I ate the Andouille’N’Kidneys and put some finishing touches on a graphic for the Campaign page. It would launch in the morning.

Four days later, and we’re funded to ten percent. Which is twenty percent shy of my goal day four, but these things take time. It was a fever dream getting this campaign launched. It was all I did outside of the day job (and often while hiding in the wings at the day job). It was seven days of blistering keystrokes and Photoshop tutorials and email volleys and price calculations. And now it’s up. And at day four I am beginning to truly understand what my good friend meant when he said, “Crowdfunding is a full-time job.”

I will be keeping a record of the campaign on this site. It will continue on through production of January Jaguar aka #JanJag. You’re welcome to visit the campaign, to share the link. Whether or not you contribute, even clicking on it gives us a little algorithm tickle, so we appreciate that.  igg.me/at/janjagfilm Until tomorrow.

-WB