On The Silver Screen

Post by Be The Shoe. Oct. 7 2009.

Shortly after the premiere of American Gothic, Executive Producer Jason Goldstein wrote the following account of the experience. It's a little long for a blog post, but it also provides an unparalleled look behind the scenes of our first feature.

Jake had a hard time holding the camcorder steady in the car. The windows were down and there was a slight breeze hissing into the camera's mic as it panned to the other three occupied seats in the car: three men dressed in suits.

Jake zoomed in on Randy, in the driver's seat. And Randy spoke. "I'm Writer/Director Randy Prywitch, and here with me is Executive Producer Jason Goldstein. Mr. Producer, what are we doing right now?"

I sound nasally when I'm recorded. "We're on our way to the sold-out premiere of American Gothic at the Plaza Frontenac."

The camera bounced as the car passed over a rough spot, and Jake shut it off.

* * *

Ten months earlier, I sat at a table across from Randy as he explained "Grant's movie idea." It was a dirt and grunge story about "how fucked up teenagers are," packed with sex, drugs, suicide, rape... The list got more outrageous the longer it went on. He had no real characters developed, no motivations, and no real story arcs.

I shook my head. It wasn't even a real story. But that aside, there was no way we could make it. Who did we have who could play these roles? How were we going to film a sex scene without unintentionally making it funny and awkward? Even if Grant turned this into a solid story, it just wasn't feasible.

Randy agreed, and the idea died on that table.

That February, Randy had to go home from college on medical leave. Stuck in St. Louis with nothing to do, he asked Grant to tell him more about his idea. In those long, lonely nights, he rethought Grant's vision. He toned it down, and transformed it into something that had little more than a trace of Grant's original images. The film wouldn't be about "fucked up teenagers" in the sense Grant had meant. This new story would be much more character driven. Drawing from discarded writing, real life conversations, and an eerily familiar suburban setting, Randy created a cast of characters with a girl named Jessica Bender at the center.

And after a dozen drafts, these became her first thoughts: Maybe this is a dream. Let's see... Deep breath, slow exhale. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. I'm still here.

On March 20, he sent me an email with a 100-page script attached. The message was brief: Call me when finished reading. What followed was a story entitled American Gothic. It followed Jessica Bender, a girl locked in a downward spiral after an ugly breakup, as she reconnects with her old boyfriend. It was a hilarious, edgy drama with strong characters, great dialogue, and really powerful visuals. There was just one problem.

"Will we actually be able to film this?" I asked him.

Movie-making wasn't new to us. We started Be The Shoe Productions our freshman year of high school, when it was just me, Randy, and two or three friends who weren't exactly actors – they just wanted to have fun. We'd come a long way since then, but American Gothic was still way out of our league.

A character driven story required real acting. Randy knew exactly who he wanted, but that meant the entire story rested upon very specific people agreeing to take their roles. And beyond that, there was still a long list of complications. We needed to make the sex scenes look authentic. We needed to fake smoking pot on camera. The script called for two party scenes, which were pivotal to the storyline and extremely complicated. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

I had my doubts.

Of course, Randy had nothing to do all semester but plan this. We would buy a second camera, and he already had several of the key cast members secured. He knew what they were capable of, and if he could get the rest of them on board they'd be able to play their roles. He'd found instructions on the Internet to build a makeshift steadycam that would smooth the tracking shots.

Two months later, I arrived at his house carrying a stack of scripts. The small part of the cast we could get together for a read-through wasn't too reassuring, but most importantly we had our Jessica: Emily Bates. She was talented, she understood the character, and most importantly, she was into it.

One week later, we started filming. I was working an internship during the day so I missed the bulk of the shooting, but the moment I got off I rushed over to the set to see how things were going. As I pulled the door of the screened-in-porch open, I choked on the thick odor of cigar smoke.

Emily and three of her supporting actors were spread across the porch furniture, pinned down by the cameras. I took a copy of the script and started to follow along as the actors passed around a "joint" and reenacted the conversation on the page.

And let me make this clear: when I say they recited their lines, I mean they did it word for word. They had actually gone ahead and memorized their parts the night before. They were taking this movie seriously. And it was then, watching Randy zoom in on Grant's face, that I realized we were too.

That was our summer. Eat. Sleep. Work. American Gothic. Over the next two months we watched the script come to life in bits and pieces, and slowly start to fit together on the editing board. I remember standing outside at midnight with the cast, shaking and utterly silent as we watched the film's darkest moments come to life in front of us.

I remember watching Emily snap in and out of character. Without so much as blinking an eye, she transformed from a depressed, unstable Jessica Bender into a forward, lively character who would declare in mid conversation, "Oh my God, you're like a real person."

I remember sitting at Steak & Shake with Grant, sketching out the shooting schedule for the party scenes while we waited for Randy to get back.

It wasn't always that intense. Later on we did some shooting at my house. Lissa was in her underwear, Jake had his shirt off, me Grant and Emily were trying not to laugh so we wouldn't make the actors lose their composure and ruin the shot, when all of a sudden my mother knocked on the door. "Um... Are you guys filming a sex scene?"

And this brings us to mid-July, when our original venue fell through. Short on time and short on options, we started looking for anywhere and everywhere that could seat over a hundred people, had a projector, and didn't censor. What we ended up with was a choice: the St. Louis Cinema Center, or Plaza Frontenac. St. Louis Cinema was willing to do it for free, but their location was terrible. Plaza Frontenac, a local independent movie theater, said it would rent out one of its theaters out for $500.

Randy, Grant, Jake and I met at a restaurant to discuss it.

"Seriously though, how cool would that be if we could actually get Plaza Frontenac?" Grant insisted. He was right, it was just a matter of money.

I reached in my pocket for a pen and started scribbling on napkins. If I threw in some cash, and if Jake and Randy could contribute something... I tallied the numbers, and looked up at the other three guys. "Um... We're basically set."

That night, Randy booked Frontenac for August 8.

But by then it was already late July. The last few scenes took far too long to finish, and we hadn't even started to edit the last third of the movie. We had barely over a week to finish the project and be ready to show it, and we already had over a hundred people coming. Grant and Jake started to panic. How the hell was this thing going to get done on time?

And they were driving Randy up the wall.

"What's left to do?"

He told me over the phone. It wasn't impossible, but it didn't leave us any time to dick around.

I didn't see much of Grant or Jake the next few days. Randy, Emily and I stayed up until ungodly hours of the night, hammering our way through the last act. Emily sat on Randy's bed while Randy and I hovered over his cluttered desk, debating what shot to use, whether or not this scene looked funny, adjusting music to fit with the video...

Exhausted, stressed, and restless with anticipation, we saw the final completed scenes late Sunday night.

By this point we knew the show was completely sold out. Twenty-four hours before our test run in the theater, Randy finished up the last few tweaks and started exporting the film. At nine AM, he handed off the rendered movie. For the first time in days, he collapsed on his bed.

Just a few hours later, I was at work, sitting in a cubicle entering data, when my cell phone rang. It was the guy who was supposed to be burning the DVD. He had no idea why, but after two hours of rendering it just crashed.

A deadweight settled on my chest. "Oh, fuck..."

The problem was, none of us had ever done this before. We didn't know how our video would look on a commercial grade projector. We didn't know whether our sound would be okay. We didn't know whether weird formatting quirks that even I didn't understand would spontaneously cause the whole thing to fail.

That night we drove down to Frontenac with a laptop, a mesh of cables, and three different DVD's hoping that something would work. We met our guy, I followed him into the projection booth, hooked up the video, and watched as the projector cast our logo across the silver screen.

And the first line of the film burst from the theater's speakers. "Maybe this is a dream. Let's see... Deep breath, slow exhale..."

I let out a deep sigh of relief. It worked. Emily stared in awe. "That's my face... It's huge!"

With eighteen hours to go, we drove home in utter silence.

Which brings us back to the drive down the next day: four men, dressed in suits, carrying a laptop, a camcorder, and the theatrical poster, on the way to their sold out movie premiere.

My phone rang. I took one look at the ID, grinned, and answered. "Be The Shoe Productions."

I liked the sound of that.

* * *

If you look on that tape, the one Jake was using, the next thing you see is a packed movie theater, with Emily and the producers standing in back, watching the audience. You see the crowd gasp in shock, you see them burst into roaring laughter, you see them fixated on the screen, and when the credits roll you see them turn tail and give the creators a standing ovation.

The next day Randy and I were driving around, taking it all in. It was weird, to think how we'd spent the last several months of our lives on this, how we had come back from college and became these movie guys, how we had created this thing that we weren't even sure was possible.

There was only one problem: what would we do with all our time now that this was all over?

He shrugged, and looked off into the distance as the light flashed across his sunglasses. "We'll make another one."