One of the most amazing things I've ever seen was a line of people outside a box office. Not that there's anything special about ticket lines, it's just… that was my box office.
Or – I should say – our box office. Mine, Randy's, Emily's, Jake's – Be The Shoe Productions, as we stood beneath the marquee of the Missouri Theatre, watching the crowds, chatting up whoever came by, tugging at our shirt-collars as the last hour before the show ticked by.
Every show is different, but the rush is the same. You find yourself up on stage, breathing too quickly as you grip the microphone.
"Welcome to the official premiere of Salad Daze."
Pause. Cue cheering. I passed the mic to Randy, who went through our usual routine. Thank some people, mention the local bands who contributed music to the movie, sit back, relax, and enjoy.
There's something unique about premiering a movie. Musicians and theatre people present their work live. By the time a film sees an audience, we've poured months of our lives into it, and all we can do is sit in the back of the theater and watch the audience stare at the silver screen.
And late that night, after the credits rolled to the sound of raving applause and the crowds filed out, something funny happened. As the girl from NBC interviewed Randy, Emily and Jake struck up a conversation about how weird the summer was going to be. After all, for the last two years, we'd spent the summer months shooting a movie.
This time things were different.
What was the future of Be The Shoe? Well, we couldn't quite tell you.
The movie that never sleeps
Just a few weeks later, Randy and I would fly up to New York, where we both had internships. We'd spend the summer in plays, bars, improv shows, parks, concerts, and that meant filmmaking was off the agenda.
What we didn't know, was that somewhere among Manhattan's horde of taxi cabs, between the hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant and the low-key Irish pub, we'd find ourselves talking about what could follow Salad Daze, and more importantly, when we could find the time to shoot it.
"Hypothetically, what would it take to shoot a movie over winter break?"
I didn't know. Normally we took all summer to create a feature, but maybe, just maybe, if we worked with a small, dedicated cast...
Sooner or later, "hypothetical" evolved into, "this could actually happen," and Randy began piecing together the crude, raw beginnings of a story in his pocket-sized notebooks. Bits of dialogue, pieces of plot, and we began to see our lead character:
Meet Grady Sullivan.
Once, Grady Sullivan was going to be the next great American novelist, author of smashing hits such as Horny Unhappy People. But his last novel flopped, his fiancé dumped him, and he's moved back to the Midwest where's he's living as an alcoholic bum who wears nothing but sweat suits.
"But most importantly," I'd explain to people, "is that for the first time, we have an adult main character."
Our philosophy has always been "make movies you can pull off." We're not going to try and make The Hurt Locker simply because we don't have the set, or the cast, or the crew. So for the past two years, our films focused primarily on teenagers, because that's who our actors were. Telling a story like this was a huge step in the right direction.
All we needed was a lead actor, which brings us to the illustrious Gary C. Warren.
Years ago, back when Randy was working as a projectionist in a movie theater, he met a guy named Gary, a 34-year-old cinemaphile and member of the Screen Actors Guild who subjects himself to medical testing in order to fund his own filmmaking endeavors. You know the warnings on drugs that tell you not to mix with alcohol? They reason they know that, is because Gary tried it for $1000.
Gary now has an irregular heartbeat.
And he has nothing to say about this except, "I love the movies."
A work in progress
And so one evening, Randy swung open the door to room 931 and announced, "I talked to Gary."
"And?"
Gary had worked with us on Salad Daze, but there's a big difference between playing a midlevel character over the summer and dedicating your nights and weekends for a full month to be the lead.
"He's in."
As was Emily. As was Jake. And by mid-July I found myself telling my family that I'd be skipping out on their Florida trip in order to film in the dead of winter.
They told me I was crazy, and I'm okay with that.
Road to Production
By the time Randy and I returned to LaGuardia for our flight home, we had an outline of what would become our third feature film. And within a few days, he set to work on the script.
The title: Loss For Words.
The long road to production began. He stayed up late nights writing, and emailed me the new stuff in the morning. I'd carry pieces of the screenplay to campus with me, reading chunks between classes and meetings.
Salad Daze was written on deadline. For this movie, we had a good three months before we needed a final draft, and we wanted it to be gold-plated. No awkward dialogue. No scenes that didn't contribute to the story. No unnecessary characters. Anything we thought we could improve upon from the last movie was on the agenda, and if we were going to pull that off in four weeks we needed rock-solid planning.
As the semester came to a close, I found myself thinking of nothing else. I'd wake up late at night to scribble something down about how we could do lighting. I'd take phone calls while working on the newspaper design desk to talk about audio production, which earned me at least a dozen dirty looks from the news director.
Randy and I wrote the schedule for the first week over dinner, trying to figure out how much time we should allot to film scenes.
"Two hours?" he'd ask, poring over his mesh of papers.
"Two and a half… Just to be safe."
Rolling
And the next thing we knew, we were setting up shop in Emily's father's bedroom. Compact fluorescent lights clamped to the doors and furniture, microphones held in the air by studio stands, and the camera mounted on the end of Gary's camera crane.
As Randy tested the black rig's range of motion, Emily started looking around frantically with wide eyes. "What the hell, Jason's wearing headphones… When did we get legit?"
I could hear her words echo through both microphones as she spoke... something I'd never get used to.
From that moment, the movie took over our lives. Every morning, Randy and I would meet for coffee, and talk some about the movie, because there was nothing else on our minds. We'd meet up with the cast, they'd rehearse, and then we'd shoot.
For the first week, we hammered our way through the script, shooting eight or nine scenes a day. We ran from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., often with just a short break for food in between. When we'd wrap for the night, some of us would go back to Randy's to skim through the footage, and then he'd stay up later to plan the next day.
We didn't sleep. We burned through tapes and cash, often filming outside in weather so cold that even our cameras protested.
But we kept rolling, and Gary, sporting a homeless-class beard, long unkempt hair and a gray sweatsuit, kept hammering away on Grady Sullivan's typewriter. As Randy directed Jake and Laura to "No, stop, keep kissing!" inside a Christmas tree, the camera drifted slowly into the air until the warm golden light vanished from the frame.
We shot in record stores, hotels, public streets, and places we weren't supposed to be. We walked into a downtown coffee shop and just asked the guy at the counter if we could film there. He looked up and Randy and replied, "We'd be honored."
In all of this, as we performed these scenes over and over, something happened. Jake had Randy convinced that his neurotic tendencies were giving him gray hair, and not knowing if Randy actually had a gray hair or if Jake was just messing with him, we all played along. Gary decided that I was the villain of the movie, secretly plotting to ruin production in subtle nefarious ways. Thirteen-year-old Danny Prywitch, who plays Jake's younger brother, became our resident dirty mind. Even Laura, who was new to the Shoe, caught on, and started ragging on Randy by her third scene.
A lot of us were close from previous movies, but not like this. Emily and David apparently got on their other friends' nerves because they were quoting Loss For Words nonstop. And how could they not? We lived in a world of scripts and tripods, where all we thought about was how the day's footage turned out.
That's a wrap
As the end came around, Gary shook and his and said, "It's going to be weird, I'm going to have to start hanging out with people my own age."
Sooner or later people started leaving town. First David, then Laura and Emily. Our schedule eased up a bit just as we started running our stamina down. On the twenty-second day of filming, we wrapped Gary, and the final minutes of tape consist of Randy and I recording knocks, squeaks, typewriter noises... all the sounds we hadn't gotten around to capturing over the past month.
We left town the next morning, listening to the new Vampire Weekend album on the way back to Columbia. We were spent, talking only briefly about the movie, because in the past month we'd become so deeply immersed in it that nothing else seemed to matter.
I walked back into my apartment, sat down on the couch, and let out a long deep sigh. Being done was a huge weight off our shoulders, and sleep was a forgotten luxury, but as I slipped into the semester grind, I found myself increasingly disillusioned with being lectured at, or working on projects that I would never want to show anyone.
The bitter cold reminded me of filming, and all I wanted to do was go back and have a drink with Jake and Emily while Gary recounted some ridiculous story about filming a porno for a 400-pound woman because he needed the money.
But life goes on.
As of now, we're waist-deep in post production. It's a long process, but putting quality work on the silver screen takes time.
In a way, I face a sobering reality. It's something we don't talk about because we have a movie to make, and there's no reason to discuss it.
I graduated in May, moved in August, and there's a chance that this was my last feature. I don't know when we'll have another chance to take out the cameras, or where I'll be when we do, or what will happen as the rest of our cast and crew has to stumble their way into the real world.
But we'll see.
There are few things I claim to know for certain, but this I believe: we live in exciting times, and as the clock ticks towards the premiere of Loss For Words, I'd be an idiot to think I have the slightest idea what will happen next.
After all, I know how far we've come in just a few short years, and we're still rolling.
