One Too Many Mornings - a new comedy.

As we prep for Park City, we thought it would be fun to interview all the people that are interviewing us. So here’s the first installment, Jennifer Wood from MovieMaker Magazine.

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Mike: What is your name, where do you work?

Jennifer: Jennifer Wood, Editor of MovieMaker Magazine and MovieMaker.com

Mike: Many journalists who write about film are filmmakers themselves – is this applicable about you, and if so – how would you describe the kinds of films you make or aspire to make?

Jennifer: Oddly enough, I’m just about the only person who writes for MovieMaker who is in fact NOT a moviemaker myself. What I am is a serious cineaste—not just interested in the end result, but fascinated by the process of making movies—everything from the genesis of an idea and the writing process to editing and soundtrack selection. As a moviegoer and movie magazine editor, I’m most interested in ingenuity—whether in the writing of a script of the pioneering use of a new film technology. I also love a modern twist on classic film genres or techniques—something like what Spike Jonze just did with Where the Wild Things Are or Wes Anderson with Fantastic Mr. Fox. (Wow – I guess I should add that I like kid’s movies.)

Mike: What are the top three things a filmmaker should NEVER do when being interviewed about their film?

Jennifer: 1) Give one-word/yes-no answers. An interviewer is looking to connect with the interview subject and the easiest way to do that is to properly express your passion for your project.
2) Seem bored by the questions. We all know that junkets suck – and the subjects are often asked the same question 100 times in one day (regardless of how witty the interviewer thinks s/he is). When it comes time to edit down – or out — stories, these will be the first interviews to go.
3) …Give… really… long… pauses… (and then forget what the original question was in the first place)

Mike: Aside from Michael Mohan, who was the raddest person you ever interviewed and why?

Jennifer: Hmmm… aside from Michael… I have been doing this for almost 10 years, so it’s really difficult to pick a favorite. Have spoken with so many interesting moviemakers of so many disciplines—and moviemakers I admire. Actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Steve Buscemi; editors like Walter Murch; screenwriters like Ed Solomon and Billy Ray; cinematographers like John Toll and Owen Roizman; even novelists like Bret Easton Ellis and Russell Banks; documentarians like Barbara Kopple and Albert Maysles. Honestly, the pieces I enjoy most are the ones where moviemakers give their opinions on movies—the best, the worst, etc. (The worst are particularly fun.)

I’m going to start posting some of my older films and music videos up here for y’all to check out. This is one of my favorites – a music video for The One AM Radio’s song Witness.

Back in Summer 2005, my friends and I used to get together on Saturday nights at midnight to play kickball. There was something kind of magical and rebellious about the whole thing – this video tries to capture a little bit of that.

Hrishikesh Hirway, the man behind The One AM Radio, has been one of the most instrumental people behind the scenes on One Too Many Mornings. He is a friend, a co-worker, an artist, and quite possibly the most resourceful person I’ve ever met. In addition to being our music supervisor, we wouldn’t have this website without him. Hrishikesh even played at my wedding this past summer. If you like this song, we’re offering another one of his tunes as part of our free mini-mixtape, which you can get below.
-mm

I feel like a super tired spy. Most of my days since the announcement have been spent setting up rendezvous and delivering discs filled with information to strangers, and then waiting. Yesterday, I was in Mount Washington looking for a street that sounded like a Turkish brothel. Those of you who know me know that I am constantly getting lost. I can produce a movie, but sometimes I can’t find my way home from the grocery store. The road decided to split into a street and a “CT” (which is still a street, more of a trick street), which then morphed into a entirely differently named street. Of course, it started pouring rain. The inside of my car steamed up. I had to remind myself I was making a movie.

Then my secret mission continued. After going up and down the street for another ten minutes I found the drop off. I parallel parked on the hill, not an easy task. I was two hours early. I call this my buffer time. I know I’ll be on time if I’m an hour early. And you never know with the traffic in Los Angeles. I called my contact. I said, “I’m pretty close, if you want to watch One Too Many Mornings early.” They were available. I confessed that I was parked, right outside. I found myself at the side door ready to meet a stranger, and hand over my proverbial baby. I noticed some garden crocs on the doorsteps. The following thoughts pass thru my head: “Oh, wow – they garden – our movie’s not about gardening – they’re going to HATE it.” The door opens. We partake in small talk—and I go back to being a tired spy. Over-analyzing each word that comes out of their mouth. What does that mean? Do they understand the current market? Do I understand the current market? Is that a South Park poster on the wall? Yes.

The wait: I find a local coffee shop and I setup more secret meetings—just like this. Figuring the time—the place—the stranger. And I remind myself I’m making a movie. I remind myself it has been a dream for many years to make a feature film. I give myself the benefit of the doubt. It might be harder to be a filmmaker than actually being a spy. I look at the girl next to me, whose worried expression is how my face feels. Is she a filmmaker? Maybe? I think of all the tired spies across the country and how loving your movie makes you crazy and paranoid. And I remind myself I’m making a movie. -ad

The other night Anthony, Mike and Myself had a meeting at Casa Bianca Pizza in Eagle Rock. We had a gigantic sausage pizza. Great pizza. BUT, this pizza shop, however, didn’t cut the pizza into normal triangle slices. Instead it just cut the pizza up into random shapes and sizes. RANDOM SLICES!! I guess it was their “thing.” I can’t imagine people say “Let’s go to that awesome pizza shop that cuts up their pizza all crazy-like!”

Some slices were just the center pieces, which are the best part. I wish they were all the center parts. But some were the outside crust parts with just a little bit of cheese and topping, hence the craziness of not doing the normal triangle slice, or even a square slice. I happened to grab an outside trapezoid piece that was mainly crust. The second I picked it up I wanted to throw it. Not throw it away, but just throw it against the wall, or at another pizza. I was really angry. The pizza was so good, but this slice made it seem like the pizza was taunting me. I would have beat it up If I could but that would have been messy, and a bit weird.

I could have easily put that slice back and grabbed another one, but then Anthony or Mike would have gotten that slice and one of them might have really beat it up. Instead I took one for the team and ate that damn slice.

Which brings me to my real (heartfelt) reason for talking about pizza (I hope this makes sense).

Everything that is going on right now could not being going on without the sacrifice from everyone that was involved in the making of the film. From Anthony to Mike to Me to people that came out for just one day or one hour to help us set up a light.

I am truly excited that we got into Sundance, not just because I think we made an amazing film, but because it is a film made by people who love movies. And I hope that the film can reach people that love movies just as much as us.

Thanks to everyone who took one for the team. No thanks to that damn slice of pizza.
-sh

One of my favorite shows is Project Runway. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, on the very final episode, the last three designers show their collections at New York Fashion Week. And of course, every season at the 11th hour Tim Gunn and Heidi Klum reveal that the designers have to make ONE MORE garment. These designers have slaved away to get as far as they did, and there’s yet another final step in between them and the glory of their premiere. And usually there’s something even crazier about it – like they have to make a dress out of q-tips or something.

After the Sundance announcement went public a few days ago, I feel like I’ve been bodysurfing on a tidal wave. It’s awesome, terrifying, and massive. While we’re trying to actually finish the movie, we’re also trying to figure out all the things that will potentially effect how wide we can get it seen. When we sat down to tell this story, we had no idea of the journey it’d bring us on. We never thought we’d be talking to publicists about how they can help shape the press coverage. We never thought that we’d be chatting with foreign sales agents about international markets. We never thought we’d be dealing with independent consultants about the hierarchy about whether or not your film can go online before it hits cable vod.

I didn’t become a filmmaker to deal with this stuff, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that if I care about this story as much as I think I do, then it’s my responsibility to get it seen by as many people as I possibly can. Part of that is scaling this learning curve/cliff. Part of that is digging in the couch for nickels and dimes to see if we can afford some of these opportunities. And the biggest part of it is trying to think if there’s some completely new way or new path that nobody has thought of before.

Like those designers on Project Runway, this is all just a part of the process. It may not be “fun”, but it’s absolutely thrilling. We are so fortunate to be here right now. -mm

Did I really just type that? We found out last week that this movie we’ve been pouring almost all our energy into for the last 2 years is premiering at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. I am emotionally unprepared for this part – I’m still a bit in shock.

To celebrate, and to invite all of you to join our community here, we’re giving away a mini-mixtape of music associated with our film. Just enter your email address in the box below, and we’ll send you three of our favorite songs.

You’ll get a track by Capybara (our composers), The One AM Radio (our music supervisor), and our friend Brad Breeck (this song is in the film).

In the meantime, bookmark our site and keep coming back. We’re going to share as much of our experience as we can. We continue to make this film at night and on the weekends, we’re just forced to stay up a bit later than normal. Right now we’re still putting the finishing touches on the film, getting everything ready for our self-release, and just trying to figure out how the heck we’re going to afford getting to Park City.

Maybe we can learn about this part together. Stay tuned.

Last Sunday, Anthony and I edited for 15 hours straight. Our process has been pretty straightforward, we just go through each scene chronologically, watching it, looking at anything that bugs us, and finessing it. It’s a great process because by starting at scene 1 and ending at scene 121, by the time you get back around to scene 1 again it feels fresh. You haven’t looked at it for a little while.

We had our second crew screening on Monday night, and it was hard both technically and emotionally. We hadn’t had enough time to burn a dvd, so we were screening off of our computers. It took 3 computers to get one that would play the file (my laptop had actually crashed and was in for repair). Then we had to connect the computer to a TV, but unfortunately the TV turned off and crashed the computer everytime the image cut from a black screen to a bright screen. Throughout the course of the movie, we use the transition of sharp cuts to a black screen constantly. So this wasn’t going to work.

Thankfully, both Jerren and Michelle had video projectors in their cars. Jerren also had a keyboard amplifier. So after much tinkering, we had a little makeshift screening room in Anthony’s house. And it felt like a screening – there was a screen, and a projector, and all of us had to sit in rows to watch it.

The film played, and I experienced a complex series of emotions while watching it. First off – I was feeling very sick. When I get stressed, my body just falls apart. Between trying to finish a cut of the film by next Monday, and also at work I’m prepping to leave to go to Florida for a documentary project, I’m burning the candle at both ends. The other tricky part of screening the movie at this stage, is that I hadn’t watched it all the way through since June. The last time we screened it for other people, I was able to sit and watch it twice beforehand. Once by myself, and another with Anthony and Stephen. I knew where I stood with it. Here, I felt a little bit naked.

I was also really nervous. A few of my friends at the screening hadn’t seen the movie yet, but had worked on it more than a few weekends. I’ve been so anxious to show the film to them, because they’re my core audience. While we hope the film reaches a broader audience – these guys have the same taste as me, and I knew from the beginning that at the very least, my friends would see the movie.

The screening went very very well. It was awesome to see how all our reshoots fit into the larger puzzle, and to really feel that tangible improvement to it all. We reshot pretty much the first 10 minutes of the film; this impacted the ENTIRE movie. Moreso, it is so rewarding to hear people laugh, and laugh loudly, at things that weren’t as funny as before. There’s one scene in particular that we’ve been struggling with – we’ve cut it, and re-cut it, and tried just about everything with it, and on Monday night it got one of the biggest laughs out of the entire film.

At this point it is much much harder to gage the dramatic scenes. For the comedy scenes – they can be measured. If people laugh, the scene is working. If people don’t, then we have work to do. It’s that simple. But for the dramatic scenes, unless people vocally gasp at something, it’s harder to measure. You don’t know if people are invested or bored because the room is quiet.

The thing that gets you through is honesty. And that’s the thing I really value in all of our friends – the feedback we’ve been getting from everyone has been both brutally honest, but handed to us in such a delicate way. The reason we showed the film to people is because we know that there’s only so far we can take the movie ourselves with our well-worn perspective. Their fresh perspective is going to keep us going.

And we’re in a great spot – it’s nice when you get feedback from four disparate people, but people who you entirely trust, that all agree on the same handful of issues. And the issues right now are not all that major – the primary one is simply pacing. There’s a couple points in the movie that feel a little long.

This is where the invention of DVD extras is able to get me through. There are some scenes that we’re looking at cutting that are my favorite scenes. But at least in this day and age, I know that they will continue to exist separate from the movie; they won’t disappear forever. It stings less.

That said, it’s still an emotional decision. And to me, the really hard part with all of this is making sure that both Anthony, Stephen, and myself can stay calm and even keeled when faced with making difficult decisions. I’ve heard a lot of stories where people get into vicious arguments at the end of the editorial process about how the movie needs to be cut, or what is going to stay in, etc. And after so much hard work, it would be a total drag if that happened. So we’re taking a really pragmatic approach.

On Wednesday we got together, and rather than talking about the solutions to the few issues in the movie, we just literally wrote down all the things we want to look at, that will either be trimmed, or certain shots we want to look at alternate takes, etc. If we can agree on the issues of the film – we’ll always be on literally the same page.

I have two rules that govern this process. I’m going to try everything. Any idea, even if I completely disagree with it, I am going to try it. It’s free to do it. And I could learn something I don’t know. The second rule is that if anyone feels really strongly about a scene, and not wanting it to be cut – it will stay in the movie. That way nobody is totally depressed about it. Friends first, movie second. Because even if it turns out a scene is not necessary to the final version of the movie, we did write it for a reason, emotionally or thematically. But we’re going to try it either way, and decide after we see it.

So yesterday, I took the day off from work, and dove in. Chronologically again. I was able to see the scenes with real clarity. Many of the scenes that people said we outright didn’t need – some of them we cut (for now, at least – they can always go back in if it doesn’t work), and some of them, I was able to make far shorter versions of. One scene in particular, after seeing it in it’s current state, I completely forgot what was even said in the full minute we had taken out of it.

Additionally, I was able to instantly see any redundant lines within scenes. I’m really concerned about making sure that the performances in the film feel natural, and a lot of the time if the actors repeated themselves or left long pauses in between words – I left it in. That’s how people talk. But I was able to really hone a lot of the scenes, and make the scenes more articulate by making the characters more articulate. It didn’t hurt the performances one bit.

I’m about halfway through, and somehow we’ve managed to cut 6 and a half minutes (!!!) out of the movie very very easily – while only making one drastic change. Now, of course we could watch this cut of the movie, and find that it goes way TOO fast. And in that case, we’ll have to go back in and add some air to it. But it feels good. By Saturday night, we’ll definitely have a much more improved cut, we’ll show it to a whole new batch of friends, and keep going from there.

mike

One of the most logistically challenging things to do in an indie film is to shoot in a moving car. It sucks. Cars are hard.

In so many low budget films – if a scene takes place in a car – the camera is almost always handheld in the passenger seat, shooting profile at the driver on the widest lens possible. This shot is always there by necessity – it’s the cleanest shot you can get of the actor driving, while not needing to add a car rig onto the car. It’s a pet peeve of mine – to me, profile shots should mean something. There should be a specific emotional or intellectual reason why you shoot someone in profile instead of straight on, or at an angle – it’s a visual decision, and it’s unfortunate that the confines of a car dictate that you have to shoot cars in this very basic way.

Additionally, cars are loud, roads are loud, and many car scenes, in addition to looking bad, also need to be ADR’ed (re-dub the actors reading their lines).

So, when writing the movie, we were thinking so much about the resources we did have, and thinking about it in a way where we knew we could achieve a specific aesthetic within that limited range. For this very scene, I made cars off limits. One very short, dialogue-less car scene made it into the script, but otherwise – off limits. We couldn’t afford it – we didn’t need it.

Until our reshoots.

When we reconceived how we were going to be introduced to the characters; there was one piece of information that we needed to get across: Peter had driven all night long to get to Fischer’s house. The easiest way on paper that we could achieve this is by showing him that morning, asleep, but seated at the wheel of the moving car. I loved this idea for many reasons. Like the rest of the film, it’s both really funny, but also kind of terrifying. It also serves as a larger metaphor for his character – without giving anything away, you could say that Peter is asleep at the wheel of his life, really. It’s a perfect solution to both setting up his character, but also giving the audience the information they need to get the story moving. But writing a scene is free. Shooting a scene is a whole other story. So how were we going to do it?

The simple answer is: illegally and dangerously.

On a “real” movie that has a budget for such things – we’d simply close down a street and tow the car. But we didn’t have money for closing a street, nor money to even rent a u-haul hitch. It was out of the realm of possibility. So really, we just needed to do it for real.

The first step was finding a road. We needed a stretch of road wide enough so that we could drive alongside the picture car in a second car. It also needed to be off the beaten path so that there would be a lot less other cars on the road. More importantly, it needed to be straight. And ideally –this would be a bonus- it needed to be visually interesting.

So back in June, Anthony and I took a whole day and just drove around. We were delirious. It sounds kind of simple, but all the roads we were finding that were wide enough, they were simply too main of a road. We would have been stopped by the cops in no time. All the roads that were off the beaten path – they were too skinny. We drove all over Camarillo, Oxnard, Simi Valley, and found nothing. Just strip malls.

Finally we somehow found ourselves in Agua Dulce, not too far from the rocks where several episodes of Star Trek were shot. There were definitely houses and small businesses around, but it was otherwise fairly desolate.

Next up, we had to figure out where to put the camera. I mean, we’re doing this for real, we’re putting Anthony’s life in danger – so let’s flaunt it. We did this in two ways. The first was we got this specialty car mount that Elisha borrowed from a friend (for free!) that was a series of industrial strength suction cups. So we could mount the camera almost anywhere on the car.

Additionally, we borrowed a van from another friend (for free!) so that we could drive parallel to the moving car, and shoot from the side of it. We could see the entire car and clearly depict that in no way was this an illusion.

The day of the shoot we woke up at 4:30am. That way we could not only start shooting right as the sun came up, there’d also be even less of a chance of people catching us.

We didn’t realize this – but at the end of this stretch of road – the one house we would meet in front of, a fireman lived there. At one point he got out, saw us, got in his firetruck and left. At another point his wife came out to check out what we were doing. We called that meeting point “the fireman’s wife’s house.” We were kind of scared of them.

The one expense we incurred – we rented walkie-talkies. It cost $40. But that way we could communicate with everyone all at the same time. For most shots we had one car driving in front of the picture car, and one car driving behind it. Meg was up ahead at the end of the road on lookout. If a car was coming up ahead – Meg would call out “car coming!” and we would stop.

Like everything– I think a hefty amount of naivety is important to success. Otherwise you may psych yourself out of doing it, knowing what the difficulties are going to be. So that, mixed with a large dose of luck has lifted us and our ability to craft what I think might end up being one of the most visually compelling scenes in the film.

Our fingers are crossed for many reasons, but the current one is that this is hopefully the last set of pickup shots we need. Onward and upward.

mike