Stomping Ground: One Month Later, Part I

 

One month. It has now been just over a month since Stomping Ground wrapped. Producer Dan Zubrzycki and I met on July 1, decided to make the film and we got the last shot of an intense two-day shoot on September 1. From pre-pre-production to a successful Kickstarter campaign to “that’s a wrap” in exactly two months? Shooting a feature film in twenty-four hours? Not bad.

I’d be lying if I said it was always easy. I’d be delusional to promote the image of everything simply falling into place. We knew it was not going to be easy. We weren’t doing it for fun. We predicted a tough shoot and got one.

On the other hand, we had no reason to expect, plan for or predict magic and we had plenty of it. There were performances and shots that far exceeded anything I’d ever dreamt about getting into this film.

And now? I have always said that shooting a film is maybe half the battle.  We expect to sign an editor this week and begin post-production by mid-October. We are hoping to have a solid cut of the film by February. A solid cut of the film is only going to go so far. Film, maybe more than any other art form, is a particularly public discipline -- it succeeds when people see it. The film is not going to do anyone any good if, like the vast bulk of the 4000-5000 indie films currently in production, it winds up existing on the hard drive of the people who made it.

Once we are happy with the cut of the film, it will be time to enter festivals and, from there....? Watch this space.

Friday afternoon: I pick up actresses Frankie and Joslyn for the drive to Yardley, PA. At that time of day on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, I am expecting a traffic nightmare but we get off easy. Of course, once we are five minutes from our base camp, our producer’s parents house, we spend nearly half an hour trying to find the spot where our set photographer is waiting for us. Three GPS systems going at once and we still don’t know where we are going? Hopefully, this is not a metaphor for my directing style.

Meanwhile, producers Dan and Isaac along with A.D. Ray take Ben, Michael, Nick and Nate, the male cast members to the set and show them around the “stomping ground.”

Friday night: At this point, we have all gotten together for rehearsals several times but never just hung out. Tonight we go over some business but, for the most part, we chill, we eat, we bond, we discuss the next day and the day after that.

We tell dirty jokes late into the night. I need to learn some dirtier jokes if I am ever going to make another film.

Saturday Morning: We get up and hit the set. It becomes extremely clear early on that the original plan of shooting the film like a play is not going to work quite as well as expected or hoped for. I don’t know how we adjust but, between us, somebody does something right and we charge ahead with a completely new game plan and the same exact goal: shoot an entire feature film in two days.

                                                                                                                                 Part II Coming Soon

The Path to Stomping Ground.... so far.

It has been a week since the completion of our Kickstarter campaign, so I decided to publish the first installment of what will be a “filmmaker’s journal kind of thing.” Action!

August 22
It’s up, it’s good, it’s over. The successful Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for Stomping Ground ended today and we earned nearly two hundred dollars more than we were looking for. It’s a good time to start chronicling the production of the film. Now, maybe seven years after writing it and a couple of false starts, Stomping Ground, formerly Aftermath, is ready to go.

August 23
Partial cast rehearsal at the South Philly home of producer Isaac Ruth. One actor couldn’t make it because of work and we decided to release the actresses from this rehearsal. We knew that scheduling rehearsals was going to be an enormous challenge, but without getting the actors together for some intensive face-to-face time to bond and form a team, this film would never work. Rehearsals have been amazing. This cast has gotten up to speed so quickly and has such a deep sense of what they are doing that I have no doubt that they will be killing it on game day.

Also present at the rehearsal was Steve, our set-photographer and behind-the-scenes videographer. He shot the Kickstarter testimonials, he shot the teaser trailer and he shot a silly video of me and producer Dan Zubrzycki chatting on location but he’d never read the screenplay. He came up to me during a break, nearly in shock after seeing the actors performing for the first time, saying that he found it hard to take photos because he was so wrapped up in the story. If a crew member gets so deeply involved in watching a rehearsal of Stomping Ground at the producer’s house, I can only imagine what will happen when audiences see it onscreen.

Director of Photography Kevin “K-Mart” Martin came down to watch rehearsal as well. He needs to be familiar with the logistics of the script because he will be directing a team of three camera operators who are all moving around, following the action together. The camerawork on Stomping Ground is especially important. Because the film is, in many ways, a one act play, I am insistent that it never become static or stagy. Having the camera and the actors in almost constant motion is my way around that issue.

August 26
Dan, Isaac and Assistant Director/Unit Production Manager Ray Davis and I met at Dan’s place in Center City at 9:00 and went until just after 1:00 A.M. hammering out logistics, crew list, props and, at long last, breaking the script down into a shooting script. All along, the plan has been to shoot Stomping Ground sort of like a play -- with an emphasis on “sort of.”  While there are several large chunks of the screenplay that take place at the primary section of the location (it’s all one big location that we have divided up into sub-sections), we are still making a film, not a play. In film production, as much as possible, you shoot all of the scenes that happen in one particular place at the same time rather than bouncing back and forth between sets. So, in that regard, it will not be exactly like shooting a play because we will be going from Scene 7 to Scene 10 to Scene 13 and so on, not shooting everything strictly in order.

August 27
Another late meeting that went late into the night, past 1:00 for the second day in a row. Dan and I met with Executive Producer Andrew Karasik who was on the last day or night of a European trip. In addition to endless last minute details of physical production, it is extremely important that everyone is both on the same page and also not stepping on anyone else’s fingers. We’re all grownups but we’re also individuals with our own needs and ways of looking at things. 

A film set can be a pretty intense place and, shooting an already highly-charged story in only two hot summer days in the middle of some pretty buggy woods sounds like a recipe for emotions and tempers to flare. My last directing gig was remarkable for a cast and crew for being so relaxed and stress free; people told me that I was a force of calm. I would love to carry this spirit over to Stomping Ground. Here’s aiming for a tension-free set.

August 28
Costumes! Hair/Make-Up/Wardrobe person Joanna Revelle and I took to the strip malls of South Philly. We scoured Marshalls, Target and Old Navy for wardrobe, props and all kinds of on-set necessities. The night before our first meeting, Joanna (whose background is in all aspects of film production, not just HMU) read the screenplay several times so that she had a good sense of the story and the characters, where they were from and what they would wear.

We want these characters to be real, dimensional people, not caricatures. While, in many ways, they come from a different way of life and a different socio-economic class from most of the people making this film, we want to be respectful of them. Ultimately, the movie is about them and the audience has to feel for them as people in a tense situation even if they do not necessarily relate to them. The best movies touch something inside and make us think “How would I feel if that was me?”



August 29
My daughter, Anna, and I went shopping for some last minute supplies: duct tape, gaffers tape and insect repellent --- lots and lots of it.

Next Up: We descend on our location for a weekend of living, working and creating together.

After The First Big Hit: Second (or third) time's the charm? Think again.

Often, we’re told to go for broke. Many of us have an instinct to shoot higher after some initial success. I guess there is nothing wrong with that, or is there? Is it so wrong to find one thing that you do well and then stay in that groove for awhile?

In the past few months, I have seen Mud and Place Beyond The Pines and Upstream Color, all of which were eagerly anticipated follow-ups to critically acclaimed indie debuts. Okay, technically, Mud is director Jeff Nichols’ third film, following up on the wonderful Take Shelter and the little seen but still noteworthy Shotgun Stories. All three of the new films are getting mixed reviews overall and, for my part, I was underwhelmed at best and bored to the brink of despair at worst.

With Derek Cianfrance and Shane Carruth whose last films were respectively Blue Valentine and Primer, their new films Pines and Color are sophomore efforts. But what I am talking about is not technically a sophomore slump and not exclusive to little, indie filmmakers. I’ve noticed that there is a trend (syndrome?) where filmmakers make it big with a little first or second film and take on a “go big or go home” mentality.

Spike Lee followed his minimalist-by-nature debut feature She’s Gotta Have It with the overblown, unsatisfying School Daze. Steven Soderbergh followed up the intimate, introspective “sex, lies and videotape” with the grandiose Kafka. Bryan Singer made a splash at Sundance with his first film, Public Access, and then hit it big with his terrific second film, The Usual Suspects. He next film was the disappointing Apt Pupil and he has since settled into a groove as the main creative force behind the popular X-Men series as well as executive producing some hit TV shows but nothing has been on the same level as Suspects.

I won’t get into the whole love it or hate it conversation about Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls, though I will point out that it was two little seen micro-budget features, Creative Nonfiction and Tiny Furniture, that put her on the map. The film world is fickle and often, one big bomb is all it takes for your latest film to be your last film and many directors might have that mentality playing in their heads when seeking out new projects.

Of course, this phenomenon is not exclusive to indie up and comers. There is Spielberg’s 1941, Scorsese’s New York, New York, Coppola’s One From The Heart and Lucas’ production of The Radioland Murders – all of which were personal, pet projects that got greenlit after the directors became proven entities, backing themselves up with box office hits, if not critical acclaim. In each case, the film was a disappointment.

That said, I am really looking forward to All Is Lost, writer-director JC Chandor’s follow-up to his impressive debut Margin Call, which was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. Lost comes out later this year and Chandor is already in pre-production on his third film A Most Violent Year.

Now comes talk that the freshly ‘retired” Soderbergh plans to release a new cut of Kafka that promises to be “A Hardcore Art Movie.” Maybe he’s onto something. Maybe more filmmakers will follow suit and re-do the disappointing films that they got the chance to make after their initial breakthrough. Maybe not.

"Aftermath" Rising

It’s on!

I have not made a blog post for such a long time but that situation is going to change soon.

If everything goes according to  plan, my-on-again-off-again-from-Philly-production-company-to-L.A.-production-company-and-back-again feature project Aftermath is on again, in Philly, later this summer. Aftermath is Mean Streets meets Stand By Me.

As a longtime student/fan/practitioner/teacher of low-budget independent filmmaking, I have spent years and years not just watching low-budget indie films.  From Blood Simple, She's Gotta Have It and sex, lies & videotape in the '80's to Reservoir Dogs, Slacker, The Brothers McMullen and Clerks in the '90's and almost everything else ever since then, I have been carefully studying the production methods and marketing strategies that made these films successful.

After college, I had the opportunity to experience an incredible study in contrasts when I went from working on a low-budget indie film crew to going to work on a big budget studio film with only one day off in between. I saw such ego and excess on the set of the studio film that I made a commitment to conscientious, fiscally responsible filmmaking practices in my own work: to make meaningful films that rely not on throwing money at the screen but on connecting with the audience.

It took a few years to put together my own first film. I was casting, shooting, editing and whatever else I needed to do --- from cooking for the cast and crew to chasing down locations.In 1995, my film The True Meaning of Cool won an award from The American Film Institute.

Being an AFI award-winning filmmaker opened some doors. Since 2006, I have been hired to write or doctor over 40 feature film screenplays, shorts and documentaries. I teach screenwriting at the University of The Arts and Drexel University in Philadelphia and work on projects for people all over the country.

With the explosion of digital filmmaking, anyone can make an indie film and far too many marginally talented people are making far too many bad films.  I decided to take a scientific approach to writing a screenplay utilizing all of the lessons I learned over the years, to write an innovative, inventive screenplay that could  be shot in 1 to 2 days for little to no money and avoid all the narrative and technical pitfalls that plagued so many micro-budget productions. The film could not merely be cheap; it had to be entertaining and accessible, something that would appeal to both an art house crowd and a mainstream audience.

The resulting screenplay is a story of a group of young buddies who commit a random act of violence and set off a series of events that quickly spin further and further out of their control, testing their friendship and, ultimately, leading to the revelation of a shocking secret.

The film has six characters, one location and takes place in real time.

A colleague of mine, Joe Stinson, who wrote four screenplays for Clint Eastwood (including the line "Go ahead, make my day"), read Aftermath and said to me, "You manage to break almost every rule of screenwriting and still wind up with a screenplay that works and could be a really revolutionary film."

After years of trying to produce the film myself or with other local producers, I optioned the screenplay to an L.A. producer who had been after me to sell the rights to it for three years. The production company was ultimately unable to put it together and let me retain the rights.

So, that history brings us to now. According to current statistics, at any given time, there are four to five thousand independent films being produced in this country. Of those, only 1 to 2 percent will ever be distributed. Aftermath is now titled Stomping Ground. Here’s looking at you, 1 to 2 percent.