Ed Wood Part II

Back in April of this year, which feels longer ago than it actually was, i participated in a 30 day film festival through the school that i currently go to. In this festival, groups of students are given thirty days to come up with a short film between four and eight minutes long and satisfying a large number of criteria. So Dan, Dick and i decided that we were going to be a group, and started laying plans for a horror film that we thought we could pull off. This was before we received the criteria for the film; the idea was that once we got them, we would just slip the needed elements into our completed script and film away. I think it should be obvious what happened next.

The requirements for the festival were as follows: there must be a character named Bud Garcia. The line "We need to track down the source of your anxiety," must be included in the dialog, there must be a basketball and a wig used as props, and there must be a shot of a reflection. And each group got assigned a different genre. We did not receive horror.

We got sports.

Panic set in for a short time, and after a couple days Dan and Dick started tossing around new ideas. Dick, from who the hell knows where, came into the idea of using the sport Chessboxing. Chessboxing has apparently been gaining popularity steadily in Europe, being hailed as a marvelous combination of the most intense physical sport and the most intense mental game at once. See, Chessboxing works like this: there are seven rounds. Competitors begin with one round of standard boxing. After the round is over, a chessboard is brought into the middle of the ring and the two sit down for four minutes of chess. Then another round of boxing, and so on, to checkmate or knockout. It's an interesting game, for sure, and we thought it would make for a strong backdrop to our story. The original horror story was, of course, completely gone. We were starting over.

Dan began working on a script. He actually pounded that thing out rather quickly. After a couple of days, we had a group meeting over at Dick's apartment to flesh out the script and discuss how everything was going to go down. The decisions made at this meeting would eventually prove to be poor, though at the time we were feeling confident. So when i say, "discuss how everything was going to go down," it's not just an expression.

I arrived at Dick's apartment complex and called up so they could come let me in. Dan and Dick come out of the building and Dan, overexcited and under the influence, shouts, "Hey! How do you feel about playing the lead in the movie?" I had barely gotten an affirmative response out when he belligerently continued: "The only thing is you have to kiss a chick. OH YEAH! And your girlfriend has to be in it, too!"

We went inside and Dick presented me with a bottle of rum. Then i got a look at the script, which didn't have a title, but i would have called it Rocky XIII, because it was essentially Rocky with a little chess mixed in. Dan had also written in a lot of references to great works, maybe in an effort to fool the judges into thinking we knew what we were doing, or maybe just as an homage of sorts. The most obvious among them were to On the Waterfront and various Mark Twain works. Our lead character, for example, was named Tom Clemens (Tom Sawyer + Samuel Clemens).

The script called for Tom, a.k.a. me, to take quite a pounding. In the opening scene, he gets hit in the head with a basketball. Then there's all the boxing. I asked Dick how he intended to get all of the fighting shots, and his response was that we would just do it. As in, actually hit each other. At the time that this came up, i had been under the impression that Dan was going to be playing my foil, the Apollo Creed of the film, if you will: Bud Garcia. This was not the case. Dan had somebody in mind for the role, and he was an actual boxer. This, i did not feel so comfortable with.

Probably the biggest mistake we made that day was allowing Dick to be the director. In retrospect, we really should have known better, but at the time it seemed like an acceptable situation for some reason. Maybe it was the rum.

It was a beautiful day when we started filming. We did our opening scene at a park off of Monona Drive in Madison, where there's this awesome view of Lake Monona behind the basketball courts. The boxer, fortunately for me, had to pull out, and instead we ended up with this tall skinny flamboyant gay man. I didn't think he fit the part in the least, and he was a pretty alright guy...it was difficult for me to portray my character's tension with him. Part of the reason i couldn't get mad at him was that he couldn't deliver his lines with a straight face, he just kept laughing at everything...it didn't so much work out. After a number of takes, we got what we needed. Then came the whole hit-in-the-head-with-the-ball thing, which we had to do four times before we got an acceptable shot.

After that, we drove up to the Monona Terrace, where we filmed me running up some stairs and then across the terrace, where i pulled a Leonardo DiCaprio on the railing overlooking Lake Monona. From there, we were going to go film the date scene, but then Amanda + i, working in conjunction with not enough communication between us, managed to get both my keys and my wallet, which has a spare key, locked in my Jeep. Dan had to drive us back to our house, which is a considerable distance from the Terrace, to get a spare set of keys and then back, all the while hoping that i didn't get towed since i was not, strictly speaking, legally parked. Dick, meanwhile, bought everybody dinner from KFC. All in all, it was a good day of shooting, except that by the time we returned to the Terrace it was pretty well dark and we couldn't shoot our date scene.

It would be a couple days before we were able to film again. Working around everybody's busy schedules was proving hard enough, but we were now starting to have trouble competing for cameras with the Camera Techniques class. This was the beginning of the frustrations. Dick, meanwhile, had been calling around to various gyms in the area, trying to get us a boxing ring to use for those scenes, but to no avail. Shooting the date scene went well, anyway, although it was all we got done that day. Dan and i were starting to have doubts that the project would get completed, given that it was at a pretty epic scale in the first place, and we were already having such trouble getting our shit shot.

A number of days went by before we were able to shoot again. Dan had secured us a boxing ring in Janesville. It belonged to this guy who just happened to have a regulation-size boxing ring in his back yard. It was a lucky break for us, getting that ring, but there were some unfortunate drawbacks. First of all, it was in somebody's back yard, but we needed it to look like it wasn't; the best solution we had was to film at night and light the ring in such a way that it was all that was visible, thereby leaving a completely black background. This didn't seem like such a bad idea; it's worked for other movies. A crowd could be easily implied. The problem with shooting at night was that the guy's daughter's room was on the back of the house, with the ring just outside her window, and to top it off she was sick the night we needed to film, so we were told to "box quietly." Hmm.

It wasn't bad, though. The lighting on the shoot was brilliant. Boxing with our fruity villain, though, proved to be a problem, though. He would hit me, and then recoil both of his arms back to his face and apologize. At first it was kind of funny, but after a while it began to seriously irritate me. We obviously couldn't use those shots, since having our huge Chessboxing star and big badass bad guy of the film apologizing every time he hit his mortal enemy wouldn't really make a hell of a lot of sense. So, every time he apologized and recoiled after hitting me, we'd have to reshoot. And reshoot. And reshoot. Over and over and over ad nauseum. And since we actually hitting each other for realism, even though he didn't hit hard, the repeated blows to my head were starting to really affect me. Plus, he had requested that i not hit him in the nipples, since they were both pierced. I had to be much more careful punching him than he did punching me.

After we got everything we needed out of him, we shot some footage for the training montages. The script called for two of them: one where i lose, and one where i win, to show the character's improvement. For these shots, i got to box Dick for a bit. My mounting frustrations toward him really lent these shots the realism needed, and from the video it looks like he was feeling the same way. Dan had also been saying all night that he wanted to take a stab at Dick in the ring, and he got his wish at the end of the night. I grabbed the camera and filmed that, too, for my own amusement. Later on, i was glad i did.

Here's where Dan and i, who had already become apprehensive about the project, really started to turn against Dick. We were already there, on location, with everything we needed, and after all the boxing had been done, he decided not to shoot the chess scenes, or my interaction with Amanda's character. "We'll greenscreen that in later," he said. I yelled at him, quite loudly before i was reminded of the sick little girl in the nearby room, about how this was poor practice and it would not look nearly as good as if we just shot it here and now. Besides, Amanda had come all the way to Janesville with us to shoot these scenes, on her birthday, no less, and for what? To stand around and watch us punch each other? In the end, we followed the advice given to us by Ray on the first day of his class: the director is always right, even when he's wrong.

After this, Dan and i became emotionally detached from the project. We started to follow that credo through everything, the director is always right. Instead of being our project, it became Dick's project.

I don't recall whether this actually happened before or after we shot the boxing footage, but i want to say it's after. Dick showed me his edited version of the opening scene. It looked awful. His cuts were sloppy and i thought he had made very poor choices on which shots went in and which did not. His audio was inconsistent and the whole thing looked like it had been slapped together by someone who had just seen Final Cut Pro for the first time that afternoon. I said, "this looks alright for a rough cut," and you could almost hear his heart drop. He tried to cover, like that was exactly what it was, but it was obvious that he thought he was finished. Well after the film fest debacle was over, Dan would end up seeing this cut and tell me that my description was generous.

Dick started to cut a lot of corners. He was becoming concerned that our final product was going to be over eight minutes, so he started chopping out pieces of the script. I kept telling him not to do it, we could shoot the full thing and when it was all over if it ran too long we could edit it down then. Taking things out now was not going to do us any good. Dan, being the author of the script, was highly offended by Dick's actions. Then he started removing things which were required elements for the contest.

We had already told Dick once that we were leaving the project, but he'd talked us into finishing. Then the final straw came. I had skipped a day of my internship at a local radio station so that we could get part of a training montage filmed. Dick had told us that the local YMCA would let us film there, under the condition that we didn't get any of their other members or any of their logos in our shots. However, he had not secured a camera for us to use on the only day that we could film there. So, armed with my little mass market consumer model camera, Dan and i headed down to the YMCA to film our scene while Dick headed to the aforementioned internship that he and i shared. After all, we couldn't both skip the same day.

It was completely silent in the van as we drove down to the YMCA. The only sound was the occasional grunts between us as we tried to figure out exactly where the place was.

"Hi, we were told we could film here today, we're from Madison Media..." Dan began.

"Oh. Are you Dick?" the clerk inquired.

"No, but we're working with him," i replied.

"I see. The manager tried calling him three times. You can't shoot here."

The dam broke. We both just started laughing. We said something that was probably less coherent than ideal about how that was consistent with everything about the project up to now.

"Oh, it's one of those projects, huh?" the clerk said. He understood perfectly. He went and got a manager for us, just to confirm that we could not, in fact, shoot there, but we didn't care. We had already heard all we needed. The manager explained to us how he had not followed the procedures they'd told him to on requesting the shoot, and it needed approval from management and blah blah blah. The point was, Dick was a dumbass.

We were much more lively on the ride back to school. We were both done with this, it was time to wash our hands of Rocky XIII (still didn't have an official name) and move on. But, we'd already put so much work into it! It would be a shame not to have anything to submit to the 30 Day Film Festival after all that. I suggested that our movie be eight straight minutes of me punching Dick in the head, since we did have that footage. Dan liked the idea, but wanted to expand it a bit better. From the school, i headed home to take care of some things, Dan went in to work out a new script. He emailed it to me about an hour later.

The new script was, in my humble opinion, hilarious. He had essentially taken the story of what had happened to our 30 day film fest entry and turned it into a 30 day film fest entry. The new script featured two characters, Tom Clemens and Bud Garcia, sitting down at a bar and talking about working for the worst director ever, culminating in throwing darts at his likeness. To tie it in to the sports genre, the final line of the script is, "Hey, do you think darts counts as a sport?" He had hit every point that we'd already filmed, too, so we effectively turned all of the original A-roll into quality B-roll.

I immediately phoned a nearby bar for permission to shoot, which was granted with no questions asked. The owner was positively excited to have us shoot in his bar.

We wanted to get everything done before Dick returned from the internship. We headed down to the bar, though still without one of the school's HD cameras, and shot Dan's whole new script with our two consumer cameras. We were back to the school before Dick, as planned.

That night, we had studio time reserved with the school's audio department to record the soundtrack to our film. Dick was there with us the whole time, and it was difficult not to tell him what we'd done, or even that we'd quit his project. He never asked us how the filming had gone at the YMCA, either, so we didn't have to tell him anything. Yes, it was an awkward night, though.

Unfortunately, our footage was too dark and just generally not very good. So, Dan and i reserved a school camera for the following Wednesday, which was getting dangerously close to the deadline, and headed back to the same bar to reshoot what we'd already done. This time, though, we knew our lines and we knew the shots. The bar was considerably more busy, though, which may have negatively affected our audio, but added realism. All in all, the shoot was smooth and satisfying, like shoving a Snickers up a baby's ass. Because Snickers is satisfying and a baby's ass is smooth. Or something. Yeah, i don't like that metaphor as much now as i did thirty seconds ago.

During one of these shoots, Dan brought up Ed Wood, largely considered the worst director ever to grace Hollywood. His crowning achievement, after all, was Plan 9 From Outer Space. They made a movie about him, appropriately titled Ed Wood, which starred Johnny Depp in the title role. Since we didn't have a title yet, i took Dan's comments as an inspiration, and the final package was called Ed Wood Part 2.

Dan thought it was funny that Dick had taken the film away from us, and now we had taken it back from him. In an ironic twist, Dan won Best Director at the film festival. We also took home Best Editing and Best Sound Design.