1997 – New Beginning
My parents were on a short vacation, so we had only two nights to get everything shot at their house. It was about 3:00am on the first night and Yolanda was to cautiously open the bedroom door and walk toward camera, gun in hand (The creature could be anywhere!). Her yawning was incessant, making her look more bored than scared.
“Action!”
The door creaked open, but no one came through. “I can’t keep my eyes open,” She groaned.
“Cut! Please try harder!” I shot back.
The Lesbian story was finally wrapped in January. I knew the girls were elated. I had been their Hollywood pied piper who’d led them into a back alley of no budget movie making and bludgeoned them with false hopes. And now they were finally free.
Steve bought a new Sony VX1000 digital camera and we quickly learned the wonderful advantage of digitizing footage directly into the computer. Steve eventually acquired the steady-cam junior and video goggles making us itchy for a chase scene.
Even reflecting back a year from this point, we had to laugh at our modus operandi. For our dolly shots, I would push Steve in a wheel chair with our rocket launcher loaded on his shoulder. Once, after shooting at my
mom’s boss’s house, he commented to her how nice of me it was to bring on a handicapped kid to help with the project.
With our new and improved camera, other elements of our production also needed upgrading. Thus began my journey down the slippery slope of forking money out to
rent good equipment such as lights and sound gear.
Even after experiencing the failures of the original thieves’ tale, it was difficult to gauge success of my new efforts. It seemed logical to write a detective story. There were murders taking place after all. And since the crimes were paranormal in nature, I wanted to ground the detective in reality as much as Eden’s story. I felt that would better sell the fantastical parts of the film. The creative process proved to be easier for me, weaving in this new story in and around the already completed lesbian story.
Armed with a sharper eye for talent I began a more discriminate search for actors to populate this new story line. It proved to be difficult because most of the available actors in town were fresh out of college. They had flexible schedules and were able and willing to do the time on their first movie project. Nothing screamed low budget more than when your entire cast is made up college age kids. Older actors are harder to find. After a couple months search, I was only able to find one. And even his audition left me unsure.
He lasted about four scenes, about a month of wasted shooting, before an attic door slammed onto his forehead, creating an enormous bruise – a deal breaker. I felt fortunate, because his acting just wasn’t translating well through the camera.
Unable to afford the $25 theater rental fee, I held the next round of auditions in Steve’s parent’s front yard. I waited on the steps of the small porch, feeling pathetic. The first potential was a pretty boy actor who had a stage name of Dakota who was supposedly a favorite of a few local acting coaches. He pulled up in a convertible and wore cowboy boots and spoke with a slight lisp. I had him read a few of the scenes I had prepared. Each scene required different emotional content. He did pretty good, however, each of his performances carried the taint of disappointment for my venue and my script which was still rough. By the third read, I could tell Dakota had had enough. I sat back down on the porch and watched as he trotted his fine cowboy boots up to his nice red convertible and drive away. I felt like a small character in the western that shouts at the hero as he rides his horse out of town to battle the bad guys. I felt like yelling, “You can do it!”
The next candidate was a no-nonsense type of guy, a forty year old who took care of himself physically. We’ll call him Hernando. He didn’t seem to care about my front yard venue and was enthusiastic about the scenes. We collaborated a little on each scene about how to make it better. I wanted to work with this guy. His voice had a nice resonance to it and his acting excellent. I called him a few days later and he was hesitant to accept my offer of a role with no pay.
I drove out to talk to him personally. He asked who else I was considering for the role. He was the only one I was considering for the role, but I lied and rattled off a few of the others that auditioned. Fortunately he knew of Mr. Dakota. I told him I was considering Mr. Dakota, but I would give him the role first if he wanted it. After a few days of thought, Hernando was on board.
Our summer turned out to be very productive. We shot several wonderful detective story scenes, weekend after weekend: rooftop gunfights, dirt field murder sites, dingy apartment investigations, forest streams, city sidewalks, meetings under bridges, etc. Despite scraping by with just Steve, me and an occasional volunteer, we managed okay. The footage was markedly better shot than our previous stuff. Hernando was a high caliber actor who was very believable as our detective. As we moved through that summer weekend by weekend, I began to feel much better about the final product.
In September I was fired from my job. Money flow stopped. Filmmaking stopped. The company where I worked was bought out by a large insurance corporation. We were moved to their location in a very ugly business park. Their employees were lifers past middle age who hobbled by us in the halls, zombie-like, shuffling their claim forms. The nurses who came to administer the annual blood drive would joke about the difficulty in finding blood in their pale white arms. My work was less than stellar and my new boss didn’t seem to think I took the office seriously enough.
So in mechanized, non-human fashion, procedures and policies were applied to efficiently and effectively remove me from the premises.
The rest of the year I wallowed, feeling useless and being unproductive as I meandered through an underworld of low paying temp jobs. Out of desperation, some weekend nights we went out with the camera and chased my brother some more through the eastside warehouse district. His character running from some invisible creature that had yet to materialize on screen and me chasing shot after shot like an addict pursuing their next high.
