1996 – Reality Bites
There was no Sundance. No cheering crowds yelling “Encore! Encore!” No meteoric rise of status.
The movie wasn’t finished. What we ended up with was about a half of a movie, scenes that were poorly lit, dialogue that was meandering and meaningless, acting that was stilted or over-dramatic, and a confusing storyline of lesbians and chess pieces that was less genius and more WTF!
How was I going to be the next Christopher Nolan if all I could do was make this crap? I couldn’t believe the wonderful script I wrote could turn out to be so bad on screen. I mean, I read every page of “How to write a movie in 16 days.” EVERY page.
I shaved my goatee and gave my beret to goodwill and returned to the cafes to rewrite. I was going to rewrite the hell out of it. The lesbian story still appealed to me mainly because I hadn’t before seen such a story enmeshed in a horror film. I still aimed to experiment with the story despite the horrible failure thus far.
It was February and the dangerously rising Willamette River threatened to overtake the sandbagged Portland waterfront and flood the parking garage where we were shooting all weekend. It was the worst flooding Portland had experienced in 30 years. The ominous biblical scene was perfect backdrop imagery to our drama and a manifestation of the many evil forces of anti-movie making determined to sabotage our every effort. I tried to keep the film’s slow progress and the encroaching river from my mind and enjoy the shooting of scene 24: Lesbians Kissing in Parking Garage.
We were nearing our year and a half mark of shooting and I could tell the lesbians’ resolve was beginning to wane and they wouldn’t be kissing each other indefinitely. Oh but how the camera did like that image! Or was that just me? The actors who played the lesbians moved from a phone call away to three or four calls away. Morale dipped lower as the months slipped by.
Yolanda (Eden #1) didn’t want to drive the security car at high speed without her prescription glasses (her character didn’t wear glasses). I tried to reason with her. I asked her if she could come up with a cooler way to attack the creature than hitting it with a car at high speed. Her glare I took as a “no”.
All she had to do was drive in a straight line, really fast, and then slam on the breaks. It was mostly safe. The mall parking lot had plenty of wide open space between the concrete light poles. Finally we got her to do it. We only got 3 takes.
The start of the 4th take had her squealing out of there in her own car at high speed in a way that was better than any of the filmed takes.
If only Yolanda and the other actors understood the importance of this project. They saw it as just
another non-paying no-budget video project being made by some beginning filmmakers who had no real filmmaking background. How can you make art surrounded by such negative energy?
I pondered this tragedy as I threw the Subaru into third gear, chasing my brother Jeff who was sprinting along the Hawthorne bridge. The December night was heavily chilled, Jeff’s locomotion breath visible. He was running as fast as his legs could carry, with the Subaru closing in on him fast, approaching 30 mph. Steve was above me with the camera (It was the POV of our invisible chess creature), in a sandbag bunker we built on the car roof, yelling at him, “Go! Go! Go!” Jeff’s fear was palpable, very real, even from behind.
Jeff’s patience was great and as years went by, incredible. Each night we shot, it would entail at least 30 minutes of applying creature slash marks on his face. Our first attempts looked like strips of strawberry jelly, but over time he began to look like the victim I wanted him to be.
