The Circus That You See
One of the most pervasive myths about the movie business is that it's glamorous. The bombastic movie premieres, the swanky red carpet events, the award night glitz, and the parties filled with beautiful people all lead the non-industry public to believe that every moment of film making is exciting.
Well, please forgive me for being the guy who bursts that bubble. Sure, there's a lot of fun to be had when you're on a live set. But the majority of the time spent filming, of actually doing the work of making a film, can be chaotic. Mind-bendingly chaotic.
On a big movie shoot, the multiple moving parts of the production can be a nightmare to coordinate. You don't just prop up a camera and yell "Action!" There are so many steps involved in getting even the simplest of scenes "in the can", as they used to say. For starters, you have to have a location, or a set, on which to film. Then the set has to be dressed with the appropriate props and furniture and the like. On top of that, many directors will get their actors into this environment and block out the scene. And then you have to factor in the time needed to capture the actual filmed takes.
Sounds like a non-stop hurricane of activity, doesn't it? Here's the thing, though. Yes, there's always something going on when you're making a movie. But there are also long stretches of time when entire groups of crew members sit around waiting for their turn to do their thing. All it takes is one camera seizing up to eat up hours of shooting time. No matter the size of the production, any delay in filming can cause a ripple effect of problems.
When you're shooting an indie film, however, you usually don't have the luxury of sitting idly by while things get sorted out. Every minute of shooting is precious. Money is a finite resource. The crew and cast may find themselves working long hours under stressful conditions. Even if there aren't any egos causing friction, or you don't get chased away from shooting somewhere without a permit, the stakes in making a low-budget film are so much higher for the hungry auteurs trying to tell their story.
Since I started my creative career in 2005, I've been lucky enough to be present on several movie shoots. Full disclaimer: I've yet to set foot on the set of a major multi-million dollar tentpole special-effects-heavy epic. Nevertheless, the small films on which I've helped out had their own share of headaches and hurdles to overcome. As busy as we all were, however, there was still a fair amount of hanging around, waiting for "the call".
It's in those interminably dull in-between times, when the grips are rigging the lighting, or the director is rewriting a scene, or an emotional actor has locked themselves in their trailer, that you need something to keep you entertained. Something to keep your spirits up. And during one long vampiric week of night shoots, I found my mental happy place warmly nestled in the jangly Brit pop genius of...
...RIDE.
My very first day in "the biz" was spent on set, actually. On October 1st 2005 I drove north of Los Angeles to Sable Ranch, a famous location that over the years has hosted such productions as Call Of The Wild, NCIS, Jackass 3D, and Firefly. I was met at the gate by Matt, the production assistant. (Remember his name... he's going to show up again...) He chauffeured me deep into the property, to the shooting location of Razortooth, a low-budget horror movie about a mutated eel who eats college kids. A few days earlier I had been hired as the editor, and this was my first chance to meet the production staff.
That day the crew was filming at the ranch's standing lake cabin set, where several crucial scenes for the dramatic monster attack were being staged. I got to watch the poor actors jump into and clamber out of the questionably murky water over and over. And my inner geek got a "brush with greatness" thrill when I was told that the shoot's hi-def cameras were previously used for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith! So now I can wander around Comic Con telling people I'm one degree of separation from George Lucas. (Okay, so, it's a technological degree, but still...)
Once all the footage was captured, my work as an editor began. The editing process is very iterative. You're likely to work with one or two clips, on a frame-by-frame basis, for hours at a time, doing your best to get the transition perfect. My wife Suzie is always blown away when she hears the same phrase or sound effect oozing out of my office dozens of times in a row. And I completely understand! If you don't have the patience for it, the constant repetition could be maddening. Luckily, I've got a brain that can handle the monotony. Hey, I suffer for my art!
As a first job in Hollywood, Razortooth was an incredible learning experience. Being as green as I was, it was a real struggle at times. But when the lights went down in the theater at our cast-and-crew screening, and I saw my name projected larger than life for the very first time... I had gotten "the bug". I wanted more.
And I got what I wanted! It just took a little longer than I expected...
Spring 2007. On set for pickup shots for Razortooth, preparing to be eaten alive by a monster.
After my Razortooth experience, I spent about a year at a boutique production company, working with the owners to develop a political comedy using actual news footage of world leaders. Just as that job fell through, the friend-of-a-friend who originally told me I should try my hand at editing hired me to work on a pair of featurettes for the DVD release of William Friedkin's movie Bug. That led to a year and a half of toiling away during the warm West Hollywood nights as a freelancer, cutting behind-the-scenes pieces for projects like Rush Hour 3, Kung Fu Panda, and the first Indiana Jones DVD boxset.
Unfortunately, the fun times didn't last. The 2007 Hollywood writers' strike caused a complete stoppage of filming for five months. Now, five months doesn't sound that long, but in movie production time, it's an eternity. By the summer of 2008 the pipeline of new movies being made had dried up. And because no movies were being made, the home video special features work evaporated too. As a freelancer, I was one of the first to be told to go home.
During this fallow period, my buddy Matt from the Razortooth days got in touch with me. (I told you he'd show up again!) He had finally put together the resources to make a short film based on a script he'd written, and he wondered if I'd be interested in editing it. I didn't even have to think twice. I enthusiastically said yes.
There wasn't going to be any money involved, though. This was definitely a Little Rascals-style "Let's put on a show!" thing. That didn't matter to me. Sure, due to the downturn in the industry, I had plenty of free time on my hands. But more importantly, I wanted a chance to work with my friend and see first-hand how a movie is made.
Over the course of three weekends in April 2009, the crew shot nights and afternoons on rooftops, at the beach, in suburban neighborhoods, and on location... at my apartment! Yes, this time the editor was involved in the on-set antics. Not only so I'd be familiar with the footage and could suggest bits for coverage or continuity, but also because that's just what you do on a low-budget indie shoot. Everyone's doing multiple jobs, whether it's moving lights, handling bounce boards, making food runs, or editing the damn thing together. In the indie world, it's a team effort.
The best part of the entire experience, for me, was working side-by-side with Matt to refine the edit. Remember, I dove head-first into this whole editing thing because someone told me I might like it. And as my initial work on Razortooth showed, I might have understood the process at a high level, but I was very inexperienced. Matt, on the other hand, had gone to film school, so he had a better handle on the esoteric nature of film editing than I did. Over the weeks following the shoot, we lovingly hacked away at his mini-epic. I paid very close attention to his tips and instructions, learning a lot from him as the days sped by.
The end result of all that work was Asleep With The Angels, a fun little thriller that twists and turns several times within its twenty minute run time. I seem to remember that Matt entered it in a few festivals, which helped bolster his budding directorial career.
For me, it served two purposes. One, it added a much-needed credit to my meager resume. And two, it gave me a confidence in my skills that I wanted to apply to bigger projects.
April 2009. Standing in for the hero during the shoot for the short film Asleep With The Angels.
That strike-created special feature editing work drought lasted a long time. After I wrapped up my time on Asleep With The Angels, I didn't land another editing job until April 2010. An associate from my first special features gig recommended me to the owners of Light Source & Imagery, a small production company in Sherman Oaks that needed someone last-minute for a six week job. After a very genial interview, co-owners Gary and Jon hired me on the spot, to help out with the boxsets for the current seasons of NCIS and CSI: Miami.
When the Universe delivers, sometimes it delivers in a big way. After suffering for a year and a half with no work, that six week freelance job turned into a four-plus years stint. I did so much stuff in that time! Editing hour-long season recaps for NCIS. Pitching and producing my own featurettes for Rescue Me. Putting together an entire online advertising package for Damages. There was hardly any downtime.
But the pinnacle of my time spent with the great group of people at LSI was editing, co-writing, and co-producing a pair of Stanley Kubrick documentaries for Warner Bros. We got to interview Kubrick's widow Christiane and other family members at the Kubrick estate in England. We spent a day shooting the amazing Kubrick exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum Of Art. We got to sift through dozens of boxes of Kubrick's papers and notes in the Warner Bros. vaults. And once again, I got to see my name up on the screen, when our feature-length documentary Kubrick Remembered was shown on the Warner Bros. lot, with none other than Malcolm McDowell in attendance.
Coming off the success of my work on the Kubrick pieces, I was on a career and personal high. I couldn't wait to see what next level of film work my editing success would bring me to. So imagine my crushing disappointment when, the Monday after the big screening, I was given the plum assignment of whipping up a few dozen thirty second online promos for the CBS fall previews.
That sort of snapped me back to reality. It became apparent that I'd gone as far as I could at LSI with my career goals. Maybe this seems snobby, but I wanted to get back into doing movie stuff, not promotional stuff. I was eager to keep moving forward, and it didn't seem like that was going to happen at LSI at that moment. After a long weekend talking over things with my wife Suzie, I announced to my bosses that I was going to finish up my current editing work, and then move on. No one was happy that I was leaving, but they understood.
So in the late summer of 2014, I found myself unemployed once again, this time by my own doing. My plan was to take a little time to decompress, then get back out there and pound the electronic sidewalk to promote myself. The industry had recovered from the strike, so it didn't seem like it was going to be too much trouble to find a decent gig.
It turns out that I didn't have to search long at all. A couple of weeks after leaving LSI, my next editing job came looking for me.
June 2013. Me with the actual typewriter from The Shining! "All work and no success makes Don a stressed boy."
I'll give you three guesses who came looking for my editorial skills. Yep, that's right, it was my good buddy Matt! This time, he had all the pieces in place to make a full-length feature. Entitled Other Halves, the script by Matt and his friend Kelly involved a group of young software entrepreneurs who create the ultimate dating app. But a glitch in the app's visual interface unleashes the darkness of their ids... and over the course of a single evening, sexy bloody mayhem ensues. It's fun for the whole family!
As thrilled as I was to be a part of another movie shoot, I found out that Matt wanted me for more than just my Final Cut knowledge. He respected my creative nature enough to involve me in numerous aspects of the production. I helped create the logo and graphics for the app. I was asked to be on set so I could keep on top of whatever extra footage might be needed editorially. I sat in on music and sound mixes. And because a friend of mine backed out at the last minute, I had to take on the visual effects too!
So during the cold mid-February week we shot at Matt's friend's offices in downtown San Francisco (a free location that would have cost thousands of dollars on a "real" movie), I could be found scampering all over the set (and the Financial District, where the building was located) doing any and every thing I was asked to do. I set up the monitors for the actors so they'd have something to react to. I crouched behind plastic sheeting, flicking lights off and on. I last-minute cut together psychedelic videos for use in later scenes. I helped cater the late-night meals. (And by "cater" I mean "carry bags of Chipotle five blocks".) I lugged equipment up and down stairs. If there was something that needed doing, I was there. And let me tell you... it was a frigging blast.
The shoot wasn't all non-stop fun and games, however. Multiple times a night, I found myself experiencing the dreaded "and wait" part of the "hurry up and wait" maxim I mentioned earlier. Since I was the sole member of the editorial department, with no eager assistant to help me, I got stuck doing all the drudge work associated with the job. And that meant baby-sitting my well-traveled Apple MacBook as gigs and gigs of newly-captured footage were copied from the digital camera cards onto one of the numerous hard drives we used for archiving.
While my fellow crew members were eating lunch at 11pm (gotta love those night shoots!), or setting up the next scene, or calling their loved ones, I was off in the dark, unused corner of our commandeered location where I'd set up my makeshift editing bay. There you could find me plugging, clicking, and transferring at all hours.
Even over a USB connection, copying hundreds of gigabytes takes a fair amount of time. For some scenes, there were as many as three cameras rolling at the same time. And since I could only copy one card at a time, that meant three times the usual downtime.
So what does a sleep-deprived editor do while he's idling?
He rocks out, that's what he does.
February 2015. Displaying my versatility by acting as "Dead Body #1". You try laying completely still and holding your breath under a sheet for two solid minutes!
Once I had been baptized in the glory of shoegaze back in 1991 thanks to My Bloody Valentine's epic Loveless, I went on a years-long crusade to discover other bands and albums that reveled in the same delicate balance of noise and melody that Loveless perfected.
The only group that even came close to satisfying my shoegaze itch was British quartet Ride, and their 1990 debut album Nowhere. Songs like "Vapour Trail", "Sennen" and "Taste" completely embrace the shoegaze aesthetic, awash in feedback, ringing guitars, and echoing vocals. Even the album cover is enigmatically evocative, an impressionistic image of a lone wave somewhere in a gray sea. What Ride had to offer wasn't Loveless... I mean, it's my favorite album of all time, so that is kind of a big hurdle to overcome. But what Nowhere did, it did incredibly well.
So now let's return to early 2015, with the production of Other Halves barely a week away. I was at home making sure my MacBook setup was ready to go, loading software and backing up graphics and other assets.
While stuck at my desk doing all this important prep work, I was entertaining myself by popping around in my iTunes library, reconnecting with stuff I hadn't listened to in ages. Randomly clicking into my Ride playlist, I realized I'd never really listened to any of their albums other than Nowhere! At least, I'd never given them anything other than a cursory scan.
I skipped over the known entity that was Nowhere, and started listening to their sophomore effort, Going Blank Again. I returned to my laptop nonsense as the album played. It wasn't nearly as shoegaze-y as their first album, but it wasn't bad either, so I just let it go.
Then the second song started. And it stopped me in my tracks.
The chiming guitars, the nimble percussion, the playful bass line, the crystalline vocals... it was sheer pop perfection. All the thoughts in my head evaporated so that I could devote every cell of my gray matter to enjoying this incredible song.
I've touched on this before, but it bears repeating: I'm one of those odd ducks who, when a song grabs them by their lizard brain, will listen to it over and over and over. And I don't mean a few dozen times. I mean hundreds of times. Morning and night. For days on end.
Don't believe me? Ask my dad how many times he heard Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls" blaring from my room in high school. Ask my college roommate Simon how badly I aggravated his girlfriend by playing "Pop Goes The World" by Men Without Hats for an entire weekend. Ask Suzie how many times she had to endure the theme song to Aqua Teen Hunger Force by Schoolly D when we started dating. When a song gets its hooks in me, I let it take over in a big way.
That's what happened with "Twisterella", the second track on Going Blank Again. That one five-star, two-thumbs-up, instant classic song became my new everything. I sat there at my desk, rapt with delight, as I replayed it for a good two hours. Days later it was on an near-endless loop during my six hour drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco for the Other Halves shoot. When filming was over, I spent another glorious half-dozen hours zipping home down I-5 with Ride as my soundtrack.
Oh, and all that footage-copying downtime I was talking about earlier? As I watched the bits ticking by on the counter, my ear-hugging headphones were filled with "Twisterella". We were on location for a week, but I was never bored during all that waiting, because that one energetic, propulsive, just plain fun song kept me company.
I mentioned earlier how my brain seems to be geared towards ignoring monotony as it pertains to editing. Maybe that same skill, in some twisted ("twisted-erella"?) form, is responsible for my mania when it comes to those "holy crap!" songs that captivate me.
It is amazing to me that I can listen to the same three and a half minutes of music for days on end without getting sick of it. Maybe I'm some sort of musical savant. Or maybe a certain sequence of notes attunes my consciousness to a higher plane of spiritual existence.
Or maybe, like my loved ones keep telling the police, I'm just mentally ill.
Well, whatever my particular repetitive affectation is, it didn't affect Other Halves in any way. Once the movie was done, it went on to rack up several awards in film festivals all over the country. Our little film-that-could even made the leap to big-time streamer Amazon Prime! (Give it a rent... you'll love it!)
Was it a Blair Witch-sized indie smash? No, but it did pretty well for a micro-budgeted indie horror movie. And I'm fiercely proud of the work that everyone did to make Matt's feature film dream a reality.
Fall 2015. The cast and crew of Other Halves at Zed Fest, after winning two awards. Great success!
Revisiting my experiences on movie shoots has reminded me of just how much fun I had being a member of a crew. Running around for hours at a time, solving problems on the fly, working side-by-side with people of all ages and backgrounds... To me, that's a fun way to spend a few days. And the bonus is that, if everything goes well, the end result of all the chaos is a piece of visual art.
And that outcome, the creation of an honest-to-gosh full-length motion picture, has been my most fervent desire since I started my screenwriting career back in 2016. I say this with all sincerity: I don't care about being famous. Red carpets, signing autographs, press tours... None of that appeals to me. Call me naive, but all I want to is to make a decent living using my brain.
Quentin Tarantino was a guest on The Howard Stern Show several years ago. When asked if he had a big house in the Hollywood Hills, Quentin offered an unexpected answer. He replied (and I'm heavily paraphrasing here) that his house was not huge, it was a nice place. But there were times when he'd stop what he was doing, look around his home, and think to himself, "My imagination bought this house. The ideas in my head paid for this house."
That's what I want. For the offbeat thoughts that have been ping-ponging around inside my cranium since I was a kid to pay for the space they've been occupying for so long. Every time I sit down to write, I spend a couple of minutes visualizing "success", as I see it: Writing the screenplay... The right person reading my work... Holding a payment check in my hand... Being on set as the cameras roll... And finally, the most satisfying step of all, when the lights in the theater dim, and "Screenplay by DON STROUD" flashes up on the screen. (There's also a version of this daydream that reads "Directed by", but I don't want to get ahead of myself here...)
Man, that sounds awesome. And I've been soooo close to getting that ball rolling. A couple of producers have optioned my scripts, but their efforts went nowhere. A co-worker got my book adaptation into the hands of a few execs, but they passed. I've won several major screenwriting awards over the last couple of years, yet despite the good feedback no one outside the competitions themselves have shown any interest.
What's it going to take for my dreams to come true? I'm itching to get myself back on a movie set. But this time, to play in my own sandbox. To make a film based on my ideas. My words. My imagination.
Hurry up, Universe. I'm tired of waiting.
Editing in the dark... That's where it's at, baby!