Archive for "The Red Machine"

Nov 22 6 comments
MANAGING EXPECTATIONS ON THE FESTIVAL CIRCUIT, The Red Machine

Film Festival Expectations Revisited (Or, “Curse You, Justin Evans!”)
.: by Stephanie Argy

A few months ago, the New Breed contributors ran a discussion about our expectations for film festivals. I put myself on record as being somewhat ambivalent about the whole idea — about whether fests can attract the right audiences for each film, about whether filmmakers can get decent exhibition and screening times, and about whether fests are really the right environment to build the connections and collaborations that will sustain us through our careers.

But what really stuck with me from that New Breed discussion was a blistering rant by Justin Evans, about all the ways that filmmakers themselves fail to contribute to festivals — about how we’re flakes and selfish and ill-prepared and ill-mannered — not to mention poorly dressed. His accusations gnawed away at me for months.

Then our feature The Red Machine got very lucky: the movie was selected by the Mill Valley Film Festival, and we had our world premiere there last month — October 11 and 12, 2009.

Mill Valley is a world-class festival in northern California that has been in existence for 32 years, and they are completely on their game. We knew that they would do their part — that our exhibition would be phenomenal (and it was - HDCAM in both of our two screenings in the festival’s excellent Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, California) and that they would know how to program well for their audiences (and boy, did they get that right).

We felt that we needed to match their effort and do everything we could to make the festival experience a great one for everyone. We treated it as an experiment — for now, I’ll call it the Justin Evans Experiment. Here’s a run-down of what we tried; some things will be relevant for other films, some less so, some went really well, some could use refinement (or abandonment):

1. Scout.

We treated the fest like we would treat a shoot. We’d never been to Mill Valley, so three weeks before the fest, my directing partner Alec Boehm and I drove the eight hours from Los Angeles to northern California to check out hotels and restaurants and get a sense of the place — and most importantly, to meet the festival staff. When we saw how hard they were working, we began to think of them as an extension of our own crew, and to see that our interaction with the festival was one more collaboration. It made us realize how much we had to do.

2. Participate as fully as possible.

Alec and I both attended the fest, and we were very lucky in that many of our cast and crew were willing to make the trek to Northern California to join us, including six of our actors — both of our leads, Lee Perkins and Donal Thoms-Cappello, plus Meg Brogan, Maureen Byrnes, Madoka Kasahara, Chad Nadolski — and many of our crew. The stage was a little crowded during our Q&A’s, but it was great to have many voices answering questions.

3. Take part in everything you can that’s associated with the fest.

We know an old-time agent/manager who says he used to tell his actor clients going to a shoot to “become family.” Our variation on this for filmmakers going to a fest to “become local.” If a fest offers you any way to connect more to its audiences and to the community, take them up on it.

One of the coolest things about the Mill Valley Film Festival is that it’s run by an educational foundation called the California Film Institute. The CFI does a great program during the festival called Filmmakers Go To School — and it’s exactly what it sounds like.

The festival hooked us up with a local high school, the Marin School. We sent script pages for three scenes from The Red Machine to their film teacher, Kieran Ridge, and their drama teacher, Philip Van Eyck, who had his students prepare their interpretations of our scenes. When we got to the school, the students showed us what they had come up with — and after living with our own versions of the scenes for so long, it was really thrilling to see them reimagined by someone else.

To give the students a hint of the difference between stage acting and film acting, we chose one of their renditions of a scene and created a mock film set environment around them, with other students standing in as film crew. Finally, we showed them the scenes they’d prepped as they appear in the final movie. All in all, one of the best experiences we had at the fest.

There are panels, there are workshops, there are all sorts of ways to get involved.

4. Suggest More Things

In honor of a Red Machine character named Agnes Driscoll — a real-life mathematician and linguist who was the head of U.S. Navy cryptanalysis during the 1930s — we proposed a panel called Girl Geeks, a conversation among some of Driscoll’s nerd chick descendents — including me.

Mill Valley took us up on the idea, and programming administrator Holly Roach ran with it, booking an interesting group of women out of northern California, including moderator Tiffany Shlain (The Tribe) and artists and technical people from ILM, Pixar and YouTube.

5. Displays

Because The Red Machine is set in the 1930s, we have costumes and props that are a little out of the ordinary. Mill Valley was fantastic about letting us create a display of our women’s costumes (which we put on mannequins and changed out from time to time so that there would be variety) and the Japanese code machine that is our title character (and the target of the movie’s heist).

6. Giveaways

The costume display fed nicely into our one big giveaway — we got together with Annamarie von Firley, who designed and custom-tailored the women’s costumes in The Red Machine, and gave away two $200 gift certificates for clothing made by her salon — one certificate handed out at each of our two screenings.

We weren’t the only ones to do a giveaway at Mill Valley: the filmmakers of the feature Passengers taped a postcard for their movie on the bottom of a theater seat, then gave the person in that seat a bottle of wine; we thought that was a nice idea, too.

The giveaway was one thing I would have done differently: originally, we’d envisioned it as a way to attract people to our screening. But because Mill Valley is so good at promoting the fest, and because they have such a supportive community, we sold out both of our screenings less than a day after tickets went on sale to the general public. As a result, we never really promoted the giveaway or even talked about it that much, and on the first night, when we gave away the gift certificate, the audience was frankly confused. The second night, we mentioned it before the movie played, but it’s still something that could have and should have been promoted and presented better.

7. Swag

The Red Machine was actually our second movie to premiere at Mill Valley; the first was our short film Gandhi at the Bat. Unfortunately, we missed Gandhi at the Bat’s Mill Valley appearance because we were shooting The Red Machine when it played — but Mill Valley still gave Gandhi at the Bat a great launch into the world. In recognition of that, and as a thank-you to Mill Valley and its audiences, we decided to give a Gandhi at the Bat DVD to every single person who came to see The Red Machine at Mill Valley.

We put the DVDs into muslin bags that we rubber-stamped with “The Red Machine” and “World Premiere, Mill Valley, 2009.” We created miniature 1930s-style lobby cards for The Red Machine, with cryptograms on the back, and we put a small assortment of those into each bag. We also created replicas of some of the prop documents from The Red Machine and put one of those into each bag — letters, a menu — but ultimately I didn’t think those particular prop documents were special enough or worth the effort they took.

Our decision to give away swag became more complicated and expensive when less than a week before our premiere, we had a call from Mill Valley, telling us that they had moved our first screening into the biggest theater at the Smith Rafael — bumping us up from 260 DVDs to give away at the two screenings to a possible 470. But we took a deep breath and gathered up what we needed to cover the new estimate.

An interesting side effect of giving away the Gandhi at the Bat DVDs: somehow, one of them found its way to Karen Redhook Dallett, the operations director of the Santa Fe Film Festival. Karen watched the Gandhi at the Bat DVD, then emailed us and asked if she could screen Gandhi at the Bat at Santa Fe; we said yes, of course, and oh, by the way, did she know that we’d just finished our first feature? She asked for a screener of The Red Machine, which we Fed Exed to her immediately from Mill Valley. She ended up booking both movies, which will play together at the Santa Fe Film Festival on December 4 and 5.

8. Clothes

Finally…one of Justin’s comments that that provoked particular controversy was his contention that filmmakers at fests dress like slobs.

We’d found the value of dressing up before, when Gandhi the Bat played the Baseball Hall of Fame. For that screening, a friend made a dress for me — a short Yankee pinstripe dress with “Gandhi” on the back. (Women tourists at the Hall would gasp and ask where they could buy a dress for their own team — a possible lucrative ancillary stream for the movie, if we could ever work out the licensing with Major League Baseball!)

This is a tale that probably won’t be useful to my mostly male New Breed colleagues, but for our Mill Valley/Red Machine screenings, I ended up finding the perfect dress, in a fabric made up of typed text, very much in keeping with the cryptographic/linguistic tone of the movie. The dress was bright white, and on stage among all the people in dark and muted outfits, I looked like a lit-up lightbulb. (Handy info for those filmmakers who want to be easy to spot — perhaps for you gentlemen, a bright white Tom Wolfe style suit?)

The result of all this effort was that we and our cast and our crew had an extraordinary experience at Mill Valley. Part of it was being at a great, well-run fest that loves and cares for its filmmakers; part of it was being there with a feature rather than a short (at the grown-ups’ table at last!), but part of it also came from having engaged so fully in the fest.

So thank you to Justin — and also curse you! You forced us to set a new standard for ourselves, and like a bell that can’t be unrung, now we’re stuck having to live up to that for the foreseeable future — which in addition to Santa Fe on December 4 and 5, will also include a screening in Prescott, Arizona on December 16, and the Sedona Film Festival in February, 2010.

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Aug 01 3 comments
CREATIVE COLLABORATION, The Red Machine

Creative Collaboration: What We’ve Learned
.: by Stephanie Argy

When I heard that the next topic of discussion for the New Breed group was going to be collaboration, I sat down with my co-writer/co-director, Alec Boehm, and we sketched out some of the thoughts that we’ve had about it, both when doing our own projects, and when working with other people on theirs.

Most of these were very obvious — though sometimes hard to accomplish:

• Communicate constantly, and if there are problems, address them immediately. Problems almost never heal themselves, so don’t let resentments and issues build up in the unlikely hope that they’ll go away.

• You don’t have to like your collaborators, but you do have to respect them. I actually believe that if you don’t respect someone, you shouldn’t work with them — (though of course that’s a problem if you stop respecting them part way through the project…).

• Stay flexible and open to new ideas. The thing that makes great collaborations so transcendent is the unexpected chemistry that happens when different people combine their ideas, then come up with something totally new as a result. (The most sublime example of this is being a writer/director and working with an actor on your own material — somewhere between the two of you, a character takes shape that’s neither you nor them.)

• If you make mistakes, take responsibility and try to remedy them. Don’t throw other people under the bus.

• Collaborations are like a romance — there’s a chemistry or there isn’t. The good in a relationship will outweigh the bad, or it won’t. And sometimes, you have to accept that it’s just not going to work (for whatever reason, no blame attached) and cut bait as early as possible.

• At the same time, a good collaboration can sometimes be really contentious. But that can still work — if the fights are good fights, if the attacks aren’t personal, if both sides can work that way. (Personally, I don’t like to — I much prefer the happy, calm, grounded kinds of collaborations. But I admit to my bafflement that several of my most pivotal, life-changing working relationships have been of the fight-all-the-time variety.)

I will admit that I found collaboration the most challenging part of making our feature, the thing that I’ve kept going back to in my mind over and over, trying to sort out what we did right and what we did wrong.

During production, we were surrounded by the largest crew we’d ever worked with, and we learned to accept that and to collaborate. But for most of post-production, Alec and I contracted into a very small unit of two; I believe we under-collaborated during post, didn’t reach out for enough help. Maybe it was financial, or maybe it was our need as fledgling directors to do as much of the work ourselves as we could, to wring every last lesson out of making the movie.

I think we also became very protective of our vision of the movie. There came a time during post when we felt we were getting barraged with comments that were not in keeping with the movie we wanted to make. For a while, to keep peace with people around us, we tried out some of those suggestions, only to feel that the movie we set out to make was slipping out of our grasp. We realized that we were sawing through the thin rope that tied us to our movie, and that if we cut that rope entirely, it would become in essence an outside project, where we could no longer tell what was good or bad in the very world we had created. So we undid all the changes and restored the movie to the one we set out to make. Whether that was the best choice — whether the movie would have been better if we’d followed the other roads — is impossible to say.

The other challenge was trying to speak the language of the people we were working with. Despite the fact that Alec and I had both spent years playing music, I don’t think we ever managed to communicate what we wanted from the composers we spoke to. And I wonder, what could we have done or said differently to get our ideas across more clearly?

But enough of words: for this round of New Breed conversation, it was strongly suggested that we filmmakers try to act like filmmakers and get out our cameras. So Alec and I tried to coalesce our ideas about collaboration and come up with something we could shoot that would get across a little of what we’ve come to believe.

The following is the result: Collaboration, as seen by three thieves from The Red Machine: Bad-Eye Bedrosian (Jon Amirkhan), Frankie “The Finger” Dexter (played by Mike Rock) and the Impeccably-Dressed Mauricio Delano (Nicholas Tucci). We wrote it last Saturday, shot it on Wednesday night, and finished it by Friday — a new personal best!

(Incidentally, the actors are themselves an example of a great ongoing collaboration — three very different individuals who found an instant chemistry on the feature and who willingly stepped back into their 1930s personas for us just do this little featurette.)

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Apr 30 2 comments
CENSORSHIP, The Red Machine

Re: Censorship
.: by Stephanie Argy

I’ve never actually had any direct experience with censorship as a filmmaker. With our short Gandhi at the Bat, we were initially afraid that we’d run into trouble for portraying a figure as revered as Mohandas K. Gandhi, and we did encounter a few people who were very ready to be furious with us — until they actually saw the movie, at which point, all was forgiven. However, we were advised to be hyper-cautious about showing the movie in India, where irate crowds have been known to burn down movie theaters showing material that they considered offensive.

But…I do have a two questions for everyone else:

1) Is there any content that you believe SHOULD be censored, and where would you draw the line?

2) If you were told that you have to cut a particular shot or scene to get shown on a site or at a festival, would you do it?

After Zeke launched this conversation, I did do some prowling around, looking for information that might be useful/educational to those concerned about censorship, and I found a few things. First, from the National Coalition Against Censorship (where I was a volunteer, years ago), here are some articles and resources on film censorship:
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/speech/arts/topic.aspx?topic=nudity

Second, the Film Foundation, which promotes film preservation, has information on the Moral Rights of artists: http://www.film-foundation.org/artistsrights/content.cfm?TopicID=49&ContentID=122

And finally, as long as we’re on the subject of male nudity…here’s my favorite male nudity ever recorded on film or video (even though it is somewhat censored:

(I can’t take credit for this — but someday, I hope to make a movie this…um…visceral…!)

CLICK HERE TO FOLLOW THE ENTIRE PANEL DISCUSSION ON “CENSORSHIP”.

STEPHANIE ARGY and her writing/directing partner, Alec Boehm, are in the final stages of post-production on their debut feature, The Red Machine, a Depression-era spy caper. Their previous work includes the award-winning short film Gandhi at the Bat (a mock newsreel about the little-known and totally fictional incident when Mahatma Gandhi pinch-hit for the New York Yankees in 1933), and Scene (a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie set in Scotland). Stephanie has also written hundreds of articles on filmmaking and movie-related technology, and for three years she edited a magazine on post production.

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Apr 20 0 comments
MANAGING EXPECTATIONS ON THE FESTIVAL CIRCUIT, The Red Machine

RE: Managing Expectations on the Festival Circuit
.: by Stephanie Argy

I’m very ambivalent about festivals — we’ve been to a lot with short films and had some really great experiences, but now that we’re about to take our feature THE RED MACHINE out into the world, we see festivals as only one small element of our overall release and marketing strategy.

I think part of the problem is that after going to so much effort to make exactly the film that you wanted to make, it’s really frustrating to put the film into a situation where it may not be able to shine its brightest. You really want to lure the right audience into your screenings - the people who will click with the movie. And those people for your film may or not be in attendance at a given festival.

It’s also hard to control how and when your movie screens. We’ve seen too many other filmmakers’ features screened way too dark, with unintelligible sound, at a horrendous time, in front of four people who are clearly not its demographic. And that doesn’t seem like a very solid foundation on which to build a movie’s community and future. Plus, it’s so easy for filmmakers to get demoralized from situations like that, or for movies to get unfairly tainted: “Oh…I saw [movie] at [festival]. It just lay there.”

So for all those reasons, we’re don’t want to rely on fests as the thing that will make or break our movie. We’d rather focus our energy on things that we can control ourselves.

I think one of the most important points of Zak’s post was what he and Hunter Weeks and Todd Sklar said about the importance of fests as a place to network, and I think that is critical. But at the same time, I’d also point out that depending on one’s personality, fests may not be the best way to do that. I spent a long time as a journalist, and because a big part of what I covered was movie technology, I went to the trade shows like NAB and Siggraph and places where manufacturers cluster for a few days of frenzied marketing and sensory overload. But I eventually stopped going, because I found that I could get deeper information and forge better relationships if I met with people at other times, when they weren’t so overwhelmed, and when we could sit down for a one-on-one conversation.

And even though we’ve made friends at festivals, the reality is that we’ve made far more valuable connections in other ways - introductions by mutual acquaintances, web correspondences, handing DVDs to people we meet through work, encounters based around collaboration.

As we plot out our strategy, the question we’ve been asking ourselves is what do films/filmmakers get out of a festivals, and can we get those things in other ways? In addition to networking/connections, the big ones I thought of were:

Exposure/Press
Sales
Ability to learn from watching an audience watch the movie
Prizes
Getting to go to cool places

What other things would others add to that list? And are there ways to get those as effectively outside the festival structure?

CLICK HERE TO FOLLOW THE ENTIRE PANEL DISCUSSION ON “MANAGING EXPECTATIONS ON THE FESTIVAL CIRCUIT”.

STEPHANIE ARGY and her writing/directing partner, Alec Boehm, are in the final stages of post-production on their debut feature, The Red Machine, a Depression-era spy caper. Their previous work includes the award-winning short film Gandhi at the Bat (a mock newsreel about the little-known and totally fictional incident when Mahatma Gandhi pinch-hit for the New York Yankees in 1933), and Scene (a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie set in Scotland). Stephanie has also written hundreds of articles on filmmaking and movie-related technology, and for three years she edited a magazine on post production.

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