Film School

by Steve Boman

  We vent for long minutes. Finally, we calm down. We sit on a bench, poke our feet in the ground. We have one more weekend left. We both understand we’re in deep trouble. In 507, I was a mild outcast for having so-so films. Now we’re both treated like pariahs in class. No one knows us. Our stuff is completely, absolutely un-understandable. Dan and I are seen as the newbies who suck. We’ve hardly interacted with the other students in class because I’ve been gone or we’ve been locked up in Dan’s apartment.

  We sit in silence, stewing. We’re both screwed if we fail. Here I am, disregarding advice to quit film school, and I’m in a stifling apartment shooting film of a prepubescent actor sitting on a couch holding a guitar while his stage mother hovers nearby. Here Dan is, paired with an old guy who keeps disappearing for days with medical issues, and who can’t keep the shot in focus.

  It feels like we’re in a football huddle and we’re losing 28-0 in the fourth quarter. Our relationship has been less than perfect, but we can either give up and go home defeated, or we can do something about it.

  Dan and I look at each other and agree we have to do something—anything. We come to an agreement. This is D-day, and we’re not going to lose. We’re going to go forward, together. We have a lot to do—we have to shoot the majority of the film in one weekend. We agree to get off our arses and get to work. We have nothing to lose. We shake hands and go our separate ways.

  Pablo sees me leaving our huddle and calls me into his office. He asks if everything is all right. I assure him everything is. He doesn’t seem to believe me. Every week, everyone in class sends Pablo an overview of how things are going on their shoots. It’s something only he sees. I’ve been bitching about Dan in my weekly emails, and I can guess Dan is doing the same about me. I assure Pablo, “Really, things are going to work out.” He looks melancholy.

  On Friday, Dan and I run around Los Angeles like cats on catnip. I head to Kino Flo in Burbank. They make and rent low-wattage lighting equipment. Low wattage means we can pump more light into the apartment without blowing the apartment building’s electrical circuits. Normal incandescent film lights gobble up a tremendous amount of energy. A single “little” 1K light uses a thousand watts. Compare that to a standard interior lightbulb, which uses sixty to one hundred watts. We need a lot of extra lighting in the tiny apartment so we can close down the camera aperture and thus increase our depth of field. That’s part of the reason we put aluminum foil over the windows in the first place. We don’t want Dan’s landlord to see an ungodly amount of light pouring from the windows at night.

  Now we understand why professional film shoots use large generator trucks to light a set. Filming uses an enormous amount of electricity, but we can use less with the Kino Flo lights. The Kino Flo lights are also cooler. Less wattage = less heat.

  We’re buying this, we’re buying that. We hit a Home Depot, a Target, thrift shops. Late Friday afternoon, Dan calls. We need to find a music box the kid can hold. I race to antiques stores and find nothing. Dan also finds nothing. The next morning on the way to his apartment, I stop at Los Angeles’ antiques row. Most of the stores aren’t open yet. I’m out of luck.

  But Dan has procured a pair of small snow globes. One has a winder on it. The other looks very pretty.

  We go over the script: the boy enters a dirty, dingy apartment. He starts cooking a pot of mac and cheese. A freight train passes, shaking the apartment. The boy peers out at the train. He sits down, turns on a TV. There’s an instructional show that teaches guitar. The boy picks up a guitar and plays along with the TV. The drips of a pipe create a beat. The music builds. Then magic happens. Flashback to a beautiful apartment. A mom. A dad. Colors. Beauty. But the pot of water is boiling. More music, more beauty. Smoke curls to the ceiling. A smoke alarm goes off, the boy jumps up and smacks it to turn it off, a train passes again, the TV goes dead. The boy is alone once more, and there’s no more color in the world and no more magic, but then the TV comes on, and the guitar lesson continues.

  There’s much more action in the film than before. The kid won’t just sit there now—he’ll emote a bit, interact.

  Dan and I have to shoot the lion’s share of the movie in two days.

  We set up the Kino Flo lights. We pray the actor and his mother show up. They do. The weather is mild and sunny. We cross our fingers against blackouts. We put more light into the whole apartment, and I stop the aperture down. Dan agrees to push the camera back a bit. Not every shot has to push right into the kid’s nostrils. We still have very shallow depth of field, but it’s not impossibly shallow. I now have a several inches of sharp focus in a shot instead of an inch or less.

  The kid actor keeps going all day. There’s no speaking, so it’s like he’s a fashion model much of the time. Dan and I are running and gunning all day, aware that we can’t use the actor more than the SAG union rules allow.

  All day long, we shoot, shoot, shoot. We have five hundred feet in my camera bag because we undershot the first weekend. The kid holds the snow globe in the air in one scene and ponders the flakes falling. The lighting is gorgeous. I’m looking through the eyepiece of the camera and holding my breath so as not to make any movement.

  At the end of the day, we’re pushing past the SAG guidelines, but the kid is game and so is his mother. The studio teacher shrugs. She doesn’t care. She hasn’t looked up from her book all day. I think of the school rules requiring a studio teacher. This old hag knows she’s gaming the system—she’s getting $20 an hour to read a book while a kid’s mother is three feet away. And now, when technically she needs to speak up and say, “I’m sorry, this young lad has worked his ten hours,” she’s mute. It’s good for us, of course. We want to finish, and we’re not abusing the kid. He plays video games between shots, and it seems he’s used to just hanging around.

  Finally, we finish shooting for the day. The kid is tired. So is his mom. The studio teacher leaves before they do.

  They walk to their car with both of us congratulating them and, between the lines, inferring that it’s super-duper important they return the next day. Our film depends on them coming back. I now realize Dan’s film is a high-stakes gamble. Having one child actor means we’re putting all of our eggs in one very fragile basket.

  After the kid and his mom leave, Dan and I transform his apartment. We hang orange Christmas lights everywhere, hang curtains, and rework the little set into a dramatically different stage. It goes from white and muted to orange and bright.

  On Sunday, the actor and his mom are shocked at the transformation. We start shooting the magic scenes. Dan gets a neighbor woman to pose as the kid’s silhouette mother. Dan is the kid’s silhouette father. The studio teacher doesn’t want to come today, so for a small bribe, she signs off on the form that she was there.

  The actor is fading as the day goes on. We urge the little fellow to keep his energy up. We ply him with food and praise. I feel guilty—we’re working this little guy like he’s a mule, and I’m using every trick I know as a parent and soccer coach to keep him in the game. This kid holds the key to our film. If he has a temper tantrum or gets a sore throat and wants to leave, we’re pooched. So we pull out the stops to make him feel wonderful. Toward the end of our shoot, we’re high-fiving the kid and “hoo-hooing” him when he strums the right chord on the guitar. Welcome to Hollywood. It’s a gorgeous weekend, and this kid is sitting in a hot, stinky apartment with two sweating film students who tell him he’s the greatest thing in the world. Finally, we wrap up in the late afternoon. The kid and his mom go home. When the door closes, Dan and I slump. I’m glad they’re gone.

  We shoot a few more scenes for cutaways and finally run out of film. It’s dark. We’re tired. Dan suggests going out for a steak. It sounds good, and I would like to eat a big bloody piece of meat, but I’m too tired. I just want to go home. We spent three straight days working with as much intensity as we could, from early morning to late at night. We’ll find out Tuesday what our fate is.

  Monda
y, I write all day on CRAZYHOUSE ON SKIS. It’s such pleasure to shift back to a private task. The yin and yang of production and writing is very attractive.

  On Tuesday Dan and I assume our usual chairs in the back of the screening room, just next to the door. Our 508 class has moved up in the world, and we no longer have class in distant Zemeckis. Now we meet in a small classroom in the heart of the film school. Today, we’ll be watching the dailies. Everyone is nervous as hell. Everyone in the room has a tremendous amount riding on the dailies. Everybody needs their final weekend of shooting to turn out.

  Dan and I have the most to lose, by far. Judging by the dailies of the other partnerships, it should be possible for them to cut together at least a mediocre film somehow. Dan and I have so far shown nothing. Just static images.

  The screenings are in no particular order.

  Dan and I are both silent as we watch the dailies of other partnerships. The anticipation is killing us. There are seven series of dailies to watch, and we comment after each of them, a bit like we did in 507. This time, the commentary from Pablo and the students is very gentle. We all know when we mess up; we don’t need people to point it out with a heavy hand.

  Unlike 507, when all films were screened with a thick layer of music larded onto them, in 508 we are watching silent film dailies. It’s so quiet we can hear sighs and groans from the filmmakers. It’s an amazingly intimate process.

  Dan and I have now watched five of the other dailies. We still haven’t said a word to each other. I’m so worried we’ll have a technical issue.

  Then our film appears on the screen. It’s perfect. It’s not just perfect, it’s fantastic. Every image is as sharp as a tack. We’re using our actor’s eyes as the focal point, and on some scenes he fills the screen, his face perfectly lighted, perfectly focused. Dan and I still don’t say a word.

  Then the scene with the snow globe comes in. Even though we’re shooting in color, our set and actor are so muted that nearly every previous shot looks as if it was in black and white. But the snow globe is a burst of color, and the orb reflects a perfect circle of light onto the actor’s young face. We can see his pupils following the falling snow in the globe. Our cinematography instructor can’t help himself. “That’s gorgeous,” he says out loud. Suddenly, we see our magic footage and it’s bursting with orange. Every reel is perfect.

  We’re saved.

  The lights come up. The other students clap and cheer. The instructors—who had lamented our earlier awful work—now trip over themselves with praise. Pablo says the footage was “extraordinary.”

  Dan jots down a comment on my notebook: Saved by the snow globe.

  I grin. I write back a simple one-word answer. Yes.

  We’re like squabbling teenagers who have decided to be friends again.

  When class ends, Dan and I are euphoric. We high-five and yell. It’s as excited as I’ve been in film school. I want to high-five everyone I meet on the sidewalk.

  8

  BMOC, WTF

  Dan’s film is fantastic. When we display it to an audience of several hundred people in the Norris Theater, the crowd roars. We have the best film of the class, and, we think, the best film of the semester so far of all the 508 groups. After we finish shooting, Dan adds some terrific stop-action animation he shot with a thirty-five-millimeter still camera. The film is just magical. The music score is beautiful. It’s a great short film.

  Our reputation is now secure. Just like that, we’re now Dan and Steve, those cool guys in film school. The 508 screenings are where reputations are made or lost. Much of the film school turns out to watch the screenings, and it’s a great evening. Dan has named his film THE ORPHAN.

  This is not to say the editing and sound mixing are a piece of cake. Noooooo. There is a time during editing when I’m ready to take Dan’s thin neck and squeeze it between my hands. I have thoughts of homicide. He moves his hands a bit and says a few words and expects me to understand. He’s exceptionally impatient with my slow editing. I remind him that I’m a quick writer, and it took him until shooting started to write a five-page script, but it doesn’t have any effect on him. He sits in an editing lab and watches my cuts. “No no no no! I don’t want that,” he says. He desperately wants to grab the keyboard from my hands—a no-no according to the class rules. I ask him what he does want. He wiggles his hands in the air. “I want … it’s gotta be different,” he says. “Don’t you get it?”

  I come home late and tell Carl and Irene of my day’s tribulations. They have pity on me and take my side in every story. I appreciate it because I’m really getting sick of Dan. Yes, sometimes I can imagine being Dan and watching me, his fat-handed film partner, slowly plonking on AVID. As much as I try to walk in his shoes, I still feel hostility toward him.

  I’m also upset at Dan because he leaves my name off the producer credits. In 508, film partners typically share producer credits on both films. But Dan, on the final cut, shows his graphics. He lists himself as director, producer, sound designer, and animator. I’m listed as editor and cinematographer.

  We have another after-class discussion. I ask him why the hell I’m not given a producer credit. “Well, you were gone a lot in the beginning. I had to do everything then,” he says. True, I add, but since then we’d been working together on everything. I remind him who bought the TV, the stepladder, various do-dads, rented the low-wattage lights, supplied the video camera, bought the food, used the Suburban. It has no effect.

  Pablo intercedes and recommends Dan share the producer credit. But Pablo explains that Dan has the final word, as it is his film. Dan goes with a solo producing credit.

  With Dan dropping my producer credit, I vow I will return the favor. But in my case, I will expect Dan to do absolutely no producing whatsoever. His job will be to shoot and edit the film, that’s it.

  Revenge is an excellent motivator.

  W

  hen I had my stroke, I thought a lot about mortality and my place on this earth. I thought about my relationships with other people and my own legacy. I felt ready to live each day as my last. I thought about Dan, who I often wanted to throttle. Did it mean I was going to forgive Dan? Did it mean I was going to be a nicer person, warmer and more generous and kinder?

  In my honest moments, I realized I didn’t know.

  For my 508, I wanted to do a film about redemption, about spirituality, about desire and greed and human nature. I started with some simple premises. What would happen if wood from the Ark of the Covenant turned up in modern times? And what would happen if it did indeed have the power to allow people to see God? What would those people do?

  I then took it a step further. In the Bible, the Son of God is born in a cold and dirty animal stall to a woman so poor and without status she isn’t even accorded space at an old-timey motel, even though she is extremely pregnant.

  So what would happen in our modern age if the vessel that allowed humans a glimpse of God was similarly low in stature? What would happen if that wood from the Ark had been transformed into a roll of toilet paper?

  When I pitch my idea to Pablo, he grimaces. “Are you sure?” he says.

  I think about it. Yes, I am sure. I tell him I want to incorporate the tale into a modern retelling of the Three Wise Men. And I want to use a porta-potty.

  Pablo is still skeptical. “But porta-potties are so … ugly. I mean, outhouses can have some real beauty. I know, I’ve built them. But a porta-potty? They’re so—industrial. There’s no beauty in them at all,” he says.

  That’s my point, I add. If a lowly place on earth two thousand years ago was a cold and dirty animal pen, then certainly one of the lowliest places on earth now is a porta-potty on an industrial job site. Pablo isn’t convinced.

  I kept honing my idea while running around the USC track. With my work on Dan’s film done (he was mixing sound into THE ORPHAN at this point), I have time to exercise again. I head out to the USC track every day at midday and run three miles. At first, I am slow,
but I keep upping the pace. Soon I am running my three miles in twenty-four minutes. Then twenty-three minutes. Finally, I’m at twenty-two minutes for my three-mile jog. At that point, I have my script figured out. The porta-potty is gone, but everything else remains.

  I talk to my parents on my cell one day while cooling off after a run and tell them my film idea. I’m soaked with sweat, shirtless, walking around the USC track. They like my idea. They’re both devout Lutherans, and I’m surprised they’re receptive to it.

  Here’s the story: We see an empty desert landscape. Morning sunlight. The middle of nowhere. Then we see a truck. It’s got a sign on the side: ARIZONA SURVEYING. Inside are three surveyors. They stop, get out, stretch, take a piss, have some chewing tobacco, and wordlessly get to work. They load up their gear and head into the wilderness, where they begin laying a line with their tripod-mounted surveying gear. We don’t know exactly where they are, but it may be close to the Mexican border because a brown-skinned woman darts through the brush unseen by the surveyors.

  During a lunch break in the shade, the three men take a nap. From out of the empty blue sky sails a roll of toilet paper, its tail flowing. It hits the smallest surveyor. He looks around, sees no one. He uses the toilet paper for a pillow.

  As soon as he puts his head on the roll, he’s transported. Our dirty, sunburned surveyor is suddenly a doctor, examining a patient in a busy hospital. But then his reverie is interrupted when he’s toed in the ribs by his boss.

  The boss tramps off into the wilderness, but the little surveyor is in awe. He doesn’t follow. Instead, he shows the roll to his coworker. When the coworker touches the roll, he, too, is transported to a dramatically different place—he’s a pianist, playing a concert.