Well, this past weekend was the world wide premiere of our humble little Movie here in Phoenix, Arizona. Even though the theater chain exhibiting the movie was gracious enough to let the movie screen in one of their theaters, since they didn’t really have any faith in the fact that anyone would show up to the flick, they only gave us one day, and that day was Sunday. When was the last time you’ve ever heard of a movie playing in a theater for one day? Um… never. But, fuck, man, it’s in the theaters and that’s what was important, and if the movie did well enough the theater would extend an offer to keep the movie in theaters for a more traditional run.
There was little money for promotion and publicity (read: there was no money for promotion and publicity) and we decided to try and scam and rely on all the free press we could get. My wife spent a lot of time diligently calling the press, making and keeping appointments, sending screeners, hustling and pimping the movie to any media type that would take her phone call. Through all the hard work and headache and stress involved with all of this she managed to get commitments from every single outlet that had agreed to take a look at the movie. In all, there were about eight newspapers and radio people that were going to write and or broadcast something, either a review or just an informational write up about the movie, screening times, and things like that. You have to understand these were verbal commitments, in some cases flat out promises that this would happen. Take a wet and wild fucking guess as to how many of these seven actually did what they said they would do.
TWO.
It’s a swift kick in the cock and balls. What the fuck is this? Since I haven’t dealt with media types in any real capacity, I’m not sure if this kind of shit is status quo, or perhaps we’re getting some sort of special treatment. There were a few hours of righteous indignation where we tried calling these people back and give them WHAT THE FUCK YOU COCKSUCKING LIAR routine. A couple of calls were actually made, but in the end we decided that there wasn’t really a point in doing this. It would not offer any satisfaction.
So, let’s do some math here. We didn’t pay for any advertising because we were counting on reviews and various news media write ups, the local media fucked us, and this adds up to the word not getting out about the movie. Basic principles here: no will come to a movie they don’t know about. That’s nice. And just to refresh your memories a bit, the reasoning behind having a screening in the first place was to garner some reviews and articles for the movie in what might become a domino theory for taking the movie to other cities with the end result, or I should say goal, being to help us get some sort of video distribution deal.
With the whole purpose of the screening spiraling down the toilet, our only hope was to have a good enough turn out to force the theater to extend the run of the movie, which would, in theory at least, make the local media take enough notice in the movie to finally do what they said they would do in the first place. We started sending out emails and got on the phones and let everyone we knew [friends and family] about the screening. We begged, literally fucking begged, them to help us spread the word.
How many people ended up coming to the screening?
Men, watch you don’t shit yourself. Women, try not to cream your jeans.
Drum roll please.
18.
Let that sink in for a second.
18 motherfucking people.
What’s the box office total?
153 dollars.
You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Okay, the press thing was unfortunate, but there was nothing we could do about that. Here’s the pisser: I know more than eighteen people. Fuck, man, I come from a Mexican family. I have more than eighteen third fucking cousins that could’ve gone to the movie. This particular math problem adds up to this: once again my friends and family have come in and given their never-ending support. To them I can only say thank you and I love you.
Motherfuckers.
Let’s examine that dollar amount again. I know it’s so goddamn big it’s difficult to wrap your mind around it.
153 dollars.
For the weekend grosses, that puts us at 135th place for movies that were playing nationally. How many movies played? 137. Now, I guess, to be fair, that’s for one day. Who knows where the fuck we’d be if we would have actually had an entire weekend?
135th place puts us just ahead of ASYLUM and SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGENCE. Yeah, fuck you Chan-wook Park. Even better, if you look at the cost per screen average, which, by the way, is really the number that matters to the dumb fuck crunchers that are making distribution and marketing decisions in the hallowed halls of Hollywood, here is a list of movies we beat [again, you have to consider that this is for one day; the world can only wonder in frustration what the results would be if we had the weekend]: CINDERELLA MAN [eat shit Opie], plus the other two mentioned above.
Is it necessary to mention that we will not be asked to extend our run?
This throws the master plan into flux, and now there’s no fucking telling what our next step is going to be.
Good times, good times.
There’s a scene in the movie that occurs at around the 32 minute mark. The subject of a documentary is about to go into her first porn shoot. She’s dressed in a school girl uniform and is sitting down on a bed waiting to start. The cameras start to roll and the director begins to talk the girl through the scene. As the direction she is giving the girl begins to get more explicit, the sound cuts completely out and the rest of the scene is played in complete silence.
A little background is in order.
When I was writing the first draft of this script, my wife and I were just dating. Originally, the scene described above was quite a bit different. It was far more graphic. It was essentially showing the entire pornographic shoot in all its nude pumping and thrusting glory [everything except actual penetration], and ended with the character being given a towel to wipe the jizz off of her as she looks at the camera humiliated and ashamed but also thrilled at just making so much damn money. To wax my own car for a second, the scene was pretty fucking great. The idea was not just to be exploitive and show some skin, but to throw an audience into a situation that is completely and utterly foreign to the theater going experience. You take a character that has hopefully become a rather endearing character for the audience, despite her monumentally idiotic life choices, and you throw her in a situation that is a train wreck. The audience knows what the character is about to do is wrong, stupid, and sure to lead to disastrous consequences, but they are unable to stop it and must in fact endure what becomes essentially a torture scene. The scene was graphic, in your face, on the edge, totally insane for a mainstream theater [delusions of grandeur on that one], and I was so fucking proud of myself for having written it. Being fresh in love, I couldn’t wait to call my wife and tell her about the scene and then sit back and wait for the praise of what a revolutionary genius I was and how she was the luckiest girl in the world to share in my greatness.
This wasn’t exactly her reaction.
After I had finished telling her of the scene, there was silence on the other end. This is never a good thing. Well, my wife was not only disgusted by the scene, she was disgusted that I had even thought of something like that, let alone taking the time to sit down and write the fucking thing out. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew the disappointment in her voice. It was crushing, and, in all honesty, it pissed me off. Who the fuck was she? She didn’t get it. She didn’t realize what I was trying to do. The scene stayed in the script and once it was finished I immediately sent it off to her. She like the script, but still hated that scene. Over the next couple years, as I was busy re-writing the fucking thing ad nauseam, the now notorious scene stayed in the script. The longer it remained, the more it angered my wife. It got to the point where she would read the fresh version of the screenplay, get to that scene, and quit reading. She couldn’t continued. She was sickened by the fact that I hadn’t taken that scene out. This eventually lead to some knock down, drag out fucking fights where two of the most stubborn people on the planet was trying to convince the other that they were right. One such argument damn near caused us to get into what would have been a hell of a nasty accident. Finally, I said to her, “Listen, your character is the documentarian. Our finished movie is really purposing to be one of her documentaries. You’re the director. You’re in that situation. What the fuck are you going to shoot? If you don’t shoot what’s going on in the bedroom, what the fuck are you shooting?” It was her idea to turn the cameras back on the documentarian and have her reaction to what’s going on be what the audience sees.
I thought this was a brilliant idea. The movie becomes the documentarian’s story in the second half anyway, so it makes sense that she would do this, and it actually worked better than what I had written. I’m actually so fucking glad that I didn’t shoot the scene as I had originally written. I wish it hadn’t taken me two years to realize my mistake. It’s virtually impossible to deal with sex on camera as a subject, it invariably becomes sex as object, and since I had written the scene there have been too many movies that have done basically what I planned on doing so by the time my movie would come out it would look to be behind the guard instead of advancing it. This is not to say that a scene like that advances anything. I’ll expound on this point in a minute.
So, the scene was re-written and it now was going to show the reaction of the porn director and the documentary crew, but you would still hear the porn shoot off screen. I now had another problem. How the fuck am I going to record the porn scene sounds and have them not come out as completely retarded and hilarious. I had painted myself into a corner that I didn’t know to escape from.
The night before we were going to shoot this scene I had a minor epiphany. I just happened to be watching a movie called IRREVERSABLE. This is an overrated, pretentious piece of shit flick that had been getting an infamous reputation, as well as heaps of both praise and disdain, for a supposed real rape scene that occurs halfway through the movie. For over a year I had been reading about the movie and this scene. So much had been made about the scene that watching the movie I had a queasy, uneasy feeling that this graphic and brutal scene was coming up. I was actually a little nervous as I was about to watch the movie. Now I’m finally watching it and I think it’s a joke. The movie itself sucks. It’s a cliché revenge story that wants to be meaningful and arty. The rape scene comes on and I’m watching it and, yes, it appears to be real, but it’s a fiction. The fact that it is looks real only makes the fiction that much more noticeable. Monica Bullucci is not being raped. She’s not being viciously beaten. She’s not being terrorized. It’s a trick. It’s slight of hand. I then remembered two things simultaneously. One was something I had read from David Mamet. He wrote, “There is no real difference between DUMBO and PLATOON. One is no more real than the other. Each do their respective jobs really well.” The second thing is that I remember an article in Film Comment that I had read years ago about a documentary directed by Abbas Kiarostami [for the life of me I can’t remember the title of the doc, but I think it was HOMEWORK]. Anyway, in that movie Kiarostami took the sound out of a scene of the movie because the song these kids were singing in the scene was banned by the Iranian government. By leaving the scene in the movie but taking the sound out, Kiarostami was making a political statement.
Insert light bulb above my head.
I knew how I was going to shoot my scene. I was going to take the sound out and let the reactions of the documentary crew and the porn director play in complete silence. This would solve a number of problems. One, I wouldn’t have to worry about a porn scene soundtrack that would end of sounding fake and lame. Two, I would have a somewhat audacious scene that is now filled with all kinds of layers and subtext and all the other shit that makes a storyteller wet his pants.
Once again I’m so proud of myself for coming up with this I don’t know what to do. The scene is shot, it comes out exceptionally well, and editing together it works perfectly. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie and I couldn’t be prouder of it.
Here’s the problem: there hasn’t been a single fucking person who has watched the movie that figured out that the sound is supposed to cut out at that moment. The ones who have watched the movie on DVD think there’s something wrong with their player, and while the scene is playing they are trying to fix the problem. In the theater, I was told that people were going to get the management to fix the sound in the theater. This is a scene that I have fucking agonized about for years. I finally get it to a point where I think it’s fucking amazing, and no one gets it. As a storyteller, I haven’t gotten the necessary ideas to the audience. So, does the scene work or not? Well, it doesn’t if the audience doesn’t understand what the fuck I’m trying to do.
What’s the lesson learned in all of this? I haven’t a clue.
There was little money for promotion and publicity (read: there was no money for promotion and publicity) and we decided to try and scam and rely on all the free press we could get. My wife spent a lot of time diligently calling the press, making and keeping appointments, sending screeners, hustling and pimping the movie to any media type that would take her phone call. Through all the hard work and headache and stress involved with all of this she managed to get commitments from every single outlet that had agreed to take a look at the movie. In all, there were about eight newspapers and radio people that were going to write and or broadcast something, either a review or just an informational write up about the movie, screening times, and things like that. You have to understand these were verbal commitments, in some cases flat out promises that this would happen. Take a wet and wild fucking guess as to how many of these seven actually did what they said they would do.
TWO.
It’s a swift kick in the cock and balls. What the fuck is this? Since I haven’t dealt with media types in any real capacity, I’m not sure if this kind of shit is status quo, or perhaps we’re getting some sort of special treatment. There were a few hours of righteous indignation where we tried calling these people back and give them WHAT THE FUCK YOU COCKSUCKING LIAR routine. A couple of calls were actually made, but in the end we decided that there wasn’t really a point in doing this. It would not offer any satisfaction.
So, let’s do some math here. We didn’t pay for any advertising because we were counting on reviews and various news media write ups, the local media fucked us, and this adds up to the word not getting out about the movie. Basic principles here: no will come to a movie they don’t know about. That’s nice. And just to refresh your memories a bit, the reasoning behind having a screening in the first place was to garner some reviews and articles for the movie in what might become a domino theory for taking the movie to other cities with the end result, or I should say goal, being to help us get some sort of video distribution deal.
With the whole purpose of the screening spiraling down the toilet, our only hope was to have a good enough turn out to force the theater to extend the run of the movie, which would, in theory at least, make the local media take enough notice in the movie to finally do what they said they would do in the first place. We started sending out emails and got on the phones and let everyone we knew [friends and family] about the screening. We begged, literally fucking begged, them to help us spread the word.
How many people ended up coming to the screening?
Men, watch you don’t shit yourself. Women, try not to cream your jeans.
Drum roll please.
18.
Let that sink in for a second.
18 motherfucking people.
What’s the box office total?
153 dollars.
You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Okay, the press thing was unfortunate, but there was nothing we could do about that. Here’s the pisser: I know more than eighteen people. Fuck, man, I come from a Mexican family. I have more than eighteen third fucking cousins that could’ve gone to the movie. This particular math problem adds up to this: once again my friends and family have come in and given their never-ending support. To them I can only say thank you and I love you.
Motherfuckers.
Let’s examine that dollar amount again. I know it’s so goddamn big it’s difficult to wrap your mind around it.
153 dollars.
For the weekend grosses, that puts us at 135th place for movies that were playing nationally. How many movies played? 137. Now, I guess, to be fair, that’s for one day. Who knows where the fuck we’d be if we would have actually had an entire weekend?
135th place puts us just ahead of ASYLUM and SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGENCE. Yeah, fuck you Chan-wook Park. Even better, if you look at the cost per screen average, which, by the way, is really the number that matters to the dumb fuck crunchers that are making distribution and marketing decisions in the hallowed halls of Hollywood, here is a list of movies we beat [again, you have to consider that this is for one day; the world can only wonder in frustration what the results would be if we had the weekend]: CINDERELLA MAN [eat shit Opie], plus the other two mentioned above.
Is it necessary to mention that we will not be asked to extend our run?
This throws the master plan into flux, and now there’s no fucking telling what our next step is going to be.
Good times, good times.
There’s a scene in the movie that occurs at around the 32 minute mark. The subject of a documentary is about to go into her first porn shoot. She’s dressed in a school girl uniform and is sitting down on a bed waiting to start. The cameras start to roll and the director begins to talk the girl through the scene. As the direction she is giving the girl begins to get more explicit, the sound cuts completely out and the rest of the scene is played in complete silence.
A little background is in order.
When I was writing the first draft of this script, my wife and I were just dating. Originally, the scene described above was quite a bit different. It was far more graphic. It was essentially showing the entire pornographic shoot in all its nude pumping and thrusting glory [everything except actual penetration], and ended with the character being given a towel to wipe the jizz off of her as she looks at the camera humiliated and ashamed but also thrilled at just making so much damn money. To wax my own car for a second, the scene was pretty fucking great. The idea was not just to be exploitive and show some skin, but to throw an audience into a situation that is completely and utterly foreign to the theater going experience. You take a character that has hopefully become a rather endearing character for the audience, despite her monumentally idiotic life choices, and you throw her in a situation that is a train wreck. The audience knows what the character is about to do is wrong, stupid, and sure to lead to disastrous consequences, but they are unable to stop it and must in fact endure what becomes essentially a torture scene. The scene was graphic, in your face, on the edge, totally insane for a mainstream theater [delusions of grandeur on that one], and I was so fucking proud of myself for having written it. Being fresh in love, I couldn’t wait to call my wife and tell her about the scene and then sit back and wait for the praise of what a revolutionary genius I was and how she was the luckiest girl in the world to share in my greatness.
This wasn’t exactly her reaction.
After I had finished telling her of the scene, there was silence on the other end. This is never a good thing. Well, my wife was not only disgusted by the scene, she was disgusted that I had even thought of something like that, let alone taking the time to sit down and write the fucking thing out. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew the disappointment in her voice. It was crushing, and, in all honesty, it pissed me off. Who the fuck was she? She didn’t get it. She didn’t realize what I was trying to do. The scene stayed in the script and once it was finished I immediately sent it off to her. She like the script, but still hated that scene. Over the next couple years, as I was busy re-writing the fucking thing ad nauseam, the now notorious scene stayed in the script. The longer it remained, the more it angered my wife. It got to the point where she would read the fresh version of the screenplay, get to that scene, and quit reading. She couldn’t continued. She was sickened by the fact that I hadn’t taken that scene out. This eventually lead to some knock down, drag out fucking fights where two of the most stubborn people on the planet was trying to convince the other that they were right. One such argument damn near caused us to get into what would have been a hell of a nasty accident. Finally, I said to her, “Listen, your character is the documentarian. Our finished movie is really purposing to be one of her documentaries. You’re the director. You’re in that situation. What the fuck are you going to shoot? If you don’t shoot what’s going on in the bedroom, what the fuck are you shooting?” It was her idea to turn the cameras back on the documentarian and have her reaction to what’s going on be what the audience sees.
I thought this was a brilliant idea. The movie becomes the documentarian’s story in the second half anyway, so it makes sense that she would do this, and it actually worked better than what I had written. I’m actually so fucking glad that I didn’t shoot the scene as I had originally written. I wish it hadn’t taken me two years to realize my mistake. It’s virtually impossible to deal with sex on camera as a subject, it invariably becomes sex as object, and since I had written the scene there have been too many movies that have done basically what I planned on doing so by the time my movie would come out it would look to be behind the guard instead of advancing it. This is not to say that a scene like that advances anything. I’ll expound on this point in a minute.
So, the scene was re-written and it now was going to show the reaction of the porn director and the documentary crew, but you would still hear the porn shoot off screen. I now had another problem. How the fuck am I going to record the porn scene sounds and have them not come out as completely retarded and hilarious. I had painted myself into a corner that I didn’t know to escape from.
The night before we were going to shoot this scene I had a minor epiphany. I just happened to be watching a movie called IRREVERSABLE. This is an overrated, pretentious piece of shit flick that had been getting an infamous reputation, as well as heaps of both praise and disdain, for a supposed real rape scene that occurs halfway through the movie. For over a year I had been reading about the movie and this scene. So much had been made about the scene that watching the movie I had a queasy, uneasy feeling that this graphic and brutal scene was coming up. I was actually a little nervous as I was about to watch the movie. Now I’m finally watching it and I think it’s a joke. The movie itself sucks. It’s a cliché revenge story that wants to be meaningful and arty. The rape scene comes on and I’m watching it and, yes, it appears to be real, but it’s a fiction. The fact that it is looks real only makes the fiction that much more noticeable. Monica Bullucci is not being raped. She’s not being viciously beaten. She’s not being terrorized. It’s a trick. It’s slight of hand. I then remembered two things simultaneously. One was something I had read from David Mamet. He wrote, “There is no real difference between DUMBO and PLATOON. One is no more real than the other. Each do their respective jobs really well.” The second thing is that I remember an article in Film Comment that I had read years ago about a documentary directed by Abbas Kiarostami [for the life of me I can’t remember the title of the doc, but I think it was HOMEWORK]. Anyway, in that movie Kiarostami took the sound out of a scene of the movie because the song these kids were singing in the scene was banned by the Iranian government. By leaving the scene in the movie but taking the sound out, Kiarostami was making a political statement.
Insert light bulb above my head.
I knew how I was going to shoot my scene. I was going to take the sound out and let the reactions of the documentary crew and the porn director play in complete silence. This would solve a number of problems. One, I wouldn’t have to worry about a porn scene soundtrack that would end of sounding fake and lame. Two, I would have a somewhat audacious scene that is now filled with all kinds of layers and subtext and all the other shit that makes a storyteller wet his pants.
Once again I’m so proud of myself for coming up with this I don’t know what to do. The scene is shot, it comes out exceptionally well, and editing together it works perfectly. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie and I couldn’t be prouder of it.
Here’s the problem: there hasn’t been a single fucking person who has watched the movie that figured out that the sound is supposed to cut out at that moment. The ones who have watched the movie on DVD think there’s something wrong with their player, and while the scene is playing they are trying to fix the problem. In the theater, I was told that people were going to get the management to fix the sound in the theater. This is a scene that I have fucking agonized about for years. I finally get it to a point where I think it’s fucking amazing, and no one gets it. As a storyteller, I haven’t gotten the necessary ideas to the audience. So, does the scene work or not? Well, it doesn’t if the audience doesn’t understand what the fuck I’m trying to do.
What’s the lesson learned in all of this? I haven’t a clue.
