11/24

John Sabotta
for Union Square Journal

The Cinema Mystique

Recently, I happened to see a television commercial promoting the newest Walt Disney animated film—an undoubtedly wholesome entertainment package called "The Emperor's New Groove." The exact content of this film remains, alas, no more than a brightly colored, heavily-outlined blur in my memory, but I do remember the commercial ending with an uplifting promise of a moral message—something to the effect of "life's a lot more fun when you have friends." 

It's difficult to argue with a statement like this, and one would hardly advise children that life is a lot more fun when you are surrounded by implacable enemies, but such sentiments always arouse a kind of mulish, perverse, argumentative streak in my soul. Just once, some Imp of the Perverse whispers, just once, it would be agreeable to see a new Disney animated film something along the lines of: "the heartwarming story of young Josef Vissarionovich, who found out that life was a lot more fun when you subjected your friends to rigged show trials, tortured them and had them all shot."

Ideas like these, of course, are exactly why my career potential as a screenwriter is sadly limited. And yet, a perverse Universe has arranged that I have been allowed to work at this exalted calling, not once, but twice, while harder working and more sincere people are denied, regardless of how many Creative Writing classes they've taken at the community college, or how many books on script writing they've bought.

Not that I've made any real money at it. I'm not even a member of the WGA, the Writer's Guild of America, the organization that all real screenwriters are supposed to belong to. Since I have a strong suspicion that the WGA, like many other Hollywood creative professional organizations, may very well have been founded by (surviving) friends of the same Josef Vissarionovich referred to above, I am not unduly saddened that I've never qualified for membership.

My first experience of the glamorous, fast-paced world of the modern cinema was in connection with a little-known masterpiece called SPACE ZOMBIE BINGO. There isn't much to say about this independent production, which was completed in agonizing fits and starts over a period of several years, aside from pointing out that the surest way of selling your script to producers is to be one of the producers yourself. (Incidentally, this is also one of the surest ways to incur massive debt.)

SPACE ZOMBIE BINGO was originally titled ZOMBIES FROM OUTER SPACE, and, as the title coyly suggests, is about zombies from outer space. Strictly speaking, the film is about an invasion of Planet Earth by a horde of aliens wearing black neoprene wetsuits, flippers, and welding masks with deeleebobber thingies stuck on them. It is needless to say that SPACE ZOMBIE BINGO relies rather heavily on references to Ed Wood's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE and Phil Tucker's immortal ROBOT MONSTER, perhaps a shade too heavily. 

Other references are of a more obscure nature: a friend of mine had a Japanese girlfriend who was given to saying, during moments of affection "Oh (fill in name here), let's just kill each other now—we'll never be this happy again as long as we live." When I showed my friend our completed film, he evinced mild amusement until the moment when our heroine used those exact words in token of affection for our stalwart hero, Major Kent Bendover. For some reason he did not seem to feel that this part of the film was as side-splittingly hilarious as the rest, and I have noticed that, ever since, he has been somewhat more careful about what aspects of his personal life he chooses to reveal in public.

The well-known purveyor of cinematic art, the renowned aesthete Lloyd Kaufman, very kindly agreed to distribute our finished film, and so it was that I found myself, a few years ago, accompanying the director to the American Film Market at the invitation of Kaufman's Troma Productions. Upon arrival, we found that there was only one extra pass available for guests of Troma. This meant that only one of us at a time could wander around the hotel, staring at the local operators and visiting Eurotrash trying to unload an incredible variety of mostly dubious entertainment product on each other, while the other half of the SPACE ZOMBIE BINGO creative team was obliged to conceal himself in the safety of the Troma suite.

George Ormrod, the director, was prevailed upon to wear a rubber Toxic Avenger mask when his turn to wander the halls came around, and thus attired, he aided Troma by passing out copies of the "Troma Times." My own contribution to Troma's sales efforts came in the form of nearly knocking their nineteen-inch TV/VCR onto the floor, which might be considered less than helpful.

Our brief sojourn in the rarified atmosphere of the AFM was soon over, and we returned to humdrum Washington State. SPACE ZOMBIE BINGO has only been sold overseas (rather like toxic baby formula being shipped to Third World nations). I can therefore take some comfort in the fact that I'm undoubtedly a very famous celebrity writer somewhere—perhaps there are symposiums on "Deconstructing John Sabotta" in, say, Ulan Bator or Stanleyville.

The second of my two experiences involved a person who, for reasons that will shortly become obvious, I will identify only as "Ted." Ted was a local filmmaker who had been trying to launch a career from Seattle for nearly ten years or so. During this time he completed a number of feature films, none of which had ever been distributed outside of the area: some of which had never been seen by anyone after the initial screening for the cast and friends and family of the cast.

I knew Ted fairly well, but had always managed to avoid getting seriously involved in any of his projects, all of which ended more or less in disaster, with enormous recriminations on all sides, unpaid invoices, unpaid wages. Invariably, Ted was obliged to move his place of residence, disconnect his phone and start his next project with a completely different cast and crew, since most of those who had worked with him previously were inclined to the notion of "deconstructing" Ted in a very literal sense—with a ball-peen hammer, or perhaps an axe.

Ted's endeavors were always hampered by a combination of baleful factors. The first was his innate, almost reflexive dishonesty, which was extreme and relentless, and often resorted to even when unnecessary. At one of his cast screenings, where he was showing the finished film to the actors and his investors, he made a point of explaining to everyone that he was about to show them a "35mm print" of his new film. I was looking right at him when he said this: he was standing next to a 16mm projector, on which was, naturally, threaded a 16mm answer print of the film—a film that had been shot from beginning to end in 16mm. No one cared, no one noticed except myself, and this bit of fakery advanced no purpose except to bolster Ted's rather fragile sense of self-worth. Other such falsehoods were often less innocent.

The second factor was Ted's erratic and often unfortunate aesthetic judgement. Paranoid self-pity was a significant aspect of his personality, and had a tendency to creep into his scripts. He had lived briefly in New York: returning to Seattle he embarked upon a semi-autobiographical film of his experiences. The finished film gave the strong impression that the entire city of New York had conspired to thwart and frustrate the dreams of an innocent, sensitive artiste: heartless film companies had refused to give the innocent sensitive artiste money, heartless girls had refused to allow the sensitive artiste to sleep with them, etc., etc. Not unsurprisingly, the resulting 90 minutes of mawkish and badly photographed self-pity pleased nobody, and the distribution of Ted's most heartfelt effort ended up being more or less confined to his closet.

On another occasion, he had convinced himself, in the wake of Mel Gibson's HAMLET, that Shakespeare movies were the key to financial success. Unfortunately, for him and others, he found funding for this notion, and went on to produce a locally-made Shakespeare movie. (Out of simple pity, I will withhold the name of the play in question.) For reasons unknown, he determined that it was impossible to cut any significant portion of the Bard's immortal words, but, on the other hand, the play in question would have run something like three to fours hours in total, which would, to say the least, have proven impractical. The resulting film turned out to be the equivilent of a suburban amateur theatre group (dressed in medieval costume somewhat below Renaissance Faire standards) delivering a performance of a Shakespeare play by saying all their lines very, very quickly. This film too excited little interest, and it's artistic shortcomings were compounded by the fact that the people who had been in charge of financing the production had (perhaps due to a lamentable ignorance of basic arithmetic—we must all deplore the ravages of "new math" in the public schools!) sold far more than 100 percent of the shares to various investors.

This and other train-wrecks left Ted with a considerable sense of grievance. When Quentin Tarantino (remember him?) was at the peak of his popularity and critical regard, Ted informed me that the sole reaon for his, Tarantino's, success was that—obviously—Tarantino had mysterious and scary Italian connections with which to intimidate the Hollywood establishment. This, so Ted believed, or pretended to believe, was the reason that Tarantino was working on big-budget productions while sensitive artiste types like Ted, lacking Mafioso muscle, were unfairly left out in the cold.

Arguing points like this with Ted was impossible, as he took personal offense at disagreement, and would get wound up very rapidly. (In some respects, he resembled our genial pipe-smoking friend of a few paragraphs back, Josef Vissarionovich.) Ted was a short, highly-strung individual, with features that a friend of mine (who disliked him intensely) described as resembling the little plastic pilot provided with model airplane kits. He never held a real job, either living off girlfriends or salvaging a few scraps from some of his better-financed disasters. After a while, he simply dropped off my radar screen.

When he showed up again, everything seemed to be different. He had new partners, and was back in business. He also seemed to have a more straightforward approach—instead of films about the travails of filmmakers, he now was making very commercial low budget sci-fi films. He had, in fact, completed one already and all the sets—constructed in a downtown office building basement—were still standing. He still had a few days left to use the space, and wanted to complete one more film, using the same sets redressed to be a spaceship instead of a futuristic underground city.

Amazingly (since we had never once agreed on any aesthetic or narrative aspect of filmmaking) he asked me to revise his script. Even more amazingly, he proposed to pay me do so, cash in hand, on delivery. This was so unprecedented that it seemed to argue a veritable moral regeneration on his part, and, being short on cash, I agreed.

Ted sent me a copy of his script, which I initially approached with some trepidation. In the past, Ted had been fond of filling his science-fictional efforts with supposedly hardcore, cutting-edge epithets like "Chow my box, pizza-face." (Friends of mine found this particular phrase well-nigh irresistible, and for some time after seeing it would say things like "Box my pizza, chow-face" or "Chow my pizza, box-face." )

However, nothing like that was to be found here. Unfortunately, virtually nothing at all was to be found in the original script, since, short on time, Ted had written what I can only describe as a generic "Deep Space Nine" or "Star Trek: The New Generation" episode. I now understood why Ted had taken the unusual step of allowing another to tamper with one of his scripts — normally any suggestion of changes to his deathless prose on my part were met with banshee-like howls of pain and heated accusations that I was enviously trying to destroy his sense of self-worth.

Time was running short, so I steeled myself to pull an all-day, all night session in order to try and make something faintly original out of the featureless mass Ted had dumped on me. After about fifteen minutes frenzied thought, I hit upon the idea of rewriting the circumstances of the action so that it turned out to be merely an induced hallucination on the part of one of the characters. The spirit of Philip K. Dick was undoubtedly guiding me to this happy solution, which had the extra advantage of allowing the numerous banalities and incoherencies in the original script to be explained away as artifacts of a banal and incoherent fake reality.

Indeed, the next day and night allowed me, in several ways, to feel a closer kinship with the late, brilliant (if more than slightly demented) master of paranoia and multiple realities. Eschewing such niceties as "sleep," I pounded the rewrite out in true heroic pulp-writer style and sent it to Ted.

Amazingly, Ted liked the changes, and paid promptly upon delivery. Ted paying anybody promptly and in full was almost frightening, and I took it as one of the omens of approaching Armageddon, along with showers of blood and sightings of the Whore of Babylon.

But the wheels of Fate, inexplicably delayed, were about to reconfigure themselves in a more familiar pattern. (A pleasantly meaningless metaphor, to be sure.) The seeds of disaster were being sown (possibly by the wheels of Fate, or perhaps the Whore of Babylon. "I am triumphantly mixing metaphors because that is what they are intended for when they follow the course of their secret connections" – V. Nabokov).

Ted's intention was to shoot the entire film in three days. Everyone has read that Roger Corman shot THE TERROR (with Jack Nicholson and Boris Karloff) in three days. Many people have concluded that they too can film an entire (non-porno) feature film in three days. Unfortunately, despite what most popular film histories claim, Roger Corman did not film THE TERROR in three days, and this bit of misinformation lurks like a landmine, ready to explode underneath anyone who tries to take it seriously.

Filming was to commence on a Friday, and continue through Saturday and Sunday. All filming was planned for the same set—there were no location or exterior shots. The very first thing early Monday morning, the people who actually owned the basement expected Ted to be gone.

Faced with this set of circumstances, Ted decided to use a two camera set-up. This meant that he would have one camera filming the actors in medium shot, while at the same time another camera was getting necessary closeups. (Roughly the same method is used for television sitcoms.) This makes it possible to get far more shots completed in far less time.

This is one side of the equation. The other side was that, after all, this was a very low budget film, and Ted had very little money to spend on film stock. Therefore he planned for a very low shooting ratio. A Hollywood film might shoot, say, 20 hours, or 40 hours of film for every 1 hour of film that actually appears on the screen. This would be referred to as a 20:1 shooting ratio, or a 40:1 shooting ratio. Ted planned, instead, to work at something like a 4:1 ratio, or a 3:1 ratio. This meant, in practice, that nothing could be done over more than once, perhaps twice.

The jaws of the trap are now beginning to appear—they are marked "time" and "film stock" respectively. However, the trip mechanism is not yet apparent, although the victim's unwary foot is descending as we watch.

On Thursday evening I showed up on the set, interested in how my immortal words were to be presented. The low -ceilinged brick-walled basement had been subdivided into various sections with plywood partitions. These partitions were covered with surplus junked computer monitors, egg cartons, keyboards, and innumerable other pieces of vaguely futuristic-looking debris, then spray-painted in mottled blue and black. Properly lit, with a few working monitors and some flashing panel lights, the effect was fairly convincing. Supplementing the small number of professional movie lights were large numbers of quartz-halogen hardware-store worklights, a useful expedient. Actors were rehearsing their lines, volunteers were unpacking equipment, and Ted, in his element again, was ebullient.

The two 16mm cameras were set up, and some film student types were loading them. As I watched, one of the "cameramen" expressed complete bafflement at threading the film through the mechanism of his camera, and I was obliged to show him how to do it. This struck me as a somewhat disquieting development, although its full, dreadful ramifications were not to become apparent until much later.

Filming commenced on Friday and, at first, everything went smoothly. Despite certain defects as a human being, Ted was a fairly efficient technical director. The cast was extremely professional, and had been rehearsing together for some time previously. I allowed myself to think that everything was going well.

The curse seemed to have been lifted.

Unfortunately, not all the cast were professional actors. Ted had neglected to inform me that one of the parts was to be played by a complete non-actor—in fact, a pretty but completely brainless stripper. She had been in the previous film but had caused no problems because she had had virtually no dialogue, and had little else to do but run around and, now and then, take her clothes off.

She didn't show up on the set until well after everyone else had arrived, and, it turned out, had not been rehearsing with the rest of the actors. There was something more than slightly odd about her—her stiff mannerisms, and her habit, on-screen or off, of talking in a bizarre, "little girl" voice. While everybody else retired between setups to go over their lines again, she tended simply to stay put on the set and stare off into space, rather like a ZOMBIE FROM OUTER SPACE herself. The reasons for this behavior, and much else besides, became all too clear later.

All unknowing, I had given this person large sections of critical dialogue. When she tried to deliver this dialogue, problems arose. She began to forget her lines, at first forgetting small parts, then more and more as time went on. She complained that she couldn't pronounce difficult technical terms like "molecule." And she ruined take after take.

This would have been bad enough under normal circumstance. But now the fatal treacherous hidden aspect of a two-camera filming setup came into play. Just as having two cameras rolling at the same time enabled Ted to complete shots twice as fast, the same factor allowed Strip Club Girl to ruin expensive film stock at twice the rate she normally could have. And, as she got nervous, she started flubbing more and more of her lines.

Strains in the formerly smooth-running machine of the production now became apparent. The independent, shoestring budget film THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT had just come out, and several of the actors were discussing it's phenomenal initial success. Ted (not unexpectedly) commenced to inform them that the film in question was worthless, a fraud, a hoax, a publicity stunt, etc., etc. Passing by, and hearing this torrent of abuse, I said "Catfight, Ted! Meooowww ,Ffffffffttttt! Hisssss!" Ted wheeled on me and, slightly crouching, favored me with a mirthless death-head's grin that reminded me of lips peeling back from the teeth on a corpse. Things were not going well.

Without going into gruesome details, the upshot was that early on Sunday, with much of the film still to be shot (and let us not forget the Monday morning deadline) Ted ran out of film stock.

Ted went into full, all-out frenzy mode. With a superhuman effort, Ted managed to persuade Alpha Cine Labs to open on a Sunday and allow him to purchase more film. Filming continued, now very much behind schedule.

Under mounting pressure, Strip Club Girl came apart, and soon proved barely capable of delivering any lines at all. I found out the reason for this much later. In an extremely ill-advised attempt to stay awake and remember her lines, Strip Club Girl had taken to slipping off into a secluded part of the basement and making use of that well-known aid to memory, crystal methamphetamine. In fact she was smoking it, no doubt believing that the faster the crank got into her head, the sooner she would be in shape to deliver her lines The meth added to the perception that everyone hated her (not entirely an illusion, by this point) and her mental and emotional state plunged downwards at a dizzying rate.

Filming slowed to a crawl as Ted was obliged to break up her dialogue into single, discrete chunks capable of fitting into her tiny, meth-fumigated little brain, and as he abandoned shooting with both cameras to save film.

All this leads up to one supremely bleak moment. It is 5:00 – 6:00 Monday morning. (My memory, understandably, is a little hazy on this point.) I, at least, have gone home and gotten some sleep from time to time. No one else has.

Ted has been up for four days straight, and he now looks like a victim of shellshock, complete with thousand-yard stare. He seems to be vibrating slightly.

The other actors are exhausted, and several of them have full-time day jobs they have to go to in a hour or two.

They have all been trapped in this basement together, among fiberboard sets festooned with surplus computer monitors spray-painted black, the rest of the cast and crew silently (and some not so silently) hating Strip Club Girl, who by now is practically catatonic. Earlier in the evening—around 1:00—she had had a dramatic crystal-aided nervous breakdown, curling up in a corner like a fetus and having to be coaxed back to the set, wasting more time.

I idly think that it wouldn't be a bad idea to attach fishing line to her arms and legs and operate her like a large, clumsy puppet. Then I remember, thankfully, that it's not my film, after all. Not my money going down the sinkhole.

There are one or two—absolutely necessary—shots left. Ted has to be out of the building in a hour or so—more to the point, the actor he needs for these last shots has to leave shortly in order to go home and get ready to go to work. Once the sets are gone, they are gone for good, so this is the only chance he'll get to get these last, critical shots. Without these shots, a large part of the movie will actually make no sense at all. It will be unreleasable garbage. Four days of hard work and thousands of dollars irretrievably wasted. Another disaster.

There is only one roll of film left—twelve minutes of footage—in Camera 2. Any mistakes cannot be made up with a retake.

The two jaws of the trap—"time" and "film stock"—loom ominously over our heartwarming little scene. The Whore of Babylon is lurking in the background.

The actors are in position. Slate in, slate out, and Ted calls "Action."

Everything is going fine.

Camera 2 stops in the middle of the shot. The "cameraman" steps back, says "Camera out."

Ted turns on him. "Why the hell did you stop shooting?"

And the explanation comes back. "The battery on the camera is run down."

It turns out that the "cameraman" had rented the camera on Thursday, and had noticed at the time that there was only one battery provided with the camera. Had he said anything to anybody about it? No. Had he bothered to put the battery on the charger, say, Saturday night, when there had been a chance to do so. No. Why not? Don't know.

Of course, since the two cameras are of completely different design, this means that the film has to be laboriously removed from Camera 2 and laboriously rethreaded onto Camera 1 in a light-tight changing bag, working by touch, effectively ruining any chance of getting the last few vital shots.

The trap slams shut with a horrible grinding, crunching sound.

Fate reasserts itself with a vengeance.

At this point I decided to leave, having seen more than enough. What transpired after that, I am not sure. Afterwards, Ted seemed unwilling to talk about exactly what had happened.

Possibly, at least for a few moments, he wondered if life would not be more fun if you subjected your friends—or at least, your camera crew, or your stripper tweeker actress —to rigged show trials, tortured them and had them all shot.

Release of the spaceship film seems to have been put on hold indefinitely—probably until Ted can figure out how to conjure up vital covering footage out of nothing. (I recommend a careful study of Kabala and gematria, myself. "The righteous could make a missing scene, if they wished." I think that's in the Zohar.)

The last I had heard from him, he had left his previous girlfriend and taken up with another (non-tweeker) actress, who had persuaded him to start work on a filmed version of her (highly unconvincing) former life as a prostitute. He outlined the various adventures of his girlfriend/ex-hooker (all of which were suspiciously just like episodes taken from twenty years or more of made-for-TV movies on the subject) and expressed the opinion that (as usual) it would be a "sure thing" and that "nothing like this has ever been done before." However, I was not asked to contribute any work on this epic whore saga, and I can't say I volunteered to do so, either. I lost touch with Ted again soon afterwards, and my brilliant career as a screenwriter seems to be in abeyance, for the moment. Such is life.

© John Sabotta 2000  All rights reserved