Film Journal: August 6, 2000

The day after shooting

It was supposed to be the ABC's of cinema, the roots of the medium . In the early days of film, a couple people with a camera would go out and just film whatever was going on. Mack Sennett, the early king of comedy, made an art of this. His crew would go out into the streets of sunny 1912 LA and they would improvise a one reel or two reel short. As a matter of fact, the second film that Charlie Chaplin made was just such an improvisation. Children's auto races were going on at the Venice boardwalk on the ocean west of the rest of LA. There was a large ramp and the gravity powered kid cars would roll down and race. Sennett asked a crew to go out to the event and come back with a movie. The star was to be Sennett's new acquisition, the stage comic Chaplin, who had only made one other film so far, a not-very-promising short called "Making a Living."

And so the crew went to the kid auto races and made a movie in little more than 90 minutes. The premise was simple: a film crew was making a movie about the auto races and Charlie was going to interfere with their production. On the way out to the shoot Chaplin improvised a costume to wear as the troublemaking tramp who got in the way of the film crew. This costume that he came up with served him for the next few decades, and was the beginning of one of the most recognizable persons, manufactured or actual, of the 20^th century.

The film really had two film crews, a crew of actors which had a dummy camera with no film in it, and the real crew, which photographed Chaplin's encounters and interference with the faux film crew. This was 1913, and already the film medium was thought capable of expressing such complex ideas. Or maybe it was just a quick idea that the filmmakers came up out of lack of imagination so that they could come back with something that afternoon to make Mack Sennett happy.

Last summer, I worked with a group of friends to make a feature film on digital video. It was from a story that my friend Rob and I worked on and refined over a period of years. We had a script, though it was written in silent film form, and had broken it down and planned extensively our shooting schedule. We shot the bulk of the film in four days in Butte, Montana, which would normally be considered an abnormally fast shooting schedule, but I was willing to try something even faster.

I thought it might be a good challenge to try to shoot a feature film on a single day. Such a film, rather than being something scripted and thought out beforehand in paper, might be improvised on film, just like the early filmmakers improvised their movies. I mentioned this challenge to my friend Trevor at a Movies and Music in the park event in Stevens Square Park, and he was up to the challenge. By the next time I saw him, at a concert at which Stereolab and Sonic Youth played outside the Walker Art Center, I had a basic idea.

That idea concerned two journalists, one of which had a massive headache, the other of whom had had a strange dream that caused her to question the entire notion of her existence. Over the film, the headache would vanish but the existential doubt would grow. The headache was to be had by a photographer, and the doubt by a reporter asking "Vox Populi" type questions for a neighborhood newspaper. They would be doing this at an art fair. The reporter's existential doubt was to grow so much that by the end of the movie she would nonchalantly die.

I was interested in shooting at an art fair because it was a background that was certain to be busy and colorful. I was also interested in the dichotomy of art fair artists, who have to have great confidence in their work to put it out so for public judgement, and the doubt that both Trevor and I share about our video and film work. It takes a great deal of confidence to reproduce similar objects for sale, and to establish a film monetary value on them, and relying on people to actually pay that sale price and walk away with that object. My own video projects just cost me money and once they are finished I rarely feel confident enough about them that I could actually bring myself to ask someone to pay for them.

First Trevor thought the idea was too concrete and wanted less to go on. I said my partner Kristine would be interested in one of the roles and he thought his friend L was perfect for the other. But he also felt it might be difficult to ask it of her.

The art fair was on August 5. We decided to call the project 8500, which was the day we would be filming.

I went to Tucson for a public access conference and while there did some thinking and wrote some ideas. When I returned, Trevor, Kristine, L and I were to meet to talk about the project. Trevor told me before the meeting that L's doubts were great, but that his friend Brian was interested in the project.

As I was biking around before the meeting, I thought about how Trevor had described Brian, and my thoughts went to "Kid Auto Races in Venice." By the time I got to the meeting, I presented a changed story, one in which the two women would be making a video documentary and asking the questions about existence, and that Brian would be the Charlie Chaplin figure interfering with their work. We talked L into being a part of the project.

A week before the art festivals, L was out for good, but Trevor had talked about it to his friend Mike and Mike was interested. Mike had recently bought a Pixelvision camera at a garage sale and Trevor wanted that child's video camera to be a part of the project. We all met, Trevor and Kristine and Brian and Mike and my friend Greg and I, at the May Day Café near Powderhorn Park. We talked about shooting different parts of the film at all three art fairs that would be happening next Saturday, with bridges between the segments on the bus.

I was concerned about the group making the project being so male at this point. Five men and one woman and certainly not enough female energy. I tried talking a friend into getting involved, but she wasn't sure, and with a busy week at work, and it getting so close to our shooting date, I wasn't able to talk anyone else into being a part of it.

On the morning of Saturday, August 5, we were to meet at Ruby’s Café, across the street from Loring Park. Our plan was to begin at Loring Park, which had the smallest art fair. This was also the first year that it had been held.

Greg picked up Kristine and I and we parked about a block away from the edge of the park. As we walked to the café I noticed all the construction going on at MCTC, the college on the edge of the park. I thought that might be a good place for the opening scene.

At the cabaret we put in an order for a table for six and waited for the rest of the people to arrive. Soon Brian arrived with his friend Trish. Later, at breakfast, we talked her into being a part of the project. But she was kind of unsure, and when she went out to put more money in her parking meter, we speculated as to whether she would actually come back. She did.

After breakfast, Greg and I went back to his car to grab the equipment I brought and were to meet the rest at the construction area. While we were waiting on one side, they were waiting on the other. We eventually did find them and shot some kind of quick opening shot. I panned the camera back and forth between Trish and Kristine and fed them lines as I panned back and forth. Then we repeated the scene in a medium 2 shot, with them doing the lines based on the ones I fed them earlier.

Then we all walked to the park, past a couple people sleeping on the ground or on picnic tables.

Trevor had brought his Bolex 16mm camera and a few rolls of film. Mike had brought his Pixelvision camera, and a large supply of audio cassette tapes, which is what the Pixelvision records on. I had my Sony TRV-900 digital camera, which was the camera I would use, my Canon Hi-8, which was the camera Kristine would be using, as well as a broken super 8, a regular 8 camera, and another small digital video camera in my backpack.

The first part of the art fair that we got to in the park was the performance stage. When we got there, a drumming group was performing, but by the time we were shooting, a pair of women was dancing to Vince Guaraldi music from the Peanuts TV shows. We did some random filming and then found our first interview subject.

Kristine was to hold the camera and direct while Trish was to hold the microphone and ask questions. I had some release forms to have people sign and I had made some small business cards with this web site address. Kristine filmed the interview, Trish asked the questions, and I filmed all of them. Meanwhile, Trevor was filming with his Bolex and he and Mike were shooting video with the Pixelvision camera. After a number of our interviews, Trevor would walk up to our interviewee and wave around the Pixelvision camera in front of them, within an inch or two of their face.

We shot a couple quick scenes between Trish and Kristine, and then Brian started dancing from where the audience was. It was supposed to rain that day so I had brought an umbrella, and he was dancing with the umbrella like Charlie Chaplin might have on a rare grey day in 1913 Hollywood.

Brian told us about a food vendor who didn't have some of the food promised on his van. Mike and I went their to shoot a short scene, in which Mike purchases a pickle on a stick.

Brian had been getting in the background of some of the shots we had been filming, and we shot a scene of him with the pixelvision camera, chasing Kristine.

After we shot a short scene in which Kristine and Trish run into Mike, Brian told us of an idea that he and Trevor had worked out. A sketch artist consented to be involved with the project, and we shot an improbable scene in which the crew interviews him only to realize that he is sketching Brian, the guy they are trying to avoid.

Next we went to the bridge that crosses the small channel between the two ponds at Loring Park and shot the scene where Brian takes over the camera from Kristine and Trish. The scene we came up with was an interview with Greg, and in the scene, Greg was coming up with such a funny word soup monologue that we made him into a character for the rest of the film. His role was to hold the microphone and get people to sign releases, but now, like all of us, he was an on-camera part of the film too.

While we were shooting this film, we noticed a guy with a video camera shooting us.

We took a break and sat down, while Trevor and Mike did some more Pixel filming. We decided to scrap the idea of going to the other art fairs and decided to remain at Loring to film the rest. The afternoon was getting close to halfway over, and transportation would take out a big part of our time. Plus, we were all starting to feel weary.

Brian's first interview with an artist was a tough one. While Kristine had been asking questions about existence, Brian was wanting to ask more specific questions about the purpose and importance of art. One of the questions we wanted him to ask was "does the artist create the work or does the work create the artist." Our first interview subject, an artist with a stand, had short answers that challenged Brian's questions.

Then we moved on, shooting a couple other interviews. At one point I saw fellow public access producers Thomas Booker and Pete Rhodes walk by with a camera and so we involved them in our project, giving our actors an excuse to reprise some of what was going on.

By this time we were by the horseshoe pits at the park, and somebody came up with the idea of doing some monologues. We decided that each person of our crew would sit next to the one of the numbers at the head of the pits and improvise a monologue about their doubt about the project or their character or whatever. While we shot this, a group was actually playing horseshoes and added nice clinking sound effects.

When I sat down to do mine, it was a bit intimidating. I had three camera facing me, which is what we had been doing to everyone all day.

By now we were getting tired and ready to quit - Trevor even laughingly suggested that we were done. But we had one more scene to film, one in which Kristine would interfere with my camera and take over the film, turning it into complete anarchy. Brian talked one artist into being involved and we shot the scene. Once Kristine had taken the video camera from me, I fished the broken super 8 camera out of my backpack, put in a roll of film, and shot some film with that. We all moved to the floating dock on Loring Pond and buoyed around shooting video and film while the bells at St. Mary's Cathedral rang and rang and rang. The martini shot.

We were done.

We went the Buca and had a huge dinner of ravioli and seafood fettucini, and spaghetti with baseball sized meatballs and wine and beer. We all seven sat around a big round table and ate up our wrap party.