By John McLean
6 April, 2006
Part Fifteen: When The Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie...
...that's amore, motherfucker!
Welcome back to the Sisyphean saga of the creation of Z: A ZOMBIE MUSICAL, coming to you from Austin, TX...the undisputed heavyweight Capitol of Independent Filmmaking.
The goal of these chronicles has been to share the experiences of making a low-budget feature, in this case, an original movie musical. If you haven't had the opportunity to peruse previous installments of "Lights! Camera! Zombies!", feel free to visit the ARCHIVES. Go ahead and read 'em now...we'll wait for you!
Okay, I lied--we went on without you, so you'll just have to catch up as best you can. Where were we? Oh yeah, for some time now we've detailed the creation and recording of the 13 musical numbers, interspersed with stories from the actual production. Now that all the songs are in the can and Principal Photography is winding down, we'll increasingly explore post-production on a movie musical, along with the all-important marketing process.
The latter is significant for all kinds of obvious reasons. It's all well and good to make a feature--hopefully something fun and unique--but getting your project noticed, splashing it onto the increasingly crowded radar of public consciousness, is an equally Herculean task. And one where many independent filmmakers fall flat.
It's the old, 'What if you gave a party and nobody came?' And it happens all the time.
Can you begin to imagine how many independent films are made each year...and how few of them you'll ever get to see? Lots of them original and slick and polished, sometimes with pedigrees from decent film festivals, and yet never to be seen by anything approximating the general public.
So as we press onward with "Lights! Camera! Zombies!", an increasing amount of real estate in our Behind-The-Scenes tales will include ideas and suggestions on how to increase the profile for your project, how to generate some buzz and ultimately achieve your original aim--sharing your story with as many people as possible, then getting a chance to do it all over again with the next story in your arsenal!
One of the premier ways to become a mote in the public's eye is through the Press, both Traditional and Internet. Even though it'll be mid-summer before our picture is completely cut and ready to show to anybody outside the Z Family, our tireless Co-Producer, Dan Eggleston, has already been ramping up the publicity efforts, securing some manner of coverage in the Austin-American Statesman, the Austin Chronicle and local News 8 Austin, inter allia.
In some cases, the unlikely fact that we're making an original movie musical--not to mention one featuring singing, dancing Zombies--is enough to attract some interest from the Press. In other cases, Co-Producer extraordinaire Dan Eggleston has helped fill some of the small, Featured Extra Zombie Roles with cameos by people who bring a bit of notoriety to the dance.
Like the majority of truly low-budget indies, we couldn't afford to hire even the most affordable Name Actors for our picture. (Parker Posey works cheap, but the bitch ain't free!) Instead we mined the best acting talent Austin has to offer, and later looked for added-value through some cool cameos.
You can do the same, for damn sure. Wherever you live, no matter how isolated, there are local citizens who are known within your community. If you can find a bit part for them to play in your project, then you have an angle for attracting local media coverage...which can lead to regional media coverage, then intergalactic coverage and so on. For example, we had a trio of small roles featuring Zombie Bums holding road signs that point our Heroine towards a particular destination in the second half of Z. Dan Eggleston was able to land not only the Mayor of Austin, the right honorable Will Wynn, but two former Mayors of Austin as well, Bruce Todd and Jeff Friedman. All of them were gracious and engaging, delighted to play a small part in helping advance Austin's independent filmmaking community, despite being plastered with Zombie Make-Up and trundled out to a city park in a chilly drizzle to shoot their roles in the dead of night.
Other cameos we've shot include Peter Bay, the Conductor of the Austin Symphony, musician Dale Watson, and the cute, energetic Whitney Matheson, who writes the popular Pop Candy column for USAToday.com, and who took time out of her jam-packed, semi-sleepless SXSW visit to do a small bit for us.
Naturally, your official web site (yo, check out: azombiemusical.com) should always be the foundation of your marketing efforts. Spend the time and energy to do it as best you can, and try your damnedest to keep it updated in the cracks of your shooting sked. Contact the Powers That Be on your favorite film-fan sites and suggest a profile of your project or an online interview or something...anything...always keeping in mind that the more mentions you get on the Internet, the higher your own project and website will rise on popular Search Engines.
Hey, you strike a few sparks here and a few sparks there and blow on 'em and pretty soon you have a crackling little fire going. Hell, the Official Site for Z--a picture which doesn't have a distributor yet and isn't even entirely finished--already averages over 15 THOUSAND hits per month...so we must be doing something right!
Think of it like this: the average Hollywood picture spends upwards of $35 million in advertising and marketing to penetrate the consciousness of the public. That's above and beyond the cost of making the actual movie. If you're creating a small, independent picture, it's a unlikely you've stashed away an extra $35 million from your budget to promote your film, so you're gonna have to come up with other ways to compete.
And competing you are, make no mistake. Hollywood studios and mini-majors release, on average, nine different pictures every single weekend throughout the entire year. At the same time, week in and week out, smaller distributors put out several times that many indies and documentaries and foreign flicks in art houses and on DVD. There's already far, far more movies out there than the average person can begin to consume...and that's not even factoring in the countless hours they spend each day devouring every other format of entertainment currently available to humankind.
All I'm saying is if you want your labor of love to be seen by anyone (and everyone) possible down the road, it's never too soon to start promoting it, by hook or crook or down on your knees before a gaudy papier-mâché altar in your closet to the Dark Lord...whatever the fuck it takes.
Of course, somewhere along the way you've gotta finish your picture. Which we're striving to do with all the gallant optimism of a Grail quest. As recounted previously, the goombah who owns the 1978 lime green VW Bus our Heroine drives throughout Z split town at the beginning of the year to move back in with his parents in Nebraska. So we're shooting a few remaining scenes here and there while waiting for dude to drag his fat ass back down here so we can complete several crucial scenes with the Bus for the end of the picture.
In the meantime, I've gotten a jump on the editing process and have begun building up Z, scene by scene, layer by layer. Even when you work quickly, on the blazing edge of the creative zone, editing can be a hugely time-consuming proposition--but every late-night second you pour into it is rewarded in the final product.
Editing involves making not hundreds, nor even thousands, but rather tens of thousands of small creative choices on picture and sound and pace...all of which ultimately add up to the finished product.
Think of editing like this: Have you ever written a meaningful letter (or, these days, e-mail) to a loved one, for example, expressing some significant issue or another? Remember how you went into the note with some kind of plan, how you thought you'd talk about A, B & C, all of which lead inexorably and irrefutably to D, which is the point you really wanna make to your loved one or whoever? But as you begin writing, you suddenly realize the REALLY important thing you want to communicate is actually L, which you hadn't even thought of previously. And that they're gonna need to grok L before you can even broach A, B & C. So you put L into your letter, right at the start, and then you realize B is just a digression and you can lose it altogether. So you take that out and your missive gradually takes shape until it's a thing of beauty, a joy forever, a veritable Ode to Grecian Urn.
Okay, now jump from your little letter to a feature-length movie with picture and sound and music, and you've still only got the Nth degree of all the creativity and choices that go into telling your story.
I mention all this because there are apparently still some directors out there who don't edit their own projects, who actually let other people create their movies for them! Not only are these directors missing much of the fun and high-octane creativity of filmmaking, but they're missing most of the point of telling their own story in the first place.
Seriously, letting another person else edit your picture is like seducing a beautiful women and then allowing somebody else to fuck her.
It's famously been said that movies are Written three times--first as a screenplay, second during Principal Photography and third when it's edited. Of these, the third phase, editing, is perhaps the most significant, because that's the final version of the story that audiences will ultimately experience.
Directors who don't edit their movies are either lazy or no longer give a shit about the story they're telling. They've already moved on mentally to the next Big Thing, whether it's another movie or their next party or whatever the fuck. Recently I was reading a blog written by a popular, A-List director, whose idea of "editing" his upcoming, highly anticipated comic book sequel was to drive his Bentley all the way to the studio lot, where the editing is being achieved by three separate teams of editors working around the clock in adjoining bungalows. This nameless director stopped in to see how they were doing, handed out a comment here and a slap on the back there, before heading out again for the more serious business of a night on the town with the latest Hollywood Starlet at his disposal.
I'm not saying Brett Ratner's X-MEN 3--errr, I mean the nameless director's generic comic book sequel--won't be good. I'm sure it'll be great. But it'll also be slightly soulless and missing a center, because the final phase of 'writing" it will have been done by a Team of Outsiders, not an individual with a vision and a serious chunk of his soul invested in it. I sometimes believe this missing spiritual core (for lack of a better term...but you know what I mean) is a significant reason why moviegoers feel increasingly unfulfilled and disappointed by Studio offerings these days.
In the end, all of this is up to you and nobody else. You can play tennis...or you can hire somebody else to play tennis for you. Color me silly, but I'd rather PLAY my own damn self. Even though I might miss a few more serves and shots than a dedicated professional, at least I would be playing MY game--and I'd be getting better at it all the time.
If you don't know how to edit, learn! There are hundreds of books and websites on the subject. Apprentice yourself to an experienced editor--which is how I started, back when movies were still cut on celluloid on a flatbed editing table with razor blades and sticky tape and "bins" weren't just icons on a computer screen, but actual bins with film clips hanging into them.
Once you get into it, once you figure the game out, editing eventually feels like an extension of your own mind and you no longer need to think about it...you just do it. This despite the fact that editing in the digital age isn't as simple as just cutting together picture and dialogue tracks for maximum impact--although that's certainly the starting point. Editing is about layers and more layers. It's about music and foley and ambient noises and specific sound effects. It's about the almost infinite varieties with which you can manipulate visual and audio assets these days.
There are portions of Z where I've put some a scene together and tweaked it and then tweaked it some more, adding layers of music and SFX and such...and even then I realize there are several more layers yet to go...a planned Voice-Over, a little "click" as a transition, a quick shot of a TV turning on with some footage playing on it. And after that I'm still gonna need to color balance and color correct the scenes I already have. And then do a final audio pass, adjusting the various audio tracks before feeling like I've reached the proverbial Top Layer. And on and on it goes throughout the rest of the story.
And then there's the Big Picture to think about. In my experience, professional editors tend to follow the screenplay too closely, figuring if they assemble the picture as close to the way it was on the page as possible then they can't be blamed if the whole thing turns out to be an abysmal piece of shit.
Whereas if you're editing your own material, a story you conceived and wrote, then you have nobody to answer to if you belatedly realize that Scene A works best if it's put after Scene C and that Scene E doesn't add anything to the story and can be cut out completely.
As it turns out, Z isn't the only independent feature I'm cutting right now. Legendary rocker Joe "King" Carrasco--who portrays the Honorary Mayor of Zomburbia in Z--was apparently engaged by my playful shooting style and hired me to edit a clever, low-budget picture he shot a year or so back, called RANCHO NO TENGO.
A small-town, DOWN BY LAW-esque tale of a loveable loser and his nutty, ambitious girlfriend, RANCHO contains a lot of the same elements that characterize my work-- energetic, playful and offbeat. But it's also different enough that editing RANCHO provides a nice separation from my labors on Z. (One of my biggest filmmaking heroes, Capt. Robert Rodriguez, often extols the virtues of chopping two pictures at once, working on one for a week, then jumping back to the other with a fresh eye and mind. This sounds like great fun, but how many independent directors have the luxury of having two separate features in front of them to edit at the same time?)
Well I got lucky this time and since January I've had the opportunity to do just that. And, I gotta say, that motherfucking Rodriguez was right! I'll often spend days and nights on RANCHO NO TENGO and come up with creative ideas or technical solutions to various problems, and then return to Z and use some of these same concepts to improve my own picture...and vice versa.
Okay, that's a lot. Thanks so much for reading this far...if, indeed, you've gotten this far! In the next installment and beyond I'll explore the specifics of editing in greater detail, along with conversations about storyboarding and the long-defunct art of original movie musicals. If you have any comments or questions or just wanna send me a free t-shirt, please write me a damn note any time of day or night!
Until then...
Release Your Inner Zombie!
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