Filmmaker blog by writer / producer Georgia Menides

3/29/08 - From the Mansion

One advantage to shooting during Hurricane season was that the cheapest way to house our cast and crew was to rent three luxurious houses.

Granted, one of these houses was also the beach house in the movie itself, and where at least 90% of our filming took place, leaving Jon, Andrea, our DP, and First AC desperately trying to find some serenity in a house that terminally stank of rotten seaweed, and was chalk full of sand, sea grime, dirty towels, wet bathing suits, equipment, paperwork, unimaginably disgusting craft service debris all over the place, including their beds, and 7 consistently overflowing trash bins fully equipped with the thousands of unavoidable maggots that start crawling around the moment your garbage hits the Florida sun. But still, it was a mansion on the beach.

Granted, the house we rented for our Hollywood actors quickly morphed into a wild on E frat house with raging parties and all subsequent destruction as every local actor ended up crashing there almost every night. But still, it was a beautiful house.

And granted, the main production house, at the height of filming, ended up housing 4 producers, 3 actors, the guy shooting our “making of” documentary, our stunt coordinator, make-up artist, 2 pa’s, and my cousin Billy who could’ve picked a less convenient time to decide to start his life over in Miami, setting up his base camp on a mattress in Doug and my bedroom. But still, we were living in an elegant mansion on a plush golf course in the Lely Island estates, and it was unlike anything I’d ever experienced in my life. And although yes, at the height of production, the place was an experiment in utter chaos, when we rolled into Naples on July 15th of 2005, it was just me, Doug, Evil, and Paul; four incredibly broke artists suddenly living in decadence.

I am not trying to give off the impression that we spent July lounging by our pool sipping martinis all day, although yeah, for sure, occasionally we had our moments of fun in the sun. We swam at sunset. I ran barefoot on the beach. Paul drove around Naples salivating over the mansions and picking out which ones he would own someday. Doug and I had hot romantic beautiful sex in our private Jacuzzi. We fired up the grill by the pool… good times were had. Sometimes networking with our top liaisons to the Naples community led to boating, swimming, and lots of drinking on Key Waden Island, where Evil, a staunch New England boy who hated the beach and the summer, and never even owned a pair of shorts, ceremoniously cut his jeans into his first pair of shorts and jumped into the ocean for the first time ever. A jelly fish stung Doug right on his nuts on that same boat trip, but this is all meandering back story that outlines about 5 percent of our time at best.

We were embedded in serious pre production. We were casting, both Hollywood and locally (and yes, part of that meant dealing with Vice President Santos), we were nailing down locations, raising money, hiring our art director, make -up artist, first AD etc.  We were trying to find water insurance that did not cost half our production budget… difficult during hurricane season. We were learning the feeding habits of sharks and barracudas, dealing with SAG, cementing our hurricane back up plans, handling the local media feeding frenzy that pounced upon us from the moment we arrived in town, hitting up local companies for donations of food, coffee, clothes anything to even slightly bring our costs down. And of course, we were dealing with Turtle Time Inc and Bonita Springs politics, trying to figure out how to shoot on the beach at night. These plans involved everything from the legal such as petitioning the mayor, to the very illegal such as boating out to a deserted island in the keys and just doing it guerilla style, and all things actor and turtle related will be discussed in full in the next blog.

Jon and Andrea were embedded with us this whole time, there were just still embedding in Los Angeles, which was crucial to casting and to the attachment of our director of photography, Brian Crane.

Anonymous Content had all but assured us that they would help replace Trevor, whose inclusion in the project was, at this point, precarious at best. But we sure as hell weren’t getting any of their clients unless we were shooting on film, or at the very least, high definition. No good agent is going to let their clients leave LA for 5 weeks for an indie unless distribution is at least a slight possibility. And clearly, for a distributor to take any feature seriously, it can’t be shot on a dvx-100. We decided to shoot on high def, as it was cheaper and easier than shooting on film, but it still meant we needed more money (of course). We also needed to pick equipment from a cannon of cameras we had never seen before and knew nothing about whatsoever not to mention all associated lights, lenses etc. And we needed to find a crew who knew how to shoot real high hef, a medium that Doug, Paul, Evil, Andrea, and I had absolutely no experience with, and Jon’s experience was pretty limited to say the least.

With three Hollywood actors now attached to our business plan, and with some newfound media exposure, Andrea and I managed to attract five new investors to the project and got a little more money out of an existing one. Meanwhile Evil sussed out camera packages and Doug talked to a wide range of camera operators in Florida.

In the end, our director of photography came from Hollywood, indirectly from Trevor Morgan, and as far as we were concerned, directly from heaven. As a younger boy, Trevor had starred in a film called Rumor of Angels which was shot by an established and connected cinematographer, and part of the American Society for Cinematographers named Roy Wagner. At this time Roy working as the Director of Photography on Fox’s House MD. Trevor had introduced Jon to Roy a few years back, and the two had hit it off.  Jon had continued to keep that relationship alive over the years. Once the shooting high def was on the table, Jon set up a meeting with Roy to see if there was anyone he could recommend that might be willing to shoot Still Green for next to nothing, in exchange to escape LA for two months, live on the beach, and shoot a movie set in a tropical paradise with plenty of room for stellar nature shots.

Roy told Jon that his top lighting guy on House, Brian Crane, was also a great cinematographer; one of his shorts had even been on the top 10 list for an Oscar nomination. But being known as a top lighting guy and due to the nature of the Hollywood system when it comes to below the line union structure, opportunities to shoot feature films were few and far between for him.

Brian was itching to shoot another feature; he needed more days to get into the cinematographers union and was an avid nature buff. Roy told Jon that in support of Brian’s career, he would release him from the House set for those 6 weeks if he wanted to do the movie. Jon set up a meeting with Brian. Brian was all about an unpredictable adventure, loved Jon, loved the script, loved the Gulf Coast where he’s had many fond vacation memories, and he signed on.

Sometimes a low budget indie like ours can benefit from the unforgiving and fierce animal that is the studio system for below the line crew. This network is brutally competitive, tough as hell, and all about working your way up, and by working I mean slaving. If you aren’t able to give 100 percent of your time and energy to it, you aren’t going to get the work.

Working with Brian gave me a glimpse into this complicated and competitive world. But I have since seen it up close and personal, now living in LA as roommates with Evil, who is now a part of IATSE local 728 electrics union (a feat to be commended), and is entirely entrenched in it. I have watched Evil spend the last two and a half years devoting an unbelievable amount of time, back breaking labor, 14-18 hr days, constant networking, money, classes, working any and every job he could get his hands on, coming home from a shoot that started at 5pm and ended at noon the next morning, only to sleep for a few hours and go right back and do it again for 14 days straight, and now he has finally gotten into the union. Being union means he will spend the next 5-7 years giving the same amount of time and energy to union gigs and it will be a long time before the work for him is just guaranteed if ever. This system is gut wrenching, but necessary, as it weeds out the folks who come out to LA to “make it” in the film industry thinking a good script, a sexy pair of legs, or an eye for pretty lights will be their ticket in. But it does not leave a whole lot of room for creative latitude to switch your niche in the industry.  If you are like Brian, and you have spent the past 20 years working our way to the top of your field in electrics, you can’t just suddenly say “Ok I want to be a cinematographer now, who’s hiring?” You’d have to start from the bottom rung all over again, but not on an indie set.

Here is where the union of the studio system and the independent film industry can be beautiful and symbiotic. The attachment of Brian to Still Green was awesome for his career, awesome for our careers, and proof that “indie vs studio” is a bullshit and unproductive way to look at this industry. Sometimes it isn’t about the “us against them” mentality. Sometimes we are all just artists collaborating.

But at the time, I wasn’t thinking about the studio system or the ins and outs of Local 728.  I was thinking about my boyfriend.

Although unquestionably an uber blessing to our film, there was some duality to the attachment of another Director of Photography to Still Green. It meant that Doug’s heart had to break a little bit.

My dream was to see one of my scripts come to life on screen, and I never would have gone through the mania of producing a feature if it wasn’t because my dream was coming true. Doug’s dream, at that time, was to shoot a feature, and he was enduring this mania for the same reason, his dream was coming true. Every project we’d done in the past years together, all the videos, the television shows, the shorts, and the work on other people’s features, all the energy and time we’d invested into bringing other people’s visions to life was all leading us to this point. Doug would shoot his first feature and it would be one of my scripts. This belief in the marriage of my writing and his cinematography was what had fueled us to make Still Green in the first place, and what had kept us going as production got harder and harder every day. Now here we were in Florida with all of this really happening for us, and suddenly, everything changed. My dream was still coming true. Doug had to surrender his to the alter of “what was best for the film.”

From the moment shooting on high def was first brought up, we knew the chances were high that Doug wouldn’t be able to actually shoot the movie, as he had absolutely no experience with these cameras. The original plan was that Doug would remain the Director of Photography and find a camera operator from FL with the technical experience who would work under him. This operator would handle the camera itself, but shoot based on Doug’s vision, shot list, angles etc. But by the time we were making an offer to Brian Crane, we realized this idea was absolutely absurd. For one thing, we could never even suggest that a DP way out of our league in the first place come onto the project and handle everything camera and lighting related only to answer to the creative visions of  23 year old kid who had never shot a feature. Second off, Brian wouldn’t be where he was in the industry if his creative visions weren’t amazing. In short, the moment Brian said yes, everything about Doug being the DP went out the door.

Yes, at the time, Doug was a 23 year old kid.

But Doug did not handle this situation like a kid. He handled it like a man.

Doug swallowed his pride when answering questions from family and friends of “weren’t you supposed to shoot Still Green?” He not only continued to sweat his way as a producer through the rest of our time in FL, but every day, he spent those 12-14 hours on set, working with Evil as a grip (the only two we had by the way). Every day in that grueling August heat, after staying up all night dealing with his producer responsibilities, he’d haul equipment, set up lights and do everything he could do help Brian.

Skipping ahead for a second, sometimes what at first seems like the worst thing that could happen becomes the best thing that could ever happen; and such was the case with this. By the time Doug was looking at those gorgeous shots from the camera viewfinder, and learning more from Brian than he’d ever dreamed possible, he was over it. By the time we were editing the movie, and sifting our way trough 40 hours of absolutely stunning footage, he was glowing with excitement. He couldn’t believe that our movie was going to look this beautiful. He couldn’t believe how lucky we were to have snagged a Director of Photography like Brian.  And from that point on, all talk of the fact that Doug was once going to shoot Still Green never even came up, or maybe it did, but it barely even registered.

A lot of people find their calling through trial and error and it seems like a lot of people find they love producing this way. Through this process, producing, which was once simply a means to an end, has become Doug’s absolute passion. It has become unquestionably where his interests and talent lie in the film industry, and it has become “the dream” for him. Whenever we talk about the future of Uncovered Productions and about getting into production for our next film, and I even joking say “well maybe you could shoot it.” He just rolls his eyes and laughs.