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Independents' DaySan Jose indie filmmaker Alejandro Adams knows that making a movie is easy—getting it shown is the hard partby Richard von Busack on Jul 01, 2009BECOME an indie filmmaker! Earn big money! No experience necessary! That seductive promise inherent in the rise of digital film and home-editing technology may be at an end. Blockbusters elbow out the offerings of small-budget filmmakers, who try to get a word in edgewise past this week’s cinematic event. It is a paradox that, even as theatrical features become easier and cheaper to make, the movies proliferate so quickly that it is harder and harder to find an audience for them. Intense competition for big-money movies results in the release each week of as many as a dozen little films no one’s heard of, with minimal budgets for promotion and just one week to make it or break it—mostly in the name of garnering blurbs for the DVD release. And those are the films that have distributors. Just ask San Jose filmmaker Alejandro Adams about how many obstacles an indie film must surmount. Adams earned praise from Variety for his 2008 film Around the Bay. The trade paper’s Dennis Harvey has called Adams “an arresting talent.” Well-regarded indie-film blogger Karina Longworth and The New York Times’ Phillip Lopate (and I, for what it’s worth) added to the positive press for Around the Bay, an impressionist tale of a Los Gatos businessman and the estranged daughter he hires to work as a nanny for his son, her half-brother. Despite the ink and some well-received local screenings, including Cinequest, Around the Bay continues to bounce around the film-festival circuit without a distributor. Not so long ago, the Woodstock Film Festival sent Adams a typical “Thanks, but no thanks” letter. “Again,” Adams tells me, ruefully. “We’re talking about a festival known to program scrappy low-budget fare. The festival made its name on DV [digital video] features with no light and bad sound. The rejection letter had a hand-written message in the margin: ‘Too bad we didn’t have room for this—the actors were good.’” Adams’ second Silicon Valley–based film, Canary (2009), also turned out to be too strange for the alleged cutting edge. Canary is far less narrative-driven than Around the Bay even. This dystopic, near-future story of organ harvesting was made with no blood, no gore and no sci-fi gadgets. Adams concentrates on one strange cog in the wheel: a dark, solitary girl (Carla Pauli) who works for the biotech concern Canary International, capturing unwilling donors and recycling their guts. She connects the film’s disparate parts: a focus group, an office full of chit-chatters and a few half-deranged individuals who have intuited what’s really going on. Triple Threat What I’ve always loved about the Silicon Valley is that local artists never dress themselves up in the ’tudes that make San Francisco such an ego-fest. The valley’s plainness and practicality kill peacocks fast. Perhaps the most talented and ambitious avant-garde filmmaker who has ever lived this area, Adams is a family man, Mr. Mom-ing it, editing his films on a laptop at various local cafes. He is married to Marya Murphy—a Twitter personality in her own right. Adams is a creative writer who moved into the realm of film. As he works, Adams opens up his process, pushing hard, experimenting and working on budgets that couldn’t even really purchase shoestrings. “In Canary,” Adams notes, “I was expressing nothing more than a notion, allowing the camera to articulate an idea that I hadn’t allowed myself to fully formulate. I guess that’s the ultimate form of organic or intuitive cinema, and I’m not sure to what degree it can be sustained in the context of an ostensibly narrative film. [I was] turning dreams into cinema, basically, as Wim Wenders dealt with in Until the End of the World.” And now Adams is editing his third film, Babnik, while working on two new films simultaneously. “I get stuck in editing,” Adams confesses, “and as in the case of my three previous longer films, I get locked in an in-depth process where communicating with human beings is not required. My films are heavily improvised, and it takes a long time to edit them. Doing two new films side by side is logistically simple; while there’s no overlap of the cast, the crews are identical. There’s no dramatic correlation—but one of the films is very emotionally difficult.” His two new films are titled Child of God and Amity. Adams is in the middle of his hectic side-by-side filmmaking marathon even as I talk to him. Before he began making these films, Adams promised, “Child of God will offend anyone who isn’t offended by Babnik and Amity.” Adams is shooting the two films locally on weekends. “Child of God, the film I’m making on Saturdays, is not so emotional,” he explains. “The Sunday film, Amity, is very much so. I should have scheduled the heavy one on Saturday and the lighter one on Sunday.” In Amity, the title character, a young girl, is about to graduate from high school. Her very estranged father, an Air Force officer, turns up unannounced on her doorstep with the surprise present of a limo. Amity wants no part of him. So the limo’s driver (a former military man himself) and the officer head off together for a self-destructive evening. The potential for trouble in a night out for these two charged-up men accounts for the film’s heaviness. Adams notes, “Amity’s father is based on my father—the irascible Air Force guy who’s as charming and magnetic as he is dangerous. It would have been hard enough to face the film had my father not died three days before we started shooting. And, no, I wasn’t expecting it.” Adams’ Sunday film, Child of God, is “very unusual for me, it has the kind of broad ideas that aren’t my cup of tea. I’m using the red-state, blue-state power struggle between a church and a variety show that’s renting their building. It’ll be the culture war in miniature; I’m still not sure how I’m going to be handle that in terms in tone—of comedy or drama.” Hipster Backlash After the crunch time of getting these three films into viewable shape, Adams proposes a concentrated attack on the film-festival circuit in time for the fall submission deadlines: “I want them to all come out of the hopper at the same time.” Meanwhile, Adams is watching his earlier films as they slowly rise in the world. This spring, Canary screened at the “Migrating Forms” program at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. In July, Canary will play at Fantasia, a Montreal film festival dedicated to science fiction and fantasy; “lots of European press there,” Adams notes hopefully. AFI in Los Angeles has agreed to look at Canary without an entrance fee. And there’s a possibility that one of the key magazines about independent film will list Adams as one of the 25 directors to watch in 2009. “Clearly, the brand is growing, regardless of how few times the film is screening,” Adams says. “Now there’s a backlash. I’m hearing the word ‘hipster’ used about me, probably because some very powerful people in the indie film community are giving me recognition.” Adams is a regular presence on Twitter, quick to reply to the critics and fans and to comment on the various feuds in the cinema world. There he can be found discussing the beyond-indie scene with intelligence or live-blogging a recent cable TV screening of The Magnificent Andersons. I griped that it was abominable to be thumbing away when you should be watching the movie. Adams countered that he knew the film well. Certainly, the track of comments he and others left was intelligent, ranging from close looks at the compositions, the underuse of Agnes Moorhead and the strangely good performance by the usually mediocre Tim Holt in Orson Welles’ second masterpiece. Adams is and has been a provocative writer on the rise and fall of “mumblecore”—an indie rebellion that, like all indie rebellions, was co-opted fast. Making ‘Babnik’ Last winter in Sunnyvale, I watched Adams at work directing a scene for Babnik. I was there for 2 1/2 hours, and mostly what I saw were people crossing the room. I sat on a spiral staircase behind the reflectors and the boom mikes. The improvised studio was quiet enough to hear the droning of a B-52 wheeling overhead from Ames/NASA. The scene involved girls auditioning for a modeling agency (maybe legitimate, maybe not), doing the pony walk for a slightly sinister group of Russians. One girl posed, sitting, smiling prettily, on the edge of a three-legged stool. Behind me in the break room, an older woman, a chaperone for one of the female players, lounged in a conical chair. (“Only one minor in this picture,” Adams says later. “I would have liked to have had more. It’s more creepy that way.”) The scene was completely unexplicit but completely insinuating. A model entered, wearing high heels, rolling her shoulders in her tight, low-cut ultramarine dress; a Russian emigrant, Misha, newly in the sex trade looking her over, pantomimed to her how to thrust out her hip and ordered: “Tip your head. I want to see your eyes.” Adams told Michael Umansky, the actor playing Misha: “You need to manhandle her more ... harder, faster, whirlwind. Touchy-touchy. Be brutal. Make this clear to anyone watching that this is a kind of sexual manipulation.” Alejandro padded around on rubber sandals in a jersey and shorts. He took care of business, cutting the air conditioning because of sound leakages. He instructed some Russian extras in the background to talk to each other so the sound would percolate in from off-camera. Directing is a matter of directing traffic as much as directing performances. “Your walk is a little campy, give me something more natural”—this was Adams’ note to one of the Russians’ security officers, who sported, for the part, a peroxided blond pompadour. Or pimpadour if you will. Adams’ work was efficient. He did not expend an enormous amount of time on retakes or reverse angles but insisted on constant momentum, both in the foreground and in the back of the frame. He was working from a script outline. Earlier, Adams had sent me a page describing the day’s work. It was more suggestion than script, explaining “the elaborate but practical-minded flattery” going on in the scenes. Misha, the director of Russian Models Ventures, would be sweet-talking the girls, repeating the sales pitch he uses to sell them worthless vitamin supplements and beauty products. Later, watching a rough cut of Babnik, it struck me that Adams’ particular angle was the work-a-day world. Babnik is a film about the bad jobs of immigrants, bad for the sellers, worse for the sold. The theme strikes me as consistent. Adams explores the solitude of a working-stiff repo-woman in Canary. The father in Around the Bay is at the breaking point from overwork in the field of venture capitalism. Adams might suspect such an analysis overemphasizes plot, when he believes that his form is more important than his content. It’s easier to write about plots than about Adams’ intense yet allusive focus, his intelligent sound design, his probing yet cooled-down use of inflammatory material and the pensive quiet force he lets loose in the actors. Kill the Auteur How does a filmmaker facing a series of artistic challenges change gears and learn to sell himself? Most recently, Adams held an online round table at his website BraintrustDV.com. The essays at BraintrustDV are both hopeful and ridden with informed pessimism. A disclaimer: I’m a full-time critic, and I haven’t heard of some of these films, either, which of course has nothing to do with their merit. Some comments: Reid Gershbein (of Here. My Explosion ... ): “I would rather have 1,000 people see my film for free than have 2 people pay me $15 for a DVD.” Noah Harlan, producer of The Vanishing Point and Plum Rain: “I believe that a performance without an audience is masturbation.” Clive Davies-Frayne, co-director of No Place: “The bottom line though is it’s all just people shouting for attention to a world that hates being shouted at. There is an answer. Mutual-marketing or tribal marketing.” Tony Comstock of the erotica/documentary series Finding the Right Fit: “With all the hype around Sundance, Tribeca, Berlin, whatever, it’s hard to accept that there isn’t any money in it.” Finally, Angelo Bell of The Broken Hearts Club weighs in: “Kill the Auteur. Long Live the Entrepreneur.” Where will these new entrepreneurs sell their films? The lineup at Tribeca this year was half what it was in 2008. The San Francisco International Film Festival runs at the same time as Tribeca—it’s ruinous that the festivals overlap, given the limited number of filmmakers and cinéastes in the world. Moreover, SFIFF folded its South Bay wing of the fest from three days, once upon a time, to no days at all this year. James Stern of Endgame Entertainment opened his conference keynote speech at the L.A. Film Festival this year with the numbers: there were nearly 10,000 films submitted to Sundance this year, of which 218 were screened, of which three were distributed. Sundance isn’t the only game in town. Moviemaker.com lists the 25 festivals worth the entry fee: two within 300 miles of us are Morgan Hill’s Poppy Jasper Film Festival in November and the Napa Sonoma Wine Country Festival. Still, Poppy Jasper’s “Art in 30 minutes or less” motto is going to keep feature filmmakers out. Of course, Cinequest in San Jose continues to be an outlet for international talents and a chance for indie filmmakers to get the attention due them. At Cinequest 2005, former Mountain View filmmaker James Ricardo played his film Sunnyvale. He retitled it Opie Gets Laid and found a small DVD distributor. Ricardo writes in: “There are all kinds of distribution these days, and I respect them all. But I guess I wanted to go with the more traditional distribution route and not just Internet only. Plus a distribution deal with a major distributor adds more street cred to your film, I feel. Maybe it’s just me but I love seeing those studio logos on DVDs and movie posters. “I still think at the end of the day people want to watch feature films on a big screen TV or on the movie screen, not on a PDA or a computer. It isn’t the same experience otherwise. And it’s not really fair to the filmmaker’s vision either.” Former Santa Cruzan Tamara Maloney, producer of the Los Angeles–made indie film A Quiet Little Marriage, says an indie film needs “a long tail of distribution. How do you market and get your film out there, for the longest period of time to the most amount of people? The Internet is opening up uncharted territory—but we still don’t know how its trajectory is going—how it will make money, how we’ll get people to see this kind of material and how to see it at home.” Link Name[/http://www.sanjose.com/independents-day-part-2-a18551] by Richard von Busack on Jul 01, 2009 |
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