Spin The Bottle Movie

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INFLUENCES FROM FAR OFF PLACES

As I inch ever so closer to shooting my first feature film, Spin The Bottle, a voice has whispered to me, from some far off place, to watch movies I love that I haven’t seen for awhile.

I tend to watch a group of about 30 movies at least once or twice a year.  I never tire of them as an audience member let alone a moviemaker.  

But, this voice whispered, maybe re-visiting some of the movies that opened up the cinematic world to you as a teenager and movie student might bring you back in contact with that buzzing feeling you had when you realized all the possibilities.

When you hear such a voice, you should give it its due so it doesn’t go away frustrated and unappreciated.

So I trudged to my local library and rented Luis Bunuel’s 1963 surreal masterpiece from Mexico, The Exterminating Angel, and Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 Polish masterwork, Ashes and Diamonds; two movies I loved when I saw them years ago.

The Exterminating Angel is one of my three favorite Bunuel movies (Viridiana and Los Olvidados  are the other two).  It tells the hilariously surreal tale of a group of rich Mexican city-dwellers who meet one night for a dinner party. At the beginning of the movie, all the servants, save one Butler, feel strangely compelled to leave the Hostess’s house.  After the dinner, all the Rich Dinner Guests feel strangely compelled to stay in one room.  Slowly, to their horror, they realize that some unseen force is keeping them from leaving (and the Servants, By-Standers outside from coming in) and the Dinner Guests slowly descend, across several days, into barbarism, homicidal thoughts, suicide-love pacts, and assorted dark comic hilarity as they try to observe societal manners in a totally surreal situation.

The Exterminating Angel’s underlying subconscious logic is perfect like an unflawed diamond.  You laugh as the Rich Dinner Guests start to snipe at each other.  Resentments surface. Affairs are revealed.  The illusion of the Rich being the “civil class” is comically slammed down.  Yet, the movie is stranger and more mysterious than that. It gets at deeper human truths through a comically non-sensical and nightmarish situation.  I always laugh (like big guffawing belly laugh type laugh) when an unexplained bear appears in the mansion walking up and down the stairs.  Since the guests can’t leave their room, they can only watch the bear in confusion.  What does it mean? Who knows. Does it work?  Completely.

Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 Polish movie, Ashes and Diamonds, was the third in a trilogy of movies dealing with Poland during World War II.  It all takes place across one roughly 24 hour period from the botched assassination of a Communist Minister through the night when the Assassins work up the nerve to try again to the aftermath the next morning.

Ashes and Diamonds achieves something miraculous for me.  While it brilliantly, ironically, intensely examines all the cross-currents that were affecting Poland at the end of World War II-Communism, poverty, the ravages of the war, social ladder climbing, what kind of country Poland would be after its liberation-it is also a deeply moving story about two young people who, against their natures, fall in love across one night.  I think the best movies have a simultaneous clarity and mystery about them.  You feel, subconsciously, that they work and yet you don’t feel beat over the head by a “message”.  Ashes and Diamonds is one of the best examples of this kind of small miracle.  You sense that the young couple (the amazing actor Zbigniew Cybulski, a beatnik Polish powerhouse actor burning with the same modern incandescence as Marlon Brando or Toshiro Mifune, who plays the Assassin, and Ewa Krzyzewska who plays Krystyna, a hardened guarded bartender) represent the frustrated potential of young Poles in the 40’s and 50’s, victims of their country and continent’s brutality.  And yet they are also living breathing young people who have an amazing affair across the night.

Ashes and Diamonds is also one of those rare movies where the amazing atmospheric style, camerawork, cross-cutting, editing completely supports, enhances, and deepens the story.  It is one of the proof positives that content and style can weave together into a wholey unique magical fabric.

*** Watching these movies again, I awakened to a sense of cinematic potential that had been slumbering, probably too long, in the darkened rooms of my consciousness.  Thank you voice for recommending I see these.  Now I hear you whispering about mid-60’s Fellini like Juliet of the Spirits and Toby Dammit. . .

[spinthebottlemovie]

Quick Notes on Long-Lasting Inspirations

The push and pull of movie-making for me is somehow studying, learning, drawing nourishment from the great masters who speak to you while insisting to yourself that you find your own voice.

Here are just a few movies, some I’ve mentioned before, that are bottomless wells of inspiration for me. I watch these movies again and again and discover, to my amazement, that my joy is undiminished.

Faces and A Woman Under the Influence written and directed by John Cassettes and starring Gena Rowlands (and Peter Falk in Woman) find furious energy, spontaneous combustion, and yet clearly painstakingly crafted poetry in the day to day striving for love, acknowledgement, determination to live life on own’s own terms.

Smiles of a Summer Night written and directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Bjornstand is one of my favorite Bergman movies. Bergman crafts a Mozartian comedy that somehow, through all the genuine laughs, is actually tough minded at heart.

Jean Renoir’s masterpiece, The Rules of the Game, one of my top two favorite movies of all time (along with Seven Samurai), achieves the near impossible: it celebrates and detachedly observes the messiness of life.  Renoir joyously embraces and angrily reveals human nature in all its messy, silly, sincerity and absurdity.  

The Fireman’s Ball, directed by Milos Forman, masterfully juggles the craziness of a huge group event.  In one evening, Forman, his actors, crew, writers, find a way to take a snapshot of a whole culture (Czech society under 1960’s Communist rule). Again Forman is somehow able to make a movie that is simultaneously an intimate warm close up and astute epic wide shot of what it means to be a human being interacting with other human beings.

Movies on my mind this 7th of July, 2015

[spinthebottlemovie]

SPIN THE BOTTLE JOURNAL, JANUARY 1st, 2015

We're going to go dark for a few months as we gear up to shoot SPIN THE BOTTLE.  Please stay on the look out.  We'll post new content as soon as we can.

[spinthebottlemovie]

Spin The Bottle Journal, December 1st, 2014

There's a lot to do. A lot I need to do.  I work to get in time each day to finalize the storyboards.  Because of the nature of the past few months, I have different versions of the boards (drawings or notes on the shots that will make up the movie).  For a while I figured I'd just look between all these notes  on shooting days and make final decisions. But I sense that's a bad idea.  So now I'm drawing/collating a definitive version of the boards so there's only one document to reference.  I sense having one definitive document will be the way to go once we're in the pressure cooker of trying to make our days, get the movie shot. It will save time and streamline creative decisions. 

At the same time, I can't just do the storyboards.  There are a lot of producing duties that need to get done if we're to make our start date.  So the best metaphor I can come up with these days is that of a cook who must work to prepare all the dishes for a meal simultaneously and hope that all the plates ready when the guests arrive.

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Spin The Bottle Journal, November 1st, 2014

It's funny making a movie.  The more committed you get, the more you realize that to be effective you need to be constantly revising, evolving, adapting your initial plans.  You don't really revise the creative vision.  In a sense, you need to make sure, above all else, you are true to that.  But the nuts and bolts of what your day should look like. That changes.  It's such an old chestnut but it's true. You learn by doing.  I'm frustrated I didn't start DOING much earlier.  But hopefully I'm learning. 

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Spin The Bottle PRE-PRODUCTION BLOG October 1st, 2014

So the blueprints are done. Now it's time to begin construction on the building.  I'm nervous because I know and feel I should have been spending much of this time as well completing the final necessary fundraising, dealing with the nuts and bolts important producing details to have a firm enough infrastructure to get through the production process.  

But I also sense that if you don't have a really good plan to execute, all the money and producing in the world isn't going to make it a good movie.  Plus, when you're making a low budget independent movie, you don't have much time once you're shooting.  From everything I've learned, you're just scrambling to get the shots you need to have some semblance of a complete movie.  

So I put the time in here, at the head of pre-production, to revise the storyboards, write out the breakdown lists (lists of needed items for each scene: lighting lists, sound lists, props lists, production design lists, etc.) so that I would know, basically, exactly the movie we want to make.  My hope is that this preparation will help me communicate the movie more confidently to everyone I speak with.  My hope is that this preparation will save us time on the set and give everyone working on the movie a sense that we know where we're going.

We'll see. I know the hard part is just beginning.  But it's nice to have a plan.

[spinthebottlemovie]

Spin The Bottle PRE-PRODUCTION BLOG August 20th, 2014

I keep forgetting that the only way you make any headway on anything is to start, to fail, to learn from mistakes, and to adjust.  Making a movie with limited resources feels like scaling a mountain made of loose shale rock.  You make some gains. The mountain shifts. You slide a bit.  You swear at the skies. You start climbing again.   

So much of this seems so common sense and yet I still find myself battling nervousness, hesitation, procrastination.  But I know progress is like exercise.  You start off slow, awkward, and winded.  But if you push through for a few weeks, the exercise becomes habit. You get better. You go further. Bit by bit, you start to get things done.

Right now, still in the early stages of organization and pre-production, these blogs are going to sound like they were written by a committee of lawyers. I apologize for the lack of specific information.  

But I hope and pray, day by day, these vague abstractions start to turn to tasty morsels of explicit information. 

[spinthebottlemovie]

Spin The Bottle PRE-PRODUCTION BLOG July 20th, 2014

We're starting to get more intense with pre-production on SPIN THE BOTTLE.  It's a good feeling and it's about time.  Right now I'm very much trying to make the most of this early time to lay a good, solid foundation.  I can sense that it will get harder and harder to make relationships, reach out to vendors, investigate, get good quotes the closer and closer we get to the shoot.

When I was in film school, we learned a camera-handling technique for difficult shots.  If you're the camera operator, you should start in the most difficult position for you physically then slowly, as you make the camera move, end up in the most comfortable position.  At first that struck me as counter-intuitive but actually doing it made me realize right away why you should adopt that approach.  You do the hard stuff first, early, up front.  If you do, you have a chance of feeling relaxed and confident enough to actually do good work.

There's no point writing more about it.  I have to do a lot of hard work.

In the meantime, I wanted to give another shout-out to a great inspiration: Satyajit Ray's 1970 "Days and Nights in the Forest" (Aranyer Din Ratri).  

If you've never seen a movie by Satyajit Ray, please watch a few of his movies.  You can't go wrong by starting with the Apu Trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito, The World of Apu 1955-1959) which he made early in his career.  But he has so many masterpieces, so many amazing movies, that you'd be just as fine if you watched The Big City (1963), Charulata (1964), and The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha (1969).

His 1970 movie "Days and Nights in the Forest" follows four male friends on a weekend escape from the city to go camping in the forests of West Bengal.  There, they meet women who have a profound effect on each of them and make them aware of their own materialistic and often shallow world views.  

The movie, like so many of Ray's movies, is at turns very funny, very light, then suddenly stingingly sharp in its critical view, then deeply, profoundly emotional.   Akira Kurosawa once said (and I'm paraphrasing slightly) if you haven't seen Ray's movies you haven't seen the sun, the moon, and the stars.  Leave it to Kurosawa to communicate better than anyone how important, vital, and amazing these movies are.

The camerawork and lighting in this movie are particularly striking. As are Ray's mastery of close ups and framing people and capturing the emotions they're feeling yet try to hide.  

There's more on Ray at our Curious Productions blog: http://curiousproductions.tumblr.com/  if you have an interest in reading about THE COWARD (1965), another of his movies that is deeply inspiring as we start our trek to shoot SPIN THE BOTTLE.

Thanks as always and more to come.

For more information on DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065417/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_19

[spinthebottlemovie]

"The All in One Day/One Night" Movie

SPIN THE BOTTLE takes place almost completely across one night.  It follows a group of friends who throw an annual party. This is the last of their 20's and it spins completely out of control.

We've all ready talked about a few movies that are at the top of this genre: Roman Polanski's first feature, KNIFE IN THE WATER (1962) and John Hughes' SIXTEEN CANDLES (1984).

I was thinking of what other movies really nail this condensed time and space narrative.  John Hughes actually did it again in THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985) and, in my opinion, most successfully in FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF (1986), one of the great all time comedies.  

What makes FERRIS so great is that somehow the surprising emotion that wells up at the end of the movie feels earned despite the fact that we've really only been with these characters for about ten hours of their life.  But Hughes also ends the movie on a great comedic set piece so he doesn't take the emotion too seriously or have it suddenly become saccharine. 

Another great, "all in one night" movie, though in a totally different genre and about as far left-field from SPIN THE BOTTLE as you can get, is George Romero's original zombie masterpiece NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968).   It's ridiculous to really talk about it as a reference point for a ensemble comedy and yet there's so much to learn from it.  The delineation of characters in quick broad strokes.  The variety of dilemmas that Romero is able to devise out of one location and a handful of characters. 

Since I'm going for off the wall choices here, I'll also throw out Ingmar Bergman's WINTER LIGHT (1962).  I love this movie and think it is hands down one of Bergman's best.  But it's funny to hear how so many people don't like it.  This movie follows a Lutheran Minister across one day as he grapples with his own faith and the problems of people in his community.  Yet it too builds to a very powerful finish that feels completely earned even though we've only been with the Minister for a few hours.

One of our original inspirations when we wrote the script was Thomas Vinterberg's Danish movie, FESTEN/THE CELEBRATION, (1998).  This movie is still a complete knock out.  Extended family gathers at the family-owned hotel to celebrate Father's birthday.  Then Son reveals, in a perverse toast, that Father molested both Son and his twin Sister who recently committed suicide.  Everybody refuses to believe this is true.  It's hard to believe that as powerful as the movie is, it plays mostly as comedy and farce.  Shot on the cheapest video cameras possible at the time, I think there's a really good argument to be made that this movie really opened the floodgates to commercial cinema shooting on video.  

And now that I'm writing about these kinds of movies, I realize that two silent masterpieces-Carl Theodore Dreyer's THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928) and F.W. Murnau's SUNRISE (1927)- both take place across a full day at most.  

Most recently, Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke have really dominated this genre with their BEFORE SUNRISE (1995), BEFORE SUNSET (2004), and BEFORE MIDNIGHT (2013) trilogy.  SUNRISE and MIDNIGHT take place across a roughly twelve hour period of time.  SUNSET takes place across just two to three hours.  Yet in each movie, we see these snapshots of the love/romance/eventual partnership between Jesse and Celine.  

And now of course, this gets me thinking about the clearest antecedent to the BEFORE movies, Eric Rohmer's MY NIGHT AT MAUD'S (1969).  I'm gonna stop here because I'd probably just end up listing a dozen more movies that shot to mind.  But this is a great place to end because MY NIGHT AT MAUD'S is a beautiful wonderful movie.  A deeply Catholic Engineer through a series of mishaps ends up spending the night at the house of an independent recently divorced woman named Maud on Christmas Eve.  Though the Engineer wants to marry a young woman he's met at church, he finds himself seriously drawn to Maud who is funny, intelligent, honest, down to earth.

I can't ruin the end for you so I won't speak about what happens.  But this was one of those movies where I actually was really torn about how it ended.  I think you're supposed to feel this but it's just such a wonderful charming night, you never want it to end.

***

I feel it would be really stupid to draw conclusions or some single point right here from all these disparate movies. So I won't.  But they do all make wonderful use of their limited location and time frame.  Something we are striving to do in SPIN THE BOTTLE. 

[spinthebottlemovie]

I FOUND THIS INSPIRATION UNDER THE COUCH: STAGECOACH (USA, 1939; directed by John Ford)

It's funny where you find creative juice.  I was watching John Ford's STAGECOACH (1939) this week and realized how much is in it that can help with SPIN THE BOTTLE.

It's about 9 people in an enclosed space.   Director John Ford does an amazing job of balancing all the characters throughout the entire movie.  As exciting as it is as a Western, it's really an ensemble piece about nine people, all with different goals, who go through an intense experience together.  

John Ford is one of my favorite directors and STAGECOACH is my personal favorite movie of his. I love so many of his movies.  Saying that STAGECOACH is my favorite is a little like saying of Goya's black paintings, "The Dog", is my favorite. It's true. But all of those damn paintings are masterpieces.

FYI, here's the painting:

And here's a link to all the Black Paintings:

http://www.wga.hu/html_m/g/goya/9/index.html

But I just wanted to say that watching STAGECOACH again (as I do once or twice every year) made me appreciate what a feat, masterclass, inspiration it still is. The structure, the performances, the story, the filmmaking are all spot on. 

To find out more about STAGECOACH:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031971/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Also, check out a clip from the movie by clicking the image below:

[spinthebottlemovie]

SPIN THE BOTTLE May 26th, 2014

We're just now getting feedback from a few trusted peers, family, friends, on a two minute short we shot last week about the launch of Curious Productions and the making of Spin The Bottle this year. 

When I had finished typing the email asking my friends and peers for feedback, I went to hit send and my finger, suddenly, surprisingly, hovered hesitatingly above the mouse. It would be so much easier to just post the short and not suffer the pain of critical feedback. 

I suddenly remembered with some bracing shock, how vulnerable and painful it is to get good feedback.  

But I brought my finger down and hit send because I know this part of the process is crucial.

Getting good feedback is hard, both for me, and I'd imagine for the folks giving it.  There's the temptation to just send it to people who will give you a kind of "great job, good work" pat on the back response.  As encouraging as this is, it isn't making the project any better.  

You have to send your work to people who will honestly tell you what doesn't work and what you might do to work on it. 

There's also the danger that you get too influenced by a really brutal response. The kind that goes something like "Tear the whole thing down and do it this way!".   While that person might be right, for himself or herself, you have to make sure you're protecting the vision that motivated you to make the piece in the first place.

I don't have any great answers on how to walk that tightrope.  But I've noticed that if you do your best to not be defensive, to really value talented people's thoughts, help will come to make the piece better.  

Stephen King once said that, for him, if he gets the same note from the ten people he sent his novel too, then he knows he needs to address it.  But if he just gets a certain kind of note from one person, he can consider it but it might also be a note which he can absorb but from which he can go in a different direction.

Shooting this short (with the collaboration of Kevin Johnson without whom it wouldn't have gotten done) was a great way to get thrown back in the middle part of the pool.  Oh man, did I remember a lot.

So I'm grateful just to be reminded of that.  Here's hoping the lessons are truly learned. 

P.S. The short should be up on these channels in the next few weeks: 

VIMEO (http://vimeo.com/curiousproductions)

&

YOUTUBE (http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtpIddept-Gqyr07xI0PCsA?sub_confirmation=1)

[spinthebottlemovie]

Spin the Bottle: Movie Inspirations and Influencers

I feel there's a funny paradox at the heart of making movies. If you want to do it well, you should watch, read, study, absorb, as much as you can of film, music, tv, literature, theater, painting, opera, video games, whatever.  But then you need to set out to do your own thing.

So embracing the paradox (and hoping it hugs back), here are a few movies that have really acted as guiding stars for our movie, but I hope, in the end, we don't chase them but make our own thing:

KNIFE IN THE WATER (Poland; 1962): This movie follows a stuffy Husband, his frustrated Wife, and an insecure young Hitchhiker on an afternoon boat trip.  Testosterone and sexual tension ratchet up until they boil over.   This was Roman Polanski's first feature and it's one of the best first features ever. Polanski and his collaborators make their limited resources work for them.  It's almost as if the movie was reverse-engineered. What's great about this movie is that you never think about the limitations. You just get absorbed in the story and how it will turn out.  Will the Wife and Hitchhiker sleep together?  Is the Husband's somewhat brutish but informed view of life the right one in the end?  

LOVES OF A BLONDE (Czechoslovakia; 1965): I'll probably write about this movie eighty more times.  Milos Forman and his collaborators tell a very wry, comedic, yet emotionally wrenching story, of a young anchor-less factory worker and her affair with a seemingly endearing piano player who turns out not to take the relationship seriously at all.  Two shared characteristics I notice of many great movies are honesty in observation of human behavior and unsentimentality.  This movie has both those qualities like a forest has trees.  

THE RULES OF THE GAME (France; 1939) and SMILES ON A SUMMER NIGHT (Sweden; 1955):  I pair these two movies together because they form a continuum in a sub-genre that I love but is, challengingly hard to add onto: the "house in the country" genre.  You've seen this kind of movie before: a group of people all go to PLACE A for a vacation/reunion/get-together catalyzed by EVENT A.  The characters jump beds and switch lovers and EVENTS C, D, and E occur!  When we wrote SPIN THE BOTTLE, though we had our influences and inspirations, we eventually had to forget them and just try to write something that worked.  Many drafts, hairs pulled, and tears later, we felt we had finally got something that might work.  Yet something became quite obvious to us: getting the tone right in these movies is everything and it is really *&$#!!! hard to do.  Both RULES and SMILES are incredibly crafted, consummate comedies that suddenly, surprisingly become quite vulnerable and honest in the end. But somehow they've earned that risk. 

SIXTEEN CANDLES (USA; 1984):  This is probably the most off the wall inspiration here. But John Hughes is a great moviemaker.  Somehow, he was able to make the emotional operas of his young suburban characters empathetic, moving, and entertaining.  SIXTEEN CANDLES and FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF  strike me as working so well because Hughes perfectly balances comedy with emotion (and vice versa).  That soufflé almost always comes out lopsided but here you remember the laughs and the great emotional pay-offs with equal fondness.  And the laughs are gut-laughs.  When I'm pressed to explain the tone of SPIN THE BOTTLE in a sentence, I say: it's the kind of movie John Hughes would have made about people in their late 20's. 

***

So while all these movies are amazing and touchstones, the only way SPIN THE BOTTLE will work is for it to be its own thing.  So here's hoping the paradox hug is the way to go. 

[spinthebottlemovie]

Spin The Bottle Pre-Production Blog Entry #1 (5th May 2014)

I have a date picked out for when I want to start shooting SPIN THE BOTTLE.  Though I feel we have a good amount of time, I know we'll need every minute of it to even have a chance at making a good movie.

I really feel how important it is, now, to get up early, to stay disciplined, to make the most of each day, to set us up for even the chance to make something that could be something.  

I've been taking tons of notes and amassing folders. I've included a shot of them (on the love seat in my studio apartment that nobody can sit in now):

But I know that this note taking and folder making also only gets you so far.  At some point, you just have to pick up the phone, get in the car, hit the street, and learn the hard way.

That's where we're at now in pre-production. 

[spinthebottlemovie]

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Waking From The Disco Nap (29th March 2014)

Dearest Friends, Enemies, Frenemies, those completely disinterested and apathetic to this endeavor:

We’ve hung up the decorations and crazy lights. The dips and drinks are out. The all-night music mix is ready to go as we get ready to throw a party we're calling, SPIN THE BOTTLE.  A movie about how parties are the best places to make the worst decisions. 

We’ve been planning this party for some time . .it’s been one hell of a disco nap. Rip Van Winkle quality. But now we’re up and this night is going to be epic.

We want to make this fun and interesting. And we definitely don’t want to waste your time. So for today, we just want to let you know that we’ll be posting across most of the major social media (hopefully only when there’s something worth posting).

Today, we tell you the story:

PLOT OUTLINE 

Jimmy has always been a time bomb and screw up. Finally in his late 20's, he gets a steady job and gets engaged to Brooke, stable, beautiful, reserved, his complete opposite. But then Jimmy brings Brooke to a party of his old friends who include a Manipulator, a Competitor, a Control Freak, a Drama Queen, and a Party Animal, all with secret plans of their own. Most dangerous of all, though she doesn't want or mean to be, is Jolie, a former train wreck of a party girl herself, and the only woman Jimmy ever really loved. But whenever they get together, bad things happen. Jimmy has to make it through the night without blowing up everything he's worked to change.  But it's never too late to ruin something good.