Puppets, Porn, and the Artist's "Skin"

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Some Advice from Dolly Parton, One Awesome Lady

I'm going to share some advice I've read from Dolly Parton's auto-biography, "My Life and Other Unfinished Business." I think it's great advice for anyone in the entertainment "biz." She's also just a swell spunky gal.

Here goes:

"If there is one bit of advice I could give to young people trying to break into show business, it would be this: Don't assume that the people on the inside know what they're doing.  He may have a big office and a fancy suit. He may have the power to hire you or not. But he probably has no idea whether or not you have any talent. Even if he has an opinion, he probably has to clear it with guys in event bigger offices with even more expensive suits (and even less of a clue). There's a joke around Hollywood about a writer who runs into a studio executive over the weekend. 'What did you think of the script I turned in Friday?' the writer asks. The studio exec answers in all seriousness, 'I don't know. So far, I'm the only one who's read it.'"

Research, O What Strange Paths Thou Shall Lead Me Down

Any writer worth their salt spends a good deal of time doing research on the topics their story is exploring. Of course, this is only my opinion as I'm sure there are the rare types of writers that just hop right into their story and what comes out is gold. I'm not that type of writer. The world is full of critics who are just dying to make you look stupid in the goal of making themselves look smart, although they themselves have never and will never create anything in their lives. They feel better about their sorry lives by trying to make the artist feel bad. Critics and their useless diatribe is a different topic for another day. My point being, if you've done your research, you are more entitled to defending the way you have presented your story.

My current film is dealing with a fictional character who was a very sought after male porn star at one time in the 1970s and 1980s, during the so-called "Golden Age of Porn." This is the father of three sisters, a man who is much older now, but loved his job of being an entertainer in one of the most economically stable forms of mass entertainment there has ever been. As I have watched maybe three adult films in my entire adult life, I can't just jump into the world of pornography without trying to have some understanding of it. So, let's just say my research for this film has been quite interesting up to now. I watched Debbie Does Dallas quite recently, and had a few good chuckles, along with some "crap that's nasty" eye shielding moments, and was humming the music to the film the next day. I did not expect that part. I understood more about how people around this time period took care of their bodies, and what was considered sexy. Body hair was apparently quite popular when Debbie Does Dallas was being made, as were visible bikini tan lines on what I would consider a "normal" female body (no amplification/reduction of parts.) In contrast to what porn stars look like today, it's a night and day contrast.

It's extremely difficult to do internet research on pornography without being bombarded by sites assuming I'm a horny male and trying to get me to use my credit card. I often wonder how professors whose careers are about pornography studies (yes, it does exist) deal with this. One has to be very careful about what they are typing in the Google search text box. I am also having a difficult time trying to locate more confessional biographies about what it's like to work in the adult film industry. The people that work here are still people, and have lives outside of their work. I'd love to know more about what drew them into adult films, why they continue to do it (beyond the money, at least for the women), the pluses and minuses, how they've dealt with raising families, or their parents' and friends' perceptions of them. Most people on the internet, I've noticed, go one way or the other when talking about how they perceive porn stars: either find it extremely shameful and chastise the adult film star or they glorify it in the sense of something like this (albeit with typos): "Yeah, man. I'd totally date a porn star. That sh*it is hot."

I'm following a male porn star on Instagram, (and the only reason I am on Instagram, my iPhone already consumes too much of my attention on a daily basis) and am delighted by his photos of himself with his two young children, doing normal dad-kid activities like going to a park and eating ice cream. This is the stuff that I also must understand when crafting my script about three sisters and their porn-star father. My fictional characters had moments like this real life porn actor. But as sex is such a huge and tricky topic for American culture, especially when it comes to art trying to make a statement or show it, something simple like a man and his three daughters becomes highly complicated when the man is an ex-porn star. There is just so much conflict suddenly. It's my job as a director to try to understand all sides of this life, and avoid stereotypes as much as possible. This is a tricky task, as my research has already shown me that getting a honest straight forward picture of this world is not easy.

Up next on my film queue: Deep Throat.

Diving deeper...

When it comes to deadlines, I can work both ways. Without a deadline, it's hard to keep the energy on a project going. However, without an imminent deadline, there is more time to explore. This is also sometimes problematic. There can be the problem of not knowing when to stop, when to finally just commit to whatever script you have with you, and shoot it and make it work.

With my first feature, "In the Shadow," we HAD to be shooting in Puerto Rico right when hurricane season was starting, or it was no shooting in our location in Puerto Rico at all. This gave me and my collaborators about eight months of writing and pre-production. Ultimately, unless you are one of the few filmmakers out there where this is ALL you do with your day for those eight months, I don't think it is enough time to really get under the skin of your story.  With my second feature, "What's the Use?" we made the risky decision to take the challenge of jumping into a story with only five weeks of writing and pre-production. Mainly due to the availability of the lead actress, in addition to the challenge of seeing where this led us. After going through multiple revisions in post for a long time in my opinion, I will stand by my current mind set that there must be ample time in development in order to really get a story going in a good direction.

Working on my third feature more fully, now that we're pretty much ready to send "What's the Use?" into festivals and see what bites, I don't have a pressing deadline to follow. This is the first time I've been able to explore a story more fully. As I said in my last post, I pushed the plot on note cards and a rough synopsis to a good ending, which in itself deserves a small trophy. Stepping back, I realize I need to understand these characters better. My initial synopsis had some very defined visions of who they are. Of course, this is because it's coming from my own limited understanding. I did not grow up with a porn star dad, and I'm not really like his daughters or his wife that much. But now it's time to really get into these people's minds, pick out the dirt, and dance with them a bit.

As an exercise, I went back and wrote a good solid twenty pages or so of their history. How did Barry, the ex-porn star father, get into the business from his humble beginnings as a high school boxer in San Antonio, TX? What did his wife, Vera, do and think about this? Why did their three children become who they are as adults: a struggling puppeteer with a propensity for laziness, an ESL teacher with a closeted fetish for vintage VHS porn titles, and a B slasher/zombie femme-core film director with a dislike for men? Why was there so much animosity between them (Let's face it. A film is boring if everyone gets along. But I need to know WHY they don't like each other.)

Strangely enough, I started to find these characters in my dreams, roaming through my head while taking the city bus somewhere, sensing them around me like tiny pleasant ghosts. On a completely impulsive note, I started to write a play about this strange family. I never have the intention of staging this thing, it's really just an exercise to see how this medium frees up my brain and where it takes me. (My background is in theater, when I was nine and discovered that I liked hamming it up on stage. That only lasted 10 years, thankfully!). Just how every person smells different or has their own fingerprint, writing a stage play about the same characters and story is nothing like writing a screen play. I find I take more risks with dialogue and transitions in stage plays than I do with screen plays. I allow the actors to do things in a stage play that you don't see them typically do in a screen play. At a few points, the damn thing became a musical. What?!? See what I mean?

Today, I have been collecting images based on the "essence" of the character. Meaning, if you had to select some images from Google and present it on a timeline for five minutes, what search words would you type in to find for images for yourself? What sort of slide show would you make about yourself?  Images of mountains? Dalmation puppies? Spaghetti carbonara? Chronic jock itch? My own time line would just be five minutes of cheese and cats.

I'm pushing it a bit further by calling on some of my earlier "acting exercises" I used to do in high school when I liked theater more than everyone, even boys. This requires getting into the skin of the character, speaking as them, answering questions on a piece of paper about why they are who they are. I'm going to record it and place these images and the audio on the timeline in my editing program. So, it becomes a narrated slide show of sorts. I've never done this for a character and I'm excited to see how close it gets me to each of them, especially the ones that are not as likeable. I think the biggest problem with creating unlikable characters, which I'm all about, is being able to latch on to them in some way to avoid making them one sided.

So, excuse me while I open up Final Cut Pro and start importing my odd collection of slasher movies, feminist writers, and other odd bits. It's time to get into the mind of Conti, the femme-Nazi B-slasher zombie film director. Here's to you, Valerie Solanis and Jess Franco!

 

End of the Tunnel, but the Trip Ain't Over Yet

After several weeks of carving out a few hours a few days a week of completely uninterrupted writing time, I have finally fleshed out the entire rough outline for this next feature. I'm calling it, "How to Eat Pho" for now. Although Pho has little to do with the meat of the story.

I find one of the difficult parts of creating when one doesn't have a lot of time to do it during a normal day is making the energy shift from task oriented adult thinking to more relaxed, playful and open thinking, more akin to the way a child might be in a sandbox full of toys. It's nearly impossible for me to stop the breaks on the former and move immediately into the later. Yeah, it sucks, but who said being a grown up is much fun?

I remember reading that Alejandro Jodorowsky required rituals for his creative process. So I created one. For me, sitting totally still for about ten to fifteen minutes, then stretching and inviting creative energy into my space worked quite well. I also turned off my phone. I had several different colored note cards and colored pens. Lots of tape and scissors. Music good for thinking. Cats.

With all of this around me, and making a ritual transitioning from the normal energy of the day to that amazing creative explorative space became quite easy. I found all sorts of new and unusual little nuances in the direction of this story. Life size puppets. Time traveling whores. Speedos and clove cigarettes and apparitions from people still alive. Lots of things opened and I was able to get past an area in my initial idea that was a huge block.

So, the twenty page synopsis is done. This is a small feat, but now I must go back and shape and refine and start asking questions of all these little visions and ideas that popped up. This is the harder part, in some ways, because it requires making a lot of tough decisions, or sitting back down and exploring an alternative for the same story concept.

So...onward ho....

Stuck on "act one..."

I'm staring off at the wood grain of my desk, with droopy eyelids, even my cats are sleepier than I am.

I'm stuck in the twilight zone of "act two," for lack of better terminology. I find the classic act structure rather confining, but it's an easy way to refer to sections of a script. I've had the first part of the three sisters-porn star dad idea pretty much ready to go for a while now. I just don't know where to take it. I'm attempting some exercises I learned while consuming as many playwriting classes as I could take while in college with the amazing Suzan Zeder: make up as many possible endings as you can, and make them as wild as you can make them. Or even better: write the area like you were another playwright. I find this one really frees up some choices. I did one at the time as Irene Maria Fornes and I did not recognize myself in what came out. Try it, you writers out there, if you have not already. It's really a great liberating exercise.

Making choices when writing is a mini death. Some things survive, others must be buried. But choosing what is executed and what remains alive is very stressful. The "what ifs" are almost constant. A director's power is in the decisions they make, I would say about 98% of the time (the other 2% is luck or lack there-of.) When one is writing what they will end up directing, there is the added pressure of making sure you are choosing the right thing. But how do you know? When you are behind the nimble keypad, while the rest of the world is asleep, and you are the only one pushing yourself forward, ignoring your internal clock, where do you go? At the end of the day (or night), what tidy little inn will you find yourself in, tucked away, trying to sleep, while the muse complains constantly about the poor executed creative nymphs she has dumped on your plate? One's stomach is only so big.

New Project, New Ideas, Old Habits

Now that the house moving and renovation has settled a bit (kinda), I have resolved to start blogging a bit more regularly about another feature I'm working on. Right now, it's a black comedy (why do I keep gravitating to these things!!) about three sisters and their old ex-porn star dad. I have other ideas in the works, as usual, but resources and time and life's realities make this most likely to be the best option for me right now. Not that I'm complaining, this is a really fantastic idea and when I talk about it to others, it always gets a good chuckle.

I started the initial idea while drinking wine after a late night catering shift almost a year ago. I was alone in my apartment. Things were pleasantly quiet as I typed away on my old Mac laptop. I started it as a fiction project, but it soon became something more than that. With some occasional revisits this last year, I have decided tonight to begin looking it over again after this several month "house-hiatus" I like to call it. My challenge as always is to put everything aside and give myself uninterrupted time (no kitties on laps, no text messaging, no checking email, no rendering something on some other film project) to truly focus on this exploratory phase. What is this story about? Who is it about? Why am I telling it?

My mind keeps wandering to method and technique as opposed to what I should be writing about. I tend to do that as a director and filmmaker, probably because most of my filmmaking time is using technology to capture and create things, rather than just raw story telling without the use of a computer. I will be crafting story over the next few months, working with actors who don't mind being part of the development process and me showing a cheap camera in their faces to capture the scenes we shoot together. Reading a script is one thing. Seeing it even on a crappy camera is another thing entirely, but provides invaluable insight into what is and isn't working.

I do know this: this is like athletic training. One has to give focused immediate attention and effort now, even after a long hard day's work, even when tired after taking care of all your other domestic and work chores, even when everything else in the world is competing for your attention. Finding those silent quiet moments when the rest of the world is asleep is sometimes I feel the reason I still wake up in the morning.

So, the spring breeze blows cool through my new studio room where my cats are fast asleep, the red wine flows, my script is open, my notes are before me, the white board clean and empty, note cards at hand...it's time to dive, and dive deeply.