Film School (27 page)

Every hour, it gets hotter in the apartment even though it's raining outside. On the first evening, the power cuts out. We're in the dark, and we think we blew a fuse in the apartment. Then we realize the entire neighborhood is out. An hour later, the power comes on again, and we're in business.

It takes all weekend to shoot our three hundred feet. Dan is highly focused during the shoot, but he's in his own world.

On Tuesday, we see the dailies again. The preteen actor looks good on film. The set looks decent, too. Dan deliberately wants as little color as possible in the set—everything is black and white; the kid is dressed in black; and he's got pale white skin. The only color in the set comes from the screen of the TV.

Our only problems are action and focus. There's still no action. The kid isn't doing anything. Some of the shots are slightly out of focus. The face of the boy is fuzzy in some takes. I'm really upset—I spent so much time trying to nail it. I'm embarrassed in front of my classmates, but I'm hardly alone. Many of the cinematographers in the class are having trouble with focus and exposure. This is the first time most of us are shooting film, and it shows.

I'm also irritated I'm giving Dan ammunition to keep harping on me and watching over my shoulder.

After class, Dan and I are both upset. I'm upset with him because there's nothing in the film so far but static images. I'm still in the dark what the story is. He's upset with me because of focus issues. Every other partnership is showing footage that tells some kind of story. We have random images with no conflict and one child actor. It seems worse than any of my 507 films. We leave class hardly talking.

I take the Arriflex the next day to the old Russian to have it checked out. There must be something wrong with it. Some of the images “breathe” a bit, that is, the focus slowly goes in and out. The old Russian pulls it apart. Shrugs. “Nothing wrong,” he says. “You are the problem.”

I talk to my cinematography instructor. I'm hoping he can help. As I diagram my shots, he interrupts me. “Steve, you have only a tiny area that can be in focus with the way you're shooting.” He opens a book on focusing charts. He shows me that with a wide-open aperture, low light, and the camera just a few feet from the actor, I have in many cases only an inch of depth where I'm getting clear focus.

He says no wonder I'm having trouble focusing. If the actor moves a tiny bit, I lose focus. He advises me to bring in much more lighting so I can close down the aperture and increase the depth of field. He also suggests I study the depth of field charts in the back of our cinematography textbooks. For the next four days, I do just that.

Part of the problem in film school is we often learn stuff after the fact. The learning curve is steep, and it always seems we discover something important—like depth of field and lighting—a day after we need it. It is why school projects should be viewed by outsiders as works-in-progress. The whole point of these films is to teach, and to give us students a place to make mistakes. It's like waterskiing: if you're not crashing, you're not pushing it.

I edit the footage for Thursday's class. There's still almost nothing to stitch together. I put together a quick compilation of the boy playing a guitar, making macaroni and cheese, boiling it over. It's really dull. Dan reviews it and hates it. “No! That's
way
too short,” he says. He scribbles out the exact shot list he wants. I make it longer. Dan isn't happy about the result, but at least he's not as unhappy as he was.

When we show the cut, it is the worst of the class, by far. We've gone through two shooting weekends, with only one to go.

With class done, Dan and I head outside to the school's courtyard. We're both pissed. Other students take a wide berth around us but watch us out of the corner of their eyes. It's a Film School Argument. I'm really frank with Dan and tell him he has to have some action in the film. The actor has to do
something
. Dan tells me I've
got
to figure out the focus issues. He's also pissed at me for using the term
hired monkey
on the set. He says it sets a bad example for the actor, that I'm making fun of my job. And he hated my edit.

We vent for long minutes. Finally, we calm down. We sit on a bench, poke our feet in the ground. We have one more weekend left. We both understand we're in deep trouble. In 507, I was a mild outcast for having so-so films. Now we're both treated like pariahs in class. No one knows us. Our stuff is completely, absolutely un-understandable. Dan and I are seen as the newbies who suck. We've hardly interacted with the other students in class because I've been gone or we've been locked up in Dan's apartment.

We sit in silence, stewing. We're both screwed if we fail. Here I am, disregarding advice to quit film school, and I'm in a stifling apartment shooting film of a prepubescent actor sitting on a couch holding a guitar while his stage mother hovers nearby. Here Dan is, paired with an old guy who keeps disappearing for days with medical issues, and who can't keep the shot in focus.

It feels like we're in a football huddle and we're losing 28-0 in the fourth quarter. Our relationship has been less than perfect, but we can either give up and go home defeated, or we can do something about it.

Dan and I look at each other and agree we have to do something—anything. We come to an agreement. This is D-day, and we're not going to lose. We're going to go forward, together. We have a lot to do—we have to shoot the majority of the film in one weekend. We agree to get off our arses and get to work. We have nothing to lose. We shake hands and go our separate ways.

Pablo sees me leaving our huddle and calls me into his office. He asks if everything is all right. I assure him everything is. He doesn't seem to believe me. Every week, everyone in class sends Pablo an overview of how things are going on their shoots. It's something only he sees. I've been bitching about Dan in my weekly emails, and I can guess Dan is doing the same about me. I assure Pablo, “Really, things are going to work out.” He looks melancholy.

On Friday, Dan and I run around Los Angeles like cats on catnip. I head to Kino Flo in Burbank. They make and rent low-wattage lighting equipment. Low wattage means we can pump more light into the apartment without blowing the apartment building's electrical circuits. Normal incandescent film lights gobble up a tremendous amount of energy. A single “little” 1K light uses a thousand watts. Compare that to a standard interior lightbulb, which uses sixty to one hundred watts. We need a lot of extra lighting in the tiny apartment so we can close down the camera aperture and thus increase our depth of field. That's part of the reason we put aluminum foil over the windows in the first place. We don't want Dan's landlord to see an ungodly amount of light pouring from the windows at night.

Now we understand why professional film shoots use large generator trucks to light a set. Filming uses an enormous amount of electricity, but we can use less with the Kino Flo lights. The Kino Flo lights are also cooler. Less wattage = less heat.

We're buying this, we're buying that. We hit a Home Depot, a Target, thrift shops. Late Friday afternoon, Dan calls. We need to find a music box the kid can hold. I race to antiques stores and find nothing. Dan also finds nothing. The next morning on the way to his apartment, I stop at Los Angeles' antiques row. Most of the stores aren't open yet. I'm out of luck.

But Dan has procured a pair of small snow globes. One has a winder on it. The other looks very pretty.

We go over the script: the boy enters a dirty, dingy apartment. He starts cooking a pot of mac and cheese. A freight train passes, shaking the apartment. The boy peers out at the train. He sits down, turns on a TV. There's an instructional show that teaches guitar. The boy picks up a guitar and plays along with the TV. The drips of a pipe create a beat. The music builds. Then magic happens. Flashback to a beautiful apartment. A mom. A dad. Colors. Beauty. But the pot of water is boiling. More music, more beauty. Smoke curls to the ceiling. A smoke alarm goes off, the boy jumps up and smacks it to turn it off, a train passes again, the TV goes dead. The boy is alone once more, and there's no more color in the world and no more magic, but then the TV comes on, and the guitar lesson continues.

There's much more action in the film than before. The kid won't just sit there now—he'll emote a bit, interact.

Dan and I have to shoot the lion's share of the movie in two days.

We set up the Kino Flo lights. We pray the actor and his mother show up. They do. The weather is mild and sunny. We cross our fingers against blackouts. We put more light into the whole apartment, and I stop the aperture down. Dan agrees to push the camera back a bit. Not every shot has to push right into the kid's nostrils. We still have very shallow depth of field, but it's not impossibly shallow. I now have a several inches of sharp focus in a shot instead of an inch or less.

The kid actor keeps going all day. There's no speaking, so it's like he's a fashion model much of the time. Dan and I are running and gunning all day, aware that we can't use the actor more than the SAG union rules allow.

All day long, we shoot, shoot, shoot. We have five hundred feet in my camera bag because we undershot the first weekend. The kid holds the snow globe in the air in one scene and ponders the flakes falling. The lighting is gorgeous. I'm looking through the eyepiece of the camera and holding my breath so as not to make any movement.

At the end of the day, we're pushing past the SAG guidelines, but the kid is game and so is his mother. The studio teacher shrugs. She doesn't care. She hasn't looked up from her book all day. I think of the school rules requiring a studio teacher. This old hag knows she's gaming the system—she's getting $20 an hour to read a book while a kid's mother is three feet away. And now, when technically she needs to speak up and say, “I'm sorry, this young lad has worked his ten hours,” she's mute. It's good for us, of course. We want to finish, and we're not abusing the kid. He plays video games between shots, and it seems he's used to just hanging around.

Finally, we finish shooting for the day. The kid is tired. So is his mom. The studio teacher leaves before they do.

They walk to their car with both of us congratulating them and, between the lines, inferring that it's super-duper important they return the next day. Our film depends on them coming back. I now realize Dan's film is a high-stakes gamble. Having one child actor means we're putting all of our eggs in one very fragile basket.

After the kid and his mom leave, Dan and I transform his apartment. We hang orange Christmas lights everywhere, hang curtains, and rework the little set into a dramatically different stage. It goes from white and muted to orange and bright.

On Sunday, the actor and his mom are shocked at the transformation. We start shooting the
magic
scenes. Dan gets a neighbor woman to pose as the kid's silhouette mother. Dan is the kid's silhouette father. The studio teacher doesn't want to come today, so for a small bribe, she signs off on the form that she was there.

The actor is fading as the day goes on. We urge the little fellow to keep his energy up. We ply him with food and praise. I feel guilty—we're working this little guy like he's a mule, and I'm using every trick I know as a parent and soccer coach to keep him in the game. This kid holds the key to our film. If he has a temper tantrum or gets a sore throat and wants to leave, we're pooched. So we pull out the stops to make him feel wonderful. Toward the end of our shoot, we're high-fiving the kid and “
hoo-hooing
” him when he strums the right chord on the guitar. Welcome to Hollywood. It's a gorgeous weekend, and this kid is sitting in a hot, stinky apartment with two sweating film students who tell him he's the greatest thing in the world. Finally, we wrap up in the late afternoon. The kid and his mom go home. When the door closes, Dan and I slump. I'm glad they're gone.

We shoot a few more scenes for cutaways and finally run out of film. It's dark. We're tired. Dan suggests going out for a steak. It sounds good, and I would like to eat a big bloody piece of meat, but I'm too tired. I just want to go home. We spent three straight days working with as much intensity as we could, from early morning to late at night. We'll find out Tuesday what our fate is.

Monday, I write all day on CRAZYHOUSE ON SKIS. It's such pleasure to shift back to a private task. The yin and yang of production and writing is very attractive.

On Tuesday Dan and I assume our usual chairs in the back of the screening room, just next to the door. Our 508 class has moved up in the world, and we no longer have class in distant Zemeckis. Now we meet in a small classroom in the heart of the film school. Today, we'll be watching the dailies. Everyone is nervous as hell. Everyone in the room has a tremendous amount riding on the dailies. Everybody needs their final weekend of shooting to turn out.

Dan and I have the most to lose, by far. Judging by the dailies of the other partnerships, it should be possible for them to cut together at least a mediocre film somehow. Dan and I have so far shown nothing. Just static images.

The screenings are in no particular order.

Dan and I are both silent as we watch the dailies of other partnerships. The anticipation is killing us. There are seven series of dailies to watch, and we comment after each of them, a bit like we did in 507. This time, the commentary from Pablo and the students is very gentle. We all know when we mess up; we don't need people to point it out with a heavy hand.

Unlike 507, when all films were screened with a thick layer of music larded onto them, in 508 we are watching silent film dailies. It's so quiet we can hear sighs and groans from the filmmakers. It's an amazingly intimate process.

Dan and I have now watched five of the other dailies. We still haven't said a word to each other. I'm so worried we'll have a technical issue.