Film School (31 page)

It's a blast directing a real actor. I realize what I missed in 507 by leaning too heavily on friends and family. I missed out on working with professionals.

On the set, we learn a lot about each other. Dream says his father was a Thai national kickbox champion. He demonstrates his own kicks, and we all see he could break my jaw in an eye blink. Dream pays his bills by waiting tables, but he wants bigger things. Robert is a schoolteacher who wants to be a professional actor. Jeffrey is the musician who wants to act. And then there's Dan, who wants to be a director. And Mikey, who wants to sail around the world. And me, who wants to support a family.

We all have our dreams.

T
he final day of shooting is sublime. We're just having so much fun, it seems we shouldn't be doing this for school. The cliff-top fighting stunts and truck spinouts work so well. My big jar of red-dyed corn syrup is insanely sticky, but it looks like blood—kind of, sort of. The actress flirts incessantly with Dream. I'm constantly—constantly—yelling for the actors to stop laughing so we can resume filming.

I'm also the bearer of an old Arizona license plate that Carl and Irene found for me by networking with their friends. It seems the perfect cherry on the sundae. I attach it to the truck, and we reshoot the opening scenes. We also reshoot a scene in which Jeffrey takes a piss. I give him a big squirt bottle of watered-down lemon Gatorade. He creates a big arcing stream of perfect yellow urine and scratches his rear as we shoot. We don't see he's holding the squirt bottle. We only see the liquid arc. It's very funny.

When we watch dailies, Dan and I are nervous about one thing only: Did the replacement camera work? As soon as we see the first images of our footage, we relax. It's all there. The footage looks simply great. Chris Caraballo whispers over to me when he sees the Arizona plates on the truck. “
Nice,
” he says. It's the details that count.

I realize in filmmaking there is no big lead—no 49-0 score. We almost lost everything, and in retrospect, we were lucky our camera broke on Friday night. Had it fritzed on Saturday at Vasquez Rocks, we'd have been out of luck. We'd have lost so much time getting a replacement that the day would have been squandered, with no way to replace it.

The Russian repairman later inspects our camera motor and demands to know what I did to break it. Then he pulls the motor apart and grunts: “Ah, this went bad!” He's pointing at a rheostat that controls the speed. “It just . . . pffft . . . Nothing you could do. These sometimes just die. They are bullsheet.”

Now Dan starts the final edit. Pablo says our only worry is getting it down to the maximum length of 5:40. “You could have a nine-minute film there,” he says.

Another 508 class component is our sound class. In 507, sound was mostly a theoretical class under Holman, but now it's all practical, under an intense drill sergeant named Frank. Frank's a sound editor with impressive credits: he worked on THE FUGITIVE, THIS IS SPINAL TAP, WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP, and many others.

His classroom behavior is just a notch less intense than the manic drill sergeant in FULL METAL JACKET. Frank struts. He cajoles. He teases. He gives everyone a nickname. (I'm “TV star Steve.” Why? I have no idea.) He closes the door precisely at the start of class and starts lecturing. If someone dares look at their laptop or Blackberry or phone during class, he walks behind them and quietly snatches it and continues lecturing without missing a beat. He puts the offending electronic device on his podium and tells the guilty student he or she can collect it after class.

Dan and I both love Frank. Frank is so refreshingly candid, blunt, and amped-up that he makes every class a Red Bull–drenched excursion into sound design. Our 508 films have no sound recorded on set. We're only shooting images. None of the characters say a word on-screen.

Now we must build the sound for the entire film, piece by piece by piece. Under Frank's tutelage, we learn how.

In screenwriting class, my comedy CRAZYHOUSE ON SKIS is taking shape. Mondays are always writing days, and I spend the entire day on my laptop, with a quick run in the middle of the day and, as usual, an evening phone call to Julie and the kids back in Minnesota—something I do every day at school.

T
he next-to-the-last edit of my film is a dandy. It's all there, so much so that there's too much there. With every scene in place, the film is three minutes too long. Dan isn't worried. While I sit behind him, he trims the film until we're at exactly 5:40. I recommend we take a few more seconds off for safety, and we do. Bingo. The visuals are striking, and the story is compelling.

“It's a real shame you can't use this as your thesis film, Steve. It's very compelling,” Pablo says in class. Dan and I add graphics, which in this case are only titles and credits. Dan doesn't flinch when I put only myself as producer. I do feel petty. I consider adding him as a coproducer, but he didn't question my decision, and he didn't produce anything. So he stays off. An eye for an eye.

We color-correct the images so each scene fits the other—adding a bit of brightness here, deducting a bit there, to smooth out any rough transitions. It's like using fine-grit sandpaper on hardwood. Just the last tweaks, and the title. I had a working title of PAPER, but it seems entirely too dull. Now, without anyone but Dan and me knowing, I name it WTF. Dan thinks it's a very funny title. I know I can tell my young children the title means “With Tender Feelings.” Everyone else will know what it really means.

Finally, we picture-lock. The images are set. Nothing will change until we screen it. The final picture lock is completed late at night.

Now I'll spend two very long weeks putting sound under the film, which means recording sounds with a tape recorder and mixing them into a timeline that corresponds with the picture. Door slams, spits, grunts, footsteps, bird cries, wind noise, fluttering, engine revs, wheel spins . . . they all need to be recorded. We get a short session in the USC Foley lab—a little soundstage where we can record while watching the film. It's perfect for matching footsteps, throat-clearing, and the like. The Foley lab looks like any other recording studio: two rooms separated by soundproof glass, with a microphone in one room and electronic mixing equipment in the other. The only difference is the room with the microphone has all sorts of flooring and a sandbox (for different footsteps) and boxes full of things that make noise. I recruit Jeffrey to record sounds. He's sick with a chest cold, which is perfect for some massive throat-clearing noises, but when he tries to match the running footsteps of the characters by jogging in place, he starts coughing. But we get it right eventually.

The sound design of my film is straightforward but incredibly time-consuming. Frank is a taskmaster, too. He looks at the layers of sound on my film and always wants more. We're only working in stereo—no 5.1 surround sound mix here—but my sound track has layer after layer of sound. It takes nearly as much time to add sound to my short film as it does to shoot it in the first place.

I have a musical score, too. Early in the semester, I attended a meet-and-greet with USC student composers. I pitched my story and was approached after class by a grinning kid who looked twelve years old. He wanted to compose for me. I grabbed his name and ignored him for days. I wanted a good score. I didn't want some comic-book-reading teenager working on it. He called me twice, wondering if we could meet. Finally, when I needed to have a composer on board (all 508 music must be original—nothing can be previously copyrighted), I called the kid. I figured I'd let him have a crack at it before I contacted someone else. I told him what I wanted and showed him a rough cut of my film. He grinned, and said he'd love to “whip something together.”

I'm not expecting anything. Zero. Three days later, the kid, Niall-Conor Garcia, brings me a score he recorded. I put my headphones on and listen. My jaw slowly ratchets down. The score is stunning.

I ask Niall,
Who are you?
He says he's an undergraduate. A sophomore. He says he really wants to work as a film composer. He keeps grinning.

The day after that, I bump into the head of USC's conducting program on a sidewalk. He asks me how my project is going. He's got a twinkle in his eye. I tell him Niall is amazing. “Yes,” he says. “I've heard he's better than most of our graduate students. He's something of a genius.”

Niall has created a score for a string quartet, a trumpet, a piano, and percussion. I set up a recording session in a USC soundstage, and he sets up the musicians. Niall works for free, but no one else does. On the night of the recording session, I bring a thick roll of $20 bills to pay the mixer and the musicians. And the score is simply phenomenal. It sounds like music from a Hollywood blockbuster. I'm in awe listening to the group play. A couple of the musicians are from USC, a couple of others are professionals—they're moonlighting at USC to make a few bucks. In an hour, we have Niall's score down pat. It is synched to the film, and it drives the action.

I know everything so far on the film is strong. Now I aim to do one more thing to put it over the top.

F
rom early on in 508, something is different: we all get along. There are no cliques and almost no negative comments. Maybe I'm viewing the world through rose-colored glasses after being released from the hospital, but I think there's more to it than that. When I returned from Minnesota after learning all about my blood issues, I came clean in front of the class. As we sat in our classroom, I explained what had happened to me. I asked all of them to call 911 if they ever saw me acting strangely or having difficulty speaking. The class was silent and respectful. I don't think anyone thought they'd be hearing such a story from a fellow student.

At the time, I didn't know most of them well. At a break, a few of them came up to talk. Rene, the tall Mexican, and Manny, the stocky Romanian, offered to help if they could, as did a few others. It was a very serious moment in our class, and for a few weeks, I noticed my fellow classmates were watching me closely. As the days went by and I
didn't
turn into a drooling mumbler, they relaxed. After that I'm teased, slightly at first, and then with more vigor as the weeks go by. Rene, who I start calling the World's Tallest Mexican, teases me by doing an over-the-top stroke-face whenever we meet. “How'ya doing, old man,” he says, mouth drooping. It's funny and a good sign. Everyone in class, men and women, treats me as one of the tribe's favorite chimps. And our tribe is very tight.

One day I'm speaking alone with Pablo and he brings the issue up. “This is an exceptionally cohesive group,” he says to me, and adds that he thinks my talking about my stroke had something to do with it. Perhaps it's all because we're a bit more aware of mortality, and like survivors on a desert island, we're willing to go the extra mile to be supportive.

It also helps that we're helping each other. Dan and I are often in our own world, as are the other partnerships, but there are moments of shared hardship. Manny, the burly Romanian, asks me if I can help tow Jason's car to a repair shop. Manny and Jason are 508 partners. Jason's car was mashed in an accident and is undrivable. My Suburban with its ample space and trailer hitch is a coveted vehicle on campus. I say, “
Sure
.”

It turns out his car is in an underground garage in Hollywood, and the repair shop is in an awful area of Compton, some twenty-five miles away. The quick little tow takes more than five hours total, but Manny and Jason are appreciative, and the trip is an adventure. Manny is in his car and Jason rides with me, and as we wind through the gang-infested streets of Compton trying to locate a bargain-basement repair facility, I tell Jason, who is black, that I'm glad he's riding with me, the white guy. Jason is from a small Mississippi town and seems as wary as I am in Compton. After we get the car delivered and return to Hollywood, we've all learned a lot more about each other—and it has nothing to do with filmmaking.

Pablo, too, has a gentle way about him. He's forgetful sometimes and always—always—faithfully upholds the banner of peace-loving hippie-dom, which is amusing to students who are only in their twenties. I've learned already that plenty of film students are either rich kids slumming for a while, delaying their entry into the working world, or they're rich wannabe revolutionaries driving their Lexuses or Audis while bitching about The Man. In our class, we have none of that as far as I can tell. Everyone wants to make films. Everyone wants to make a career out of the business somehow. We don't fit many of the film school clichés. We're almost all of middle-class or lower background. Caraballo is a staunch Reaganite and is fluent in Cuban-inflected Spanish. Brent and Justin are both superjocks. Brent played hockey through college. Justin works as a weightlifting trainer. Manny is a Romanian immigrant with nine siblings and a knack for knowing something about everything under the sun, from car repair to camera operation to cold fusion, and he worked for a spell as a TV cameraman. Jason comes from a tiny dot on the map in the Deep South. Rene, the World's Tallest Mexican, was raised on the Tex-Mex border and was on a basketball team that won a Texas high school championship. Alan is from Chile and always seems to have a surprised smile on his face. Lea is from the Philippines and lied to her parents about why she was coming to the United States. She told them she was coming to medical school, not film school. Jeanette and Resheida grew up in the same South Side Chicago neighborhood and both have the Michelle Obama thing going as far as height and fashion. Both have supportive, generous families. Michelle is a glam lesbian Valley Girl, and her film partner is Kat, a wanderer and raver who told us a frightening story about getting lost hiking with her boyfriend in a snowy Pakistani valley.

There are fourteen of us in the class. Just as in 507, we spend hundreds of hours together. Outside of the partnerships—where conflict is inevitable—I rarely hear an argument. As the semester goes on, we talk about how much we look forward to getting together, and how there is such a feeling of support. Although in 507 I'd sometimes drag myself to class, wondering what hardship awaited us, in 508, I invariably bound up the stairs to our classroom, eager to start our day's adventure. One felt like a mandatory office gathering, the other like a really good party.