A Few More Days of Radio Silence

[Dingman's Falls, near Dingman's Ferry, PA]

Hey. I know, Bad Blogger. I have been both busy and goofing off. At first I was busy-busy, the last few days I have been goofing off-busy. I went up to Mikey's cabin in the Poconos with the intent of getting some writing done, but I convinced Bentley to come with me, so I accomplished nothing in the writing department, but did hit the trifecta of waterfalls on Route 209 (Bushkill, Raymondskill, and Dingman's Falls).

I am SUPPOSED to be writing and directing a short for the 29 Day Film Project, but am having a little trouble writing under pressure. Maybe it is not enough pressure, since it is not the last minute, but since I still have to cast, schedule, shoot, and edit it, I better get a move on. Deadline's August 6th for the finished project. Michelle is shooting for me, and I think I have the key players but will need more soon and when you are scheduling people who are workig for free, it can get rather nighmarish and you have to give yourself a lot of lead time. Sooo, I will not be blogging for at least a few more days, but when I start again, you will get to hear about the new project!

Mikey is working on getting me a graphic artist to design postcards and posters for Smalltimore so I will have marketing for the Indie Fest in California next month. We did not get into Red Rock or Rhode Island, rather bummed about that. I really wanted to go to Red Rock just for the super-cool venue, and Rhode Island was a long shot but I tried it anyway. Some women and comedy festivals have recently opened for submissions, so I sent a few more out. Now that the movie is very,very close to its final tweaks I feel much more confident in the DVDs I am sending out. I think the sound quality may have really hurt us for Red Rock and Rhode Island, but it is MUCH better now. I am pretty proud of the sound, actually, considering I did it all myself. Can't believe how far I have come from the first version!

Okay, really gotta get to work. Have a great weekend!

Flow

[ Bentley at the Dirt Church. No particular reason, other than the plaque on the door behind him is Oh So Bentley.]

Feeling good today. Got a lot of little nagging things off my plate yesterday, but most importantly (1) got the form & photos I need to renew my passport, and (2) a script problem that I had cleared itself up, and I will soon be putting pen to paper.

The passport thing is pretty significant to me. I look at the one I am about to turn in, and I know there are novels crammed in those tiny, dog-eared pages. It was my first passport, issued July 9, 1999. The photo... I was blonde then, and - my friends will find this hard to believe, I know - it was a period in my life when I had absolutely no style whatsoever. My uniform was jeans, tennies, and polo shirts from the gap. Ew, I know.

Traveling, especially to Paris, now my second home, changed me for good. The things I have seen and the people I have met in my two dozen or so trips to Europe... I don't even recognize the person in that photo. It is hard to remember what was important to me back then. I thought I had it together, I thought I was confident. I didn't even know I was stepping off the precipice.

I feel that I am entering another ten-year cycle, and I am in some ways in that place again, but now I am aware. This time, I am leaping off that precipice, knowing that everything is going to change, again, and ten years from now I will look at the photo that today is new, and smile at how innocent I was. I think somehow that my progress in life is not in spite of my naivete, but because of it. Since I rarely think in terms of, "there's no way I could ever do that," it doesn't occur to me until I've finished whatever it was that I shouldn't have been able to do in the first place, that it doesn't make a lot of sense that I got it done, and most often someone else has to point this out to me.

I try very much to appreciate what I have while I have it, and I have these moments once in awhile, when things are going very well, that I soak it all in, recognize how lucky I am, and understand that this will not last. I don't mean that being happy won't last, for the most part it is unnatural for me to be any other way. I mean that this, this exact daily existence, in this town, with these people, in these circumstances, is fleeting.

I had one of those moments last night. I was out in Fells Point with Bentley, who is here for a few weeks from Toronto, again. I was just starting to get used to having him around and he'll be gone by the end of the month, probably until late fall. We got some sushi and then met up with my friend Christie for a drink on the open-air upper deck at Harry's. It was here that I had that moment. Here I was, looking out over a crowd of people on the wharf watching the free movie that had been set up there, a perfect night breeze blowing the fake tropical music through the bar, hanging out with my semi-unemployed artist friend and my self-employed yoga instructor friend. The bar was decently busy but we got a table right away, the waiter was friendly, everything was just so... relaxed. I took it all in, and I consciously said to myself, someday, sooner than I think, this, Baltimore, will just be a fond memory. I need to etch every detail of this into my brain.

I don't know what comes next, but I know I will be fine, I always am. I love Baltimore so much, more than anyplace I've ever lived, but I just have the feeling that by this time next year I will be elsewhere. That's a little scary, but in a good way, that keeps my blood pumping. Just as traveling changed the way I look at everything, the way I think of and carry myself, the way I interpret... everything... making this movie has reinvented me as well. I like it, and I can't wait to see what happens next.

Research Can Sometimes Be Helpful

[The Real Keith Bentley, after I accosted him in my pool room.]

Well. I am so excited about the Heart of England Festival in June, and I am fairly determined to make it there, somehow, though I am pretty strapped for cash. I might have to have a fundraiser or something. It got me thinking about the other festivals I've submitted to, how good a chance "Smalltimore" stands in getting in to them, and if I will be able to afford to go to all or most of the festivals it gets into (hoping that it gets into more than one!).

So I went back through the festivals that I had submitted to and looked at them a little more closely. The St. John's Women's Film Festival kind of jumped out at me. I found this one initially by searching the tag "women" on www.withoutabox.com. I saw it was in Canada, and Bentley is always talking about how gorgeous St-Something-or-Other is, and I thought it was the same place, so I submitted. It sounds like a very cool festival, completely dedicated to promoting women within the field, and they are in their 20th year, so they must know what they are doing. There aren't that many movies that are written, directed, produced, and edited by the same woman. So I figured I had a decent shot.

Later I told Bentley about it and his reaction was, "St. John's?!" I said, yea, isn't that the place you are always going on about? He said no, that is St. Andrew's. Oh. Well, St. John's is still in Canada, right? Yes, but... "It's in NEWFOUNDLAND," he said. His mere tone of inflection let me know that the two Saints were nowhere near each other.

But I knew it was east coast Canada, so it couldn't be that bad, right? Wrong. Very, very wrong. I tried to find a flight from Baltimore to St. John's, but everything had me flying to Toronto first. So I started at St. John's airport and backtracked. There is ONE flight on Continental, out of Newark. And it is $500 minimum round trip (add taxes and fees and I am sure it is closer to $700), and that doesn't include hauling my butt to Newark!

That's absurd, I thought. It's CANADA. I'll drive.

Apparently not.

I google mapped it. One-thousand eight hundred and ninety-six miles. 106 miles of that on a ferry in the North Atlantic. With my car. In October. I really, really think not.

Everybody has google-mapped their own address, you know, when you zoom in closer and closer until you can see your house? Try that with St. John's, Newfoundland. It doesn't look that bad when you are zoomed all the way in. It looks like a beautiful port city, and people have posted some very nice flicker photos on there (the ones of the icebergs floating by is what had me saying, oh HELL no to the idea of the ferry). But zoom out ever so slightly and you will see what I suddenly remembered that I have seen many, many times when flying over Newfoundland going to or from Europe. Tundra. Frozen. Hundreds of barren miles of it. There is like ONE main road, and it starts at the southwest corner of the land mass, goes almost all the way north and then heads due east across the entire thing until it gets to St. John's. No joke, I seriously on more than one occasion have looked down from inside an airplane to this blindingly white piece of land and asked myself, "People LIVE here?!" and then anxiously waited until we came into view of land that was green, or at least brown, and showed signs of civilization. Cuz if we crashed in the middle of Newfoundland, ain't NOBODY coming to get us.

I know from Bentley that winter starts pretty early in Canada, and as the festival there is in late October, I was afraid it would be totally frigid by then. I looked up St. John's on Wikipedia and to my surprise, the average temp is about 52 degrees Fahrenheit, with lows in the high 30s. Not nearly as bad as I thought. But the very last line of the climate chart was what made me do a double-take. "Hours of sunshine (per MONTH): 106."

106 HOURS of sunshine for the whole MONTH! Less than 3 1/2 hours a day. And that's the average, so by the end of the month it is probably less than 3 hours a day! Well, I guess it is the perfect place to have a film festival, though. Doesn't it always feel weird to come out of a theater and it is still daylight?

Honestly, I really hope that, "Smalltimore," gets into the St. John's festival. I would so like to be a part of something that tries to give women a break into the boys' club that is filmmaking. I'd find a way to get there. Bentley said he might even go with me if I do. But my cute little car will stay safely in dry dock here in Baltimore, believe you me.

Johnny Benson, as Bentley

Ahh, Bentley. Keith Bentley, in real life, is quite a character. As is Johnny Benson. So Johnny Benson PLAYING Keith Bentley... "hilarity ensues," is an overused, but completely appropriate turn of phrase.

Now, to be clear, the character of Keith Bentley is not really Keith Bentley exactly, but rather a characterization, and sometimes a caricature, of Keith Bentley, loosely based on my friend Keith Bentley, who actually is an artist, as is the character, Keith Bentley. Is that clear enough for you?

As with many of the characters in, "Smalltimore," I used friends, acquaintances, events and circumstances as jumping-off points - and then leapt.

When I first started writing this script, one of the most difficult things was, for me, to let go of my tight grasp on events and the exact details of how they transpired, and learn to massage them with a little poetic license until I could weave a bunch of interesting experiences I have had, fudging the details where necessary, into a cohesive storyline of events. Equally difficult for me was letting go of the characters that were based, albeit loosely, on people I know in real life, and letting the actor put their own spin on them.

For example: Keith Bentley actually did a screen test for the character of Bentley. But he was so nervous about it that he couldn't play the loose, funny, relaxed, neurotic, hot mess, hysterical Bentley that I know and love. And he was (is) living in Canada, which would have been a production scheduling nightmare. So, I had to cast the part.

I remember Johnny Benson's audition very clearly. Not so much what he read but how he read it and his general stage presence. I am pretty sure he was within the first FIVE people who read on the first night of auditions, so when someone sticks out in your memory 80+ people and two exhausting nights later, that is a pretty good sign. He didn't seem nervous at all, sort of threw away the lines, which is how Bentley often talks. I also don't remember exactly what he was wearing, but he definitely has his own style, which lies somewhere between vampire and pirate, if you can imagine a vampire or a pirate tending bar at a tiki lounge. I don't know if that makes any sense, if you know Johnny it might. Maybe that's just me. He's just so relaxed and comfortable with everyone at all times, you know, like all good bartenders are. I've never seen him in an awkward or nervous moment. And he owns a couple of cool Hawaiian shirts.

Ann Mladinov was my second pair of eyes at the audition. As soon as Johnny walked out of the theater, I looked at her and we both said, "Bentley."

Now, it wasn't as simple as that. There was another actor that we also both really liked as Bentley, and it was a very difficult decision between the two of them. There were a few deciding factors, and it really came down to the wire. Several people whose advice I trust were pushing me in the other direction, but there was something about Johnny that my gut was telling me, that's the one. I know in the end the right person got the part.

One of the factors that pushed me towards Johnny was that after a grueling day (about 6 hours straight) of callbacks, I had a little cocktail party for the actors so I could chat with them a bit more, and see how they interacted with each other as well. I know that for some, this was the most nerve-wracking part of the day. I could see it on their faces, and I empathized. How comfortable would you be, socializing, sometimes side by side with your competition, while talking to your potential director? I didn't envy them. But Johnny... he was so fluid, it surprised me that he didn't know any of these people already because he was so comfortable and sociable, I think he even exchanged contact info with a few of them, in case they, or he, didn't get a part in "Smalltimore," so they could still reach each other.

Some of my more experienced director friends warned me that I should not give bonus points to actors who can socialize so easily, nor demerits to the wallflowers, of which there were a few. But, to a degree, I disagree. If the wallflower is far and away a better actor, well then of course, it's no question, they should have the part. If it were just about being my friend, well then... Bentley would have actually played Bentley (I love you, Bentleeeeey...).

But when it is neck-and-neck... I'm going to go for the person who is blending with their potential castmates as if they were old friends. But what if they are doing that on purpose, you ask? What if they know that is what you are looking for and they are just giving you what you want to see? Well then, I say, that's really good acting! Sign 'em up!

Johnny was a pleasure to work with and had great chemistry with everyone, but especially with Cheryl (Gracie) and Kelly (Mel). One of my favorite scenes is the three of them in Dionysus, sitting on the sofa having a beer and picking on each other like only the best of friends can and get away with it. Johnny did a great job of nailing a certain aspect about Bentley (whom he has yet to meet). There is a way, in real life, that Bentley always seems to be the one being picked on, and yet he often manages to have the last laugh; the verbal "love slaps" just seem to roll right off him. He never overthinks anything, and he never holds a grudge. I have known him for almost exactly ten years and we have never had a fight. I once made a mean comment on one of his Facebook photos (which was meant to be funny, and would have unmistakably been if delivered in person) to which he typed a reply, "That was just mean," which, had that been delivered in person, would also have been unmistakably funny. But, fearing I had truly hurt his feelings, I apologized all over myself in a note. His immediate response was, "Good lord, are you drunk?!" He'd never take anything that seriously, as I should have known.

Johnny definitely put his own twist on Bentley, and once I saw where he was going with it, I pushed him to go even further. It worked very well and I think Johnny is funny in every single scene, but in no way buffoonish or slapstick. Johnny's humor is concurrently subtle and apparent. During production, I was on the phone with (the real) Bentley, and of course he asked about the guy I had chosen to play "him". "He's fantastic!" I said. "He actually plays it a lot like you, especially the chemistry between Johnny and Cheryl is a lot like the chemistry between us. But... he's like, a darker, more aggressive, sexually deviant version of you."

"Oh," Bentley said. "So he is playing me the way I think I am in my head."

"Exactly."