PARK CITY, Utah—They didn’t take home awards, but some of the most buzzed-about films at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival were made by filmmakers with links to the commercial production industry. Among them was The Woodsman, directed by Nicole Kassell, who is represented for spots by Washington Square Films, New York. In fact, it came as a shock to many that Kassell’s film—which centers on a convicted sex offender’s struggle to start a new life after being released from jail—didn’t garner any awards. The consensus among those who had attended the film’s screenings was that the first-time feature filmmaker’s mastery of such intense and controversial material would surely be recognized.
While Kassell—who was rewarded when her film was picked up for distribution by Newmarket Films during the festival—seems destined for a distinguished filmmaking career on the strength of her first feature, director Angela Robinson’s feature directorial debut, D.E.B.S., also showed potential. Featuring extensive effects work completed by Edgeworx, New York, Robinson’s stylish comedic film chronicles the campy adventures of the D.E.B.S.—high school girls who are recruited by the government to be part of an elite paramilitary group.
Established filmmakers gained notice for their work in the documentary vein. One of the festival faves was well known music video director Matt Mahurin’s I Like Killing Flies. Mahurin’s character study focuses on a cranky New York chef named Kenny Shopsin, who is famous for kicking customers out of his tiny Greenwich Village hole-in-the-wall for all sorts of minor infractions—such as daring to request seating for parties of five.
Meanwhile, directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, who are represented for spotwork by bicoastal/international @radical.media, rocked Sundance with their documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. Frank Scherma and Jon Kamen, co-proprietors of @radical.media, served as executive producers of the film, which chronicles a rough patch in the lives of the famed metal band’s middle-aged members.
Editor Don Kleszy of The Well, New York served as co-producer and editor of Neverland: The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army. An entrant in the Documentary competition, the film, directed by Robert Stone, offers an amazingly comprehensive examination of the group responsible for the ’74 kidnapping of Patty Hearst.
SHOOT spoke with some of the aforementioned filmmakers and others regarding the work that they had showcased at Sundance. Read on for a more in-depth look at some of the festival’s most noteworthy feature films and feature-length documentaries.
THE WOODSMAN
Can a pedophile be reformed? Kassell explores that and other questions in The Woodsman, which was selected to compete in Sundance’s Dramatic category. The film finds a convicted sex offender, Walter (played by Kevin Bacon), being released from prison after serving 12 years, and returning to his hometown to rebuild his life. "It’s a massive taboo subject," Kassell acknowledged. "To humanize a sex offender is controversial because it’s much easier just to see them as one-dimensional, evil people."
The Woodsman is based on the play of the same name by Steven Fechter. According to Kassell, Fechter wrote the play in response to a number of laws passed in the late ’90s, including Megan’s Law, which requires that local law enforcement inform residents when a convicted sex offender moves into their neighborhood. After seeing Fechter’s play back in ’00 when she was still a graduate filmmaking student at New York University, Kassell asked Fechter to co-write a film version of the work with her.
A great deal of research went into the project. "I met with sex offenders, I met with victims, and I met with family members of victims and therapists," Kassell shared. "I really tried to meet the gamut. I did not want to take on this material naively."
Kassell and Fechter’s script won the Slamdance Film Festival Screenplay Competition in ’01. That led to Kassell securing a manager at Washington Square Arts, a division of Washington Square Films. Kassell’s manager sent out the script—along with Kassell’s portfolio containing a few shorts, including The Green Hour, which had competed in Sundance in ’02 —to potential producers. "The first question from most of the producers was would I sell it for someone else to direct? I said no," Kassell recounted.
Ultimately, the script fell into the hands of Monster’s Ball producer Lee Daniels, who took on the film. In addition to Bacon, the film stars Bacon’s wife Kyra Sedgwick as Walter’s love interest, Benjamin Bratt as Walter’s brother-in-law, singer/actress Eve as a secretary at the wood yard where Walter works, David Alan Grier as the wood yard boss, and Mos Def in the role of a detective who keeps an eye on Walter.
Xavier Perez Grobet DPed The Woodsman, which was shot over five weeks in Philadelphia.
With the success of The Woodsman, Kassell hopes to break into the spot market through Washington Square Films. "With features, it takes months and years to get one going," Kassell said, "and I would just like to be working on smaller projects in between that let me exercise my creative muscle."
RIDING GIANTS
When director Stacy Peralta submitted his surfing documentary Riding Giants for consideration to Sundance, he had no idea that the film would be chosen to open the festival—the first time ever that a documentary was awarded that honor. "It was such an utter surprise that when Jeff Gilmore, who runs Sundance, called me to tell me, I was so shell shocked that an hour later I had to call his assistant just to double check that I really did have that conversation with Jeff," related Peralta, who directs commercials via Nonfiction Spots, Santa Monica.
Riding Giants is a Sundance sequel of sorts for Peralta. In ’01, his skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys premiered at the festival and won the Audience Award for best documentary film. As for his latest project, Peralta said, "Basically what we’ve done is we have told a history of surfing by using the canvas of big waves. We’re using the spectacle and the visual of these hundred-foot waves to tell a great surfing story, to explore surfing culture, to explore surfing’s origins."
The film’s spectacular surfing footage was shot by Don King and Sonny Miller—both famed surfing cinematographers. Additionally, Peralta said he licensed footage from at least 40 other cinematographers. Peter Pilafian served as DP for the interviews and interstitial material.
Like Dogtown and Z-Boys, Riding Giants isn’t your average documentary. It’s a fast-paced, energetic film edited by Nonfiction Spots’ Peter Crowder, who Peralta praised for his creative style and ability to tell a longform story. An eclectic soundtrack complements the action in Riding Giants. Documentaries don’t have to be dry, Peralta pointed out. "You want the films to be entertaining," he said. "You don’t want them to be bitter pills that people have to swallow to learn something."
In addition to educating and entertaining filmgoers, Peralta hopes Riding Giants, which was picked up for distribution during the festival by Sony Pictures Classics, will also help improve the image of surfers. "There have been so many surf movies over the years that have depicted surfers as not very intelligent people," said Peralta, who started surfing when he was 11. "I tried to show with the people that we profiled that these are very independent and iconoclastic thinkers. They’re adventurers, and there is a reason why they have centered their lives around the ocean."
METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER
About three years ago, Berlinger and Sinofsky began documenting the recording of what would become Metallica’s St. Anger album. The filmmakers thought they would spend six months or so on the project and fashion the footage into a straight-to-video release. They wound up shooting for nearly two years. The end result is Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, featured in Sundance’s American Spectrum showcase.
Hardly your typical rock documentary, the film finds Metallica’s members—drummer Lars Ulrich, singer James Hetfield and guitarist Kirk Hammett—in turmoil. After 20 years together, the rockers have so many conflicts to contend with that they actually hire a therapist and attend group therapy sessions. Hetfield winds up in rehab, leaving Lars and Kirk to wonder if Metallica is finished.
Despite the drama, Metallica gave Berlinger and Sinofsky an all-access pass to film their lives. "These guys were willing to show us warts and all, and as it turns out, it makes them look heroic and gutsy," Sinofsky said.
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster was shot on digital video due to cost considerations. "The challenge here was to shoot a boatload and then find the film in the editing room, so there was no choice but to use digital video," Berlinger said. Bob Richman served as DP on the project, while Berlinger and Sinofsky both shot second-camera.
About halfway through the shoot, Metallica’s record company Elektra, which was splitting the cost of the film with the band, decided it would be best to take the footage and make it into a reality show à la The Osbournes. Although they were willing to go that route, Berlinger and Sinofsky said they were convinced the project was destined to be a film. The band felt the same way after Elektra came back and said the best offer they could get was from VH1. "At that point, the band said, ‘No fucking way,’ " Berlinger said.
"They felt like VH1 is where bands go to die," Sinofsky added.
Metallica subsequently bought out the record company’s interest in the project. Now that Metallica: Some Kind of Monster has made its Sundance premiere, Berlinger and Sinofsky will turn their attention to the distribution of the film, which they are handling themselves. Additionally, they expect to have time to direct commercials. "I know Frank [Scherma] would love that," Berlinger said, laughing.
Berlinger and Sinofsky credited Scherma and Kamen for their patience. After all, this project came up only a few months after they signed with @radical.media, taking them away from the spot world for more than three years. "There was a while where we were taking up a tremendous amount of real estate in [@radical.media’s New York office]. We had four editing rooms going at one point, and films are not as profitable as commercials," Berlinger pointed out.
For his part, Scherma was thrilled to play a role in the making of the film. "They are amazing filmmakers," he said of Berlinger and Sinofsky.
Interestingly, there was an unexpected benefit that came out of making Metallica: Some Kind of Monster—the filmmakers said the process was as therapeutic for them as it was for the band. "Bruce and I had a bit of a chill in our personal relationship [at that time]," Berlinger admitted. "We’re very close friends, but we were in a period where we were each doing our own thing and having some growing pains. It’s hard to be a team and be collaborators, so to be sitting in therapy sessions as collaborators with [other] collaborators exploring their issues and their problems was very inspiring."
"After [filming] some of those therapy sessions, especially some of the heavier ones, Joe and I would go back to the hotel and just sort of let it all hang out," Sinofsky said. "There were hugs. There were tears. There was anger. But it really solidified us, and I think it made our work better."
SEPTEMBER TAPES
What drove director Christian Johnston and his crew to sneak into Afghanistan last year to shoot September Tapes? "Part of the intrigue was that it was such an insane idea," mused the director, who is represented by Venice, Calif.-based Cucoloris Films for spots.
Certainly, shooting on location lent an authenticity to Johnston’s film. Featured in Sundance’s American Spectrum, September Tapes tells the story of journalist Don Larson (played by George Calil) who travels to Kabul less than a year after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to do a story on the bounty hunters tracking Osama Bin Laden and goes missing. Weeks after Larson disappears, Northern Alliance fighters discover some of his belongings—including tapes—in a tunnel.
While much of September Tapes is scripted—Johnston and Christian Van Gregg co-wrote the screenplay—the genre-blending film also includes documentary footage. Watching the film, one does not always know what is scripted and what is real. Johnston declined to specify what percentage of the film is narrative. "I encourage people to come see it and decide what they think is real," he said.
Johnston noted that he would have never been able to pull off the film if it weren’t for the invaluable contributions of production manager/co-star Wali Razaqi. A native of Afghanistan who left the country as a child, Razaqi returned a few weeks before the shoot to arrange whatever assistance he could for the production.
During the shoot, it wasn’t unusual for Johnston and his crew to find themselves dodging bullets and other dangers. Brent Henry, one of the film’s executive producers and the man who dared to finance the high-risk project, would occasionally hear from Johnston by phone. "I wouldn’t hear from him for days on end," Henry said. "A lot of people were worried they wouldn’t even come back."
Johnston and his crew did manage to return to the U.S. safely. However, a major problem arose when the U.S. Department of Defense confiscated Johnston’s footage. "They wanted it under the guise of making sure we weren’t pre-releasing anything that might be connected to active military on-goings near the Pakistani border, which is where we were," Johnston said. "I think they just really wanted to see if we had documented certain military mishaps—there were a lot of things that did happen with accidental bombs dropping in the wrong spots."
After six months, the Department of Defense returned most of Johnston’s footage, and he was finally able to edit the film. While Johnston was thrilled that September Tapes made it into Sundance and was picked up for distribution by First Look Media, his dream is to see it play in Kabul. "We would like to show the film in Kabul and do a fundraiser to help all of the people who helped us," Johnston said.
D.E.B.S.
When it came to choosing a facility to do post and effects work on her feature film debut D.E.B.S., director Robinson, who also wrote the film, turned to Edgeworx because she knew the crew there quite well. "She was an intern here while she was in film school [at New York University]," related Edgeworx’s David Tecson, who along with Mark Thompson served as visual effects supervisor on the movie.
D.E.B.S. originated as a short film financed by a ’02 grant from POWER UP, a Los Angeles-based networking organization for gay women in the entertainment industry. Robinson went on to expand her humorous short—a spy film send-up shown at Sundance last year—into a feature film version produced by Sony’s Screen Gems. Best described as Charlie’s Angels meets Austin Powers meets The L Word, the film finds the D.E.B.S. facing their archenemy Lucy Diamond (played by Jordana Brewster), a sexy lesbian bank robber. When Lucy kidnaps Amy (Sara Foster), a D.E.B.S. member, the rest of the girls go on a mission to save her. But Amy doesn’t really need saving—she is actually having an affair with Lucy and staged her kidnapping so that they could be together.
Robinson made D.E.B.S. on a relatively low budget. "The budget was $3.5 million, which is cheap for an effects movie," Robinson shared. Given the amount of effects that needed to be done (Edgeworx was called on to do everything from adding several floors to a restaurant to recreating the D.E.B.S. car in 3-D to beaming characters into scenes à la Star Trek), D.E.B.S. was shot in HD. "It would have been too expensive to do the effects it if were shot on film," Tecson said. "HD made the process a lot easier financially."
It also helped that Robinson relied on old friends at Edgeworx—who had also worked on the short version of the project—to get the job done. "There were favors done for Angela because of all the hard work she gave to Edgeworx," Tecson said.
Robinson also saved some money by editing the film herself, although it wasn’t cost considerations that drove her to do the cutting. "I always edit my work," Robinson said. "It’s something that I enjoy doing, getting right in there with the footage."
LBS.
It isn’t unusual for an actor to change his appearance to play a part, but Carmine Famiglietti really went all out, losing 170 pounds during the making of the Lbs., which was featured in Sundance’s American Spectrum. Written by Famiglietti and the film’s director Matthew Bonifacio, Lbs. tells the story of Neil Perota (Famiglietti), a 315-pound Brooklyn man who suffers a heart attack because of his weight, ruining his sister’s dream wedding. The subsequent fallout hits Neil hard, and he flees to upstate New York, where he lives in a trailer and embarks on a quest to lose the pounds.
Given that Famiglietti’s weight loss had to be shown onscreen, Lbs. was shot over the course of two years. The shooting schedule worked well for the film’s editor, Jim Rubino of Slingshot Post, New York. "That actually made it easier for me to take [on]—we’d have three month breaks where I was able to do my commercial work," shared Rubino, whose spot clients include Bank One, Diet Coke and Maybelline.
Lbs. is Rubino’s first feature. It also marks the feature debut of Slingshot Post co-owner/executive producer Stephen Ashkinos, who co-executive produced the film. Rubino noted that it took him awhile to get into the swing of editing a feature. "When I first started doing the film, I was editing it a little bit faster, cutting it like a thirty-second commercial," he recalled. "It would have been a disaster had I not recognized that. What I learned from that [experience] was to let the acting breathe."
Rubino wasn’t the only person new to film. Bonifacio had never directed a film before—let alone collaborated with an editor. Through working with Rubino, Bonifacio grew to appreciate the difference a good editor can make. "He brought things to it that I never imagined or expected," Bonifacio said.
Additionally, Rubino and Ashkinos provided Bonifacio with a path into the world of commercialmaking. "While the movie was being edited at Slingshot, Jim and Steve would show clients scenes, and they would say, ‘Wow, this is great,’ " Bonifacio related. During the making of the film, Bonifacio found time to put together a reel of spec spots that Rubino edited for him, and he ultimately garnered freelance spot directing jobs for clients such as Verizon and Major League Baseball.
Bonifacio said he is definitely interested in pursuing more spotwork. Right now, however, he and Rubino and the rest of those involved in Lbs. are basking in the glow of Sundance. When he learned that the film had been chosen to be a part of the festival, Rubino said he cried. "It was a lot of blood, sweat and tears—two years of working so hard," he added. "I still get choked up. It’s an amazing accomplishment."
IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL
In the documentary In the Realms of the Unreal, director Jessica Yu examines the life of Henry Darger, an artist who lived a virtually invisible existence. Born in Chicago, Darger was orphaned and spent much of his younger years in mental institutions outside of Chicago. At the age of 17, he ran away from one and made his way back to Chicago, where he spent the next 64 years leading a reclusive existence, working as a janitor in various hospitals and attending Catholic mass. Darger died at the age of 80, and when his landlord cleaned out his room, he discovered a wealth of writings and art work, including an epic, 15,000-page novel titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.
Yu first became aware of Darger when she saw his work exhibited in Los Angeles about 15 years ago. "I just remember being struck by his work because the subject matter was so strange and on the surface very perverse," she said. "You had these scenes of battles with little girls and these men, but at the same time there was something very innocent about it and very un-ironic in the way it was presented."
In her film, which competed in Sundance’s Documentary competition, Yu sought to compare and contrast Darger’s real world with the fantasy world he created through his art. "As you get to know a little bit more about each, you start to see what the appeal of this grand, strange fantasy life was," Yu noted.
For insight into Darger’s life, Yu interviewed the few people—essentially neighbors—who knew him. Yu purposely did not interview art experts or psychologists. "I wasn’t interested as much in his clinical diagnosis, and I didn’t want him to be easily labeled. I didn’t want the art to be seen as the symptom of some disorder," she related, adding, "I think if you spend a good amount of time with his work, you come up with your own assessment, and I wanted to leave room for that in the film."
Meanwhile, Yu found a unique way to take us further into Darger’s work—as the film goes on, we increasingly see animated versions of his art. "If you just see a couple of his paintings, you’re like, ‘What is this? This just seems really whacked out.’ But once you get a sense of what he went through in his life and why he was occupied with these themes, then it starts to become more real, and you start to become more engrossed in the fabric of his world," Yu said. "So in the film, what I wanted to do was have [the animation] slowly bring that world to life."
Darger’s art was quite filmic, according to Yu. "He wrote this incredibly long novel, and then he created paintings to go along with that world. He would even write lyrics to battle songs," she related. "It was almost like he was creating all of the elements to make a film."
One has to ask: Did Yu read Darger’s 15,000-page book? "I went into this thinking I’m going to be the first to read the entire book. The first night I read two hundred pages. At four in the morning, I was like, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ The next morning I’d read one hundred pages, then it was down to fifty. It was very repetitive," Yu said, laughing. "I tried to read as much as I could."
Editor’s note: Look for coverage on spotmakers’ Sundance shorts entries in next week’s issue.
