filming "jack's last date"

Everyone in my class at USC (except two sneaky people who got exemptions) has to take a required production class this semester called 507. (For some reason classes at SCA are universally referred to by number instead of name.) We're grouped in teams of five or six people, and over the course of the semester we shoot a short project, which is basically a scene in one location, and a long project, which is a short of up to ten minutes, rotating crew positions on each project. A ten-minute short may not seem like a "long project" until you start to film it. Then you realize just how long ten minutes can be.

People tend to either love or hate this class, depending on how much they love or hate physical production. I love it. Probably the single most important thing I've learned from 507 is that a lot of production is looking at something on the page and saying "Well, that's clearly impossible. Okay, let's figure out how to do it." Shoot a two-character scene in an elevator? That'll never work. Well, my group did it. Fake a subway station with an on-campus location for a scene that ends with someone jumping in front of a train? No way! Another group in my class did it, and it worked beautifully. When you start out, things like permits and white balance and Avid seem overwhelmingly complex. But when you actually start working you realize a lot of this stuff is not as complicated as it first seemed, and if you have good material and good actors and a good crew, making a movie can actually be fun.

For our long project, my team selected a script I wrote last semester called "Jack's Last Date." I submitted this script to 546, the graduate production class, and it made it through the first round, but didn't end up getting selected. I'd purposely made it very easy to shoot--three actors, minimal and easy-to-find locations, no crazy effects. It was designed to be technically simple but dramatically interesting--which apparently is not what grabs the attention of USC production students. So I thought, why not just film it ourselves?

I have a lot of love for this little script, perhaps because I'm terrible at writing things that are short, and I felt this was the one short script I'd produced last semester that I was really happy with. It had all the things I think a good short should have--it was only 10 pages, but offered a lot of emotional range for the actors to play with, it told a big story (really, the most important moment in the main character's life), and it was still very "me." Of course, that means that Jack, the protagonist, is a serial killer. It's a dark comedy. Sort of.

I knew a lot would depend on getting good actors who were excited about the script, since the piece really hinges on four or five two-character dramatic scenes. We were incredibly lucky to find a fantastic cast. Danny, who played Jack, and Karly, who plays Katie, the woman he's supposed to kill but ends up falling in love with, were the very first people we saw at auditions. They read together and just knocked it out of the park. They had great, natural chemistry, which was very important since we have only a few minutes of screen time to build their connection with each other. Danny was perfect--disarmingly sweet, charming, slightly awkward, with a wonderfully expressive face--exactly what I wanted. The director and I spent a long time debating between casting him and another actor who was also very good, but very different. I pressed hard for Danny and after filming I'm convinced we made the right choice.

Jackie, who plays Jack's manipulative mother (who's a figment of his imagination but appears on screen) was also one of the first people we saw at auditions and was by far the best. Her interpretation of Mom actually ended up being fairly different from what I had in my head, but it totally worked and was delightful to watch. She could be gleeful and seductive one moment, cold and calculating the next. When the climactic scene between her and Jack wasn't packing the dramatic punch we needed, we asked her to ad lib and DAMN! Out came the most blistering torrent of emotional abuse you could possibly imagine--which actually worked better than the lines I had written, while still being completely consistent with the character. She's supposed to be the manifestation of all the foul things in his psyche, and boy did she deliver.

Watching actors play with your words and find things you didn't even know were in there is probably one of the most fun experiences in the world. We only had one rehearsal before we were going to shoot, and the actors weren't even off book yet, but it was still an absolute blast. The only problem was that I kept wanting to direct, and I'm sure my many interjections and notes on the performance annoyed the hell out of the actual director--especially when I had different opinions from him.

That one rehearsal made me realize that I really want to direct my own work. There is nothing more satisfying than finding the thing that unlocks the drama of a scene for an actor and suddenly seeing an emotional world that previously existed only in your head come to life inside another person. I found myself pulling out a lot of tricks from Nina Foch's class, and also from Ted Braun's 514 class, of all places.

We were again lucky that the actual shoot went pretty smoothly--thanks in a large part to the tireless work of Joan, our fearless producer, who not only drove all over the city getting permits and fake blood and prop weapons (including a very realistic-looking prop rock) but was kind enough to let us shoot the majority of the film in her apartment. In the long list of things that could have gone wrong, almost nothing did--everyone showed up on time, the actors knew their lines, it did not rain when we needed to shoot in Griffith Park, no one fell down any of the park's incredibly steep hills, no equipment broke, the sound recorded clearly even when Jackie and Danny were screaming at each other, and we shot the whole thing in about a day and a half. Of course, not everything was perfect, and not everything was exactly the way I would have shot it, but after watching the dailies I'm confident there is a movie in there.

Taking 507 has made me realize two important things: (1) I want to take more production classes, and (2) I want to direct something I wrote. Unfortunately, I don't tend to write things that can be shot in a modern-day urban environment on a budget of approximately zero. So one of my goals for the summer has become writing a feature that's easy enough for me to direct myself (not this summer, but soon) but still representative of my aesthetic. I don't have the idea yet, but the wheels are turning. I'd also love to write a few more shorts, since there are a lot of opportunities to get shorts produced at USC, and I need to brainstorm some ideas for the webisode class I hope to take next semester. And start thinking about my thesis. And come up with some TV pilot ideas, although there's only one I really want to write. In conclusion: lots of writing. And somewhere in there I'm supposed to be taking a class and doing an internship and learning how to drive.

Onward!