Back To One
How It All Began, Part I
First, as promised, I sit here at another incredible coffee shop, Brewers Experimental, in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City. And this is their excellent flat white.
This spot is around the corner from my place in La Roma and it’s a great place to work and fuel up on incredibly tasty chilaquiles and coffee. They take their coffee seriously which I appreciate. It’s not obnoxiously loud, one can write comfortably so buckle up for this one cuz it’s like The Brutalist of Substack posts, includes an intermission.
Memory is an unreliable narrator. I can recall with impeccable detail the seminal experiences, the moments, though not dates.
I just remember it had to be March of 2003 and I only know that because what I count as my first professional job on a real movie happened in 2004 and the movie came out in 2005. The movie was Drop Dead Sexy and it starred Jason Lee (Almost Famous, Mallrats, Chasing Amy), Crispin Glover (McFly!) and Xander Berkeley (a ton of stuff from Sid & Nancy, to Air Force One, to 24).
I was at the SXSW Film Festival with some friends and my girlfriend at the time. My buddy James and I went to the bar to get some drinks for our dates and upon returning to our table, there were two asshole L.A. types chatting up our dates. And the ladies were having a grand old time, laughing it up with these creeps. So, James and I wearing fake smiles squeeze in between the dudes and plonk the drinks on the table so as to mark our territory. My girlfriend speaks first...
“Hey, I was just talking about you…this is Michael. He’s a director from L.A.”
It’s funny how my perception of the guy as an asshole L.A. type was spot-on but also, while trying to contain my excitement, I quickly began excavating the guy’s brain. He tells me he’s in town raising money for an indie feature to shoot in Austin. Guy was speaking my language.
For context, this was Austin in the early 2000s. Austin was an unassailably cool city at this period in time. The 1990s American New Wave of filmmakers - Soderbergh, Spike Lee, Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, Tarantino, Hal Hartley, The Coen Brothers…and more specific to me…Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklater - they were all my reason for being. I was devouring movies through the late 90s-early 2000s. And Rodriguez and Linklater were local. Rodriguez was SO local to me (Mexican-American, born in San Antonio, TX) that he filmed his feature directorial debut, El Mariachi, in my parent’s hometown of Acuña, Coahuila, Mexico just over the border from my hometown in Texas. (For more about his story, read Rebel Without A Crew. It’s an excellent book/diary on the making of his first movie in what feels to be a bygone era - still, the spirit of the book remains relevant. In fact, it is a sort-of-inspiration in retrospect for this Substack as it serves as a sort-of-journal of my experience making not my first film, but my first in another country.)
Anyway, all this to say, my time living in Austin was my BA in film.
Back to the scene with the asshole L.A. types. By now, I’m pelting Michael with questions. I’m a kid in my 20s with boundless energy and chomping at the bit to be a director. He shouldn’t have been hitting on my girlfriend if he was so put out. Michael is nice enough, he’s a 40 something dude making his first film as a director, though he’d produced a handful. A fountain of wisdom as far as I was concerned. Guy tells me he doesn’t know much about Austin and I see an opportunity.
Just a month or so prior to this meeting, a young, wanna-be producer optioned my first screenplay. I had taken pages out of that script and shot a short film, which she loved. She had come into some money - 200K or so - and wanted to open up shop, do it right, get an office, develop a script and make that time-honored, however elusive low budget indie. So, I had an office. With a chair and a desk and a computer and everything. A conference room. An actual fucking water cooler. This was the early 2000’s. How charming it all sounds now.
So, I tell Michael…
“Listen, how about this…I’ll introduce you around to a bunch of locals, other filmmakers, the best restaurants, the great music venues and bands to check out. AND you can use my office for your calls, meetings, internet and just set up shop. All I want is…you let me sit in on your meetings, listen in on everything as you setup your movie.”
We’re a few drinks in now and I’ve essentially ignored my girlfriend for the past 20 minutes or so. But I hooked the director.
Michael starts coming by the office every morning. My office was in a cool, industrial building in the arts district, literally in a back room of an art gallery. My producer was cute and I think Michael liked her a little and liked being there, felt somewhat at home considering it was around this time when Austin was attempting to be L.A. lite. Michael was a big fish in this pond. He was bringing a movie down to Austin to shoot with some movie stars. And I had him in my office.
After a number of calls and meetings, I start to see the matrix a bit more clearly. That’s not to say it makes any fucking sense. To this day, the models of making an independent film rely on, at best, outdated information thought often at worst, obsolete information. This is not a business. It is gambling.
Michael had a meeting with some local fat cats that were funding the film. He came back from the meeting, shaking his head at some of their requests - one of which, I happened to be keenly prepared to help him with. The fat cats asked if it was possible for him to create a kind of visual tool for them to more clearly understand the “tone” he was going for on this film. A reference reel, a fake trailer or something. I can understand the ask. The film is about a couple of local goobers coming up with a goober idea to dig up the dead wife of a fat cat who was buried with a pricey necklace. The goobers know this because one of them works at the cemetery, digging the holes. That’s not the tricky part - the one goober who works at the cemetery gets a little crush on the good-looking corpse wife. In this dark comedy, it is also intimated that the relationship was consummated.
The question the fat cats had was are you leaning into the dark? or the comedy? Michael doesn’t have any idea what to show them but he does know he’s leaning more into the comedy. Luckily, he had a cinephile sitting across from him… with a desk and chair and a computer and everything.
You have to laugh at the tech from those days. I had the Apple G4 Tower with Final Cut Pro 2! I had honed my editing chops cutting my own short films. And there was a video ripping app where you could rip movies off of DVDs (!!) into QuickTime files, dump them into an editing timeline and get to work creating what were called “rip reels” back then. In some circles, still called rip reels or tone reels.
The ask was to find scenes from similar movies that can be compiled in a way that communicates as best you can the general vibe of the film…use some music and some clever stitching to convey the tone Michael was after. So, I thought up a bunch of movies with the kind of nonsense that goes on in ridiculous film script. Michael was going for a Coen Brothers thing, think Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski. Try as we might, we did not come close to Coen Brothers anything.
Anyway, I clipped some scenes from a handful of weird movies where someone is coming up with some hair-brained idea, threw some funky music under it, text cards with some lighter beats of what was to come and Bam! Michael had his rip reel to show the fat cats.
This reel of mine helped Michael close the financing on the movie.
The guy owes me big right? So I ask him to put me on as the editor of his 2 million dollar indie! Of course, I’m secretly thinking “I want your job, mother fucker!” But, he tells me they have secured the legendary Austin-based editor, lifelong collaborator of Richard Linklater, Academy-Award nominee Sandra Adair.
“I’ll bring you on as Sandra’s assistant editor,” said Michael.
That was my official first job on a real movie, though with an asterisk. It lasted all of six days.
End Part I