A Spoon Full of Masochism

After recently watching Faithless, a film Ingmar Bergman wrote and Liv Ullmann directed...

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...I've been thinking about the telling of painful stories well.  In Faithless, an aging screenwriter conjures a woman to help him tell a layered tale of deception and betrayal between her, her husband, and the husband's best friend.  Ullmann and Bergman made striking choices about which parts of the story the woman narrates while moving from window seat to armchair to guest chair in the screenwriter's seaside study and which parts get staged in Paris and Stockholm and the Swedish countryside.  The appearance of a key prop tells us which of the two men the screenwriter is, and also lets us know that this affair really happened.**


Now, I happen to like movies with Russian-doll plot lines like this.  Carlos Saura's films Carmen and Tango stand out for their intricacy.  My question is why writer-directors like Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen choose to be mean to their characters.  Is it auteurial self-loathing?  Sure, they're gifted filmmakers, but their later films in particular show a disappointment in humanity—a misanthropy—that just begs scoffing and dismissiveness.  The pity is they slime the audience with that misanthropy as thoroughly as their characters. Self-loathing doesn't have to lead to cruelty.  Suicide suggests self-loathing, but David Foster Wallace's contrasting kindness towards his fictional characters and the world leaps to mind.  Wallace could write about vile characters doing despicable things, but never with a whiff of cruelty towards them.


Maybe Faithless could have focused more on the effect of the adults' actions on the woman's daughter, like Fanny and Alexander centered on the children, but the screenwriter in Faithless insists the woman articulate her sin and his.  At least she's allowed to protest the anguish of the recounting and grieve the damage to the girl (thank you, Ullmann?).  By the end, the characters are wrung out, and so is the audience.  What does it take to explore difficult truths in film without requiring the collusion of the viewer's masochism?

Susana Darwin

*http://www.discshop.se/filmer/dvd/trolosa/P29100
**"really" as in within the film and "really" as in in Bergman's real life

No Gong Needed

No gong needed.  No shepherd's crook, no mask-of-gelid-politeness dismissals.  This is yet another great thing about working in Chicago—we saw a dozen talented performers read for roles in Hatboxes in the first set of auditions a couple of evenings ago, and every one had talent.  Sure, some were stronger than others, some were more in their groove, some connected better with the emotional nuances in the script, some took direction particularly well, but not one called to mind Jennifer Tilly as Blanche "Monica" Moran...

or any of the other 36 cringe-inducing also-rans in The Fabulous Baker Boys.

Far from it.

Truth is, auditions are very unglamourous.

                            


But, in very modest surroundings, some interesting performances happen.

And it's helpful for me as writer and director. The auditions were energizing and clarifying.  I saw ways to tighten the Hatboxes script and heard variations in rhythm and timbre that will help tell the story better.  I look forward to the next round.

Susana Darwin

Passover

I’ve studied a half-dozen Passover  haggadahs in the past month ahead of  hosting a “salon seder” last night with a great group of women.  We used the recently published New American Haggadah  (check out the “simultweets”).  The haggadah is the book that  guides the seder ritual, and tell you what, Passover is a marvel of an  all-over-the-place holiday:  we  observe the festival because the  Almighty told us to, but we’re also supposed to tell the story of the mass  escape of the Israelites from Egypt.  The story, the festival table, even the food, are all heavy with  symbolism, but the underlying message is self-determination.  Freedom.

Often everybody attending a Passover seder has a book in hand—the  haggadah—men and women, young and old.  Literacy affords an unparalleled promise of  freedom.

matzah = flight  from Egypt into the desert…the Israelites took off without time even to let  their bread rise; charosset, a  mixture of fruit, nuts, and spices = the mortar the Israelite slaves used  in building for the Egyptians; beitzah (hard-boiled  egg) = mourning the destruction of the Second Temple (and celebrating springtime); maror, here horseradish = the bitter harshness of slavery; z’roa (shankbone) = the  Passover sacrifice and the protection of the firstborn from the last plague; karpas (parsley) dipped in salt water =  the tears of the Hebrew slaves.

The orange is a  late addition to some seder plates:  a rabbi’s wife is alleged to have said that women belong in the  rabbinate like an orange belongs on the seder plate.

We do love our irony.

Four questions tell  us about different types of children, or different types of Jews.  Four  glasses of wine mark the holiness of the occasion, the telling of the  Exodus story, grace after the meal, and the psalms of praise.  A cup of wine welcomes the prophet  Elijah.

An observant Jew might hear the Bible’s telling of Exodus once a year, like  clockwork.  If you’re not so  observant, though, maybe you channel-surf past The Ten Commandments,  but you may be a bit vague on the details (Moses, reed basket…ten  plagues, “Let my people go,” miraculously divided sea…).  The parts of Exodus that get into the haggadah  and then into English translation assume an intimacy with the story that many  celebrants may not have. Like…Did you know that Moses had a speech  impediment?  Did you know that the  first thing the Almighty said to Moses after calling him from the burning bush  was “Take off your shoes”?   Did  you know that four women get named in the Exodus story, and the Jewish people  owes its existence to them all (Miriam, Shiphrah and Puah the midwives, and  Zipporah, the Midianite who married Moses)?

Susana Darwin

The Producer

“What does a producer actually do,” someone asked me recently. I sighed.  This wasn’t going to be a quick and easy answer. A producer is . . .

Oh, yes, the person (people) who tromp up to the stage at Academy Award time and collect the Oscar for best picture, thanking everyone along the way.

Ah, but that doesn’t answer the question. People end up with producing credits for a variety of reason:

• they may have contributed or invested a significant amount of money

• they may have made some important connections to assure the film’s success—maybe have gotten a well-known actor or two to commit to the project, or some important investors, or a studio, or . . .

• they may  have helped develop or shape the idea with the writer and the director

• they may have been rewarded for something they contributed of significance along the life of the film

• they may have worked tirelessly to gather cast and crew, and other resources needed

• they may have organized the shoot, created the budget and schedule, and made sure those documents made sense and were adhered to

• they may have stood around during a shoot in the background, solving problems as they arose

Well, the list could definitely be added to.

The titles that come with producing could be executive producer, producer, associate producer, co-producer, line producer—each of those may or may not connect easily with one of the bullets above.

So, although I didn’t totally answer my friend’s recently asked question, I made a start.

For HATBOXES, perhaps I can tell you what I am doing.  I’m a project manager, essentially. I believe my job is to assure that the film is completed on time, on budget, and at a high level of quality. 

I’ve managed a lot of projects.  In fact, that’s how Susana Darwin and I first met.  I was a project director at an educational publishing company, managing a multi-million dollar textbook project. I hired Susana as a photo researcher—her first position in publishing.

Back to the film.  My job is to make sure that things happen and this baby gets made.  If it was a really big project, there’d be lots of people reporting to me, doing the legwork. But this is a small project, so a lot I’m doing myself.  This is shared as well. Susana is producing as well, but I see my role as making sure those parts of the project don’t overwhelm her, so she can focus on being the director.

Certainly, when we go into production, I  hope that she sheds her producer shawl completely so she can only think of her directing tasks.

So, what is a producer?  It’s somebody who makes things happen.

But I’m interested in finding out something: have you ever wondered what a producer does and if so, has this in any way answered the question?


by Etta Worthington

On Casting

I circle back to the film Antonia’s Line every couple of years not only for one of the best understatements by a lesbian in all of film (“Mooi motor” is Dutch for “Nice bike;” the look Els Dottermans gives that motorcycle is pure chrome lust), but because the film tells a compelling story and its actors are interesting to look at.  Few are classic beauties, but their faces and bodies are powerfully expressive, enlivening completely the characters they play.

I’ve tried not to fix particular faces in mind for the characters in Hatboxes as I’ve drafted the script and rendered the storyboards, though I did have to tell myself to quit staring in early April when a dead-ringer for “Miriam” turned up in line at the grocery store check-out two carts behind me.  Energy, presence, depth of attention, flexibility are among the qualities I’ll be watching for when we hold our casting calls.

Chemistry is the element that stirs the most anxiety when considering casting.  An individual actor’s charisma is one thing; what happens when two actors play together, with and against and off each other, is part of film’s magic.  The conundrum of chemistry is that acting at one level is fake.  

However, chemistry is something that can’t be faked, and its faking has been the downfall of too many lesbian films.  Maybe it’s one or both actors ducking out mentally at the moment when authenticity matters most; maybe it’s the director failing to clear obstacles to authenticity.  Maybe it’s rushing and losing focus and not capturing the best take, not having the courage or discipline to wait to be moved and insisting on that.

Susana Darwin

April 2012

Hatboxes script...storyboards...overheads...shot sheet

First came the script:  the idea of chemistry developing between a secular lesbian and a recently separated Orthodox woman arrived a long time ago, but telling a compelling story in an independent short was there from the beginning.  After many years, various titles, and numerous shifts in focus, the script made huge gains with the attention from my writing group, 41N 87W.  "Your story starts at page 15," they told me in 2009, and they were right.  In early 2011, I said to myself—probably aloud—"All you've ever wanted to do is make a movie, so go make a movie!"  A Chicago Filmmakers screenwriting class in got the screenplay within striking distance of creation.  Producer Etta Worthington applied her expertise late in the year, and now, Hatboxes is locked down and ready to shoot.


Which means that whatever is on the page today may need to change once we get on set in June.  Whatever's best for the story.

Next came the storyboards, which for Hatboxes look like a graphic novel by someone who is competent with a pencil, but who hasn't dedicated a lot of time to drawing.  Round 1 was good for the trees (six images to the page), but if you don't have a single image per page, it's hard to move them around.  Hard?  Impossible.  Plus, the scale of the boxes I was drawing in was too small for my skills—I needed more room (I felt like a kindergartner with a fat pencil).  And then there was the fact that pencil didn't scan well at all...so round 2.5 featured me and a Sharpie getting reacquainted with each drawing.

There are 123 of them.  That may be overkill.
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After the storyboards came the overheads.  Imagine those schematic drawings of office cube farms showing the chairs, the desks, the filing cabinets, and maybe circles within flattened ovals representing a human figure from above.  Overheads are great for discovering logic bombs in the storyboards:  in shot 15, character X is on the left, but in 16, she's on the right.  Was her move intended?  Why did she move?  It has to be better to work out these kinks on paper [sic] than on set.  Planning is a gift to your future self.


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And then came the shot sheet, a list of all the shots that squares with the script and storyboards.
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I can't wait to review these with our director of photography.

Stay tuned...

Susana Darwin

April 2012