What People Are Saying

It's nice to be talked about. Usually.  We're happy to have a couple of media outlets run stories about us recently.

One is the Forest Park Review. 

 

The other article appeared in the Windy City Times.

Announcing Our Cast

We are delighted to announce the actors that have been cast for roles in HATBOXES.

Miriam will be played by Robyn Okrant, a veteran actor of Chicago theatre and indie film.  Miriam is an orthodox woman with three children trying to deal with her husband's abandonment of the family and of Orthodox Judaism.

Playing Nadine is Kat O'Connor, who studied acting both in the US and London, and has acted in theatre and film productions in Chicago.  Nadine is a secular Jewish lawyer who has been out as a lesbian for years but is trying to figure out what it is she's longing for.

The estranged husband of Miriam is Aaron, also a lawyer,  who will be played by Tom Hickey. He recently had a role in the pilot for Underemployed and has played many roles on the stage for companies like Straw Dog Theatre and Lakeside Shakespeare.

Nadine's friend Lena is a creative business woman, free spirited, energetic and witty. She will be played by Fawzia Mirza. She was in the new film Scrooge and Marley, that is currently in post production, and has appeared in many Chicago indie films.

Rounding out the cast is Maya Boudreau who plays Hannah, the 15 year-old (and oldest) daughter of Miriam and Aaron. Maya is a graduate of New York University. Locally she has performed with  companies such as Lookingglass Theatre and American Theatre Company.

Generosity and Intimacy in "Mad Men"

*

Mad Men was coming perilously close to losing me this season until the episode "Christmas Waltz," which features an extended sequence between Joan Harris and Don Draper.  After Don hustles Joan out of the agency before she does bodily harm to the dingbat receptionist who'd allowed Joan to get served with divorce papers, they slip deliciously into the entitlement beauty brings...at a Jaguar dealership (where else?).  With exquisite timing and self-assurance, Don and Joan play off of each other and off of the poor salesman and walk away to test drive a shiny red midlife crisis coupe.  Who else could get away with writing a $6,000 check for a $5,600 car and shrugging, "If we don't return it, consider it sold"?

Joan and Don wind up at what Rachel Maddow would probably call an "old-man bar" and drink the afternoon away.  The splendid writing gives the performers room to play as they get deeper into their cups.  Layers of friendship and attraction and accumulated time and experience between Don and Joan allow Hamm and Hendricks to listen to each other and hand the scene to one another in a spiraling accumulation of power and good will.  It's a glory of intimacy and generosity.

Susana Darwin


*http://blogs.amctv.com/photo-galleries/mad-men-season-5-episode-photos/episode-10-don.php

The Casting Director

Casting. It’s fun. It’s maddening. It’s tiring.  It’s sort of like doing a puzzle—trying to fit the pieces together. For HATBOXES, we only have seven roles. That should be easy, right?  But besides being able to act, the person has to look right for the part.  The children must be believable as being part of the same family, for example.

So, to help with this task, we employed the skills of a casting director.  But for so few roles, such a short film, why use a casting director, you might ask.

We decided we needed someone with connections to actors and to talent agencies. And so we brought on Anthony White of Anthony White Casting.

Starting his casting career in 2008, Anthony White was first introduced to the casting world working as casting production assistant with Los Angeles based Reality Casting Company, Doron Ofir Casting. He later worked as a casting assistant for both Sharon King Casting and House Casting.  As an independent casting director, Anthony has cast several independent feature, commercials, industrials, music videos, and short films including ads for Lexus, McDonalds, and Cover Girl.

So Anthony pre-auditioned many actors before the director got to see them.  And ultimately that saves a lot of time.  And, because of Anthony’s connections, we were able to cast from a larger pool of actors.

We’re happy that casting decisions have been made and will be announced very soon.

How NOT To Throw a Movie Premiere

A recent evening attending an indie film premiere was a drag of night out, but a valuable object lesson:

1.  Don't present a rough cut as a "premiere."
2.  Especially, don't charge $25 for tickets to the "premiere,"

3.  indicate the event is "formal" (I wore a silk suit and heels, for crying out loud),

4.  and then have the nerve to ask for feeback from your audience of suckers.

5.  Don't serve one-per-customer treats cold to your "platinum" attendees.

6.  Don't advertise the start time as 7 when it's really 8:15.

7.  Don't ignore the screenwriter you hired to clean up your script and give it some shape and heft.

8.  Don't forget to storyboard.

9.  Don't scrimp on your director of photography.
10.  Don't scrimp on your sound team.

11.  If your movie is going to feature "intertwined stories," intertwine the doggone stories.

12.  Don't rely on music to tell your story ("I have something to tell you."  [musical interlude while the two characters walk in the park] "That's a lot to take in.")
OR to pass for transition
OR to tell your audience what to feel
OR to pad your movie's length.
13.  Rack focus sparingly.

14.  Spell-check your credits.

15.  DO NOT write AND produce AND direct.

When the film was over, I said to my date, "I owe you."  She told me I owe her a bad lesbian movie.  "You're a cheap date," I replied. "When I dragged [a certain ex] to see Bertolucci's Sheltering Sky, I came out owing her seven movies."  And at least Sheltering Sky was beautiful to look at.

Susana Darwin

just like the raid on Entebbe

Because Hatboxes is operating on a fairly tight budget, we have to be creative about envisioning and choosing shoot locations.  The Daley Courthouse, for example, charges $3,000 per day just to film inside it, and that doesn't include any of the labor or other fees, so...outside it is.


Daley Plaza, Chicago (© Burmese Tiger Trap)



One scene takes place in a grocery store, and it turns out that the first store we approached is never actually empty—even when it's closed, workers are stocking and rotating the produce.  Another store has agreed to allow us to shoot there, but it has a more boutique layout, which may entail more intensive set dressing, which means more time spent doing that in a compressed window.


The raid on Entebbe comes to mind:  Israeli commandos had a partial replica of the Entebbe Airport to use for drills before their dramatic rescue of 102 hijacked hostages in Uganda in 1976.  Once we confirm where we will be shooting, one way we can speed set dressing would be to create a partial backyard replica of the produce department to design how we want it to look ahead of time—how high to stack the apples, what pricing signage should look like, where to place the extras.


Susana Darwin

"Yadda Yadda Disquisition Talky-Talk," said George Clooney

I would rather read a book on a plane than try to watch a movie cut and bleeped to mid-air PG.  On a recent flight to Las Vegas not only did I catch a basic point about memorable screenwriting, but I witnessed why The Descendants lost the Best Picture Oscar to The Artist.  And that was just glancing up from Tolstoy from time to time, Coltrane on the iPod...but I digress.

In scene after scene, the King family and those around them sit or stand still, just talking—one missed opportunity after another.  Why bore your audience with static visuals (even if that is Hawai'i in the background) when actors can add dimension to their words with actions? Action can contradict the words, emphasize them, work in counterpoint to them.  A variety of activity from subtle to strenuous can add another axis to the film's picture and the sound.

During casting for Hatboxes, a section of "blah-blah-blah" in the script caught our attention. Hearing the reader—the person who utters the other side of conversation while an actor auditions—have to run through several sentences to get to the actor's next line started to sound alarms, especially since the characters are just sitting there talking.  Actually, it's just one person talking at some length.  As I hear her words in my head, she goes from seething to despairing to mortified, and that could be enough, but laying her words over some actions that can punctuate her speech gives us a better shot at success.

Nothing's writ in stone.

Susana Darwin