When not blogging about movies, sometimes I actually make them. In the past year, after a decade or so of endless yammering—for listening to which I compliment my friends on their patience—I finally wrote, produced, and shot two short films: Byron Invented Boredom, a 15 minute drama about a womanizing writer who, upon meeting the now-adult son he never knew he had, discovers the need to take responsibility for his actions; and Monday, a seven-minute short for Bryan Enk's horror anthology The Sinister Six Must Be Destroyed, about a woman—guided by some unspecified but malignant inner Other—who mutilates herself to death (that one was for the kids).
Toward the end of the editing process on Byron, I was stumbling home drunk one night when it occurred to me to make a series of films of similar length about a large, interconnected group of characters dealing in various ways with matters of the heart. The second, Until Death (wherein a married couple each hires their respective lover to kill their respective spouse), is currently in pre-production (specifically, the stage in pre-production where I tear my hair out going “Fuck! I need a couple thousand dollars! Help!”) and the third, as yet-untitled installment (I was thinking of calling it The Elusive O; it's a comedy about a woman with really bad taste in men) is still being developed. The idea with this series is that each film, although interconnected through its characters, may be in a completely different genre from all the others. I'm also experimenting with process: for example, Until Death is going to very tightly scripted, blocked, composed, and edited, and the third as-yet-untitled one is going to be developed through improvisation and maybe even shot hand-held. Hopefully, once I get a couple of these under my belt, I can start showing them at festivals, and some nice person from California will give me lots of money.
Although I've only recently discovered industriousness and focus, I've wanted to make movies for a really long time. I started writing in junior high, churning out a number of three-to-five page short stories about a character named Agent 000 who was the last line of defense against nefarious villains attempting to nuke Brooklyn (though one time I branched out and had Agent 000 investigate the assassination of George Bush in Grand Army Plaza). Then when I discovered Raymond Chandler I started my hand at detective fiction, though my detective only ever managed to solve one case. I must have started about thirty different whodoneit premises, and the only one I ever finished prompted this kindly proffered but nonetheless stinging note: “Your detective doesn't seem to do any actual detecting, people just come up to him and tell him stuff.”
Due to a failure of imagination, it never occurred to me that being a writer meant anything other than being a novelist or short-story writer until I was just about to turn 16. In October 1994, Pulp Fiction came out, in a perfect confluence of age, mindset, and movie. The final title card “Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino” made me say to myself: that's what I want to do. “Written and Directed by Danny Bowes.”
So I started studying photography at school, because I could, thinking that learning what I could about framing and composition could come in handy. I wrote a play for a citywide student playwriting contest, and started several abortive attempts at screenplays—influenced though I was by Quentin Tarantino and to a lesser extent Kevin Smith, it had failed to dawn on me that their scripts were anything more than endless, idle chatter.
When I arrived at Bard College, I intended to major in film, though due to a youthful inability to focus and a (related) Pac-Man-like tendency to gobble every chemical in sight I was all like, “I'm going to be a novelist, historian, economist, philosopher, and filmmaker while racing stock cars and being the left-handed short reliever for the Yankees in my spare time.”
My first film production class was a nightmare. The only introduction they gave us was a semester of theory and history, which was fruitful intellectually, but from a practical standpoint pretty useless. Still the first day, the professor's first words to us were, “So you've all made movies before, we don't need to spend too much time on boring shit like how the camera works, how to make a work print with sound, et cetera.” Now, I probably should have raised my hand and said, “Sir, not to be a dickhead, but this is Intro to Filmmaking, and I've never made a movie before, so could you maybe cover all that 'boring shit'?” But I was 18, and terrified of appearing uncool, so I didn't say anything.
I went and bought a Bolex, not realizing that the reason I was getting a good deal was because it didn't have a viewfinder. Out of caution, I signed up to present my first finished film a ways into the semester, after a few other people had already done theirs, so I could look and see what they'd done. Happily, none of their movies made any sense or were about anything, and seemed to just be a random collection of shots designed to look cool and pretentious. Awesome, I thought, I can do that.
My first couple test reels came back from the lab completely blank. I screened them for my class, not knowing that they were completely blank because I'd had to take the train back from the lab in Manhattan up to Bard the morning I had class, and only made it back to campus five minutes before class started. One of my classmates—who had previously been very condescending to me because, among other reasons, he'd had to explain who Stan Brakhage and Will Oldham were—got very excited and started chattering with a huge, sincerely delighted smile on his face how I'd redefined cinema, employing brutal minimalism as a defiant, dare he say Marxist, act of rebellion against the bourgeois Cult of Pretty. I spent about thirty seconds thinking, “Seriously, if Nathan convinces the professor that that's what I was trying to do, I will literally blow him” until the professor peered at me over his little half glasses.
Professor: Danny, is that really what you were trying to do?
Me: Yeah, totally, I mean . . . minimalism is like more effective when it's practiced brutally. I, um, I . . . I did this as an homage to Stan Brakhage! Yeah! Stan Brakhage!
Professor: Did you load the film in the camera properly?
Me: No.
So my professor heaved a melodramatic sigh and explained to the veteran filmmakers in the class that it appeared we needed a lesson on how to load film into the camera. He kind of sounded like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket explaining that everyone else had to do pushups when Pyle fucks up, except fortunately I wasn't beaten with bars of soap by film students.
After that debacle, I got some more film and walked around DUMBO with my Bolex and shot a few reels of 16mm black & white and spliced it all together randomly. I made a recording of a phone conversation between me and a playwright friend of mine that had nothing to do with the footage in “an ironic juxtaposition between sound and vision” (the only reason I survived five years of college was because hippies don't have guns) and screened the film for the class. Reaction was less than stellar.
Professor: This is just random footage that you didn't even edit.
Me: I edited in camera.
Professor: No you didn't, you just strung a bunch of random shots together.
Me (under my breath): Just like everybody else in this class . . .
Professor: What was that?
Me: Nothing.
And, when he yelled at me for running a print with tape on it through the projector and I asked, “How are you supposed to screen edited footage if you can't run tape through the projector?” instead of doing a punishment lesson on what a work print was—to my naïve mind, possibly useful knowledge—he just shook his head and moved on.
Because I'd turned in a film, he couldn't fail me, so my professor gave me a C- and wrote “Danny has very little talent and aptitude for cinema” on my report card. The next semester, the rest of my class and me had the other Intro to Filmmaking professor, who was much nicer and actually didn't say “narrative” in the same tone of voice as “chlamydia.” She had us write an outline of our movie and present it to her so she could say “Hey, this is gonna be too expensive/time-consuming/impossible” if necessary. I proposed a silent comedy—since a buddy of mine in the class had just showed me how to make title cards and I still didn't know how to work the sound equipment—about a shy, introverted Bard kid who stumbles upon the idea of starting an escort service, gets popular and successful, becomes full of himself, and loses everything, except the love of the girl he liked from the beginning but was too shy to talk to.
My professor liked it. She told me: “It's transgressive. If you can pull it off, it'll be fun.” Feeling more confident than I had yet in my embryonic filmmaking career, I went around and started casting: a friend of mine who'd never acted before as the lead, a couple theater girls (I had, completely by accident, been cast in a couple plays, about which more later) as the escorts, and a random selection of non-actor friends of mine in incidental roles. So I shot like hell, never more than two takes, and took my footage down to the lab in the city one weekend to develop. I chilled out at home, told my mom all about the movie while she nodded politely and said, “Sounds great,” probably distracted by the astronomical fucking credit card bills I was running up buying and developing all this film. Then come Monday I picked up my footage and headed back up to Bard.
Whereupon I found out that the lab ate a good half my footage, and what was viewable was murky, dark, and all fucked up. The next day I had class, and went up to my professor, who I liked, respected, and got along with, figuring she'd understand:
Me: The lab ate half my footage, including most of the stuff that makes it all make sense.
Her: Seriously, Danny? That's the film student's equivalent of “the dog ate my homework.”
Stung, I went back to the editing room to try and salvage what I could. I basically had a (very badly lit) nighttime party sequence, about half the footage of a—very attractive and topless—female friend of mine, and some random stuff I shot of this tractor behind my dorm. So I slapped it all together and played a tape of “Rock n Roll” and “Stairway to Heaven” because they kind of fit my footage. Fingers crossed, I screened it for my class:
Proto-hipster classmate: So, wait . . . do you like Led Zeppelin unironically?
Me: Ye—no—well, kind of . . .
Professor: Thank you, Danny. Who's next? (Translation: “You won't be majoring in film at Bard.”)
At that point, the hundreds (I really hope it wasn't actually thousands) of dollars I'd pissed away making a couple unwatchable student films were starting to weigh on me, so I called up a theater professor I'd met in the course of my acting dilletantery and asked if I could switch over and major in theater. Not only was it okay, they pulled all kinds of strings so I could take two years of intro classes in one year and basically made me feel like I was home and among friends.
Nice as that was, and as seriously as I took my acting training, playwriting classes, design seminars, part of me always treated my theater education as enrichment for my eventual—though delayed—career in film. When I graduated, my department head called me out on this.
Department Head: You keep citing films and filmmakers as your primary artistic influences. Why did you choose to major in theater and not film?
Me: Um . . . because . . . well, I flunked out of the film department.
Department Head: I see.
Needless to say I didn't get a whole lot of grad school recommendation letters from the theater faculty. It was only due to the generosity of the same friends of mine who cast me in the first show I was ever in that I was able to get a foot in the door of indie theater in New York after I graduated.
Meanwhile, I was still movie-crazed, and in 2002 I finished my first novel, The Van Damme Papers, narrated from the point of view of Jean-Claude Van Damme, renaissance man nonpareil, musician, philosopher, lover, savior of humanity. A friend of mine living in Bordeaux, France, serialized this craziness, and I had had plans to try and make a movie out of it someday . . . until I got scooped by JCVD, which would have pissed me off if it wasn't a terrific movie.
Since then, I've been doing a fair bit of indie theater, meeting people, having experiences, gradually meeting enough theater people who also made movies that it finally occurred to me, “Hey, asshole . . . why don't you just fucking make a movie?” Why indeed?
And so we arrive at the present day. And a glorious future in which I keep making movies, which when I'm totally honest with myself, have been my main obsession in life since seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater. Long live cinema!
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