Omaha Film Festival Highlight: Yolonda Ross Adds Writer-Director to Actress Credits; In New Movies by Mamet and Sayles as her Own ‘Breaking Night’ Makes the Festival Circuit

If you appreciate really good acting then a name you should know is Yolonda Ross.  Her face may be familiar but her name likely isn’t.  She doesn’t get the high visibility film and television parts that another Omaha native actress of color , Gabrielle Union, gets but it’s not for lack of talent.  It certainly isn’t for a lack of looks either.  No, it’s hard to say why she hasn’t had the major breakthrough that other actresses have but it’s not as though her career is wanting either.  She’s done lots of good work on the big and and small screens and three new movie projects are sure to bring her more attention than she usually gets.  She appears in new movies by noted filmmakers David Mamet and John Sayles and her own writing-directing debut, the short Breaking Night, which she also stars in is making the festival rounds.  Indeed, her dramtatic narrative short is screening at the Omaha Film Festival on March 8.  She’ll be there for that screening and she’ll also participate in an acting panel on March 9.  I’ve been following her career for several years now and you’ll find my earlier stories about her and her work on this blog.  I’m hoping she finally gets the due she deserves.

 

 

Yolonda Ross

 

 

Omaha Film Festival Highlight: Yolonda Ross Adds Writer-Director to Actress Credits; In New Movies by Mamet and Sayles as her Own ‘Breaking Night’ Makes the Festival Circuit

©by Leo Adam Biga

Soon to appear in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

You may not know the name but for more than a decade now Omaha native Yolonda Ross has been a stalwart actress in American independent cinema and quality television movies and episodic dramas.

Before recently working with a pair of star indie writer-directors – David Mamet, on the new HBO movie Phil Spector, and John Sayles on the coming feature Go for Sisters – she’d previously been directed by Woody Allen (Celebrity), Cheryl Dunye (Stranger Inside), John Cameron Mitchell (Shortbus) and Todd Haynes (I’m Not There).

Ross played the recurring role of documentary filmmaker Dana Lyndsey in season two of the acclaimed HBO series Treme. She’s guested on such prestigious network shows as Third Watch, 24, Law & Order and New York Undercover.

Spector and Sisters come on the heels of her turn as a mother and wife in the well-received 2012 indie feature, Yelling to the Sky, that deals with issues of race, violence, bullying and relationships. It was shot in Queens, NY.

A measure of the esteem Ross enjoys is that both Mamet and Sayles wrote parts for her in their new films. Though she’s only in one scene in the Spector biopic, which premieres Mar. 24, it’s with the great Helen Mirren. Her co-lead role, opposite LisaGay Hamilton, in the Sayles  cross-cultural suspenser Sisters marks her first lead in a prestige feature.

2013 also marks Yolonda’s writing-directing debut with the short drama Breaking Night, an official selection of the Mar. 6-10 Omaha Film Festival unreeling at the Regal Stadium 16, 7440 Crown Point Avenue. Her dramatic narrative short screens Friday at 5:30 p.m. The coming-of-age story stars Ross as a young woman riding the throes of first love to escape a harsh home life. The film was selected for the New Voices in Black Cinema series in Brooklyn, NY.

Ross is a veteran of workshops at the Sundance Institute‘s screenwriters and directors labs, where she’s worked with her “dear friend” screenwriter-director Joan Tewksberry (who scripted Nashville). The actress filmed her short last summer in St. Charles Parish, New Orleans and in Baton Rouge, whose spell she’d already fallen under from her work on Treme, the post-Katrina Big Easy-set drama. She recruited some of her crew from the show.

Fellow Omaha native Alexander Payne served as a Breaking Night producer.

A longtime New York City resident, Ross will be at the OFF screening, where  Omaha friends and family will lend support.

Though she hopes Sisters leads to acting offers and Breaking Night establishes her directing cred, she’s taking matters in her own hands by writing new scripts for her to direct and/or star in. She’s currently penning a feature family drama she plans to direct in Houston, Texas next year. She’s also writing a spec pilot. She has more short scripts she’d like to develop.

She clearly views Breaking Night as the start of her career as filmmaker.

“It’s like one down and many to go. Once I got it finished it was just onto the next one. It doesn’t stop at one,” she says.

 

The many faces of Yolonda Ross:

 

 

Ross, a Burke High graduate who left Omaha in the mid-1990s to work in fashion, also sings (jazz, R&B) and paints (acrylic abstracts) and thus she views writing-directing as simply two more expressions of her creativity.

“I can do a lot of things. I happen to be one of those people that’s gifted in a lot of ways creatively. I mean, that’s just how I function. To not be utilizing all the parts of yourself sort of feels like you’re wasting yourself .”

Her writing’s evolved to where she’s confident she can craft her own vehicles.

“I feel as time has gone on my writing has gotten more defined. I know what my voice is, I know I have a unique point of view, I know I see things in a way that I feel are not being seen. Also, so many things are from a male point of view. I find it refreshing to see somebody else’s point of view, and you know I’m a black woman and one that I don’t feel is stereotypical,” says Ross, who’s worked with several women directors.

“I can tell a story and my writing has been really going places.

Breaking Night realizes a long-held goal to put her ideas on screen.

“I wanted to get the visions out of my head and see if I can do it, see what I can make, see what comes out of me. I actually had something else written but I didn’t feel like doing that so the story of Breaking Night just kind of came about. I had just been up at the Sundance film labs the summer before working on a project and it just made me want to have my own project to work on and to see what came of it with a collective group of people.”

Helming her own film proved to be everything she thought it would be.

“It was like an amazing, magical event. Little by little it all came together. It was a four-day shoot. Our last day of shooting was a night shoot that went into morning and the sun came up and we watched the sun rising. We all broke night together and nobody wrecked anybody’s nerves. We all worked together, there were no like attitudes, it was just beautiful.”

She says the film’s story is “a universal one with a different face on it.” Her inspiration was the classic ’70s rock song “Blinded by the Light,” a personal favorite that always conjured romantic and rebellious images for her. She set the story, which all takes place in the space of 24 hours, in the same decade to stay true to the song’s roots.

“I tell a universal story of a young person going through problems at home who doesn’t have support and leaves home. That’s every race, every generation.”

In her script the song becomes an anthem for breaking free of shackles that define or limit us. Her choice to infuse an interracial love relationship into the mix was about overturning stereotypes but in the end her film’s less about that than it is about finding one’s identity and following one’s destiny.

“There are definitely images that would always come to mind when I would listen to the song, knowing the time period it comes from, knowing which stations it would be played on and who the audiences would be for it. But in my thoughts it’s universal because everybody I know loves that song and rocks that song and I wanted to put a different face on who the characters were in it.

“If a film from the song was made in the ’70s when it came out I’m sure those characters would all be white. In TV and film then most times you would see black people either in the city on drugs or selling drugs or trying to get out of the ghetto or in the South trying to flee the South. In this case I wanted to put certain constraints on myself to fit the story and these elements into this seven minute song and tell this story.”

She’s satisfied she delivered a tale of youthful angst and longing that transcends cultures.

“I feel I’ve succeeded because race is not the issue at all in it. The story happens to have a black family. What I used as reference were movies like Silkwood and Norma Rae. It’s a rural home where the mom, even though it’s not said, has like a factory job and she’s got a dude she shouldn’t be with. He’s not a dad, he’s kind of living off them and taking advantage.

“The boy the girl is in love with is her escape. He’s the only one that understands her. At that age you have that person and he’s that person. They both run away. She’s got him as protection. That’s a young romance, so who knows what’s going to happen to it when she gets to wherever she’s going.”

Ross has the girl she plays cross paths with a posh black couple out on the town getting their disco down. The couple represent to the girl a sophistication and life far removed from her own.

“It’s like they symbolize to the girl that she can become that. So then she does take her life and her future into her hands and makes a decision. She’s not going to be a person who gets run over and taken advantage of, she’s not going to allow herself to be in the same kind of situation as her mom.”

An actress who never looks the same from part to part, Ross deftly plays both the ingenue and the ethereal disco mama.

Ross shot and edited the encounter to indicate the disco couple also see in the girl the possibility of something she’d never seen in herself. The girl becomes empowered by accepting a knowing look from the woman and a kiss and a business card from the man. All affirmation of her worth and  emancipation – that her time has come, that her path will be different.

“It’s like, ‘This fabulous couple sees something in me? OK, I’m out of here.’ The kids don’t know where they’re going, they’re just running away, but now she’s going wherever the disco man’s card says he from. It’s that kind of feeling.”

Ross went after a late ’70s-early ’80s Pop style look for the film, which plays like a good music video. She doesn’t mind the music video comparison but is adamant the story stands on its own.

“It has the aspects of a music video to it but it really is a short film because without the music the story is still there. I would like people to understand that there’s a lot actually happening there. All those frames in it have meaning.”

The visual palette changes as the drama plays out.

“It’s got three parts to it. It starts off light and kind of generic but once you get into the home it gets dark, it gets more real because it’s a messed up situation that happens. Once she’s out of the home that night it goes through a kind of surreal take. It leaves you wondering did this really happen or did she dream it.”

 

 

Breaking Night

 

 

In one shot the two young lovers have a kind of out-of-body experience while making out and to convey that feeling Ross wanted a visual effect she recalled seeing from that era. But she couldn’t find an example and she didn’t know what to call it.

“That was like the hardest thing,” she says. “In describing seeing that thing on TV or in videos in the early ’80s I could not find anybody who knew what that thing was. I finally found somebody to actually do it for me. It’s called a trail.”

The ending unfolds in an other-worldly rural idyll flush with Spanish Moss trees. There’s a sumptuous quality to the imagery throughout, even the gritty parts, that she credits her director of photography, Justin Zweifach, with.

“My DP was amazing. He literally came on a week before us shooting because my original DP dropped out and it was a blessing because he understood everything that was going on in my head. I made storyboards and there’s a full script but him asking me certain questions about the feel of things, the feel of characters, how I saw things, that was way more helpful in him capturing how it looks. It’s above and beyond what I expected. I mean, he shot it beautifully.”

She says crew embraced the project because with its minimal dialogue and luscious images their work can be readily seen on the screen.

Others who helped ease her through the first-time filmmaking process were executive producer Tim Mather and associate producer Sasha Solodukhina.

About Mather, she says, “When you’ve got somebody who’s got your back and understands the whole production part of it to guide you through it’s a lifesaver because there are so many little things. I come from acting, so I know about emotions, I know about all that kind of stuff. Before I did this i really didn’t even know the difference between a gaffer and a grip. I hate to say this but I didn’t know what the jobs were, but now I know. I know in front of, I know behind, I know these things now.

“And Tim is great dealing with people and places you need to have connections to to get better deals and to get things done.”

She says Solodukhina was “like wonder woman because she got me so many people. She knows everybody.”

As for having Payne’s imprimatur on the film, she notes, “What can you say? How can that hurt? I’m glad that our friendship made him come on and contribute. I still have to show him the film though.”

With the likes of Payne, Mamet and Sayles in her corner, she knows her work is getting noticed by the right people.

“It’s like how I feel most of my career has been, you just do your work and a lot of times you don’t feel anybody’s paying attention or whatever but then you get these offers from these great directors, so it’s amazing who watches and who does think of you.”

The offer from Sayles came while she location scouted for her short. She knew him from auditioning for his Honeydripper, losing a part in it to her Go for Sisters co-star, LisaGay Hamilton.

Sisters is the fictional story of childhood best friends whose different life paths have separated them for 20 years until events reunite them as adults. Ross is the newly released from prison Fontaine, who finds her old friend Bernice (Hamilton) assigned as her parole officer. The street wise ex-con becomes a lifeline when Bernice’s son is captured and held for ransom by drug dealers in Mexican border towns. Edward James Olmos becomes the third amigo in this search party that courts danger at every turn.

 

 

 

 

Edward James Olmos, LisaGay Hamilton, Yolonda Ross in Go for Sisters

 

Olmos, Hamlton, Ross in Go for Sisters

 

 

The low-budget, guerrilla-style shoot in Mexicali, Calixico and Tijuana required a huge number of locations in a short number of days, which kept cast and crew hopping.

“It was fun but just different logistically for me,” says Ross. “It was sort of like you wake up and you just go. You don’t even look around. You’re like, OK, who am I? What are we doing? It’s almost a road movie because we’re on the move so much. The story takes you on a nice trip. There’s lots of familiar faces in cameos and it’s fun to see who you come across next.”

About the enigmatic Sayles, she says, “Pretty much he gives you the blueprint and you do it. He has said, and now I see it, that his directing is choosing the right actors,. He lets us do our work.” By contrast, she says Mamet “is more verbal than John. I think he’s really funny, I really like him a lot. The one way they are alike is they both tell stories while working  and they both have people around them they’ve worked with before, so there’s a level of comfort with the crew.”

She’s excited to see who next notices her work. though she says she’s been around long enough to know that some filmmakers “go after the same people or who they think are hot or whatever,” adding, “You can be talented all day but that has nothing to do with them hiring you.” She says if box office performance is the arbiter then she’ll always be at a disadvantage because the small indie work she does rarely makes much of a splash or a profit.

“It’s unfortunate. The rest is just all crazy business stuff, which makes no sense. That’s why I’m writing.”

Ross is also part of a March 9 panel, Actors on Acting, at 3:15 p.m.

The Omaha Film Festival is a curated assemblage of narrative feature films, documentaries, live action and animated shorts as well as workshops and panels. Now in its eighth year, the fest has a strong track record of bringing film artists with and without Nebraska ties to discuss their work.

For schedule and ticket details, visit http://www.omahafilmfestival.org.

Related articles

• John Sayles – An American Classic (mrmovietimes.com)
• Phil Spector Biopic Trailer Released By HBO (noise11.com)
• Interview with Victoria Mahoney on ‘Yelling to the Sky’ starring Zoe Kravitz, Gabourey Sidibe and Black Thought (ifelicious.com)

Payne’s ‘Nebraska’ a Blend of Old and New as He Brings Indiewood Back to the State and Reconnects with Tried and True Crew on His First Black and White Film

Alexander Payne is at it again.  By that I mean he’s in progress on a new road picture, Nebraska, whose principal photography was accomplished October 15 through the end of November.  The filmmaker will be editing the project through the spring.  Here’s my second cover story about the project, this one based in part on a short visit I made to the set in November.  The piece will be appearing soon in The Reader (www.thereader.com) and it features material gleaned from interviews with Payne, screenwriter Robert Nelson, cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, and casting director John Jackson.

The writer-director is the subject of my new book, Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film – A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012.

 

 

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Payne’s ‘Nebraska‘ a Blend of Old and New as He Brings Indiewood Back to the State and Reconnects with Tried and True Crew on His First Black and White Film

©by Leo Adam Biga

Soon to appear in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

Alexander Payne‘s decision to make Nebraska in his home state brought into sharp relief some realities with large implications for his own work and prospects for more studio films getting made here.

The state’s favorite son had not shot a single frame here since About Schmidt in 2002. With Nebraska, whose principal photography went from October 15 through  November, he continued a tradition of shooting here and surrounding himself with crew whom he has a long history. Some key locals are part of his creative team, too, including one metro resident he calls “my secret weapon.”

Aesthetically and technically speaking, Payne also stretched himself by lensing for the first time in black and white, wide screen and digital. He says abandoning celluloid marks a concession to the new digital norm and to the fact today’s black and white film stock options are limited.

Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael says digital “allows us to work more with natural light and not have to carry a larger equipment package. We did specific black and white tests to choose the texture and quality in terms of contrast and film grain level we want for the picture. So we went into it knowing exactly where we want to be at.”

Papamichael adds, “Digital means needing less light, so we can do tighter interiors, which is important on this show because we’re entirely a location picture. We don’t have anything built. A lot of these interior spaces are very small and whatever space we can save in terms of lighting and camera equipment is helpful. Rather than having traditional bigger car rigs and following cars with camera cars we’re able to just get in the car hand-held. Also, these newer cameras allow us to do good car work without lighting. It just helps the whole natural feel we’re going for.”

At the end of the day, says Payne, digital “doesn’t matter to me because my process stays exactly the same.” His process is all about arriving at the truth. Capturing the windswept plains and fall after-harvest season figured prominently in that this time. Papamichael and Payne sought ways to juxtapose characters with the prairie, the open road and small town life milieu. In a story of taciturn people rooted to the land and whose conversations consist of terse exchanges, context and subtext are everything. Therefore, the filmmakers extracted all the metaphor and atmosphere possible from actual locations, geography and weather.

Payne doesn’t belabor the point but he received pressure from various quarters to shoot the picture elsewhere. The suits pressed going to states with serious film tax credits. Many locales could approximate Nebraska while saving producers money.

He finds himself in the awkward position of having lobbied long and hard to try and convince the governor and state legislators to support film incentives only to see his entreaties largely ignored. As much as he and his projects are embraced, his moviemaking forays in the state seem taken for granted. But the fact is he only ended up shooting here because he had the motivation and clout to do so.

If not for Nebraska there would have been no feature film activity of any significance here during 2012. Minus his Citizen Ruth, Election and Schmidt, the state has precious little feature film activity of any size to show for it. Refusing to cheat the script’s Nebraska settings, Payne brought Indiewood feature filmmaking of scale back home for the first time in a decade. Basing his production in Norfolk provided a boost to the northeast part of the state.

Norfolk director of economic development Courtney Klein-Faust says the total impact the project had on the local economy has yet to be tabulated but that just in lodging alone the production spent more than a half-million dollars accommodating its 100 cast and crew members. She says the film bought local goods and services whenever possible. She feels the experience will serve as “a case study” for elected officials to assess the trickle down effect of mid-major features and will be used by supporters of tax credits to push for more film industry friendly measures.

Like many filmmakers who develop a track record of success Payne’s cultivated around him a stock company of crew he works with from project to project. During a mid-November visit to the Nebraska set it was evident he enjoys the same easy rapport with and loyalty to crew he had before his two Oscar wins. The only time this visitor saw Payne betray even mild upset came after a principal actor was not in place when ready to roll and the filmmaker emphatically tapped his watch as if to say, “Time is money.” He expressed mild frustration when cows drifted out of frame and it took awhile for production assistants to wrangle them back in position.

 

 

Payne and some assembled crew, ©Sam Herron

 

 

On Nebraska he collaborated for the third consecutive time with Papamichael, the director of photography for The Descendants and Sideways. Their relationship entered a new dimension as they devised a black and white and widescreen visual palette to accentuate Nebraska’s stark characters and settings. That meant fixing on the right tools to capture that look.

“We did a bunch of testing and dialed in a look we’d like for our black and white because there are many different ways to go about black and white,” says Papamichael. Some of the expressive light and shadow images extracted by Papamichael and Payne recall memorable black and white treatments from cinema past, including Shadow of a Doubt, Night of the Hunter, Touch of Evil and It’s a Wonderful Life.

“It’s not really a film noir look, it’s definitely a high con(trast) with natural lighting” Papamichael says. “We were very diligent in selecting our lens package, which is Panavision C Series anamorphic. That’s from the ’70s, so it has a little bit of a less defined, less sharp quality and that helps the look. We’re adding quite a bit of actual film grain to it which will feel like you’re watching a film projection. We’re even talking about possibly adding some projector flicker imposed. So we’re really going for a film look.

“And through a series of tests we’ve been able to achieve that.”

A week into filming, Papamichael was pleased by what he and Payne cultivated.

“There’s an overall excitement the whole crew has. Everybody feels we’re doing      something very special and unique and the black and white has a lot to do with it. After you work with it for awhile it becomes the way you see things. In a way we’re learning the power of black and white as we go. We’re really coming to appreciate and love the poetic power of the black and white in combination with these landscapes and, of course, the landscapes are playing a huge role in this story – just scaling the human drama and comedy.

“The black and white is becoming a very powerful character in this film just in terms of setting the mood for this.”

Grizzled Bruce Dern as the gone-to-seed protagonist Woody is a walking emblem of the forlorn but enduring fields and played out towns that form the story’s backdrop. His tangle of white hair resembles shocks of frosted wheat. His drab working man clothes hang on him as if he’s a scarecrow. His gait is halting and he lists to one side. His Woody is as worn and weathered as the abandoned farmhouse of the character’s youth. But just like the artifacts of Woody’s past, this physical-emotional derelict holds on from sheer cussedness.

Papamichael says part of the fun became “discovering Bruce Dern’s great visual qualities – his face, the textures and everything that are emphasized through the black and white.”

The film’s full of Nebraskesque places and faces. There’s that farmhouse a few minutes outside Plainview. There’s the town of Plainview itself standing in for the fictional Hawthorne. There’s an American Legion hall, some bars, farm implement dealerships and mottled fields full of lowing cows. There are earnest farmers, shopkeeps, housewives and barmaids, plain as the day is long.

“Alexander is very diligent about finding the exact right spot for everything,” says Papamichael.

The original screenplay is by Bob Nelson, whose parents grew up in the very northeast environs of the state the film’s set in. He’s also impressed by how rigorous Payne is in location scouting.

“I think he’s done a great job of finding a combination of things around Norfolk,” he says. “I’ve seen the location photos and it’s pretty stunning to see it in black and white. You know it has that The Last Picture Show quality to it. It is funny to see these things that were in your mind, like the abandoned farmhouse, come to life. I don’t know how they found it, it must have been a chore, but they came up with a good one. Almost everything I saw was spot-on perfect.”

The locations are pregnant with memories and incidents, thus Payne and Papamichael chose ones most reflecting the characters and situations and they cast actors and nonactors alike who most represent these places and lifestyles.

“For him it’s not all about trying to capture something truthful and comedically grim about the American landscape but also something archetypal,” says producer Albert Berger.

 

 

Whenever Payne works with Papamichael it means inheriting the camera and lighting crew the celebrated DP brings with him, including chief lighting technician Rafael Sanchez and key grip Ray Garcia. Boom operator Jonathan Fuh is a regular on Payne sets as well as costume designer Wendy Chuck.

Then there’s veteran Payne collaborator Jose Antonio Garcia, the sound mixer on the writer-director’s last three films. George Parra goes back as far as Election in capacities ranging from assistant director to co-producer to production manager. He executive produced Nebraska.

Production designer Jane Ann Stewart had been on every Payne show since Citizen Ruth but J. Dennis Washington took over that job on Nebraska. Interestingly, a Hollywood art director who lives in Nebraska, Sandy Veneziano, joined the crew to mark her first Payne production.

Omaha resident Jamie Vesay, a key assistant location manager, crewed along with other locals, including set medic Kevin O’Leary.

Screenwriter Nelson is a Nebraskan by proxy. His folks hailed from Hartington and growing up in the Pacific Northwest he visited relatives back here, several of whom were models for his characters. Woody is closely patterned after his father.

Payne conferred with Nelson as he tweaked the writer’s work.

“Yeah, every time I’d do a pass on the script I’d send it to him and see what he thought, and he seemed to like it,” Payne says. “Sometimes there were certain moments or a certain scene I’d want a little more information about. Like one scene I really like in the script is when the family visits the house where Woody grew up and it’s now an abandoned farmhouse. And there Woody delivers a speech about having found the hail adjuster’s knife in the field, and it’s really the only time Woody speaks in the film, and I just remember asking Bob where that came from.”

Nelson says that American Gothic scene when Woody tells his son David (WIll Forte) “a story about how the hail adjustor tried to screw them out of their insurance is actually a true story based on visiting an uncle near Wausa on his farm. That’s almost verbatim.”

Payne says Nelson also helped inform some creative decisions. “He sent me some old photographs of his actual family from Hartington to serve as something of a reference for casting and costuming.”

The colleague Payne refers to as “my secret weapon,” casting director John Jackson of Council Bluffs, is undoubtedly the most influential local in the filmmaker’s close circle of collaborators.

“We just have really similar tastes and in honing our working method since 1995 we just have developed a very similar aesthetic of what we want to see in a film, the type of reality we want,” Payne says of Jackson. “And also I think the two of us have developed a pretty good eye for spotting acting talent in nonactors – talent they may not even know they have – and by talent I just mean the ability to be in front of a camera playing some version of themselves and saying dialogue believably and without getting freaked out.”

 

 

 

 

“People can be cinematic just by being themselves and being appropriately placed where they need to be, people can be brilliant by just doing what they do, listening or talking or moving,” says Jackson, who along with Payne is excited about several of their nonactor discoveries on Nebraska.

“Glendora Stitt, the woman that plays Aunt Betty, what a find. Dennis McCoIg, who plays Uncle Cecil, is like Gary Cooper. Scott Goodman, the barista who served me at the Scooters drive-thru in Norfolk was hilarious without trying and I cast him in a tiny role. John “Jack” Reynolds, who plays Bernie Bowen, an old friend of Woody’s, is right out of a Preston Sturges and Frank Capra movie. He’s the face of the rolling plains and hilariously funny.”

Jackson says he thinks of filling out the people who inhabit any movie, such as Woody’s clan,”in terms of I’ve got to build the family, and then, ‘Who are the next door neighbors? who are his friends? what do they do for a living?’ I always have a back story for them. It’s not like I sit down and make it up, the script tells me what it is by the things they say.”

“Obviously it’s worked well,” says Payne. “Together we cast Chris Klein, Nick D’Agosto going as far back as Election. In the traditional American filmmaking model for casting you have one casting director, typically out of New York or L.A. or Chicago with whom you cast the lead parts, maybe the top five or 10 or 15 speaking parts. And then if you’re shooting on location you have a second casting person, a local casting person. That’s what John Jackson was for me on the first three films. And then you have a third person who’s in charge of extras. And I somehow thought that one person should be in charge of all of the flesh.

There should be one vision guiding all of it. You can’t get anyone in L.A. or New York to do that, so the person I want to do that is John Jackson.”

Jackson says his guide in casting is looking at “what does the script say,” and then conferring with Payne. “We talk a lot about the characters in relationship to the text. I frequently find myself asking him questions like, ‘At this point in the movie what do you want the audience to feel? what do you want them to think? what do you want them to say as they walk out of the theater?’ One of the things I learned from him is to look at a moment in the story and to ask questions like, ‘Who’s funnier doing this? who’s more believable doing that? who breaks my heart more?’

“I remember when we were doing Schmidt and it was between this woman in New York, June Squibb, and a woman in L.A. the studio was pushing and I said to him, ‘Well, it has to be her,’ meaning June Squibb, and he said, ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘Because in that moment when she surprises him with the motor home and she’s seated at the table and says, Isn’t it going to be great? you know he’s hating every minute of it. Somebody needs to break my heart, and June Squibb breaks my heart. At that moment I feel for her. I feel pain for him, but I really feel for her, so when she dies I’m going to hurt, whereas this other woman I don’t feel anything.’”

Squibb plays Woody’s wife Kate in Nebraska.

“Those are the kinds of conversations we have,” Jackson says of he and Payne. “We never talk about, as other producers do, ‘Well, you know, this person’s presence in the film would be great because they’re so huge in terms of DVD sales.’ I never have those conversations with him. I’ve tried in the past and he’ll just look at me like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to know.’ So it’s cleansed me.”

Jackson says he’s learned not to try and anticipate what Payne wants. “He constantly surprises me, he constantly challenges me. I wouldn’t want it any other way. What he’s looking for, I don’t know, I don’t know that he even knows, but I know one thing – when it’s there he recognizes it. That’s alchemy.”

No two projects are alike, Jackson says. “Every single one of these films is a completely different organic living thing and the challenge is to honor that and to help that grow and evolve and become whatever it’s going to become and Alexander is the guide to all of that.”

Payne and longtime editor Kevin Tent will be cutting Nebraska through the spring and the film will likely start playing festivals in late summer-early fall in advance of a end of 2013 general release.

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Alexander Payne’s ‘Nebraska’ Comes Home to Roost: The State’s Cinema Prodigal Son is Back Filming Again in his Home State after Long Absence

I call Alexander Payne Neb.’s cinema prodigal son because he left here to find himself as a filmmaker, then he came back to make his first three features in his home state, only to leave again to make Sideways and The Descendants in faraway Calif. and Hawaii, respectively.  And now, after a 11-year absence filming here he’s back shooting his new pic, Nebraska.  In truth, he was never really gone-gone.  He’s maintained a residence in Omaha all along and has returned innumerable times for all sorts of things.  That he’s returned to make a feature with the name of his native state in the title and is doing so after the immense success of The Descendants only makes Payne, who’s already the most compelling living Nebraskan outside perhaps Warren Buffett, only more a figure of intense interest.  The following cover story for The Reader (www.thereader.com) is the first of what I anticipate will be a whole string of pieces I do related to this film.  My reporting on the project converges with my new book out on the filmmaker, Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film – A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012, which you’ll find plenty of posts about on this blog.  My coverage of Nebraska will undoubtedly end up in future editions of the book.

 

 

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Alexander Payne’s ‘Nebraska’ Comes Home to Roost: The State’s Cinema Prodigal Son is Back Filming Again in His Home State after Long Absence

©by Leo Adam Biga

Now appearing in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

In 1968 Francis Ford Coppola led a small cinema caravan to Ogallala, Neb. for the final weeks shooting on his independent road picture The Rain People starring Shirley Knight. Joining them were future fellow film legends George Lucas, Bill Butler, Robert Duvall and James Caan.

Now a road pic of another kind, Nebraska, is underway here by native prodigal son Alexander Payne. For his first filming on his home turf since 2001 Payne’s lit out into northeast Neb. to make a fourth consecutive road movie after the wandering souls of his About Schmidt, Sideways and The Descendants.

Nebraska began shooting October 15 around Norfolk, where the production’s headquartered, and will complete 35 days of principal photography by the end of November. A week of second unit work will run into early December.

The project is set up between Payne, Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa’s Bona Fide Productions and Paramount Pictures.

Despite proclamations he doesn’t care for road movies, much less shooting in cars,  Payne’s once again attached himself to a story of lost and broken people careening to some revelation about themselves.

Asked why he keeps returning to this theme or structure, he says, “I have no idea, I personally don’t really like road movies all that much and it’s all I seem to make. No, none of it’s intentional, I’m a victim. Yeah, it just happened.”

Characters hitting the road is a classic metaphorical device for any life-as-journey exploration and Payne’s not so much reinvented this template as made it his own.

“I think self-discovery is a big theme in his movies,” says Berger.

The protagonist of Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) goes in search of meaning via his mobile home after his life is knocked asunder. In Sideways buddies Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (Thomas Haden Church) indulge in a debauched tour of Calif. wine country that rekindles the love impulse in one and confirms the unreliability of the other.

The by-car, boat and foot journey of The Descendants is propelled when Matt King (George Clooney) discovers his dying wife’s infidelity and sets off to find her lover. What he really finds is closure for his pain and the father within him he’d forgotten.

The bickering father-son of Nebraska, Woody (Bruce Dern) and David (Will Forte), hold different agendas for their trek along the highways and byways of Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota and northern Nebraska. Woody, a unrepentant, alcoholic old coot estranged from everyone in his life, is hellbent on collecting a sweepstakes prize that doesn’t exist. David, the good-hearted but exasperated son, decides to placate his pops by promising to drive him from Billings. Mont. to the prize company’s home office in Lincoln, Neb. by way of several detours. He’s sure his father will come to his senses long before their destination.

This mismatched pair’s road-less-traveled adventure in the son’s car finds them passing through Woody’s old haunts, including his hometown, the fictional Hawthorne, Neb., a composite of Hartington, Wausa, Bloomfield, Norfolk and other rural burgs. At nearly every stop they encounter the detritus from Woody’s life, which like the broken down Ford pickup in his garage he can’t get to run is a shambles of regret and recrimination. Woody’s made the fool wherever he goes.

A longtime nemesis, Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), is a menacing presence.

By story’s end this father-son journey turns requiem. To salve his father’s broken spirit David performs a simple act of grace that gives Woody a valedictory last laugh.

 

 

 

 

Producer partners Berger and Yerxa (Little Miss Sunshine), who shepherded Payne’s Election in conjunction with Paramount and MTV Films (1999), brought Bob Nelson’s original script for Nebraska to the filmmaker’s attention a decade ago.

Payne says, “Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa had gotten a hold of it, and asked me to read it, not thinking I would want to direct it myself. They wanted to know if there was some young up and coming Neb. director I knew about who could make it for a very, very low sum, and I read it and I liked it and I said, ‘How about me and for a sum not quite so low?’ And so it was, and they’ve been kind enough to wait for me these eight or nine years since I first read it.

“I read it before making Sideways but I didn’t want to follow up Sideways with another road trip. I was tired of shooting in cars. I didn’t think it would take this long, I didn’t think Downsizing (his as yet unrealized comedy about miniaturization) would take so long to write in between. And then The Descendants came along and now I’ve circled back around to this austere Neb. road trip story.”

The story’s essential appeal for Payne is its deceptive simplicity.

“I liked its austerity, I liked its deadpan humor, I like how the writer clearly was writing about people he knew and representing them faithfully to a certain degree but also sardonically. And I’ve never seen a deadpan, almost Jim Jarmusch sort of comedy that takes place in rural Nebraska.”

Phedon Papamichael

 

 

The barren, existential landscape should find ample expressive possibilities in the black-and-white, wide-screen visuals Payne and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael (Sideways, The Descendants) plan capturing. Papamichael says the palette they’ve hit upon after much testing emphasizes natural lighting and texture. They’re using a high contrast stock from the ’70s that’s less sharp or defined. Film grain is being added to it.

“We’re really coming to appreciate and love the poetic power of the black and white in combination with these landscapes” says Papamichael, “and of course the landscapes are playing a huge role in this story. It’s scaling the human drama and comedy with this vast landscape. It’s a road movie but it’s also a very intimate, small personal story.”

“Well, I certainly wanted to make one feature film in my career in black and white because black and white when well-done is just so beautiful,” says Payne. “And I knew that whatever film I made in black and white couldn’t have a huge budget, so this one seemed to lend itself to that that way. Then also in reading it I wanted the austerity of the characters and of their world represented also in a fairly austere way and I thought black and white in the fall could be very nice. By that I mean ideally after the trees have lost their leaves – to just get that look.

“Sometimes where you’re in rural America there is a certain timeless quality in all those small towns which have the old buildings. You know, change comes slowly to these places.”

In terms of visual models, he says, “we’ve looked at a number of black and white films and photographs but it’s not like I’m consciously saying, ‘Oh, Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange’ (or The Last Picture Show) or something like that. No, not really. I mean, I’ve seen them. We’re just going to follow instinct in how this one should look like.”

Albert Berger

 

 

Berger supports Payne’s aesthetic choice, though it came with a price and a fight as Paramount execs reportedly resisted the decision to forgo color. But Payne and Papamichael held firm. Berger feels the project gives Payne a new creative space to work in.

“I always was excited artistically about what he was trying to accomplish,” says Berger. “Clearly we would have gotten a lot more money if we didn’t film in black and white and life would have been a lot easier for the production. Alexander’s films have always had a very authentic look. He’s obviously a great appreciator of cinema and he has a wonderful eye and I think in a way this is his first opportunity to showcase a more iconic, archetypal look.”

Payne may just do for the northeast Sand Hills what John Ford did for Utah’s Monument Valley in capturing a certain beautiful desolation. The play of light on wind, barns, trees and wide open spaces offers evocative chiaroscuro possibilities.

“I think it’s exciting to see what he and Phedon will come up with here,” says Berger. “And it’s scope as well and so that will add yet another dimension. And digital for the first time for him and it’s going to be interesting how that helps us getting in tight spaces like cars and using low level lighting. There’s all sorts of tools at his disposal on this one that he hasn’t had before.”

Berger’s come to know Payne’s meticulous eye for finding locations and actors that ring true.

“Once the script is right and once the cast and the locations are in place I feel he’s completely ready to make the movie. I wouldn’t say the rest is easy but I think that is the critical bedrock upon which his movies are made. I think he’s a filmmaker who’s completely in-tune with what he’s trying to say both emotionally and comedically.  It’s been a real pleasure to be able to watch this evolution in his work.”

Bruce Dern, ©projects.latimes.com

Payne says the more specific the character on the page the harder it is to cast, which is why his search for the right Woody and David took so long.

“I just know in the time frame in which I was trying to get this film made these guys rose to the top of my research and struck me and John Jackson, my casting director, as being the right fit.,” Payne says of Dern and Forte.

The irascible yet playful Woody proved most difficult.

“In this case Woody’s a very, very specifically rendered character and I just couldn’t plug any actor in there,” Payne says.

He interviewed-auditioned many, including big names. For the longest time no one matched his conceptions.

“In today’s world it was kind of hard to find someone whom I believed in that part and I didn’t want it to change the character of Woody.”

No compromising.

He finally found his Woody in Bruce Dern, whose daughter Laura Dern starred in Payne’s Citizen Ruth and remains a close friend. What made Papa Dern (Silent Running, Coming Home, Family Plot) the perfect Woody?

“Well, he’s of the right age now and he can be both ingenuous and ornery. And he’s a cool actor. And in a contextual level I haven’t seen on the big screen a great Bruce Dern performance in a few years and I’m curious to see what he can do. He’s a helluva nice guy as well.”

Will Forte

 

 

Dern and Will Forte (Saturday Night Live) didn’t meet until they arrived in Norfolk in early October to participate in table readings and visit locations with other principal cast. Any chemistry they produce will be worked out on set. That’s how it worked between Giamatti and Haden Church on Sideways.

“I cast those two guys in Sideways separately. They never met before 10 days or two weeks before we started shooting. Or George Clooney and Shailene Woodley (in The Descendants), they had never met before. I’ve just had good luck with that. Actors know it’s their job to develop some sort of chemistry, hopefully not force it but develop it, and then of course film has a wonderful capacity to lie.”

The casting of Forte surprised many. Not surprisingly, Payne has a considered rationale for the choice.

“Will Forte, physically, I believed could be the son of Bruce Dern and June Squib (who play’s Woody’s long-suffering wife, Kate). and then I just believe him as a guy I would know around Omaha or meet in Billings. He has a very, very believable quality. And I also think for the character of David he is capable of communicating a certain wide-eyed quality toward life and also damage – like he’s been damaged somehow, somewhere.”

Payne’s confident he has a stand-alone project.

“I don’t think you would have seen anyone portray characters like these before. I mean, I’ve never seen exactly this move with exactly this dynamic.”

Payne revised Bob Nelson’s script alone, then had Phil Johnston (Cedar Rapids) take a pass, before revising it again. He admires how close the material is to Nelson’s experience.

“His parents were from Hartington, Neb. and I think Wausa (Neb.) but he grew up in Snohomish Wash. You know how other people summer in the south of France or the Caribbean? Well, this guy used to summer in Hartington, That’s where he would spend time with his many uncles on his father’s side.”

Nelson confirms the hard-tack individualists and towns of Nebraska are composites of relatives and places there and in rural Wash., though Woody is directly based on his late father. He darkened characters and incidents for dramatic effect and invented the sweepstakes storyline. Nelson’s best-known writing credit before Nebraska was for the award-winning Seattle television show, It’s Almost Live. He meant to shop his feature script around L.A. but it quickly got into the hands of Payne, who instantly committed to making it and never reneged. Getting Payne behind it, he says, “changed everything.”

Bob Nelson, yankton.net

 

 

To his surprise and delight, Payne didn’t overhaul his script.

“I’m pretty sure I would have been happy no matter what he did with it because I believed in him as a filmmaker. The fact that so much of my dialogue and so many of the scenes remain is really almost unheard of if you have a writer-director taking over,” Nelson says. “That’s another thing that impressed me. I could tell he didn’t go in and try to turn it into his own screenplay. He wasn’t driven to put his own stamp on it just to do that. He went through it and thoughtfully changed things he thought could use changing but he left in things he thought could work well. For that I’ll always be grateful.

“When he’s rewriting it I think he’s turning in a way already into a director who’s thinking, ‘Do I really want to shoot this scene and do I want to shoot it like that? Is there anything that could make this better?’ You can almost see that going on in his mind. The one thing you hope when your work is adapted is that it will be made better and he’s one of the few guys in Hollywood you’re almost certain will make it better. I really trust him.”

Payne rooted the production in Norfolk after a long search.

“I spent a year driving around Neb. when I had free time – a wonderful education on the state. I considered places like Columbus. Grand Island. Hastings, but I landed on Norfolk because Norfolk has a pretty good number of small towns of about 1,500 people orbiting it, and maybe it’s also no coincidence that that’s the area Robert Nelson was writing about. Hartington is within spitting distance of Norfolk.”

Earlier this year Payne and Papamichael followed the route Woody and David make in the film, traveling for three days in a Toyota owned by Payne’s mother, Peggy, “just to get a feel for the land,” says Papamichael. “He really wanted to convey the feeling of the land to me and that was very helpful. I took a lot of black and white stills.”

Nelson, who’s seen footage and visited the set, says the film’s locations are spot-on.

Finalizing locations and cast members led Payne to make certain tweaks. “Yeah, as it always does,” he says. “I start incorporating locations more into the script and I might steal a line of dialogue or two from an actor in an audition who can’t remember his line or adds an improve that I think is quite good. Or as I’m going along I just think of things which could be better.”

He’s continued tinkering.

After seven years between his last two features he’s moving quickly from project to project now. He expects to jump from Nebraska, whose editing he should finish in the spring, into Wilson, his adaptation of the Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel slated to shoot in San Francisco next fall.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Biga is the author of a new book about Payne. Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film – A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012 is a compilation of the reporter’s journalism about the filmmaker. Preview it at http://www.facebook.com/LeoAdamBiga. Pre-orders are being taken at AlexanderPayneTheBook.com. Biga’s appearing at several venues through the fall to discuss the book and his many years covering Payne. At each venue he will personally sign copies. The book retails for $19.95.

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Thy Kingdom Come: Richard Dooling’s TV Teaming with Stephen King

I have only read two things by Stephen King and I thoroughly enjoyed them both:  his celebrated novel The Shining and his equally well-regarded book for aspiring and emerging writers called On Writing.  I’ve read much more from author Richard Dooling and have thoroughly enjoyed his work, too, including the novels White Man’s Grave and Brainstorm and the cautionary  of the singularity, Rapture for the Geeks.  So when I learned that these two had combined talents to collaborate on writing the miniseries, Kingdom Hospital, I jumped on it.  I interviewed Dooling about the project but never landed my hoped-for interview with King.  The result is the following story I did for The Reader (www.thereader.com) just as the series was about to air.  I don’t believe I watched more than a few bits and pieces of the series because I find most horror dramatizations done for television don’t much work for me.  This wasn’t the last time Dooling and King collaborated. Dooling, an Omaha native and resident, also adapted King’s short story Dolan’s Cadillac into a feature film.  In my story I try to give some insights into how these two writers work together and apart.

 

 

 

 

Thy Kingdom Come: Richard Dooling’s TV Teaming with Stephen King  

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

Omaha author Richard Dooling has collaborated with the Master of Fright, Stephen King, in creating the new prime time television miniseries Kingdom Hospital, a darkly comic supernatural fable The Horrormeister himself calls a cross between ER and The Shining. Dooling, whose novel White Man’s Grave was a National Book Award finalist, said comparing the show to the venerable NBC series and King’s own classic horror novel “would be a good way to describe it because…in the same way the Overlook Hotel (in The Shining) was haunted by things that happened there in the past, the setting for our show, Kingdom Hospital, is haunted by spirits from the past, and…there’s a lot of medical stuff going on, hence the reference to ER.”

The fictional one-hour drama is inspired by the acclaimed Danish miniseries Riget (The Kingdom) from director Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves). Consistent with the new prime time TV trend of limited run series, Kingdom is slated for a straight 13-week run. The opening and closing episodes are two hours apiece.

It may be a surprise that Dooling, the social satirist, has teamed with King in writing this original 15-hour miniseries debuting March 3 on ABC. Then again, Dooling, who came to literary prominence from legal-medical careers, has made a name for himself exploring the moral-ethical quandaries facing protagonists caught up in the foreboding, labyrinthian maelstroms of: the law (Brain Storm, White Man’s Grave); medicine (Critical Care); and insurance (Bet Your Life); three strange, intimidating fields and fraternities built on people’s fear of the unknown and of losing control.

In Brain Storm, a lawyer struggles with the Genie-out-of-the-bottle implications of constructing a biomedical defense for a virulent racist murderer, whose violent outbursts may or may not be triggered by faulty brain chemistry. In White Man’s Grave, a young American goes missing in the charm-filled Sierra Leone bush and his father’s well-ordered life back home comes undone when totems sent from Africa unleash malevolent forces that pull him to their source. Critical Care essays the inexorable, by turns absurd dance of death in an intensive care unit. Bet Your Life examines the elaborate insurance fraud schemes computer savvy scam artists use to bilk people of their money and, in so doing, to turn victims’ lives upside down.

Dooling was unsure himself how his work meshed with the horror genre until, he said, King reassured him with, “You don’t think you write horror, but you do.’ In White Man’s Grave…there would certainly be some elements of horror and there’s a little medical horror in Bet Your Life, especially towards the end. So, I’ll trust him, I guess.” Dooling said a horror pedigree doesn’t matter much as Kingdom Hospital is “all over the place and is so many different things,” not the least of which is its taking wicked, scatological aim at such solemn subjects as faith, life and death, thereby displaying the satiric sensibility shared by both authors.

“I never really thought he was scary, but that he always had his tongue in his cheek,” Dooling said of King. “His Misery is one of the best books ever written. I mean, it’s gruesome and everything, but it’s a very funny book. He’s a great writer, especially of slang, which I really like.” A book of essays by Dooling, Blue Streak, makes the case for colorful, colloquial language of the offensive kind. If there’s anything that connects the two men, Dooling said, it is their penchant for “black comedy. I think most of what I did with this series was black comedy, which is what I always do. So, it’s satire with some horror. And he’s funny, too.”

Ultimately, Dooling was sold on the show by a promise from King, who is its executive producer. “He said from the very beginning, ‘We can do whatever we want to.’ Since I’d never worked with him before, I didn’t know whether to believe him…I mean, I was afraid that might mean he could do whatever HE wanted. But he was telling the truth. Besides, it’s not like he’s doing it for the money, right? Steve’s in a position where he can get done what he wants…within reasonable limits. He has total control. It was important to me we could do what we wanted because I didn’t want people saying, ‘Oh, you can’t do that.’ I wanted to be able to show open brain surgery, for instance, and I didn’t want somebody telling me, ‘No’.” All that creative freedom, he added, will either have been “a blessing or a curse. I won’t know which until the Nielsen ratings.”

Such dramatic license, he said, resulted in a non-linear narrative, some of it occurring inside the heads of characters, that combines disparate elements, themes and styles. “I don’t know whether it will succeed or not, but you’ve never seen anything else like it on television, I can guarantee you. I mean, I’ve never seen drama, black comedy, spiritualism, psychics, ghosts…everything. In 30 seconds, you can go from one scene where you feel like you’re going to cry because you’re so involved with this character who’s been injured in a car accident over to slapstick or black humor and then to some appearance by a ghost during surgery.”

ABC, which has struggled finding a prime time drama hit, is eager to try something different. “Television executives are not stupid. They know they’re losing viewers,” Dooling said, “and so they’re looking for new stuff.”

Kingdom Hospital is set in arch, eccentric, God-fearing King Country — Lewiston, Maine. The well-spring for the apparitions and disturbances at the hospital is the unsettled grounds upon which the facility is built — the long destroyed Gates Falls Mill, a terrible 19th century imagined sweatshop where, the story goes, many child laborers died in an 1869 fire. The children’s restless spirits seem to inhabit the place, variously bringing peril and relief to those they encounter.

 

 

Dooling said the show’s premise — strange goings-on in “a wild place” — and its structure — episodes opening outside the hospital — encouraged he and King to “write about almost anything. You can bring almost anybody in there you want. All you have to do is make them a patient. For example, I have an earthquake scientist who gets admitted. And that’s the beauty of a series. You can bring in a character and you can either kill them right away or keep them around if they work out.”

The prospect of maintaining dramatic cohesion within such a sprawling story and among many recurring characters worried Dooling at first, but to his surprise it proved manageable. “I was afraid it would be hard, but by the time you spend so much time with the characters, you feel like it writes itself in a way because you already know them so well and you know what they would do. You have a large story that spans the whole season and then you try and make short stories that fit within that large story…and I think we held it together.” Accenting the story, he said, is the series “beautiful” cinematography and “spectacular” production design.

The staff and patients at Kingdom Hospital are as odd as the incidents befalling them. A paraplegic artist, Peter Rickman (Jack Coleman), is miraculously cured. The brilliant surgeon Dr. Hook (Andrew McCarthy) lives in the hospital’s basement, tending to his collection of medical equipment. The cynical Dr. Stegman (Bruce Davison) is the arrogant face of medicine. The addled Dr. Ehrlich (Ed Begley, Jr.) is oblivious to the crazy events around him. The heart of the series is the psychic hypochondriac Eleanor Druse (Diane Ladd), the older mother of a hospital orderlie, and the unstable link to a tormented girl trying to reach her from the other side.

“The driving force is Mrs. Druse,” he said, “and her attempts to contact the little ghost girl she hears crying in the elevators. Mrs. Druse tries to find out why the little girl’s spirit is stuck between the here and hereafter and how she can find rest. I really like Mrs. Druse. Everybody will. She’s a great character.”

The Druse character is lifted from Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom, a series both King and Dooling admire. “It’s a little slow for American audiences, but it’s funny and it’s creepy. I recommend it,” Dooling said. “We added a lot of characters and stories and stuff of our own, but we got the main characters basically from there and we just kind of Americanized their concerns and endeavors and Steve, of course, added the whole” back story and subtext.

A lifelong New Englander, King’s fiction often takes stock of locals’ stoic, enigmatic determination even in the face of bizarre goings-on. In episode one, he dramatizes his own well-publicized brush with death in the scene of an artist, Peter Rickman, walking on a rural road and being struck by a van, which happened to King near his home in Maine. The incident places Rickman in Kingdom Hospital, where he’s left open to its many wonders and dangers. King’s own weeks-long stays in hospitals were enough to convince him, Dooling said, “that hospitals are scary places.”

When King conceived the series, he wanted a collaborator with a medical background and Dooling, who worked as a respiratory therapist in the ICU at Omaha’s Clarkson Hospital, fit the bill. Long before enlisting him as a medical consultant and writer-producer, the literary superstar had his eye on Dooling, whose work he is a fan of. King quoted from Dooling’s Brain Storm in his own book, On Writing. King also contributed a glowing back cover tribute for Dooling’s Bet Your Life, calling him “one of the finest novelists now working in America” and describing the book as “by turns horrifying, suspenseful and howlingly funny.”

In his ongoing role as consultant, Dooling ensures the accuracy of all things medical in scripts, even tweaking King’s work as needed. To do this, Dooling draws on his and others’ expertise. “If I don’t know, I have to find out. I have a lot of friends that are doctors and nurses and I call them and ask them questions.” A med tech on the set acts as another check and balance, even training actors to draw blood gases, to intubate, to hold surgical instruments, et cetera.

After consulting in the series’ early preproduction stage, Dooling began writing episodes, first in concert with King, then by himself, in the winter of 2002. The two worked intensively through March 2003. Although the scripts are long finished, “it’s never done,” Dooling said. “Things happen. They can’t get a set, they lose an actor, an actor insists their character wouldn’t say a line. Or, trying to save money, the producers change locations. That stuff goes on all the time…up until the day it’s actually shot. There’s always something to do. I’m still doing a lot of work on Kingdom Hospital, and they’re 120 days into a 140-day shooting schedule.”

King-Dooling are hardly ever in the same physical space and rarely communicate by phone. Instead, they share work and comments via cyberspace.

“A lot of it is just passing files back and forth,” Dooling said. “We do it episode by episode. We attach notes. You say, ‘Tell me what you think of this. If you like it, add some more. If you don’t, cut it.’ Or, you say something like, ‘It might be funny if we did this.’ Or, ‘What if Mrs. Druse said that?…Blah, blah, blah.’ It’s just like talking. I didn’t really mess around with his stories, except to add or fix medical dialog and medical procedures, and he really didn’t mess with my stories either. We did get together once (at King’s winter home in Florida), shortly after episode nine or ten, to figure out what to do about the end because, you know, there was still four hours left and the last episode was a two-hour segment.”

 

 

Working with the prolific King proved exhilarating and taxing. “When you work with him, it’s night and day. It was night and day for three-four months. He just works all the time. He’s working right now, I’m sure,” said Dooling, who soon found there was no point in trying to keep pace. “Well, there’s no way you can keep up. A couple times, he just passed me. He would start episode nine while I was starting eight. He just got tired of waiting, I’m sure. I mean, he never said that, but that’s probably what happened. When he gets an idea, he’s not going to sit around and wait while I catch up. He’s really a fast, fast, highly-productive, laser-beam concentration type of guy. It’s been a good experience. A definite collaboration-synergy and all the good things you want to have working with somebody.”

Dooling, who periodically goes to Vancouver, British Columbia, where the series is shooting, loves the “cosmopolitan” city but loathes visiting the set.

“I don’t really like being on the set all that much. You don’t really have much to offer there. The script is done and, you know, the director is the person who decides how the scene plays. As a writer, I feel about this teleplay the way a famous screenwriter once described screenplays: It’s not a work of art, but it’s an invitation to a bunch of other people to make a work of art. Once you have the words on the paper you have every right to complain if they’re not saying the words, but once you let go of the script an actor who’s being well-paid and who’s well-qualified is going to render those lines in collaboration with the director. And, really, to have a writer there injecting their opinion into something where it really doesn’t belong, doesn’t make sense.

“However, that said, there are times they ask the writer to come down because they have a question about the way a word is pronounced or emphasized or they ask, ‘Why did you write that she had a tissue in her hand — was that because she was crying?’ or something like that. That’s a legitimate question.”

Otherwise, the set gets to be a drag as set-ups and takes mount. “They have to do things over and over. I don’t know, I suppose it’s like rewriting a sentence.”

The buzz is that if Kingdom Hospital hits big, ABC may pick it up for the fall season. In that event, Dooling, who expects to stay with the gig, has been brainstorming story ideas with King for a new slate of episodes. “Yeah, very vague type what-might-we-do-if-there-were-another-season conversations. And then we have things we didn’t really use, because there wasn’t time, that we could use.”

Even if the show isn’t renewed, Dooling may do more TV, a medium he entered with reservations. “I was skeptical of television. But this experience has made me more accepting of it and I could see myself working in it again if I find a show I like that’s funny and dark.” Unlike film, where not one of his several screenplays has yet to be produced, he said, “the nice thing about television is, you write it, and it gets shot. So, this has been fun. There’s not the big hold up there is with feature films, where you write it and you wait three years and maybe it’ll get shot, maybe they’ll ask you to rewrite it, maybe another director will pick it up. Maybe.”

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Filmmaker Steve Lustgarten Proves He Can Come Home Again

The first film story I ever had published was about an Omaha native filmmaker not named Alexander Payne.  That may come as a surprise to those of you familiar with this blog and my work as a film journalist who has long covered the Oscar-winning writer-director.  No, the profile subject of that first film piece was Steve Lustgarten, who left here a number of times going back to the 1970s, searching for his creative mojo outlet and finally finding it after several fits and starts as a largely L.A,-based indie producer-writer-director.  I wrote this piece more than 20 years ago on the occasion of his coming back to shoot an action feature in his home state that had the working title of Homefires Burning but that eventually got released as Power Slide.  Lustgarten had previously generated some buzz with his Student Academy Award-winning feature American Taboo.  His returning to make Homefires/Power Slide was a big deal in 1989 because of the paucity of films made here, especially by homegrown filmmakers.  This was some years yet before Payne began making movies in Omaha (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt).  Interestingly, Lustgarten chose Plattsmouth, Neb., a small town in the far southeast corner of the state, to shoot in and that’s also where Sean Penn decided to film The Indian Runner just a couple years later.  Lustgarten had a slate of films he wanted to make after Homefires/Power Slide but while he did direct again he largely transitioned into being a distributor of low budget films, ranging from festival art pics to exploitation genre pics,  through his Leo Filns.  It’s not surprising given the fact he came out of the Roger Corman school of filmmaking and never really worked in the mainstream Hollywood industry. My 1989 story made much of the fact that this wanderer and prodigal son had returned to film on his home turf and that the storyline of his picture centered on a protagonist who also returns home.  In reality, as soon as the film was completed Lustgarten left Nebraska for L.A. again and pretty much stayed away until a few years ago, when he relocated Leo Films here.  As soon as he moved here however the state of Iowa suspended the film incentives program that enticed him to relocate in the first place.  He does corporate, commercial, and doumentary work while waiting for a feature project to materialize.  He appears set to stay here this time and perhaps the Nebraska Legislature‘s recent passage of film incentives makes launching a film more practical than before.

You’ll find many more film stories on this blog.

In an interesting twist, Lustgarten’s running for the U.S. Democratic Senate seat that retiring Ben Nelson will be vacating and the political noivice is going up against contenders he surely has no chance against, including former Senator and Nebraska governor Bob Kerrey.  Then again, Lustgarten’s been fighting the odds all along as a filmmaker and distributor and somehow making that work for him for the better part of 30 years.

 

 

Filmmaker Steve Lustgarten Proves He Can Come Home Again

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally appeared in the Omaha Metro Update

 

Wanderer.

It’s an apt description of Steve Lustgarten, an itinerant artist whose wanderlust has uprooted his native Omaha ties the past 20 years. While always returning here, Lustgarten invariably gravitates to the West Coast, where he makes films.

His most recent homecoming is causing quite a stir because this prodigal son has brought back a slice of Hollywood with him. The 38-year-old is the producer-writer-director of Homefires Burning, a feature-length dramatic film shot entirely in Nebraska this fall. Filming began October 13 and is wrapping up this week.

“I think this is one of the first indigenous movies to be made here,” he said. “We have all local actors and primarily a local crew.”

Besides keeping costs down by using local talent, he explained that filming in the state offered the scenic harvest landscapes the story required. “I think it’s a beautiful area in the fall and I always wanted to shoot here. I’m really into beautiful visuals.”

The principal filming location was in and and around Plattsmouth, Neb. “Plattsmouth is a truly old pace and that’s what drew me to it,” he said. “Everything we shot has a sense of time passing. The thematic part of the film is about history and time, and that area just resonates with it.”

Last week’s snow caused a delay in production, pushing the film over its six-week shooting schedule with three outdoor scenes left.

“We’ve been running around Plattsmouth trying to find one tree with leaves left on it because this is a fall picture.”

To avoid cost overruns on his less than $200,000 budget Lustgarten released most of the crew last week. He and a skeleton crew are filming what remains of the picture. Overall, he said he’s captured what he came here for. “We shot some great photography.”

Since any movie made in Nebraska is still a novelty Homefires and its native son creator have received much attention. For all the hoopla though Lustgarten seems unpretentious about the whole business. Perhaps he sees irony in coming home after a long absence to find himself lionized.

“It’s the first time I’ve been home for any length of time since 1978.”

 

 

Steve Lustgarten

 

 

Although he’s bounced up and down the West Coast he’s mostly lived and worked in Los Angeles the last five years. Since coming back last spring to raise money for Homefires he has lived with his parents at their northwest Omaha home.

His appropriately titled film concerns a man who after years away returns to his Nebraska roots only to find things changed – the past irretrievably lost. The protagonist is Kyle, a professonial race car driver who’s a celebrity in how small hometown for past exploits. He returns tired, down-and-out and no longer able to connect with old friends.

“Eighty percent of it’s about Kyle’s relationships with people he left behind, how they changed, and what it’s like to try and go back.”

Lustgarten said his own comings and goings from home have lent the film some autobiographical weight. “The most autobiographical element s the whole idea of my being away from Omaha and my home, coming back and seeing some of my old friends and not being able to fit in anymore. Because our relationships are based in the past, they aren’t the same anymore.”

He felt alienated after winning a 1983 Academy Award in the student film category for American Taboo. He produced, wrote and directed the feature-length film while at Portland State University in Oregon. His success came during a turbulent time in his personal life. Visitng Omaha some time later he noted an uneasy gap between his self-image and people’s inflated perceptions.

 

 

 

 

“People here might have thought it (the award) was a bigger deal than it really was. I ran into a certain, ‘Oh, yeah, we heard about you on ‘Entertainment Tonight,’ and, ‘Oh, it’s a success.’ That engendered an idea about this race car driver who had been on TV and was a small town hero to people back home but he knew his life was burned out.”

Lustgarten can relate to that. The Omaha Burke High School graduate has traveled a “circuitous” road to satisfy a restless creativity. In the early ’70s he attended Wayne State College (Wayne, Neb.) and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he studied English and journalism. He was a reporter for the Alliance (Neb.) Times-Herald, covering the Wounded Knee occupation. Then he sought adventure out West.

He learned how to use a motion picture camera doing commercial work for a local advertising agency. When the movie bug bit he said he itched to make his own films “but really wasn’t aware of how to do it myself,” adding, “So I just started making short, super 8 mm movies and pretty much picked it up on my own by reading a lot of books and going to a lot of cheap movies.”

He landed his first professional film job in 1976 with an L.A. production company. “I worked in Hollywood on a lot of little low budget movies,” he said. Eventually he became “burned out” in L.A. He came back to Omaha and then lived in Seattle and Portland. By the time he started at Portland State, which had a film program, he wanted to make a feature but lacked the necessary means. The opportunity arose through an unlikely chain of events worthy of any script.

“My grandfather died and left me about $10,000. I put $5,000 into a house. The $5,000 left over really wasn’t enough to do it, so I invested it in some highly specualtive stocks, which for some reason doubled over the course of a month. I was able to start the film and put it in the can with that money. Then I scrounged up some more to finish it.”

Perhaps it was poetic justice that his grandfather, Harry Lustgarten Sr., indirectly made the film possible. “He was a large booker of films in the Chicago area in the ’50s and early ’60s,” said Steve. “He gave a lot of the early Samuel Arkoff-American International pictures their break in that market. He was probably my first exposure to the movies as a kid.”

Made under Portland State’s auspices, Taboo is described by its creator as a “European-style art film.” He said, “It deals with a lonley photographer who’s hidden behind a camera lens all his life. He gets enamored with the girl next door, who confronts him with his sexual repression and brings him out of his shell. It creates some turbulence in his life that he isn’t prepared for.”

While the film “hasn’t seen much U.S. distribution,” he said, “it’s constantly marketed overseas.” He said Taboo’s limited theatrical release included showings in Minneapolis, Portland and L.A. despite good reviews Lustgarten said he “didn’t make any concerted effort to book it theatrically becauae it was just too difficult. I found a foreign distributor and it’s been shown all over Europe as well as in Asia, South America and Australia.”

He said low budget titles like Taboo and Homefires face steep odds breaking into the U.S. theatrical market. They must compete against studio-backed films that cost $15 million on average and that have robust multi-media marketing campaigns behind them. That’s why most films budgeted under $5 million, he said, are directly sold to the home video and cable television markets domestically and abroad, thus bypassing theatrical distribution altogether.

Before tackling Homefires Lustgarten worked as a production assistant at New Horizons, where the one-time King of Hollywood B movies, Roger Corman, reigns. Corman made his name producing, sometimes directing and releasing low budget exploitation genre movies that became popular fare at drive-ins and that today stock the shelves at video rental stores and fills late night cable TV schedules. Corman also gave many then obscure and now big name actors, writers, and directors their start in features.

A typical Lustgarten job under Corman was serving as production coordinator on Strip to Kill, a project the filmmaker sarcastically refers to as “a memorable experience.” When that schlock picture’s first-time director needed bailing out Lustgarten said he pitched in and “ended up doing the storyboards, shooting second-unit stuff and finding new locations. I was trying to stand-out and move up in the organization. But I never quite learned the just-do-your-job-and-shut-up routine. That is not my nature.”

On the set of American Taboo 

 

 

However, he did learn some valuable lessons along the way, such as bringing productions in on budget and at a fraction of the major studios’ price, and weaving enough action into stories to make them marketable. He’s applied these lessons to Homefires, which is emphatically “not an art house film,” he said, but rather “commercially targeted for the home video and cable TV markets in the U.S. and theatrically overseas. It’s positioned as an action-oriented film. We’re going to market it in that fashion. There are car chases, explosions, gunfights, so it fits into that ilk. Hopefully, it also offers more of a story than the Ramboesque movies provide.”

The film’s action is triggered by a rural drug lord who bails out beleagurerd farmers with loans in exchange for harvesting marijuana on their land. His terror tactics keep the community silent until Kyle returns and discovers his brother has gotten in deep with the kingpin in an attempt to save the family farm. Kyle helps his brother do the right thing and smash the drug ring.

Before going independent Lustgarten tried to interest several producers in Homefires, one of six or seven screenplays he’s written and shopped around in Hollywood. In fact, deals for Homefires were struck, he said, but the financing always fell through.

“It was almost made once iin South Africa, once in Australia, once in Texas and somewhere else. It’s been around the block. At different times it was a $1 million to $6 million budget. It’s just a nightmare trying to raise major sums of money for movies.”

Lutsgarten began raising funds anew for Homefires in April. “I talked to bank presidents. lawyers, accountants, doctors, mechanics, anybody who had a glimmer of interest in film. It’s a lot of telephone calls and meetings. It’s really tough to try and sell a motion picture investment here because people don’t understand the movie business.”

The project remained on hold until “right down to the wire,” he said. “I pushed back shooting a month to raise money.” He ended up finding six Midwest investors, most from Nebraska. He’s put up a “big chunk” of the money himself. The film is a production of his own Lustgarten Entertainment Organization.

What pitch does he use to lure potential investors? “I tell them at this low of a budget you cannot lose money if you competently produce the picture because there is such a demand for the product. It’s very hard to make promises but I show comparative values of what other films have made overseas, which is the primary market for low budget films. About 70 percent of the money comes back from foreign distribution.” For example, he said a $100,000 sale to Japanese home video distributors is “not unusual.” He added, “I tell investors I would be surprised if we don’t break even. The top side becomes pie-in-the-sky. It could be three or 20 times your money.”

Homefires will come in under $200,000 – a budgeting feat considering its scope. “It’s a big, sprawling script with a lot of locations, actors and cars. There’s about 120 scenes,” he said. His decision to shoot in the less expensive 16 mm film stock, he said, was a cost conscious one as film and processing,  each outsourced in L.A., are the two largest budget items. He also saved money by getting non-union actors to work on deferment, “meaning they’ll make money if the movie does.” And the only out-of-town crew ne brought in were the cinematographer and sound mixer, both imported from the coast. The entire cast and crew numbered about 50, well below industry standards.

The cast, which features about 30 speaking parts, is headed by Tim Vandeberghe as Kyle. Local community theater fans may be familiar with his stage work and that of such fellow cast members as Karen Kuger, Laura Marr, Earl Bates and John Durbin. For most, it was their first film role.

“I got real lucky,” said Lustgarten. “I found some really excellent actors. I think everybody was so excited about working on this that it overrode the inconveniences and lack of comforts.”

A major annoyance was the daily commute to Plattsmouth for Lustgarten and most of the Omaha-based cast and crew. The travel, on top of shooting schedules that lasted up to 18 hours a day, made for some very long days and nights. Low budget sets don’t have trailers where actors can escape the elements.

“We were out there on some pretty windy, cold days,” he said. Added to Lustgarten’s headaches were his multiple responsibilties. “The producing problems are so overwhelming that directing almost gets swamped by them.” Despite the distractions of wearing many hats he relishes the creative freedom each gives him. “I like to have control of my destiny rather than let someone else take over and not really know how to handle the material.”

He did seek help from Janet Traub of the Nebraska Film Office. She suggested film locations and arranged meetings with Plattsmouth officials to obtain permits and approvals.

What kind of reception did Lustgarten and his made-in-Nebraska film get from city fathers?

“Skepticism at first, but gradually they warmed to the idea that it was realistic and finally they gave us their full support.”

The shoot’s drawn its share of sight-seers. “People cruise up and down the main street,” said Lustgarten. “It all worked out real well. We got 100 percent cooperation.” He said the city definitely felt an economic impact from spending by cast and crew members. “They bought their everyday needs down here. They left a few bucks, which is always welcome.”

He noted the production also attracted the curious from nearby communities, further boosting the local coffers.

According to Traub the cast and crew many have “spent as much as $100,000 in the state.” She said the Department of Economic Development uses a multiplier of 2.7 to project the total trickle-down income generated from such activities as film productions. “Consequently it generated an estimated $270,000 of new money in the state.”

Lustgarten said it’s possible he’ll make future films in Nebraska but the site “depends on where the financing comes from” and what the story requires.

“The next project I’m looking at doing is a murder-mystery called Lady in the Dark, which I hope to start in late winter or early spring.”

Until then he’ll be busy editing Homefires, which he  hopes to have ready by April for distributors. To finish his film the wanderer may be leaving home again. “It kind of depends on my personal life. Do I want to spend another two or three months here or go back to L.A., because when I do editing I also start the marketing-sales process that can only be done there.”

It sounds like the wayfarer is about to roam again. He did leave open the possibility of premiering the fim in Omaha and Plattsmouth next spring.

Until then, the home fires will be burning.

 

 

 

 

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• ‘Out of Omaha’ (‘California Dreaming’) Project Adds to Area’s Evolving Indie Filmmaking Scene (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Tempting Fate: Patrick Coyle Film ‘Into Temptation’ Delivers Gritty Tale of a Working Girl and an Idealistic Priest in Search of Redemption (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
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• Joan Micklin Silver’s Classic ‘Hester Street’ Included in National Film Registry (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Alexander Payne Delivers Graceful Oscar Tributes – The Winner for Best Adapted Screenplay Recognizes Clooney, Hemmings and His Mom (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• My Forthcoming Book, ‘Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film,’ Due for a Fall 2012 Release (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)

Talking Screenwriting with Hollywood Heavyweight Hawk Ostby, The Omaha Film Festival Panelist Counts ‘Children of Men’ and ‘Iron Man’ Among His Credits

Another indication the Omaha Film Festival has arrived as a major regional film event is the high caliber of special guests and panelists it continues to attract.   The 2012 version counts actress-writer-director Jaime King (see story on this blog) and screenwriter Hawk Ostby, the subject of this story, among its featured attractions alongside the films themselves.  My Q&A with Ostby, who with Mark Fergus has written Children of Men and Iron Man, finds him talking about craft, of course, but also about the persistence it takes to make it as a screenwriter.  Go to http://www.omahafilmfestival.org for details about the March 7-11 festival and the appearances by King, Ostby, and others.  This blog, by the way, is full of more film stories that might interest you.

Hawk Ostby

 

 

Talking Screenwriting with Hollywood Heavyweight Hawk Ostby, The Omaha Film Festival Panelist Counts ‘Children of Men’ and ‘Iron Man‘ Among His Credits

©by Leo Adam Biga

Soon to appear in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

Hawk Ostby, one half of the scriptwriting team of Children of Men and Iron Man, will provide an insider’s take on the screenwriting trade at the Omaha Film Festival’s Filmmaking Conference.

Speaking by phone from his Vermont home, Ostby says a big part of making it in the industry is “perseverance and discipline.”

“You really get tested when you start off,” says Ostby, whose writing partner is Mark Fergus. “I was fortunate in that I knew somebody who had a foot in the door, and he said, ‘Look, if you really concentrate for three to five years you’ll be doing what you want to do,’ and I sort of had that tattooed behind my eyelids.

“Three to five years can be a really long time when you’re watching your friends go on to their careers, doing really well, and you’re still tapping away in a sweaty little band box, but then one day it happens. It doesn’t seem so weird or outlandish when somebody calls and says, ‘Hey, we read something of yours and we really like it and we want to try and make it.’ I think in your own mind you fantasize about that moment so often and then when it finally happens it feels right because you’ve done the work.”

Mark Fergus

 

 

Knowing your craft is essential.

“I just was so enamored with the idea of trying to make a living by writing, and I realized I enjoyed it so that it was going to be with me for the rest of my life anyway, so why not knuckle down and really try to learn what it is, what is a story?”

Hollywood seems unattainable but he says he and Fergus prove it’s not.

“Look, I’m not a genius by any means. I just love stories and I stuck with it. It was more like play, and I think if it’s that for you then you’ve got a shot. If you’re trying to get rich or famous, you can do it a lot easier than trying to make it in this business. It’s not really what it’s about. To learn storytelling and all those things it’s a long apprenticeship, at least it was for me. I know there are people who are way more natural who write two scripts and they’re smash hits and they go on to have long careers, but that certainly wasn’t my story, and not Mark’s.”

Collaborators 15 years, Ostby and Fergus play to their respective strengths.

“Mark is very analytical. He can look at a script and say right away, ‘Ah, page 7 is where it goes wrong.’ He’s very clever at those things and I’m not. I’m more instinctual. I’m not sure what’s wrong. I have to take it home to the cave and sort of chew on it. We don’t sit in the same room and fire dialogue back and forth, it’s more of a two-headed thing. We discuss at length the story and how to lay it down, and then Mark will go in, write the outline, sculpt it down to its essence, and then I will take that and do the first draft, and use that as guide for where we want to go. That draft is often written very maniacally and quickly. I don’t stop to edit myself. We used to write and edit at the same time and what happened was we never got the flow of it.”

Children of Men 

 

 

After each makes another pass, he says, “usually we’re left with a couple things he’s holding onto and I’m holding onto and we just sort of argue those out and whoever has the best argument or is able to convince the other is what we go with. Sometimes we find a better solution spitballing things.”

The pair have adapted Philip K.Dick (A Scanner Darkly), a comic book (Iron Man) and an animated film (the forthcoming Akira) but their adaptation of the P.D. James novel Children of Men may have been most instructive.

“If there’s one thing we learned, especially on Children of Men, you can’t always follow the book. It’s just a totally different experience. But if you can capture the feeling of the book then that’s what you’re really aiming for. The book just wasn’t working as a film. What broke it for us is when we came up with this idea that it’s really Casablanca set in a dystopian future, complete with a spiritually bankrupt protagonist who has nothing to live for and then finds something and sacrifices    himself for something greater.”

The writers are trying to get a television series and two original feature scripts off the ground this year. One feature puts a twist on the heist genre and the other dramatizes a manhunt in the wilderness.

For details on Ostby’s OFF Filmmaking Conference panels, visit http://www.omahafilmfestival.org.

Iron Man 

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Alexander Payne Delivers Graceful Oscar Tributes – The Winner for Best Adapted Screenplay Recognizes Clooney, Hemmings and His Mom

Alexander Payne‘s love affair with the movies began when he was a child in his hometown of Omaha.  The nascent cinephile’s frequent filmgoing companion then was his mother, Peggy Payne, who recognized her prodigy of a son expressed far more interest in grown-up films than children’s fare, and she indulged his serious passion by taking him to screenings of art movies.  Decades later the world-class filmmaker told the world how much he appreciates what she did for him when he dedicated his Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Descendants to her.  In doing so he said “I love you” in Greek, thus acknowledging his family’s heritage, which he’s extremely proud of.  He also singled out one of his producing partner’s, Jim Burke, star George Clooney, and author Kaui Hart Hemmings, whose novel he and fellow Oscar winners Nat Faxon and Jim Rash adapted.

Alexander Payne with his mother on the red carpet

 

 

Alexander Payne Delivers Graceful Oscar Tributes – The Winner for Best Adapted Screenplay Recognizes Clooney, Hemmings and His Mom

©by Leo Adam Biga

Published in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

The obvious and not so obvious came into focus when native son Alexander Payne accepted his second Oscar in front of a live audience of his peers and a television viewing audience estimated at 1.2 billion during Sunday’s Academy Awards.

He shared Best Adapted Screenplay for The Descendants with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, whose mimicking of presenter Angelina Jolie‘s power pose seemingly distracted and peeved Payne as he tried beating the clock with his thank-yous. Always the pro though, he quickly collected himself and offered one of the evening’s best grace notes with this tribute:

“We share this with George Clooney and the rest of the cast for interpreting our screenplay so generously and we also share it in particular with Kaui Hart Hemmings, our beautiful Hawaiian flower, for her novel.”

A radiant Hemmings sat next to the debonair Payne and his date for the evening, his well-coiffed mother Peggy, and it was to her and their shared Greek heritage he made the most moving gesture.

“And on a brief personal note if I may, my mother is here with me from Omaha, hold the applause, and after watching the show a few years ago she made me promise that if I ever won another Oscar I had to dedicate it to her just like Javier Bardem did with his mother (eliciting laughter). So, Mom, this one’s for you. Se agapao poly. (Greek for “I love you very much.”). And thanks for letting me skip nursery school so we could go to the movies. Thanks a lot.”

Payne has sometimes mentioned his mother and father both indulged his early childhood fascination with film, but it was she who took him to see the cutting-edge grown-up movies he preferred over children’s fare.

He could have quipped about her insisting that only her Countryside Village hair stylist attend to her tresses, which meant he had to fly the hairdresser out to L.A.

He could have used the stage to poke Nebraska legislators, as he did six weeks ago in Lincoln, for leverage in trying to get film industry tax credits passed here, lest he have to take his planned Nebraska project to, say, Kansas. He could have tweaked the noses of Paramount suits who gave him a hard time about his insistence in wanting to shoot Nebraska in black-and-white.

That he didn’t show anyone up speaks to his respect for the industry and his desire to not burn bridges. Besides, as he recently told a reporter, “I like the Oscars.” It’s obvious the Oscars like him. The only question is when he when he will take home Best Picture and Best Director awards.

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• My Forthcoming Book, ‘Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film,’ Due for a Fall 2012 Release (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)

Two-Time Oscar-winner Payne Delivers Another Screen Gem with ‘The Descendants’ and Further Enhances His Cinema Standing

UPDATE: Alexander Payne has added to his growing legendaric status by picking up his second Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.  He, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash shared the Academy Award for their work on The Descendants.  Payne shared the same award with Jim Taylor for their Sideways script.  It seems only a matter of time before Payne is recognized with a Best Director Oscar.

Here’s a capsule take on Alexander Payne and The Descendants, the latest in the filmmaker’s seriocomic forays into the existential angst, folly, fragility, and yearning of the human condition.  If you’re a fan of Payne, the film, or of cinema in general, then check out the batch of stories on this blog about about him, this picture, his other movies, and a slew of other films and filmmakers from cinema’s past and present.

Jim Taylor, Jim Burks and Alexander Payne accepting Best Picture Golden Globe

 

 

Two-Time Oscar-winner Payne Delivers Another Screen Gem with ‘The Descendnats’ and Further Enhances His Cinema Standing

©by Leo Adam Biga

Appeared in Omaha Magazine

 

Until The Descendants opened to golden reviews last fall, seven years elapsed between feature films for its celebrated writer-director Alexander Payne.

The Omaha native and Creighton Prep grad came of age as a film buff here. He made his first three features (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt) in his hometown, each moving him up the ranks of elite moviemakers. His surprise 2004 hit, Sideways, took him to Southern California’s wine country. The combination road-buddy picture and unconventional love story confirmed Payne as a film industry leading light, earning him a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.

He then busied himself writing-producing films for other directors. When he couldn’t find financing for his own pet project, Downsizing, he made The Descendants. Before shooting it in late 2010 the only directing he did in this period was a segment of Paris, I Love You and the pilot for HBO’s Hung.

The Golden Globes won by Descendants star George Clooney for best dramatic actor and by Payne and producing partners Jim Burke and Jim Taylor for best drama harbors well heading into the Oscars, where the film will be well-represented with five nominations (for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing and Best Actor). The three friends share their own production company, Ad Hominem Enterprises, which produced the picture for Fox Searchlight, with whom Ad Hominem has a first-look deal. The pic’s strong showing with critics and award shows is reminiscent of Sideways. Like that film, this one took Payne far from the Midwest – to Hawaii. A decade after working with iconic Jack Nicholson on About Schmidt, Payne teamed with another icon, Clooney.

As land baron attorney Matt King, Clooney is a man in crisis. His wife Liz lies in a coma after a boating accident. After years of indifferent parenting he’s suddenly in charge of his two girls. He’s burdened, too, by the valuable land entrusted to his care by ancestors. When his older daughter Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) reveals her mother’s infidelity, Matt sets off on a journey that begins in retribution but ends in forgiveness. Payne says “two acts of love” are what drew him to adapt the Kaui Hart Hemmings novel.

The story shares in common with Schmidt and Sideways and Payne’s forthcoming Nebraska a beleaguered protagonist trying to mend an unraveling life.

“It’s just the comic archetype Jim Taylor (his producing partner and former co-writer) and I came up with and I’m continuing of the middle-aged guy who’s really unconscious and has a bunch of anguish and frustration in life,” says Payne. “It’s a guy with good intentions but who’s bought the wrong package. I think it’s funny.”

Extracting equal amounts pathos and humor from human folly is what Payne does.

“I’m just always drawn to material that remains human. You don’t need guns and spaceships and great contrivance to have a movie and a meaningful one. I don’t think those elements are necessarily bad – I like movies of every genre, but what I’m drawn to is trying to somehow explore and express and mock the human heart.”

Descendants is being called Payne’s most fully realized work. “I hope so,” he says, adding that any new maturity reflects his more accrued life experience at age 50 and his evolving film craft. Some observers note he seems more comfortable letting tender emotions play out on screen.”Well, that’s what this story called for,” he says. “I mean, it could be a new vein of filmmaking in me or could just be I was serving this particular story as a professional, workman-like director. I have no idea.”

Staying true to his Omaha roots, he attended the movie’s local premiere at Film Streams, where Descendants smashed box office records. Payne enjoys sharing his work at the art cinema whose board he serves on. Before an appreciative crowd of friends and supporters he announced the film was among the highest grossers nationally its first week. By early February its domestic take stands at $66 million-plus, makeing it the top indie flick released in 2011.

Exuding grace and humility, Payne personally greeted audience members before and after the opening night screenings here. In accepting his Golden Globe, Payne deflected praise to cast and crew, to the people of Hawaii and to Hemmings, whose “beautiful gift” of a novel he made his own.

“He made this movie that’s hugely successful and he made sure that success was also Film Streams’ success, and hopefully Omaha’s success,” says Film Streams founder-director Rachel Jacobson. “We had so much fun at the premiere. It was just a blast. I wondered if we should do it at a bigger venue, and he said, ‘We’ve got to do it at our home.’ Getting the exclusive from Fox Searchlight was all him. That was huge for us.”

He’s conquered Cannes, Toronto, New York, Hollywood, but he proves he can come home again. Payne, who keeps a condo here, plans shooting the father-son road pic Nebraska in various Panhandle locales come spring. Home is where the heart is and he’s always happy to return where his cinema dreams were first fired.

Related articles

• Alexander Payne Achieves New Heights in ‘The Descendants’ (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Alexander Payne and Kaui Hart Hemmings on the Symbiosis Behind His Film and Her Novel ‘The Descendants’ and Her Role in Helping Him Get Hawaii Right (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, Producer Jim Burke and Actress Shailene Woodley Discuss Working with Alexander Payne on ‘The Descendants’ and Kaui Hart Hemmings Comments on the Adaptation of Her Novel (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• From the Archives: Alexander Payne, an Exclusive Interview Following the Success of ‘Sideways’ (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• About Payne: Alexander Payne on ‘About Schmidt,’ Jack Nicholson and the Comedy of Deep Focus (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Jim Taylor, the Other Half of Hollywood’s Top Screenwriting Team, Talks About His Work with Alexander Payne (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• From the Archives: About ‘About Schmidt’: The Shoot, Editing, Working with Jack and the Film After the Cutting Room Floor (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Payne named filmmaker of the year (bbc.co.uk)
• From the Archives: Conquering Cannes, Alexander Payne’s Triumphant Cannes Film Festival Debut with ‘About Schmidt’ (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• From the Archives: Alexander Payne Discusses His New Feature ‘About Schmidt’ Starring Jack Nicholson, Working with the Star, Past Projects and Future Plans (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• When Laura Met Alex: Laura Dern & Alexander Payne Get Deep About Collaborating on ‘Citizen Ruth’ and Their Shared Cinema Sensibilities (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Living the Dream: Cinema Maven Rachel Jacobson – the Woman Behind Film Streams (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Joan Micklin Silver’s Classic ‘Hester Street’ Included in National Film Registry (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• My Forthcoming Book, ‘Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film,’ Due for a Fall 2012 Release (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)

Oscar-Winner Alexander Payne and Kaui Hart Hemmings on the Symbiosis Behind His Film and Her Novel ‘The Descendants’ and Her Role in Helping Him Get Hawaii Right

Oscar-winner Alexander Payne and Kaui Hart Hemmings on the Symbiosis Behind His Film and Her Novel ‘The Descendants‘ and Her Role in Helping Him Get Hawaii Right

©by Leo Adam Biga

Published in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

When Alexander Payne‘s turn came to speak in the glow of The Descendants winning best motion picture drama at the Jan. 15 Golden Globes, he made sure to thank the people of Hawaii and author Kaui Hart Hemmings.

He did something few directors do by involving Hemmings, a Hawaii native and resident, in the adaptation, preproduction and production of the George Clooney-starring film. He’s widely credited her vital role in helping him get a fix on the island state’s particular culture, or as much as a mainlander like himself can attain. For all the time he spent researching, writing, prepping and shooting there, mainly in Honolulu, he never lost sight of being a visitor in need of expert advice.

Of course, the well-received 2007 Hemmings novel is the reason there’s a movie at all. He knows golden material when he sees it and he remained true to the book beyond her expectations.

“I’ve had the privilege of seeing Alexander making this film, from location scouting and casting to directing and filming. His attention to the minutiae of Hawaiian life, his humor and restraint, his casting decisions – I felt like I’d be surprised if it wasn’t a good film. Still, I couldn’t prepare myself for how good,” says Hemmings. “It’s a film that sticks with you, teaches you something without being at all didactical. It brings Hawaii to the big screen, something that’s never been done before, in an authentic way. I never insisted on him being faithful to my novel, but he did, and I’m pretty happy about that since it led to results like these.”

His respect for her work and inclusion in his process is why he told a world-wide Globes audience, with some prompting from his Ad Hominem Enterprises producing partner and former co-writer, Jim Taylor, “…thanks to Kaui Hart Hemmings – she gave us a beautiful gift.”

“I don’t need the public thank you but…it sure does please the locals. I spent a lot of time with Alexander, the crew and George, so it was just fun times,” says Hemmings. “I’m a big fan of this movie. I have the privilege of feeling like I contributed to it in some way and so it’s nice to be acknowledged.”

In adhering closely to her tale of a good man negotiating personal upheavals, the film’s struck a responsive chord with critics and audiences…

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THE STORY IN MY NEW BOOK-

Alexander Payne: HIs Journey in Film – A Reporter’s Perspective  1998-2012

A compilation of my articles about Payne and his work.  Now available for pre-ordering.

Related articles

• Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, Producer Jim Burke and Actress Shailene Woodley Discuss Working with Alexander Payne on ‘The Descendants’ and Kaui Hart Hemmings Comments on the Adaptation of Her Novel (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Alexander Payne Achieves New Heights in ‘The Descendants’ (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings – READ THE BOOK FIRST (Drool Over Clooney in the Film Later): (booktopia.com.au)
• Alexander Payne and Kaui Hart Hemmings on the Symbiosis Behind His Film and Her Novel ‘The Descendants’ and Her Role in Helping Him Get Hawaii Right (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Payne Delivers Another Screen Gem with ‘The Descendants’ and Further Enhances His Cinema Standing (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Alexander Payne Delivers Graceful Oscar Tributes – The Winner for Best Adapted Screenplay Recognizes Clooney, Hemmings and His Mom (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)

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• Alexander Payne Delivers Graceful Oscar Tributes – The Winner for Best Adapted Screenplay Recognizes Clooney, Hemmings and His Mom (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)

From the Archives: About Payne – Alexander Payne on ‘About Schmidt,’ Jack Nicholson and the Comedy of Deep Focus

 

 

From the Archives: About Payne - Alexander Payne on ‘About Schmidt,’ Jack Nicholson and the Comedy of Deep Focus 

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally published in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

Bolstered by rousing receptions at prestigious film festivals, critical kudos from leading reviewers, widespread predictions of Oscar nods and loads of studio marketing behind it, the momentum attending About Schmidt surpasses anything Alexander Payne saw for his previous features’ openings.

Where Citizen Ruth and Election were accorded the kind of lukewarm studio backing (from Miramax and Paramount/MTV Films, respectively) that idiosyncratic movies get when “the suits” don’t fully endorse or understand them, Schmidt is getting the type of red carpet treatment from New Line Cinema execs that signals they see a potential winner, read — moneymaker, here. And why not?

The film, making its Nebraska premiere December 10 at the new Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center (formerly the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater) in downtown Lincoln, appears to have everything going for it heading into Hollywood’s big ticket winter season, when prestige pictures are positioned at the cineplex for box-office leverage and Academy consideration.

The timing of Schmidt’s release seems right. There’s the snob appeal that comes from boffo Cannes and New York Film Festival screenings of the film this past spring and summer. There’s the raves it received from Stephen Holden in the New York Times, Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times and a slew of other name critics for major media outlets. There’s also serious Oscar talk for Jack Nicholson’s celebrated turn as dour Omaha Everyman Warren Schmidt and for Payne and writing partner Jim Taylor’s sardonic take on middle American mores.

Then there’s the priceless mojo Nicholson’s mystique brings to the Nebraska-made project.

Of course, none of this guarantees Schmidt will do any business, especially in light of the fact Payne’s films have so far fared better in home-market release, where they have time to be discovered and appreciated, than in theaters. That his films appeal to a discriminating audience is logical given his wry, sagacious work, which is really in the realm of social commentary.

Film critic David Denby called Payne and Taylor “perhaps the only true social satirists now working in American movies.” But satire can be a hard pill for filmgoers to swallow. They may feel the sting hits too close to home or they may prefer something lighter to go with their concessions.

According to Dan Ladely, director of the Ross Media Arts Center, Schmidt is “a little bit of a departure from Alexander’s two previous films, which were known for their kind of biting satire. This film is a little bit more nostalgic.” While perhaps gentler, it is, like the others, a painfully honest and ironic examination of how good people lose their way and court despair even amidst the so-called Good Life.

In today’s spoon-fed movie culture, bleak is a hard sell unless accompanied by big action set pieces, and the only thing passing for action in Schmidt is Nicholson’s comic struggle atop a water bed. That scene closes a sequence in which the tight-assed, buttoned-down Schmidt is disgusted by the outrageous new family he  inherits via his daughter’s impending wedding.

The son-in-law’s mother, Roberta, is, as deliciously played by Kathy Bates, a brazen woman whom, Payne said, “is the type of person that will say anything to anyone.” At one point she tries seducing Schmidt in a hot tub by “telling him about how sexual she is and how she had her first orgasm in ballet class at age six,” said Payne, delighted with offending every propriety Schmidt holds dear. “Oh, it’s so fun to torture your characters.”

In this scene, as in much of the film, Nicholson’s performance rests more on his facial-physical reactions than words. Indeed, instead of explosions, verbal or otherwise, moviegoers get the implosion that Nicholson’s Warren Schmidt, a retired and widowed Woodmen of the World Life Insurance actuarial, undergoes.

Severed from the twin tethers of job and wife that defined him and held his orderly life together, he begins questioning everything about his existence, including the choices he made. He lets himself go.

The state of his disillusion is captured in the film’s ad campaign in which Schmidt appears as a shell-shocked, disheveled man shadowed by a dark cloud overhead in an otherwise clear blue sky.

In the throes of this mid-life crisis, he sets off, in a huge, unwieldy motor home that is an apt expression of his desperate inadequacy, on an existential road trip across Nebraska. His destination is Denver, where he heads ostensibly to heal his wounded relationship with his daughter and to save her, as he sees it, from the mistake she is about to make in marrying a frivolous man. Along the way, he conveys his troubles to an odd assortment of people he turns to or rails against in a kind of unfolding nervous breakdown. Unable to express his real feelings to those closest to him, he instead pours out his soul, in writing (and in voice-over), to an African orphan he sponsors, Ndugu, who can’t possibly understand his dilemma.

Regarding Nicholson’s portrayal of a man in crisis, Dan Ladely calls it “probably one of the most subdued performances he’s ever given and maybe one of his best. I’d be really surprised if he doesn’t get nominated for an Oscar. It’s a role where he really stretched himself, and I think probably a lot of the credit for that could be given to Alexander, because Alexander is a director who works well with actors.  He gets a lot out of them.”

Directing Nicholson allowed Payne to work with an actor he greatly admires and solidified his own status as a sought-after filmmaker. He found Nicholson to be a consummate professional and supreme artist.

“Nicholson does a lot of work on his character before shooting. Now, a lot of actors do that, but he REALLY does it. To the point where, as he describes it, he’s so in character and so relaxed that if he’s in the middle of a take and one of the movie lights falls or a train goes through or anything, he’ll react to it in character. He won’t break.” Payne said Nicholson doesn’t like a lot of rehearsal “because he believes in cinema as the meeting of the spontaneous and the moment. His attitude is, ‘What if something good happens and the camera wasn’t on?’”

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THE STORY IN MY NEW BOOK-

Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film, A Reporter’s Perspective 1998-2012

A compilation of my articles about Payne and his work.  Now available for pre-ordering.

Kathy Bates in About Schmidt

Jack Nicholson as Warren Schmidt

Alexander Payne

Related articles

• From the Archives: A Hollywood Dispatch from the set of Alexander Payne’s Sideways – A Rare, Intimate, Inside Look at Payne and His Process (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• From the Archives: A Road Trip Sideways – Alexander Payne’s Circuitous Journey to His Wine Country Film Comedy (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• From the Archives: Alexander Payne, an Exclusive Interview Following the Success of ‘Sideways’ (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• From the Archives: About ‘About Schmidt’: The Shoot, Editing, Working with Jack and the Film After the Cutting Room Floor (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• From the Archives: Conquering Cannes, Alexander Payne’s Triumphant Cannes Film Festival Debut with ‘About Schmidt’ (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• When Laura Met Alex: Laura Dern & Alexander Payne Get Deep About Collaborating on ‘Citizen Ruth’ and Their Shared Cinema Sensibilities (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Alexander Payne on ‘The Descendants’ (variety.com)
• From the Archives: Alexander Payne Discusses His New Feature ‘About Schmidt’ Starring Jack Nicholson, Working with the Star, Past Projects and Future Plans (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Alexander Payne Achieves New Heights in ‘The Descendants’ (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Omaha’s Film Reckoning Arrives in the Form of Film Streams, the City’s First Full-Fledged Art Cinema (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Payne Delivers Another Screen Gem with ‘The Descendants’ and Further Enhances His Cinema Standing (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
• Alexander Payne Delivers Graceful Oscar Tributes – The Winner for Best Adapted Screenplay Recognizes Clooney, Hemmings and His Mom (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)