TOM SEYMOUR

By Mike Watt

TOM SEYMOUR We're living in an entertainment age. With the ease and relative inexpense of digital video, online editing and Internet Streaming Video, everyone makes movies now. You can't throw a stone in any direction without hitting a filmmaker. Like any artist boom, though, it's hard to bean a good one.

There's a trio of really good filmmakers floating around right now, however, operating under the banner of Hale Manor Productions: Mike Aransky, Phil Guerrette and Tom Seymour. They have a pair of terrifically entertaining movies on the market right now that come highly recommended for any film fan. THRILL KILL JACK IN HALE MANOR is a goofy, insane shot-on-video feature about a killer-for-hire who enters into a madhouse to retrieve a mystical weapon. During the course of his search, he is forced to dangle over rooms filled with digital lava and battle an infinite number of "gimps" - mostly teenage guys wearing inverted Bart Simpson masks and bad crepe beards. This is the kind of movie that has been made by every high school kid with a camcorder. The difference is: it's fun, it's well made, and it's highly watchable - and competent enough to attract the attention of The Independent Film Channel, which showed a very brief segment of the project on their "Split Screen" show last year.

Recently, however, the Hale Manor trio released EVERYTHING MOVES ALONE. A serious comedy/drama shot on film, EVERYTHING MOVES ALONE has received very positive reviews from the New York Times, The New York Post, and TV Guide Online. It proves that the Hale Manor fellows are serious about their work, even when they're having goofy fun dressing as gimps - but especially when they're making a story that relates to them all.

While all three perform triple and quadruple duty on their projects, the titles of these two movies credit Mike Aransky with direction, Phil Guerrette as co-producer, and Tom Seymour as screenwriter. All three also appear on screen as well. I got the chance to talk to Seymour last summer, as they prepared to premiere EVERYTHING MOVES ALONE at the prestigious Den of Cin in New York City.

The genesis of the Hale Manor company, according to Tom Seymour: "[Phil Guerrette and I] went to high school together, and we bought a broken camcorder off a friend for about 150 dollars. In order to keep the thing closed you had to wrap a bungee cord around it. Actually, from time to time that would come loose and the tape would pop out - and we'd lose all the footage as the camera ate the tape. We made a whole bunch of shorts that way and eventually aired them on public access television. We had our own little public access show for a while.

"I started working at Wendy's - every kid has to have a fast food job, it's like a rule or something - and I met Mike [Aransky] there. He had also done some shorts at High School. We went to separate colleges but we were all studying film and video and we decided to do a movie together - THRILL KILL JACK. We did it on weekends, and at night in our parents' houses - while they were sleeping at times. We'd have these 300 watt mechanic's lights shining everywhere, and we shot on a hi-8 camcorder. We graduated to the higher format for that. We tried to make it as cool as we could."

Right away, it was almost unconsciously decided that Aransky direct THRILL KILL JACK. "I feel like each of us have certain strong points, and Phil and I knew Mike had the strongest visual input. I knew that it would take me years to reach the level he was already at. I understood that. He was a lot better with the aesthetics of the film. We've all improved in that area, but he really excelled there."

After a making a few other short films, the trio turned their attention to making a movie that actually said something - both to and about - their own generation. EVERYTHING MOVES ALONE the story of an army-washout who attempts to reconcile with his estranged older brother, and meets up with another young man who is attempting to deal with his own demons. While it contains its share of cynical humor and one-liners, EVERYTHING MOVES ALONE is also a good look at our "lost generation", the twenty-somethings fresh out of college who are trying to deal with life, getting older without actually becoming adults. It's an impressive film for any filmmaker to undertake, let alone a group of independents whose only reward would be getting the film seen.

"It came from that shock you get when you're done with high school and you're almost done with college and the monotony of life is setting in. You think 'Damn, this isn't very storybook-like at all, is it?' You try to keep in touch with your friends. There's no real melody to life; you just wander. It's the idea of being lost and the things I wish I could do. I wish I could do nothing all day and just sort out my problems. And that's what I wanted to explore - to create this reality where people can deal with the silly things they find important - God, the more I try to describe this film, the less intelligent I sound. The title itself stands for a number of things. A lot of things happen in life, and they all seem to be part of this vast plot to keep you down. But really, they're all separate occurrences, and you just have to keep them separate and try to conquer them separately. Sort them out. And at the same time, it's a reference to being able to have good relationships. How it's okay to be alone, while moving towards your goals."

As would be expected, many of the film's plot points are taken from Seymour's own life. "I'd have to say that part of the brother thing probably had something to do with my own older brothers. They're not psychotic like the brother in the movie, but one of the things that I did try to show is that the reality of relationships are not - the resolutions aren't permanent. It takes a shitload to alter someone's mind and it usually doesn't stick. Scotch makes headway with his brother, and a couple of scenes later you see it revert back to the way it was. People admit to changing, they make an effort to change, they pretend to change, but really, it takes years and years and it rarely ever happens."

EVERYTHING MOVES ALONE took almost four years and ten thousand dollars to go from script to screen. The bulk of the money came from the trio's own savings and credit cards. They shot on location in their own town and surrounding Connecticut locations, rounding out the cast with friends and acquaintances - including one "name": Carmine Capobianco. Capobianco starred in the cult films PSYCHOS IN LOVE and GALACTIC GIGOLO, and makes cameo appearances in both THRILL KILL JACK and EVERYTHING MOVES ALONE. "My brother and Carmine opened up the FunStuff Video chain here in Connecticut," Seymour explains. "I helped them open a couple of stores. A lot of people know him and know his work. So we asked him to be in THRILL KILL JACK. We were able to get him for a couple of hours after the store closed down. "Okay, go ahead, shoot me". Then with EMA, we ended up calling him the day of instead of beforehand - 'Hey, Carmine, could you do us a favor?' - 'Yeah, alright. Fuckin' guys…' So he came down and did the [used car dealer scene] for us. And I love that scene."

Once the Hale Manor boys had assembled a rough cut, they did something very few filmmakers think to do: they polished it. A lot. "It took about seven months to complete the edit," says Seymour. "I had three versions of the script, which we shot, and reshot, then edited, then showed to people. Then we reshot, and re-edited again. So it took us quite some time. We had some trouble with the lab, and they ended up adjusting a lot of the footage for free for us."

While Seymour is admittedly no great fan of the video format - which is an attitude he shares with much of the free world, unfortunately - he is an advocate of non-linear digital editing. Another attitude shared by much of the free world. "If we couldn't do this non-linear, it would have been a piece of shit. Non-linear is great because it's easy - "Oh, I want to alter this thirty seconds", swap it around to the front of the movie, and whatever. It let us play with the pacing. I don't want to bash my movie, but every movie is flawed. This one certainly was. But non-linear allowed us to work with it more, and let us play with the whole project very easily. We were able to work and work and re-work until it was something that was very watchable."

EVERYTHING MOVES ALONE is an achievement in and of itself. It's a quiet movie, about people, rather than incidents. Yet it never feels boring or over-long. As for the movie's future, things are still up in the air. "We've entered some film festivals, so hopefully we'll hear back. We had a small theater run in June at the Den of Cin in New York, and got some positive reviews."

Like his partners, Seymour is skeptical about working above their meager budgets. These opportunities come few and far between. Even when opportunity rings your bell, it usually runs away before you get to the door. "We've been let down quite a bit. We had two people who we thought were legitimate say that they wanted to back EVERYTHING MOVES ALONE, and then disappeared. So we just said 'Fuck it, we're going to do it ourselves'. [Now that it's done] it's hard to find the right audience for it. It's tough, you show them to friends, and they're just like 'Ho Hum'. Not to sound like a snob, but I think we make movies for people who like movies and understand movies."

But the trio is prepared. All three have worked as crew on other movies, and they've learned as much, if not more, by doing things themselves. "I'd learned to D.P. and to change out film on the set of another movie. I worked on that movie and weaseled my way into being a camera P.A. So that was how Mike was able to do the camera and I was able to light for film. I'd learned how to meter. That's another thing that I think is important - that you learn to do everything yourself. No one can tell you how to do something on your own film in that regard. We don't have people talking down to us. I never want to sound ignorant of film."

As for what's coming up: "I'm working on a movie called THE LAND OF COLLEGE PROPHETS. It's a mix of EVERYTHING MOVES ALONE and THRILL KILL JACK. I know: 'How the hell does that work?' The main characters are going to be these two poetic bruisers, Hemmingway types. An intelligent action movie. We'll see if I can pull that off. I think it will work. I've never seen an action movie that ever had anything profound to say, and I really want to make a movie that is sincere. That's the one thing I feel that we did right for EMA was that we had some genuine and sincere moments. Things that didn't feel engineered. For all the flaws, I think that's the one thing we had. In every movie we do I want to keep that going. We all want to change gears and do different projects. We had talked about doing a THRILL KILL sequel. And that's something I'd love to do. Just not right now. I feel like we're making real headway with our careers. I think that's for later."

For more information, please check out: http://www.halemanor.com/home.html