| THE BEGININGS The idea for Them's the Brakes started forming as early as 1996, while I was attending my first year of college in Walla Walla, Washington. Walla Walla is located in the middle of the desert. Not a dune desert like you think of in Death Valley, but a desert nonetheless. The roads leading away from the college seemed to stretch forever into the distance. It is a very striking image, and I knew that I had to film something there someday. Several years later, in the fall of 2002, I got that old familiar urge to shoot somthing. I don't know what it is about fall that just makes me want to create, something to do with the change of seasons and the energy that is in the air. Having already made Car Trouble, I felt compelled to revisit the story of the lone driver (unfortunate motorist) on a deserted road, encountering problems. This time I decided I would write something we could shoot during the day. I did this for two main reasons: first, I could finally shoot something in the desert between Portland, and Walla Walla (as it turns out we shot a bit farther South than that), and secondly, we wouldn't have to use lights. We could use the natural sunlight. So I wrote Car Trouble 2: Them's the Brakes (the subtitle "Them's the Brakes" was given to me by Todd Robinson, the star of Car Trouble 1, at its screening. He jokingly said "coming soon...Car Trouble 2: Them's the Brakes" ). Of course, when I wrote the script, I didn't know it was going to be Car Trouble 2. Its initial title was That One About the Guy Who is Driving Through the Desert and Has a Brush with Death. It was not until I had finished the script, and had a couple people read it that I realized that, with the exception of the sock puppet, these two stories were very similar. So I made it the sequel - sort of. it is a sequel like Halloween 3 and Jason Goes to Hell are sequels - in title only. CAR TROUBLE II: THEM'S THE BRAKES This is the story of a man who is driving through the sesert on his way to meet with a woman who is not his wife. As he is driving, he sees a man on the side of the road. He cannot make out the man's face because he is backlit by the sun, but he can tell that the man wants him to stop. Our hero(?) doesn't stop. He drives right on by. In fact, as he drives by, he throws water in the face of the man on the side of the road as a little joke and keeps on driving. After awhile, with the pedestrian all but forgotten, he comes to a curve in the road, so he puts his foot on the brake to slow down. He is horrified to find that the brakes are not working. His car careens off the side of the road, throwing him from his car. When he comes to, the Grim Reaper is standing over him. He pleads for his life but to no avail. He manages to escape from Death and runs back toward the road. When he reaches the highway, he sees a car on the horizon, and tries to flag it down. As the car approaches, he realizes with dread that it is his car coming, and with him in it. He tries to get himself to stop before it is too late, and he crashes all over again, but all he gets is a face full of water. His car speeds away from him, and he is left to face Death. PREPRODUCTION: SELECTING THE CAST AND CREW After the script was written, and the title had been decided, I gave copies of the script to the other members of Short Bus Films. After reading it, we all decided it was good enough to produce, so we scheduled the shoot for the following September. That would give us about four and a half months to prepare for the shoot. I chose Christian Dolan to be my Assistant Director (he would also do some kick-ass sound design in postproduction), Tony Bevacqua would , naturally, be Director of Photagraphy, Laura Roe would be Script Supervisor, and Unit Production Manager, and I would Direct the short. And although, I had some trouble with him on Car Trouble, I gave Neal Vance the jobs of Lighting Director, and Editor. It was in the role of editor that I had encountered the most trouble with him, and was the most worried about on this film. These were the major crew, but also helping out would be Dan Sanderson as Key Grip, and Production Sound Recording, Ilana Sol as Still Photographer and Behind the Scenes Documentarian, and Adriana Bevacqua would again supply the Craft Services. Although I intially was going to have Todd Robinson play the lead in this film, I ultimately decided to go with someone different. After watching his performances in The Dividing Hour and The Sexy Chef, and also getting to know him a little better, I knew that I wanted Greg James for the Part. The question was, would he want the role. As it turned out, Greg was a big fan of both Car Trouble, and Black Hills Zombie 3. He was very enthusiastic about the short, and in fact, contributed much more than just starring in it. For the part of the Grim Reaper I had planned to have Todd, but due to scheduling conflicts he wasn't available. Fortunately for us though, Bryan Kamae, who composed the music for Car Trouble, was available and wanted to help us out. Now we had our crew, and we had our cast. It was time to get crackin' on preproduction. The first thing to do was story boards. With the help of Christian, I drew out the complete stroyboards. Every shot was now mapped out. I learned the hard way that you must have an exact map. (If you want to deviate from the storyboards once you get out in the field, so be it, but you best have a plan before you get there.) With the storyboards drawn, we needed to find the exact location we would shoot. Three expeditions were made into the harsh Oregon desert. LOCATION SCOUTING The first expedition I made by myself and found the sand dunes where we would shoot Greg's confrontation with Death. It was a large stretch of state park located abnout 20 minutes East of Christmas Valley, Oregon (just a mere four and a half hours away from Portland). It is truly a beautiful area, but for shooting it posed several problems. First, there was no place to stay close by. So we would have to rough it and camp in the area (that meant no toilets). Secondly, there was no power supply anywhere, which meant that we would have to use natural light. We would be at the mercy of the elements. If the day we decided to shoot was partly cloudy, then continuity would be impossible. I decided to risk the potential continuity nightmare and possible crew mutiny though, and officially claimed that site for day one of shooting. The second time I went scouting for locations, the DP, Tony Bevacqua came along with me. We went to the most South-Eastern corner of Oregon in search of a road that cut through the Alvord Desert. The Alvord Desert is approximately a nine-hour drive from downtown Portland. We set out at about 2:00 pm (three hours late), and did not reach the area where the Alvord Desert was supposded to be until sundown. No use looking for a good place to shoot in the dark. So we set up camp about 200 yards from the road. We slept under the most brilliant display of stars I have ever witnessed, and we awoke the next morning refreshed and rejuvenated. We headed down a road that looked promising, and that was, according to the map, headed in the right direction. But it was a dirt road and that wouldn't do for the story. Still optimistic, we forged ahead. After about three hours of driving, and in the middle of absolutely nothing, we got a flat tire. "No problem, I have a spare" I said. Unfortunately the spare tire was only one of those little doughnut tires rather than a full extra tire, so we were forced to drive on this dirt road at a neck-breaking speed of 15 mph. Anything over that would risk blowing the spare, and then we would really be screwed. It was about five hours into our drive (sometime around noon) that we began to get a little worried. We had very little gas left. The gauge was almost on empty, and the end of the road was nowhere in sight. On top of this, because we were running low on gas, we could not use the air conditioning. So there we were, in the middle of the desert at high noon, one flat tire, no air conditioning, with the windows down, driving 15 mph, and practically coasting on fumes. I suppose it could have been worse (there could have been evil monkeys after us). Shortly after 1:00 pm, some of our fears were alleviated when we met a woman on the road who informed us that the nearest gas station was only about 14 miles away. When we finally reached the gas station (and pavement again), air conditioning never felt so sweet. Though we didn't find the Alvord Desert, we did find a Les Schwab and got the flat fixed. The third expedition out to the desert proved a bit more fruitful. we did find the Alvord Desert this time, and it was spectacular. Nothing but scorched earth for as far as your eye could make out, and in the distance, jagged mountains cut their way out of the bone-dry soil. Unfortunately, there was no paved road going through the desert, so we were not able to use this location for Them's the Brakes. But perhaps sometime in the near future, we will be able to revisit that striking landscape. PREPARING FOR THE SHOOT As the summer months slipped by, I frantically prepared for fall's shoot. With the help of Tony and Neal, I built the reflectors we would use. We decided to make them because they cost about $200 a piece to buy, used, at the local grip shop, Pacific Grip and Lighting. We were able to make them for slightly less. We made three reflectors for right around $44. I also purchased the car that we would use in the shoot. I wanted to get something cheap so we could actually crash it when it came time to shoot the car crash. I found a car at a local lot with a sticker price of $54. So I thought what the hell? I'll take it for a test drive. It seemed to drive fine (as long as you were driving in forward that is, it didn't drive in reverse), and it was definitely in my price range. So I talked to the dealer and got him to take the price down to $50. I haggled him down $4. In retrospect, I should have bought a $75 car instead. That extra $25 worth of car would have saved us some time and hassle out on the shoot. Before I knew it, it had somehow become September. The shoot was mere days away. I was consumed with this film. I thought about it ever minute of the day, and I dreamt about it at night. And I am sure that all those around me were becoming very sick of me talking about it all the damn time. The night before the shoot, I didn't sleep. I was stricken with nerves. PRODUCTION On Friday morning, September 21, 2003, Tony and I drove to the airport to rent the production van. When we got there we found that the van was going to cost more than we were quoted over the phone. It seems that renting a car cost more if you are under the age of 25. Here we go, I thought while trying to remain in good spirits. Now the snags in our seemless plan begin. After we rented the van I had a few other odd chores to do before we were supposed to leave that evening. Some of these chores included renting the generator from Home Depot, and double checking gear. It was very important that we pack everything we might possibly need (seeing as how we were going to be 5 hours away from home and 3 hours from anything that remotely resembled a city), and getting the craft services from Adriana. When 3:00 pm rolled around, and Adriana failed to show, I called her house only to find that no one was home. Adriana had never been to my apartment before, so I was a little worried that she had gotten lost somewhere, and was just driving around in circles. At about 4:45 pm, Tony Came over to see if he could help me track down his sister (Adriana). She finally arive at about 5:30 pm. So two and a half hours behind schedule aready, we drove to the other two sites we had to visit to load up gear and crew before leaving town. We headed east toward the desert at 7:00 pm, two hours behind schedule. When we finally reached Christmas Valley, and the campground where we would be staying it was 2:00 am Saturday morning. Needless to say, some of our campers were less than happy. After all the tents were set up, and everyone was in them, I hit the sack (or sleeping bag if you want). I fell asleep somewhere around 3:15 am. DAY ONE: Morning came very early on Saturday. I was up at about 5:30 am. Tony was the next person up, and I could see that he was just as excited as I was. We were ready to make a movie......Almost. The crew arose shortly after, and we all had breakfast, huddled in a little circle to try and keep warm (before the sun rose that morning it felt as though it were about 35 degrees outside). While the others were finishing up their meal, Christian, Tony, and myself looked over the schedule and devised our plan of attack for the day. I could really feel the excitement now. It was rolling around in my stomach like a typhoon. With breakfast finished, we packed up and headed for the dunes. We were worried about driving our car to far out onto the sand (the last thing we needed was to get a vehicle stuck out there) so we drove as far as we dared and hiked the equipment the rest of the way. As the rest of the crew lugged the reflectors and what-have-yous to where we were going to be shooting. I remained by the van with Greg, and Bryan. Bryan applied his own make up (which consisted of smearing black face paint all over his face) while I concentrated on making Greg look like he had just been through a car crash. I have to admit that I probably went a little overboard on Greg's make up. I could have just slapped some fake blood on his face and called it good. But it was the first chance I'd had to do make up since Black Hills Zombie and I was enjoying myself. The very first shot we got is my favorite shot in the whole movie: it is the wide shot where Greg is running away from Death, and they both crest the sand dune. Things went very smoothly once we started shooting. Everybody was doing their jobs, and doing them well. One of the only difficulties we had that first shoot was that there were other people on the dunes besides us that weekend. Locals came to the dunes to race around on their ATVs and dune buggies. So every once and awhile we would have to hold off shooting until an ATV was out of the shot in the background. We also had to really be careful not to show any of the numerous tire tracks that criss-crossed the desert floor. We broke for lunch around 1:30 pm. After lunch we headed for our next site (approximately 2 miles down the road from camp) and set up. At this site we would be shooting Greg's character's first encounter with death, one of the only two scenes in the movie with dialogue. Again, things went very smoothly once we started shooting. We had a few curious on-lookers that we had to kepe out of the shots, but other than that we shot pretty much nonstop until just before sundown. Then we hit another snag (litterally). As I was backing the van up, the tires slipped off the road and sunk deep into the sand. One of our big fears had come true - we were stuck. We spent about an hour trying to dig the two ton van out of a sand burm. We basically had to level the entire burm in order to get our back axle free. So, weary from the day, and now exhausted from digging us out of my mistake, the crew returned to camp for supper. Greg was caked in sand and the carrow's surup we used as fake blood. So I decided to rent him a motel room in Christmas Valley so he and Bryan could take a shower and wash their make up off. After we rented them a motel room, Tony and I had to drive back to a truck stop just South of Bend, where the Good People at Alaska West Express trucking services had delivered our $50.00 prop car. (We didn't even attempt to drive it to Bend because we knew there was no way it would have made it that far.) So while everybody else was eating or taking a nice warm shower, Tony and I were driving. Fortunately, the car made it to Fort Rock (which is where we would be shooting on Sunday). So we left the car parked there over night and returned to camp. DAY TWO: The next morning, after breakfast, we packed up our gear, and headed for Fort Rock. We reached the Car around 9:00 am and began shooting shortly after that. Shooting went fine until we needed to use the car, then we hit a few snags. The first problem we encountered wasn't with the car but rather with one of the crew members. The camera we were using was a Canon GL-1, and it belonged to Neal Vance. In the middle of the shoot, Neal decided he didn't want us to use his camera for a specific shot. This was understandable (sort of) because there was a chance, allbeit a SLIGHT one, that the camera may have been damaged if something went wrong with the shot. The shot was this: we were filming part of the car crash scene. This particular shot was going to look like the car careens right into the camera then we'd cut to black. To achieve this safely, we started with the car up against the camera, then we towed the car backward out of the ditch and away from the camera. Later, in post, we would run the footage in reverse and it would look like the car coming toward the camera. Now it wasn't the fact that Neal didn't want his camera to be used for this shot that bothered me. What pissed me off was that we had discussed this shot in great detail back in Portland, before we ever started shooting. Neal didn't have any problem with it then. He never spoke up and said "hey, you know, my camera was expensive, and I don't want to run even the slightest risk of breaking it." If he had, I would have said "ok," and thought up another way to shoot it. But instead he waited until we were out there in the middle of the shoot and got to that particular shot to protest. Fortunately, I had brought along my camera for Ilana Sol to use in documenting the making of the film. So we used that one. It was only because Christian calmed me down, and reasoned with me that I let Neal finish helping us with the shoot at all. Christian convinced me (rightly so) that Neal's camera was better than mine and that the film would suffer if I chose to use my camera instead. So grudginly, I decided to finish shooting with Neal's camera (and in turn, allow him to continue working with us). The next problem we hit was mechanical. The problem occurred about three hours before the sun went down, and we lost the light We were shooting the last couple scenes we needed to have a complete movie (except for the actual car crash scene, which I planned to come back and shoot at a later date). The scenes were interior scenes in the car, where Greg is driving and sees the stanger on the side of the road - fairly simple scenes right? Well, they would be very easy (and pretty quick) to shoot if the car that you were using didn't break down in the middle of shooting. Unfortunately, ours did. I suppose that's what I get for deciding to use a $50 car. The engine overheated right in the middle of a shot. So we had to grab the production van and strap a tow rope to it to drag the car. It was lucky that we brought along the tow rope for another scene, otherwise we would have had to get real creative. So we finished the shoot by towing the car while Tony lay on the hood of the car shooting through the windshield. We barely, finished shooting before the light quality was too poor for us to shoot anymore. With a great deal of saitisfaction I called "That's a rap." We popped open a bottle of champaign, and had a mini celebration right there by the side of the road, and then we packed up the gear and began the long trek home. Weary, but in good spirits we rolled into Portland around 1:30 am, and parted ways. POSTPRODUCTION And so began the seven months that were my Postproduction Nightmare. When we got back home, I turned the master feild tapes over to Neal, so that he could dump the footage onto his computer and start editing. Once the footage was on his computer we sat down and discussed which takes we thought would work best on the timeline. When these were chosen I let Neal get to work editng. CUT TO: INT. ANDY'S HOUSE - FIVE MONTHS LATER Neal still had not locked down the picture yet, and I was growing a little anxious to finish this project. So I decided that we should start working on the audio for the film while Neal was finishing up the video. Now, as we had discussed in our very first production meeting, Christian was going to do the postproduction sound. But for some reason, this is not what Neal understood. He thought that he should do the sound. So I get this call from Christian one afternoon and he asks me what he has done that I didn't like, and why have I decided to let Neal edit the sound and not him. I have no idea what he's talking about. Well come to find out, Neal had called Christian earlier that day and told him that we (WE being Tony, Neal, and Myself) have decided that the editor should edit the sound, and that Christian should hand over the audio tapes (we had recorded some ADR of Greg, and some foley a week or so earlier). I told Christian not to worry about it, and that I thought that he was doing a fantastic job, and I wanted him to keep doing a fantastic job on the audio. I said he should know better than to listen to Neal (ever). Of course, then I had to call Neal. I told him that, as was always the plan, I wanted Christian to edit the sound. That way Neal could focus soley on the video. I said "Since we didn't focus on audio recording while in the feild, and there were only a hand full of dialogue lines in this short, we need to focus on making the video the best quality it can be." He didn't buy it. He some how got it in his head that he should be the one to edit the sound, end of story. I told him "I'm afraid I'm going to have to pull rank on you here. I am the executive producer, and director, and I have final say over this. And I say Christian is editing sound." To which he replied "we are all producers on this film and we all have say in these matters." I told him that wasn't exactly true, if he had put up any money for the film, any money at all, that would make him a producer (though not an executive producer), but he didn't and so I had final say. I told him that he could either work on the video and accept the fact that Christian was doing the audio, or I would be forced to find someone else to finish editing the project. Then he called me a "two-faced little prick," and hung up on me. After that he would not return my calls, or answer when I called, which would have been fine by me except for one thing: he had my master field tapes. So I had to have SBF VP Tony Bevacqua, his partner at Avanti Video (actually ex-partner - they had to dissolve the business because Tony couldn't handle working with Neal anymore), act as a mediator. Neal wouldn't even talk to me. Poor Tony had to act as a go-between for about a month. So anyway, to make a LONG story short, Neal decided that he was going to keep the tapes and finish the project on his own. It was only after I threatened to sue him, and Greg "SUPERMAN" James was able to talk some sort of sense into him that he agreed to give the tapes back. He agreed to return the masters to their rightfull owner, ME, on the condition that I signed an agreement stating that I would not sue him. Which was really fine by me for I hadn't the money to take him to court in the first place. It would have cost me three times as much to retrieve the tapes via the legal system as it did to produce the film in the first place. For a look at some of the email correspondence surrounding this fiasco, CLICK HERE. POST-NEAL POST PRODUCTION The rest of this journal will have to be filled in at a later date due to the fact that the project isn't finished yet. Stay tuned for the exciting(?) conclusion ..... |
| Director's Retrospective Journal: CAR TROUBLE II: THEM'S THE BRAKES |
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