Kyle McConaghy and Joe DeBoer know their way around the guts of an analog synthesizer. Back in their days as part of St. Louis-based band Jumping Towers, DeBoer said, “Synths would break, and we’d have to open them up and get in there.”
“We were pushing a screwdriver at the circuits and hoping something would start working,” McConaghy added, ruefully.
The filmmaking duo channeled that knowledge into South by Southwest Visions selection Dead Mail, a trip into dual obsessions in the Midwest in the mid-Eighties. First, there is Trent (John Fleck), who has dedicated his life to creating the perfect musical synthesizer. Then there are the employees at a dead letter office who dedicate their lives to getting incorrectly marked mail to its intended destination. These two compulsions – one altruistic, one twisted by mania – crash into each other in a tale of kidnapping, murder, and digital pipe organs.
That onscreen hunt for the perfect emulator was reflected in the duo’s own efforts to replicate how keyboards sounded in the ‘80s. McConaghy explained, “We were always in big pursuit of certain sounds.” They were hugely influenced by synthesizer pioneer Wendy Carlos, electronic punk pioneers Suicide, and most especially the synesthesiac sounds of British Goth innovators Joy Division. Just as listeners can visualize “the cement wall warehouse they were playing in,” he wanted Dead Mail viewers to “feel the wood paneling and feel the strange fabric on the couch. We wanted to give it a texture.”
That texture was built into the sets, as McConaghy and DeBoer tried to replicate the look and feel of the Midwest in the ‘80s – all without ever leaving California. Having grown up in small towns in the region, their preference was to head back home, but location scouting counted that out. DeBoer recalled, “I had sourced 20 different people: ‘I need a white ranch house, somewhere in a 500-mile radius in central Illinois. Can you find one?’ and nobody could find one. Then it’s ‘How are we going to get a vintage mailbox?’”
Filming in Los Angeles made more practical and budgetary sense, and the duo praised production designer Payton Jane for reviving an authentic, lived-in, beige and brown ‘80s. That included McConaghy’s own, more modern bathroom, which becomes the prison in which Trent stashes Josh (Sterling Macer Jr.), the keyboard engineer who becomes the object of his obsession. “We wallpapered it and I spray painted the floor,” McConaghy said.
This temporary remodel as a DIY oubliette involved one particularly memorable piece of hardware for DeBoer. “You’re over at Kyle’s house to use the bathroom and there’s this creepy exterior lock.”
McConaghy grinned: “Every time I had a new guest over, I’d have to be like, ‘I promise you, I have to keep this up because we’re shooting pickups next month, but I will not use it.”
The sound and setting were merely background for an equally unsettling resident, and DeBoer credited theatrically-trained actor and radical performance artist Fleck for finding Trent’s tortured humanity. “He really worked to hone that character in,“ DeBoer said. “On the page we had good lines and good beats, and obviously we wanted Trent to be a tormented figure that you feel sympathy for, especially towards the end, but John just brought it.”
Dead Mail
Visions, World Premiere
Saturday, March 9, 3pm & 3:30pm, Violet Crown
Sunday, March 11, 8:45pm & 9:15pm, Alamo South Lamar
Wednesday, March 13, 2pm & 2:30pm, Alamo South Lamar
This article appears in March 8 • 2024.
