While
the Hollywood machine cranks out an endless stream of big-budget blockbusters for summertime
consumption, several Austin independent filmmakers also are laboring on
projects that are comparatively low on cost but high on aspirations. Currently,
a half-dozen or so films are in the pre- to post-production stages.
By now, the game plan is familiar to the point of clich�: Make a film
for as little money as possible and hit the festivals. Attempt to find a
distributor (foreign and video sales seem to be one easy route to a little
quick cash). Scrape together what’s left over and begin work on the next film.
And, of course, little is definite in the world of low-budget filmmaking.
Sometimes, great gulfs can emerge between aspirations and accomplishments. Even
the best-laid plans and intentions can go unexpectedly awry.
Profiled here are three Austin-based film projects that have dotted the Austin
landscape this summer. Olympia filmed in May and is presently in
post-production; Aunt Vivien’s Wedding is still in the pre-production
stage after a planned summer start date was pushed back; and
Tourmacherai began shooting on August 1 and will wrap at the end of the
month. These three projects are not the sum total of independent film work
originating in Austin this summer (some other notables include George Ratliff’s
Purgatory County, David Zellner’s Plastic Utopia, and Null Set
Productions’ Pressurecooker). Olympia, Aunt Vivien’s
Wedding, and Tourmacherai are, however, illustrative examples of the
kind of work that is increasingly becoming part of the everyday tapestry of
Austin.
Returning to the Plate
Local filmmaker Bob Byington has been through the process once before. Threeyears ago, he wrote and directed the low-budget feature Shameless.
“It was our first film and we had a lot to learn,” says producer Jason
Silverman. “We learned on our feet. Our rule of thumb [on our next film] is not
to make the same mistakes we made in Shameless; we want to make a whole
new batch of mistakes.”
Shameless picked up a $2,500 prize and was named Best Feature Film at
the Great Plains Film Festival, and was the runner-up for the audience award at
the International Film Festival in Mannheim, Germany. During those trips to the
festivals, Byington met actors Jason Andrews, star of Rhythm Thief, and
Damian Young, who appeared in Amateur and Simple Men. Andrews and
Young agreed to act in Byington’s second film, Olympia, lending extra
prestige to the project.
“The money-raising became a lot easier when we attached Jason Andrews to the
project,” Silverman says. “Jason has a really good reputation in the film
community. He’s been in a couple of high-profile films.”
Austinite Carmen Nogales, star of Shameless, takes the title role of
Olympia, a Mexican soap-opera star who travels to the United States to pursue
her dream of throwing the javelin in the Olympics. She hooks up with a
down-on-his-luck coach played by Andrews, who has an unconventional method of
training — he gets Olympia angry to the point at which she’ll hurl a javelin
at him. The farther he stands away, the farther she throws.
Young plays Olympia’s former manager and lover, who comes north to track her
down. Rounding out the cast are Austinite Patricia Fiske and Houston’s James
Black, who garnered favorable reviews in last year’s low-budget The Man with
the Perfect Swing by Wimberley filmmaker Michael Hovis.
Olympia was shot last May in Austin, Lockhart and Laredo and will be
completed with money raised from a group of local investors that includes
Byington’s former teacher and a handful of attorneys. Bill Stott, a professor
of American studies and English at the University of Texas and one of the
backers of the film, says Byington is currently in Los Angeles editing
Olympia.
“In order to rent the system, we get it a lot cheaper working at night and on
weekends,” Stott says. “There’s going to be a certain amount of sound work that
has to be done… but I’m not certain what his next step is.”
A rough cut will be ready by the end of August to show to distributors and
others to help raise the money needed to strike a 35mm print of the film from
the Super-16mm negative. Olympia may be ready for public screenings by
Thanksgiving.
Going Courting
Backroad Productions formed last January and is in preproduction for AuntVivien’s Wedding, a low-budget short film described as “Steel
Magnolias meets The Wonder Years.”
Although Backroad’s young but well-connected group of Austin actors is having
trouble raising the money needed to start shooting, they’ve already staged an
impressive coup — they’ve gotten Academy Award-nominated actress Susan Tyrrell
to agree to be in their film. Nominated for an Oscar in 1972 for her work in
John Huston’s Fat City, Tyrrell has also appeared in such cult favorites
as Andy Warhol’s Bad, John Waters’ Cry-Baby and Big Top
Pee-wee.
Other castmembers of Aunt Vivien’s Wedding include Backroad principals
Patrick Harrison, Laura Hudson, Landon Peterson and Will Wallace. They are also
listed as the film’s producers. The group met each other over the years through
acting or in acting workshops in Austin.
Peterson, 17, had a supporting role in The Stars Fall on Henrietta and
starred in Breezy Hill, a low-budget feature shot in Louisiana last year
(see sidebar). Eighteen-year-old Harrison has been featured in several
commercials and had bit parts in the made-for-TV movies She Fought Alone and Mother’s Gift. Hudson, 27, is a former tennis pro who got into
acting at Harrison’s urging. Her r�sum� includes Mother’s
Gift and a handful of commercials and music videos. Wallace, a 30-year-old
attorney who has left law for acting, landed an appearance on Walker, Texas
Ranger and in Evening Star, the Terms of Endearment sequel
shot in Houston earlier this year.
Although their screen roles usually have been minor or even walk-ons, each of
them have used that time on the set to their best advantage. They’ve made
friends and asked for favors.
“It’s a long story,” Harrison says about how he and Peterson wrangled an
invitation to a wrap party for the film Powder in Houston last year, and
how they got themselves invited up to Tyrrell’s room, made friends, and later
got her to agree to be in the movie — and for a reduced rate.
During this year’s SXSW Film Festival, the filmmakers met Lucy Frost, a
producer for Granite House, a local production company that makes commercials
and industrial videos, and is preparing to enter the feature film market, too.
“When I met them at South by Southwest, they just came in and said what they
wanted to do. They’re straight-shooters,” Frost says. “That’s part of it, but
part of it is that they’re pretty well-connected. I don’t know many young
people who could get Susan Tyrrell in their movie, and that’s what this
business is about.”
Frost knew a writer, San Franciscan Dan Carter, whose unpublished short story
is the basis for Aunt Vivien’s Wedding. The story is a folksy tale of a
young woman about to marry into a prominent family and whose dreams of the
perfect wedding are dashed when her nephew inadvertently makes a shambles of
the ceremony. “They want to make movies that you can watch with your
grandmother or your nine-year-old kid and be okay with it,” Frost says.
“We’re not Christian filmmakers — we’re Christians who are filmmakers, but
we’re not Christian filmmakers,” Hudson says. “We want to make more positive
films. There’s a lot of stuff out there that I just don’t think there’s a need
for…. We want to make films that are positive, that make an attempt to change
things.”
She also brought director Dwight Adair into the project. Adair, another
Granite House principal, directed several episodes of Dallas and
Dynasty, and served as dialog coach on Urban Cowboy and A
River Runs Through It.
“I think it’s a charming little script and it has real potential for the
festival circuit,” Adair says. “It would be real fun to do.” He’s also
impressed with the Backroad group’s drive. “They’re more mature than they have
a right to be,” Adair says. “They’re doing a good job beating the drum and
raising money for the project.”
Adair’s wife, Sandra, has agreed to edit the film, provided she can fit it
into her schedule. Sandra Adair has previously edited Richard Linklater’s
subUrbia, Dazed and Confused, and Before Sunrise.
Aunt Vivien’s Wedding, a sponsored project of the Austin Film Society,
is budgeted at $50,000-$70,000 but, Peterson says, “To tell you the truth, it
fluctuates every day.” In addition to pooling their savings and hitting up
family and friends to raise the budget for the film, the group held a
$50-per-ticket benefit concert July 19 at the Austin Music Hall featuring Dove
Award-winning vocalist Gary Chapman and three local bands. Chapman’s
involvement was another example of the Backroad pluck. While living in
Nashville, Hudson attended the same church as contemporary Christian music star
Amy Grant and won an appearance in one of Grant’s videos. Through that
connection, Grant’s husband, singer/songwriter Chapman, agreed to perform at
the Backroad benefit.
“I think it was successful,” comments Frost, “but we didn’t raise as much
money as we’d hoped.” Several factors may have hurt attendance: competition
with the opening of the Olympic games, confusion over who would be getting the
money, a last-minute change of venue, the stiff admission price, and the
possibility that Chapman wasn’t quite the draw that was hoped.
“That’s why we don’t have a definite start date,” says Frost. “We don’t want
to schedule people until we know for sure we have the money to shoot.” She says
Backroad hopes to begin shooting in September.
Bizarre Love Triangle
Tohn Eisenman and David Haynes, the principals in Saketini Productions, hadoriginally planned to open a bar and serve “saketinis” — a martini made with
sake and vermouth.
“It was going to be a bar a couple of years ago, but instead of spending money
on a bar we spent the money on the film,” says Eisenman says.
“But we kept the name,” Haynes adds.
Haynes and Eisenman are co-directing and producing Tourmacherei.
“It’s an old, archaic French term used to define a certain mentality amongst a
certain end of society in which a person could be in love, physically in love,
with more than one person at one time and act on those emotions,” Eisenman
says. “It’s kind of a love triangle situation where you’ve got the main
character being pulled and drawn in two different directions because of the way
he wants his life and social pressures that force him to follow a certain
path.”
According to the film’s plot synopsis, the man finds the love has drained out
of his marriage, but he is unwilling to leave his wife and daughter. However,
he finds himself drawn to a former lover who has since become lesbian, but is
willing to rekindle a relationship only so that he can father a child she and
her partner can raise.
The film is being made on a budget of some $50,000-$60,000, money raised from
several investors from different walks of life putting up $5,000-$10,000 each.
Haynes claims to have cut production costs almost in half since the actors and
most of the crew are working for deferred payment. Tourmacherei is an
original screenplay by Haynes, a 27-year-old film school drop out.
“I pursued an RTF degree for a while and basically decided and realized the
best way to get the RTF education I wanted was to actually make a film,” Haynes
says. “I actually dropped out of UT film school halfway through the development
of this project.”
Eisenman, 24, was studying philosophy and film in California, but dropped out
and moved to Austin last year to work on this project. Haynes, who has lived in
Austin off and on for the past 10 years, and Eisenman are both originally from
Dallas.
The cast also all hails from Dallas and includes Todd Faulkner, who appeared
in the low-budget film Subterfuge and The Last Laugh, and Diana
Jorge, who had bit parts in Demolition Man and Rising Sun. The
other players, Quenby Bakke, Liz Piazza Kelley, and Shawn Harden, are veterans
of the Dallas theatre scene. Most of the production crew, however, are from
Austin, Haynes says.
Shooting began Aug. 1 and should last through the end of the month. “We have
distributors already talking with us… finding out what we’re doing and how
things are coming along,” Eisenman says. “But the nature of the independent
film is that no one’s willing to commit anything until they see the finished
product.” n
This article appears in August 16 • 1996 and August 16 • 1996 (Cover).