Interview – Page 6 – We Are Movie Geeks

SLIFF 2019 Interview: Cody Stokes – Writer and Director of THE GHOST WHO WALKS

THE GHOST WHO WALKS will screen at The Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar) Friday, Nov 15 at 9:30pm as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Writer and Director Cody Stokes and producer Dan Gartner will be in attendance and will host a post-screening Q&A. Ticket information can be found HERE

Shot in St. Louis by former St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase award-winner Cody Stokes, THE GHOST WHO WALKS is a breathlessly paced ride through the hidden underbelly of the city. After five years in prison, Nolan (Garland Scott) is given his freedom, but his release required that he rat on his former boss — a betrayal that carries a death sentence. Nolan must now scramble to find his ex, Lena (Alexia Rasmussen), and the 5-year-old daughter he’s never met before Donnie (Gil Darnell) can track him down and kill him. Nolan’s quest is simple: Put his family back together and escape. But to build a better future, Nolan first must face his past in all its forms. Can Nolan survive the night? Or is he already a ghost, doomed from the moment the prison doors opened?

Cody Stokes took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about THE GHOST WHO WALKS

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman November 29th, 2019.

Tom Stockman: You’re from St. Louis, correct?

Cody Stokes: Yes, I still live here now although I did move away early on in my career and was working in New York. Really my bread-and-butter activity is directing TV commercials. Having kids gave us a reason to move back, but I bounce back-and-forth between here and LA for my commercial work. I do some work here as well, but mostly my work is on the coasts.

TS: Where did you live growing up?

CS: I lived in North County, and then my parents moved us to Saint Charles.

TS: Were you something of a movie buff growing up?

CS: I was obsessed with them, but movies weren’t something that were readily available to me. When I was a kid, we didn’t have cable TV. We barely had TV with the basic channels. My dad was a firm believer in “getting out to ply” My parents have always been supportive, but movies weren’t something we thought much about when I was younger. I wasn’t really exposed to good cinema until I was much older. I always wanted to be a stuntman. I would do stunts in my backyard and I would storyboard films incorporating stunts, but I never actually had a camera. My parents just figured it was me playing out in the yard. I would jump off the roof and crash my bike.

TS: Did you ever hurt yourself?

CS: Fortunately I did not! When I was a teenager, I started making some stop-motion animation films. I was inspired by Nick Park and his Wallace and Gromit films, but I don’t even know what happened to those films.

TS: Let’s talk about THE GHOST WHO WALKS. I liked that you used St. Louis locations, but didn’t make it obviously the this was the city it was set in. For example, I never saw an establishing shot with The Arch, which you so often see in films shot here.

CS: Yes, and that’s fine for a filmmaker who wants to set his story in St. Louis, but I wanted THE GHOST WHO WALKS to be set in more of an unidentified city. The city could be anywhere. It could be New York City, or it could be like more like one of these Rust Belt cities that I spent time in. It was very natural for me to set this in a generic city in a sense. I wanted people to see the film and relate to it in their own lives, and I think that helped.

TS: What were some of the locations you used here in St. Louis?

CS: We shot primarily in North St. Louis city and also downtown. There were a lot of locations in the city where I had worked when I was in the construction business years ago, and I wanted to go back to those places and utilize ones that I remembered.

TS: I noticed that you shot at the Dogtown Liquor store.

CS: Yes, we shot there. I think that’s a pretty iconic location for people from St. Louis. We also shot at Billy’s Diner off South Broadway, which I believe is now shut down. We filmed at Bastille in Soulard, which is a pretty well-known gay bar there. They were really kind to us when we filmed there. One reason we shot in St. Louis was that we simply did not have the budget that the film required, a common problem for independent films. We had so many locations where we really had to rely on people’s enthusiasm and love for the project. Locations were no small part of that. We needed to film a scene inside of a jewelry store. Ironically, there had been a series of jewelry store holdups recently in which the robbers used the guise of a filmmaking crew scouting locations. So when we wanted to find a jewelry store, nobody would talk to us. They didn’t trust us because of those recent crimes. Fortunately I knew someone who knew somebody who had a jewelry store that was able to put in a good word and let us shoot there.

TS: How was it working with the city of St. Louis and the Saint Louis Police Department on this film?

CS: They were great to work with. The city of St. Louis really cooperated and seemed to welcome us with open arms. They were able to shut down entire blocks from traffic while we shot. That’s something that can be very expensive to do on the coast.

TS: If you had a larger budget, what would you have done differently?

CS: I may have put a name performer in the cast, but I love the cast that I had.

TS: Tell me about the casting of Garland Scott in the lead. Did you write this script with an African-American in that role?

CS: No, when I wrote the script I really wasn’t thinking about the race of any of the characters. Garland was the first to send an audition tape for the film. We ended up looking at over 100 more auditions, but we ended up going back to him, and he was perfect. Garland and I were very much in sync together about how we wanted to work. It was his first starring role. He had been in some shorts. He’s in almost every scene so it was important to have someone that looked at the project the same way I did.

TS: Yes, he’s very good. He’s charismatic and has a certain quiet menace about him. Tell me about Dasha Nekrasova. Where did you find her?

CS: Joni Tackette was our casting director here in St. Louis. Of course I wanted some local talent in the film, but she and I discussed getting some nationwide casting going for it as well. Whenever you cast a role that’s a female in her 20s, that’s going to be the biggest demographic for someone looking for a role. For that role, I think the number of auditions was close to 600. There were a lot of great auditions but something about Dasha Nekrasova stood out to me. There was something so real about her and I really fell in love with the idea of casting her as Mitzi early on and I’m just thankful that it all worked out .

TS: One thing I liked about your film is that it has exploitation elements that an R-rated crime film should have. There’s violence and there’s nudity. Those are things I want to see when I watch a crime film.

CS: Right, when you make a movie that takes place in that world, those are things that think you have a responsibility to include, but it needs to be realistic and that helps. I was watching JOHN WICK 3 recently and, while I enjoyed the film, there were so many bullets going through heads, it just became too much.

TS: I agree. The violence in your film is not overwhelming but when it’s there it’s realistic and shocking.

CS: Yes, and the nudity is natural as well. People who are in that life aren’t going to simply cover themselves up out of modesty. I don’t film nudity to titillate an audience but to keep it real.

TS: How did you get this idea for this story?

CS: Really it was about the bond with my children after being on the road early in my career. All time with your kids is important, but especially those very early years. And I also thought about what my kids were missing from me. So it was really about fatherhood. When I first started on this film, it was much different than it turned out to be.

TS: How did you go about financing this film?

CS: We went out and raised money with investors, and it was all made with St. Louis money, even though St. Louis is not well-known as a hotbed of filmmaking and financing, so that was good.

TS: How has it been received at festivals so far?

CS: It’s been received wonderfully. I think it’s one of those films that people connect to. There’s enough familiarity with the crime genre for an audience, but I think they are surprised with some of the twists and turns in the film. I think there’s something exciting for audiences to find something new, in the sense that I am an unknown and the cast is basically unknowns. We won the St. Louis Filmmaker Showcase here over the summer and in October we won Best Dramatic Feature at a film festival in New York . Before that we were at the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham. After the St. Louis International Film Festival, we’re taking it down to Anchorage for a film fest there.

TS: Will the film be streaming?

CS: Yes, the film is currently available for pre-sales on iTunes and Apple TV and will be available across VOD and streaming platforms beginning Christmas Eve. There is a link for pre-order HERE

TS: Best of luck with THE GHOST WHO WALKS and all of your future projects.

CS: Thanks, man!

SLIFF 2019 Interview: Fenell Doremus – Producer of COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIP CODE

COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIP CODE will screen at The Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar) Friday, Nov 15 at 5:30pm as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Producer Fenell Doremus will be in attendance and will host a post-screening Q&A. This is a FREE event.

Chicago suffered the worst heat disaster in U.S history in 1995, when 739 residents — mostly elderly and black — died over the course of one week. “Cooked” — an adaptation of Eric Klinenberg’s groundbreaking book “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago” — not only links the heat wave’s devastation back to the underlying manmade disaster of structural racism but also delves deep into one of our nation’s biggest growth industries: disaster preparedness. Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand uses her signature serious-yet-quirky style as interlocutor and narrator to examine both the cataclysmic natural disasters for which we prepare and the slow-motion disasters we ignore — at least until an extreme weather event hits and those slow-motion disasters are made exponentially more deadly and visible. But whether it was the heat wave in Chicago or the devastation caused by Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Irma, and Maria, all of these disasters share something in common: They reveal the ways in which class, race, and ZIP code predetermine who gets hurt the worst, who recovers and bounces back, and who receives minimal or no aid. “Cooked” asks the question: What if a ZIP code isn’t just a routing number but a life-or-death sentence?

Producer Fenell Doremus took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIP CODE.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman November 12th, 2019

Tom Stockman: You have produced a movie called COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIP CODE that will be screening Friday night at the St. Louis international Film Festival. You’ll be here for the screening, correct?

Fenell Doremus: I will be.

TS: Have you ever been to St. Louis before?

FD: I have. My children are big fans of The City Museum there so we have made a couple of road trips to visit that.

TS: A wonderful place. Let’s talk about your film. How did you first meet up to work with the film’s director Judith Helfand?

FD: Judith approached me three years after she started production on the film. That would have been summer of 2008. I’m a local Chicago producer and she is a New Yorker who is telling the story of Chicago and realized that she needed to pair up with someone that was local. She talked to me a bit about the film. I knew of her other films and had a lot of respect for her. I also had lived through the 1995 heat wave so her project naturally appealed to me. In 2008, Hurricane Katrina was still very much on our minds and this was just about three years after that disaster. I immediately saw it as a parallel story and one that people still weren’t really talking about in the right kinds of ways, so I very much wanted to get on board and work with her to make this film.

TS: Tell me again how many people died in the Chicago heat wave of 1995?

FD: The number that the Chicago epidemiologist came up with was 739.

TS: I watched the film. Why do you think so many people died? It seems like a lot of people had their windows nailed shut, and no fans.

FD: I think it’s a combination of several things. What we found to be the case was that people who died were disproportionately living in the low income neighborhoods and communities. Those people may have had their windows nailed shut, but that was the natural state of their existence. They lived in a community where they were afraid to go outside because the crime rates are high, and there are a few jobs because of disinvestment in those communities. It’s layers and layers and layers of different factors that go into why someone would nail their windows shut. There is also a huge health disparity in those communities that goes back to the fact that if people who live there don’t feel safe to go for a walk or a run in their neighborhood and they don’t have grocery stores that sell fresh produce. There have been decades of structural racism and segregation in Chicago that contribute to poor health, isolation, crime, and inadequate housing.

TS: Was 104° the highest temperature in 1995?

FD: Yes, and it lasted for three or four days. What I learned what was that the critical factor, when it gets that hot, is that if it does not get below 80° at night, then you are in trouble. Even when it’s hot, if the temperature goes down to 75° at night, it’s survivable because your body has that chance to cool down in the evening. Even though in 2012, we had similar hot daytime temperatures, at nighttime people were able to cool down and there weren’t as many deaths.

TS: In 1995 mayor Daley blamed, in part, the families of the heat victims. What do you think of Daley‘s statement? Do you think he had some kind of point?

FD: What’s interesting is that what has happened ever since then, we’ve had such messages as “check on your neighbors“, “take care of yourselves“ and I think that has had some effect on people. There have been programs that have cropped up, Nonprofit groups that will collect air conditioners for people with low incomes and who might not otherwise be able to afford them. That has helped a little bit, but ultimately it’s never effective to blame the victim. Ultimately, Mayor Daley‘s statements caused Ill will in the city. As a white filmmaker going to the South side of Chicago, even 10 or 15 years later, there is such a level of distrust of any sort of media because the people felt that they were generally mistreated by Mayor Daley and the media during the heat wave.

TS: Your film has an interesting structure. It starts out really about this1995 heat wave, and covers it in depth for the first 20 or 30 minutes, but then goes off in a lot of different directions. It covers economic disparity, racism, food deserts, and disaster preparedness. When you and Judith had planned out this film, was there an outline of where the film would go, or did you just let things unfold?

FD: Like any documentary, you sort of have an outline in your head for what it might look like but once you are on the ground, the story can unfold in surprisingly different ways. We took it to the editing room and found other ways for the trajectory of the film to go. So no, we definitely did not plan for it to go this way.

TS: Your film shows that the politicians of Chicago have put a lot of programs into place since 1995 to make sure something like this does not happen again. You cover a lot of that. Do you think that’s good enough or do you think there’s even more they should be doing?

FD: Chicago is always opening more cooling centers and trying to come up with ways to address extreme weather. Today it’s extremely cold in Chicago, so we are talking about warming centers. I think that government and institutions still need to address the underlying issues that affect social determinants of health. In our film we talk about how there is a 16 year life differential between the South side of Chicago than the North side. But that was in 2011. Just this last year, New York University Medical School did another study and found that differential is closer to 30 years in Chicago, which is greater than any other city in the country. So all of those factors that I was talking about; disinvestment, lack of jobs, lack of grocery stores, those are factors which make neighborhoods healthy and vital places for people to live. There needs to be reinvestment in those communities. Over 50 schools were closed in 2011 in Chicago. That sends a huge message to a community that their future is not being invested in. There may be legitimate reasons for closing those schools, but even that is rooted in systemic policies of racism that over the years weakened the schools to begin with. I don’t think everything that needs to be addressed for these communities to be healthier is being addressed. That’s what we’re trying to say in our film. We got a lot of attention when our film played in a small theatrical run in Chicago last summer. We scheduled it to coincide with the anniversary of 1995’s heatwave and it happened to get very hot that week, as it tends to do in July in Chicago. It was a mini-heatwave. We got a lot of press attention that we normally would not have received. If you have a film about racism and poverty, people often don’t really want to touch that. It’s hard and it’s complicated and often people just don’t want to go there. Our film used a weather disaster as a portal to talk about racism and poverty and the media wanted to talk to us because it was hot. The focus was that there was another heatwave in Chicago and had the city done enough to prevent another disaster. But we tried to stear the conversation to be about addressing the roots of poverty in the city as the ultimate preparedness.

TS: Let’s talk about these food deserts. There are great swaths of neighborhoods in South Chicago where you can simply not buy healthy foods. Why do grocery chains not recognize that there are markets there? Are these neighborhoods just so dangerous no one wants to open stores there? It seems like a missed opportunity.

FD: That’s a good question and something I’m not sure I have a handle on. I think it’s simply that the economic drivers went away. People have really struggled since the factories have closed up and jobs went away. Convenience food and fast food became more of an affordable option. Also, those communities really thinned out. Of course there was a decade of white flight in the 1950s, but I think later, when the jobs went away, there were plenty of black and brown neighbors that also left if they could. They went looking for better neighborhoods and for better opportunities.

TS: There’s a striking shot in your film or somebody goes in and buys a bag of chips and some candy that has to be pushed through bullet proof glass. We have that in St. Louis as well. There’s a dividing line here as well. If you go north of where were where you were when you visited The City Museum, that’s like the Chicago South side, But south of there is mostly much better. Let’s talk about you. What is your background in filmmaking?

FD: I attended the university of Wisconsin for undergrad as a sociology major. And one of my final classes was about the history of social movements. We watched Eyes On The Prize and I was really moved by that series. It’s a long series and very in-depth. It had a lot of voices of people who lived and fought through the civil rights movement. I started to think about documentary film as a career. I did not go to film school but I moved to Chicago and started looking around at who was making documentary films here. Kartemquin Films was one of the few options and I got an internship there. They were in their final years, I believe year two of editing HOOP DREAMS. As an intern, I was pulled into that project to assist in editing and transcribing interviews. It was tape-to-tape editing in those days so a lot of what I did was to go through what was a six-hour cut at the time, and replacing that VHS footage with newer VHS footage that was watchable. I was hooked and completely fell in love with the form. I was hired on at Kartemquin Films as a staff producer and manager for about nine years. I worked on developing a number of films and was producer on the series The New Americans and Five Girls, another documentary that came out of Kartemquin. 15 years ago I went freelance and have been a freelance producer ever since.

TS: Have you taken COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIPCODE to other film festivals?

FD: Yes. We premiered it one year ago yesterday at Doc NYC. We’ve played it a number of environmental film festivals: DC Environmental Film Festival and Dallas has one called Earth X. We played it at the San Francisco Green Film Festival, The Planet In Focus Film Festival in Toronto and some other smaller film festivals. We’re showing it in Wilmington North Carolina in a couple of days. We’ve shown it at several community screenings as well, partnering with different community organizations to think how than can use COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIPCODE as a tool to further their work.

TS: How has it been received?

FD: People are loving it, but they are also very angry when they are finished watching it. People who have lived in better resourced communities are feeling guilty, and wondering how we can let this all go on in our neighboring communities. We’re developing an engagement campaign right now and thinking about how we can take action across the country with people who want to do something about this problem.

TS: What are your distribution plans for COOKED: SURVIVAL BY ZIP CODE?

FD: It is streaming now on iTunes and Amazon and Google Play. It will play on PBS’s Independent Lens series next year on February 10th as part of their Black History Month programming. We’re just trying to get it out there as much as we can.

TS: Best of luck with the film and I hope you enjoy your visits to St. Louis.

FD: Thanks, I’m sure I will.

SLIFF 2019 Interview: Harper Barnes – His Career Inspired the 1977 Film BETWEEN THE LINES

BETWEEN THE LINES (1977) will be screening at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 E Lockwood Ave) on Thursday, Nov 14 at 7:30pm as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Harper Barnes, former film critic of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. This is a FREE event.

In BETWEEN THE LINES at the offices of a Boston alternative newspaper, the staff members enjoy a positive and open-minded work environment. Music critic Max (Jeff Goldblum) uses his influence to score dates, while news reporter Harry (John Heard) is involved with the lovely Abbie (Lindsay Crouse), the publication’s lead photographer. However, it seems as though their relatively carefree days are numbered when the owner of a major publishing company buys the paper, leading to more money but even more changes. The film’s astonishingly deep cast also includes Bruno Kirby, Gwen Welles, Jill Eikenberry, Joe Morton, Marilu Henner, Michael J. Pollard, Raymond J. Barry, and Stephen Collins. “Between the Lines” — directed by pioneering woman independent filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street,” “Head Over Heels”) and recently restored by Cohen Film Media — was loosely inspired by events involving longtime St. Louis film critic Harper Barnes during his early-’70s tenure as editor of the Cambridge (later Boston) Phoenix. Barnes will be on hand to introduce the restoration and lead a post-film discussion that separates fact from the film’s fiction. (For another take on the tale, see Fred Goodman’s book “Mansion on the Hill.”)

Harper Barnes took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about BETWEEN THE LINES and his early career in underground journalism.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman October 31st, 2019

Tom Stockman: Let’s talk about this film that was made in 1977, BETWEEN THE LINES, that will be showing November 15th as part of SLIFF. I understand the film was based, in part, on some of your experiences.

Harper Barnes: My experiences are tangential to the film. One of the basic plot points of BETWEEN THE LINES was that a reporter played by John Heard is fired. I was the editor of The Boston Phoenix, one of the two alternative papers in Boston in those days. When I was fired, the whole staff walked out We had a month-long strike It is not quite duplicated in the movie, but you can tell that part of the story came from my firing. It was the front page news in The Boston Globe at the time. They had this photograph of me, a side shot, and they would post it and the headline would just say “Fired!“ then about five days later, I would get hired again, then fired again, and the Globe would re-post the picture. Sometimes they would flop it! it was quite an adventure and the tone of that was well-reflected in BETWEEN THE LINES.

TS: Did someone contact you in 1977 about the possibility of you being involved in this film? It was written by Fred Barron from the story by David Helpern.

HB: No, I didn’t know anything about the movie until it came out I had heard rumors of it, but I did not know those writers before that. They came through town on a tour of the movie and talked to me. You really couldn’t talk about the underground papers in Boston in those days without talking to me. I was the editor of the principal paper then. My firing lead to the formation of a union. There were lawsuits and it dragged on for about five years.

TS: So the movie came out in 1977, had you moved to St. Louis by then?

HB: Yes I had. You should read my review of the film.

TS: Tell me about Fred Goodman’s book Mansion on the Hill.

HB: That book is about Boston in the 60s and 70s. It was written after the movie BETWEEN THE LINES came out. It’s really about the difference between Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, but the book has a lot to do with the clash of the underground and what Kennedy called “hip capitalists“, And that’s what happens in the movie BETWEEN THE LINES, a capitalist buys The Back Bay Mainline, which is what the paper is called in the movie. There’s quite a bit about me and the whole strike in that book. It came to symbolize the battle for the minds of young people between left wing political purity and these ‘hip capitalists’. The movie treated the subject lightly. It’s a funny movie

TS: I recall one of the very first movies I ever saw on HBO was BETWEEN THE LINES, probably around 1980 but my recollection of the film is vague. I didn’t want to watch it again until I had the opportunity to see it at this year‘s SLIFF.

HB: I haven’t seen the film again since it was a new either.

TS: Where did you see the film for the first time?

HB: I don’t recall the exact theater but it did get distributed and played theatrically here in St. Louis when it was new. They had sent screenwriter Fred Barron on a tour.

TS: Did you review movies for The Boston Phoenix?

HB: No, I was the editor. The movie reviewing thing was something of a fallback position. I had always loved the movies ever since I took a year-long course in movie history at the University of Kansas so movies was really more of a hobby for me. I hated being an editor. I wanted to express my own ideas.

TS: Do you think Joan Macklin Silver, director of BETWEEN THE LINES, and writers Fred Barron and David Helpern captured the mood and setting of working at a counterculture newspaper in the 70s well?

HB: I’d say they captured half of it. The tone is fairly light. The principal character I think is the one played by Jeff Goldblum. He is the music critic for the paper. He’s in it for the bucks. Like rock critics really did, he gets review copies of records and then he sells them. The record companies would put holes in the corners of the album covers, so they couldn’t be sold as new. He tells the record company that if they don’t send him a pristine copy he can sell for a full price, he’s going to stop reviewing them. I did that as well. The last year I worked in Boston, I work for a communal paper called The Real Paper, which was formed after the last time I got fired. I would go to the post office once a week, and there would be a stack of records that I would truck down to the record store and sell them. I made more money that way than I did with my salary.

TS: How did you end up in St. Louis?

HB: When I got out of college, graduate school at KU, I sort of stumbled into a job at the St. Louis Post Dispatch. My friend Bill Woo was my college roommate. He was sort of the rising star at the paper at the time and he eventually became the editor. So I went to work for him. I was for Feature Director at the Post for a while, and I edited the Sunday magazine I did a lot of jobs for the Post during my 35 years there.

TS: So what are you going to talk about when BETWEEN THE LINES screens at SLIFF on November 15?

HB: I’m going to read part of my original review of the film, and then if people are interested, I’m going to talk about how well the movie reflects what the real situation was. BETWEEN THE LINES mostly got good reviews from critics when it came out, but the critics from Boston didn’t like it because they thought the film didn’t take them seriously enough. The strike was a bitter strike and I was sort of battered by it, so by then I was ready to take a funny look at the whole thing. One thing the movie did to lighten things up was to put a pinball machine in the main office. That was going a bit too far. But the movie has a great cast. It’s got Jeff Goldblum and John Heard and Lindsay Crouse.

TS: I can remember a scene with Michael J Pollard selling the papers in the street.

HB: Yes, those guys were called Hawkers We had a whole network of mostly kids who sold the paper on street corners

TS: I looking forward to watching BETWEEN THE LINES with you on November 15th as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival.

SLIFF 2019 Interview: Ben Scholle – Director of THROUGH THE CRACKS

THROUGH THE CRACKS screened November 10th at The St. Louis International Film Festival.

In July 2002, Johnny Johnson was arrested and charged with the abduction and murder of 6-year-old Cassandra Williamson in Valley Park, Mo., and the effects of the crime continue to reverberate in the community. During the capital-murder trial, a proceeding clouded by questions of mental illness and competency, a juror described the killing as “the worst possible crime.” “Through the Cracks” seeks to answer the question: Does the worst possible crime deserve the worst possible punishment? Director Ben Scholle, a professor of digital cinema arts at Lindenwood University, co-directed “HairKutt,” which was named Best Documentary by the jury at the 2005 St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase.

In attendance was director Ben Scholle, George Lombardi, psychologist and former Missouri Department of Corrections director, and Jeanie Thies, Lindenwood University professor of political science and coordinator of the Hammond Institute’s Criminal Justice Reform Initiative.

In July 2002, Johnny Johnson was arrested and charged with the abduction and murder of 6-year-old Cassandra Williamson in Valley Park, Mo., and the effects of the crime continue to reverberate in the community. During the capital-murder trial, a proceeding clouded by questions of mental illness and competency, a juror described the killing as “the worst possible crime.” THROUGH THE CRACKS seeks to answer the question: Does the worst possible crime deserve the worst possible punishment? Director Ben Scholle, a professor of digital cinema arts at Lindenwood University, co-directed “HairKutt,” which was named Best Documentary by the jury at the 2005 St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase.

Ben Scholle took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about his film and his thoughts about the death penalty case at its center.

Interview conducted October 31st 2019 by Tom Stockman (who had not seen THROUGH THE CRACKS at the time of the interview)

Tom Stockman: Congratulations on your film THROUGH THE CRACKS. You teach film at Lindenwood University.

Ben Scholle: I do.

TS: I’ve been on the jury for the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase for a number of years and I’ve noticed more and more student films are coming from Lindenwood.

BS: Yes, we’ve been really pushing that. I think some of our students just thought their films wouldn’t be good enough for competition, but in recent years that attitude has changed.

TS: The local films at the local showcase just seem to be getting better every year.

BS: I’ve noticed that as well. Part of that is that production value is just so much more accessible than it used to be. Things used to look different when they were shot on VHS or 16mm, but now anyone can get a decent looking image if they have the time and put an effort into it.

TS: Let’s talk about THROUGH THE CRACKS. How did you first get interested in the story of Johnny Johnson and the abduction murder of Cassandra Williamson?

BS: I first heard about the case when I moved back to St. Louis in 2002. I remember the story in the news., and I remember the story lingering throughout the trial and prosecution Around 2012, I was contacted by the Missouri public defender’s office about doing a documentary film. At first they wanted me to work on a different case. They had a client who wanted to have a film made about his case and to raise awareness about his situation. I met with them and we talked about the case, and they gave me some files and things. I told them that if I did it, I would want to explore the whole story and not just do it for their client. I wanted to cover all sides. Then the client had second thoughts about doing that. I think he was worried about what other stuff might come out in the course of a documentary. Subsequently, they brought up the case of Johnny Johnson, a case that they said had been haunting them for years. That’s when I became involved in this project about the Johnny Johnson case.

TS: Where is Johnny Johnson now?

BS: He’s currently on death row in Potosi Missouri.

TS: Did you get a chance to interview him for this documentary?

BS: I got a chance to meet Johnny. We ended up not doing an interview. In the meeting that we had, he talked, but he didn’t really talk about the crime and it was clear that he had no recollection of it. It honestly didn’t seem like an interview would be all that useful to the story because so much of the story was covered elsewhere. I have his voice in the film in his confession which was done immediately after the crime. It didn’t seem like he or his attorneys had much interest in getting him into the film. I was conscious of that. I explored ways to have his voice in there. I wanted to perhaps film a visit down to the prison with him and his mom, but that ended up not working out. The department of corrections wasn’t crazy about that idea. He ended up being present in the confession tapes and that audio, but otherwise he’s pretty much absent from the film .

TS: How old was Johnny Johnson when he was arrested in 2002?

BS: He was in his early 20s

TS: Was he a neighbor of Cassandra Williamson? How did they cross paths?

BS: His family had connections with her family. His sister had gone to school with Cassandra‘s mom. She was friends with their family and he also knew them from school and living in the area and just being generally connected. What happened was, the night of the murder, he was homeless. He was kind of wandering the streets of Valley Park and the Williamson family invited him to come in and sleep on their couch. It turns out that he was un-medicated at the time. He had been diagnosed as schizophrenic but he had stopped attending his appointments with his psychiatrist and stopped taking his meds. He’d sort of gone “off the grid”.

TS: Do his defenders think he was innocent of this crime, or just so mentally incompetent that he should not have received the death penalty?

BS: In general, everyone agrees that he was the perpetrator of this crime. Johnny has never even contested that He confessed immediately and he’s never claimed that it wasn’t him. His attorneys conceded that. The question in the trial was whether he would live or be sentenced to death. That’s really what the trial was about. It was a first-degree murder conviction and he was eligible for the death penalty. But the question is whether his mental illness was a reason not to send it to him to death row.

TS: Were you able to interview members of the Johnson and Williamson families?

BS: Yes, that was probably the most interesting thing , talking to members of both families and getting their perspectives. I feel that’s where you really get two different perspectives on this event. Everyone views it as a tragedy and obviously Johnny‘s family would like for him not to have been sentenced to death. They don’t think they expect him to ever come home, but I think that for them, they would like to see something happen that saves his life. His attorneys feel the same way. The Williamson family, on the other hand, all support the death sentence for Johnny Johnson. They feel that it was right and just and I feel that they look forward to seeing it carried out. I think that it’s important that with each of those viewpoints, we put a human face on it. If you come from an anti-death penalty background, I think it’s really important to hear what the family of the victim has to say about that. And if you are a pro death penalty it’s important to hear what the family of the convicted has to say as well.

TS: Is there anybody that you wanted to talk to that did not want to cooperate?

BS: I would not say that there was anyone who did not want to cooperate. I threw out a net and invited members of both families to talk and not surprisingly, not everyone wanted to. There was one brother of Johnny‘s that I would like to have talked to, but he just was not interested. With Cassandra‘s family, I reached out to her aunt Della, Who was really sort of the public face of the family. She had created a memorial website and has hosted a memorial event every year in Valley Park. She was very forthcoming and talked a lot about it She took us on a tour of different places in Valley Park that were relevant to the case. I told her that I was also would like to have talked to Casey’s immediate family. I even called Cassandra‘s mom and left her a voicemail, but I got the impression they really didn’t want any part of it. But honestly, I think it’s very difficult It’s not something I really wanted to push because here I come along trying to turn up stuff that they have spent many years trying to get over. Even when we screened the film at the St. Louis Filmmaker Showcase, I was talking to members of Casey‘s family and they thought this was a very difficult thing for them. We had a bit of news coverage prior to the showcase screening that caught them off-guard. It really brought the story back into the forefront of their consciousness, which was something they were not ready for. It’s asking a lot to ask people to relive something like that. The families come from different backgrounds. They have different perspectives and feelings but everyone agrees that going through the difficulty and pain of reliving all of this is worth it if it can make a difference for other people. In the future, if somebody who has seen this film is more likely to get help for a family member who is living with untreated mental illness, or someone who is more likely to be conscious of the safety of their children, then that makes it worth doing. I think this explains their willingness to be involved in the film

TS: I heard that the Q&A after the screening of your film at last summer’s Filmmaker Showcase got a bit heated.

BS: I wouldn’t say heated, but I would say the Q&A was a bit difficult because we did have members of Cassandra‘s family there. Everybody was conscious of that. It’s difficult for me to talk about the film and the filmmaking when I’m trying to be conscious of how everything comes off to the family. It’s not my story. It’s a story that I have adopted and it’s a story that I am telling and I’m trying to relate to the audience my journey through this, but ultimately it’s their story. It’s a bit uncomfortable to be the public face of it, but that Q&A was a good conversation and really powerful for an audience.

TS: Have you screened THROUGH THE CRACKS at other film fests?

BS: No, I have a university screening booked in January I’d like to find a higher in the market for it if I can. It’s probably a good companion for some psych or criminal justice curriculum. For the Q&A when we screen it at SLIFF, we are going to have two people there with criminal justice background so it will be more of a panel.

TS: Have there been any developments in this criminal case since your film has been completed?

BS: Johnny’s last state appeal was denied but it could go to a federal appeal court or maybe eventually to the Supreme Court. I think at this point that’s all still in the works. It’s a very long and drawn out process

TS: Has the Johnson family described to you how Johnny’s mental condition is now after being in prison for the past 17 years?

BS: Interestingly, I think one thing that you find is being in prison allows doctors to stabilize your meds. If someone is un-medicated on the streets, they are more likely to be stabilized in prison. I think him being medicated resulted in us having no real conversation, or at least any conversation of a substance. I think being medicated in prison today takes away a lot of your affect and memory and ability to express yourself. I talked to the attorneys about what would be the best outcome for him and they thought that, barring some sort of institution, because there really is very little State support for mental health cases, prison is not a terrible place for him. Probably a majority of inmates have some sort of psychiatric condition. In a way, prisons have turned into the new mental institutions That being the case, him being there is probably not the worst outcome, but so many don’t want to see him lose his life.

TS: Did being involved in this project change your view of the death penalty?

BS: I wouldn’t say it changed my view. I entered into this with an anti-death penalty view and came out of it feeling more or less the same way, But I do think it changed my outlook and my ability to empathize with people on the other side of the argument. And that’s what films are supposed to do. I made this film to take an issue and attach a human face to it and to help people try to understand it in more depth than they typically do in everyday conversation. One thing that I really like about a film like this, where you have two different sides of an issue, is that what emerges after you have talked to everybody, There’s always something that everybody agrees on. I think it’s important to figure out where the consensus lies With THROUGH THE CRACKS, the consensus was that no one thinks the crime should have happened. Everyone believes that it was preventable and that if we had better services for mental illness, things like this would happen less often. It feels good to have that sort of take-away.

TS: Good luck with THROUGH THE CRACKS and all of your future projects.

SLIFF 2019 Interview: Davy Rothbart – Director of 17 BLOCKS

17 BLOCKS will screen at The Missouri History Museum (5700 Lindell Blvd) Saturday, Nov 9 at 7:00pm as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Director Davy Rothbart will be in attendance and will host a post-screening Q&A. This is a FREE event

In 1999, 9-year-old Emmanuel Sanford-Durant and his Washington, D.C., family began to film their daily lives in America’s most dangerous neighborhood — just 17 blocks behind the U.S. Capitol building. They’ve been filming ever since. Made in a unique collaboration with filmmaker and journalist Davy Rothbart — author, editor of Found magazine, and director of “Medora,” which played SLIFF in 2013 — the film focuses on four generations of the Sanford Family, including Emmanuel, a promising student; his brother, Smurf, a local drug dealer; his sister, Denice, an aspiring cop; and his mother, Cheryl, who must conquer her own demons for her family to prosper. Spanning two decades, “17 Blocks” illuminates a nation’s ongoing crisis through one family’s raw, stirring, and deeply personal saga. The Hollywood Reporter writes: “The ironic title of Davy Rothbart’s ‘17 Blocks’ refers to the distance between the U.S. Capitol and the Washington, D.C., neighborhood where the family at its center resides. It’s not a long distance geographically, but it might as well be worlds away, judging by the harsh realities of the daily lives so powerfully chronicled in the documentary, which recently received its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.”

Davy Rothbart took the time to talk too We Are Movie Geeks about 17 BLOCKS and the Sanford family, who are at the film’s center

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman November 11th, 2019

Tom Stockman: 17 BLOCKS is your film and it’s screening this Saturday at 7 PM here at The Missouri History Museum as part of the St. Louis international film Festival. Will you be here?

Davy Rothbart: Yes. I’m really excited about that. That’s a beautiful venue. I really appreciate that they’ve made the screening a free one. It’s a project that the Sanford family and I are passionate about and we want to share it as widely as we can. It’s nice not to have that barrier for some people, since film fest tickets can be so expensive and that eliminates the pool who of who can come and see it. I want this film to be for everybody.

TS: Have you taken it to other film festivals?

DR: Yes, we started it at Tribeca in New York and it’s played it a number of other fests. I haven’t been able to attend as many as I’d like. Members of the Sanford family have gone to some of the fests, and I have gone to some. And there have been some where we have gone together.

TS: Who shot this footage in 17 BLOCKS?

DR: It was a combination of me and the Sanford family. Some of the most recent footage my friend Zach shot, but 90% of it was shot either by me or a member of the Sanford family. Emmanuel Sanford shot some of the footage when he was just nine years old back in 1999.

TS: That’s what I thought. That’s what makes it such an unusual documentary. How did you get involved with this family?

DR: It was a real collaboration. I met Emmanuel and his brother Smurf, who was 15 in 1999, on a basketball court We hit it off and Smurf invited me over for dinner one night after we finished playing. That’s when I met their mother Cheryl and their sister Denise. The way Cheryl likes to put it is that the family adopted me. It really did feel that way. Here I was in DC, far from home in my early 20s.

TS: What were you doing in DC?

DR: A friend of mine had gotten a job on Capitol Hill with a congressional staffer. He thought the cultural atmosphere of DC was rather lame, so he invited me, an aspiring writer at the time, to come and live out there rent-free and just sleep on his couch. He lived nine blocks from the Capitol building. The Sanford family lived 17 blocks behind the capital building.

TS: Tell me about this neighborhood that the Sanford’s were living in.

DR: It was called at the time one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country. here was an incredible article in The Atlantic the same year called ‘Notes on the Murders of 30 of My Neighbors’ that was about how prevalent gun violence was. The Sanfords had lived all over the DC area, previously in a neighborhood more southeast called the Anacostia neighborhood. It was really striking as most families in that neighborhood we’re just trying to get by, people like Cheryl and her kids. You could look up from almost any street corner and see the Capitol dome, so this neighborhood, which was dealing with serious poverty, was literally in the shadow of the capital. I had just bought my first video camera when I met the family and I was interested in filmmaking. It was nothing fancy, just a consumer brand camcorder. I learned to use the camera at the same time Emmanuel and Smurf and Denise did, because they took an interest in it. I always had my camera around, but I would leave it with them sometimes at night and on the weekends. We would roam around and film stuff together. I would interview them and they would interview me. When I would leave the camera there and come back, they would show me all the footage they had shot. It was obviously very raw and personal. Emmanuel had, I think, a real poetic guy eye and the stuff he would film was so interesting and we continued to film together for 20 years. But everything changed the night there was a death in the Sanford family. The first 10 years it was essentially home videos. There was no plan really. The night of the death, I was back here in Michigan. When I got there the next day, Cheryl asked me where the video camera was. I was unsure what she meant but she said it was such a common story with kids from this neighborhood. So many friends of hers in that neighborhood had lost kids in this way and that the difference this time was that none of their lives had been documented so thoroughly. She wanted to film all of this. She knew what the family was going through and was about to go through. She was in pain and suffering but she thought people really needed to understand what was going on. Throughout this project, Cheryl has really been the vision for the film. She’s so brave to be so often open and honest about her journey.

TS: Yes, but she does not come off totally sympathetic in your film.

DR: Definitely, especially for the first 3/4 of it but when you have a bit more context later on in the film, you understand her a little better. She always said that substance abuse is ugly and that people need to see it. She’s the one who wanted to be filmed abusing drugs. Most people would never ask to have themselves portrayed in these vulnerable and even unlikable moments. But I think you still see all of the love that the family has for each other. 20 years later, they are all still living together. It’s pretty remarkable.

TS: Did the Sanford family rent this house or did they own it?

DR: They were renters. It’s mostly all rental apartments in that neighborhood. Cheryl‘s father had owned a house which is where she grew up so her family lived there for a little while after her dad passed.

TS: Is this neighborhood 17 blocks from the capital building become somewhat gentrified over the years?

DR: Yes, totally but there are still pockets, other nearby neighborhoods just 10 to 12 blocks from the capital, that are bad. There is a neighborhood called Potomac Gardens that the Sanfords lived in for a while where there is still much crime and poverty. So one neighborhood might gentrify while the next one still has problems. But the Sanfords neighborhood is getting a bit safer and there is more of a police presence, but the rent has risen so much that many people can’t afford to live there.

TS: In your film you visit the house as it currently stands, and it’s almost unrecognizable. There’s a guy living there who has obviously cleaned it up and rehabbed it, put in new floors and such. When the Sanfords lived there, I was struck by just how much trash was strewn all over the place.

DR: Yes, I think that guy gutted and renovated it.

TS: He was nice to let you guys come in and film. How many hours of footage did you have to work with?

DR: About 1000. It was a three-year editing process. We were lucky enough to work with an editor named Jennifer Tiexiera. She’s talented and was so devoted.

TS: How has your film been received at film festivals?

DR: It’s been amazing and moving to us. It was a 20-year journey and the story means so much to us. It means a lot personally. We are excited about using 17 BLOCKS as a tool for change and want to show it to organizations like Black Lives Matter and the ACLU and gun safety advocates. We have a national release coming out next year. We are going to be partnering with these organizations and others. Cheryl always said that there was just a statistic with all of these people getting killed in major cities, but when you get one victim and really get to know him, you connect with the issue. During the closing credits there is a list of 1200 names of gun violence victims just in the DC area. You could make a documentary just about any one of those people. It’s been an honor to be at the festivals with the family. We won ‘Best Documentary’ at the Woodstock Film Festival and we have been to Telluride Colorado . We won an award at Tribeca. It’s great just to play it for audiences but it means a lot to the Sanford family to win these awards and for people to see what a special story it is.

TS: It’s a very dramatic story. You could almost see it as a narrative, with these two brothers who are so very different. With this tragedy in the middle of the story, you could almost see it being adapted into some sort of narrative screenplay.

DR: Yes, I totally see that. In the right hands, I could see it being extremely powerful.

TS: What about Smurf? Has he kept clean?

DR: Smurf is doing awesome. Just this month he was promoted to manager at the deli that you see him working at in the film. Both of his sons made the honor roll at their schools this year and he’s a big part of their lives. Smurf was so lucky to have that judge on his drug case. She understood his potential. I think that was a rare outcome. Most judges would have tossed him in jail. I’d like for Law schools and young judges and prosecutors to see this film, just to give them a look at the human side of the people that come in front of them every day and to see what’s possible when people get another chance.

SLIFF 2019 Interview: Danielle Beverly – Director of DUSTY GROOVE: THE SOUND OF TRANSITION

DUSTY GROOVE: THE SOUND OF TRANSITION will screen at The Stage at KDHX ( 3524 Washington Avenue St Louis ) Saturday November 9th at 3pm as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Ticket information can be found HERE. Director Danielle Beverly will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A as well as Rick Wojcik and JP Schauer, co-founders of Dusty Groove.

Iconic Chicago record store Dusty Groove has been buying vinyl collections for 20 years. But how can you put a price tag on something so personal as another’s music? Owner and record buyer Rick Wojcik walks into the homes — and stories — of strangers, digging through their jazz, soul, and hip-hop records, buying their once-prized possessions. Each seller shares a common reason: They face a major life transition. Forced to sell because of health crises, downsizing moves, financial woes, or deaths, these collectors (or, in some cases, their heirs) are highly vulnerable, reluctant to abandon the LPs that often have helped define their lives but desperate to convert their personal treasure to cold, hard cash. Their disappointment over the collections’ true value is sometimes acute, and Wojcik is careful to be gentle in his assessments, apologetic about his inability to purchase more records or to increase the frequently modest payout. The buyer manages to establish surprising connections, and his interaction with an elderly, ill African American — a former musician who became a pharmacist for stability — is especially moving: When he discovers an old record that features the musician, Wojcik sits down with the grateful senior to listen to it together. “Dusty Groove” — a film about love, loss, and our deep connection to music — is a collection of intimate narratives, akin to a record album of songs.

Director Danielle Beverly took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about her career and her documentary DUSTY GROOVE: THE SOUND OF TRANSITION.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman November 6th, 2019

Tom Stockman: Your new documentary DUSTY GROOVE: THE SOUND OF TRANSITION plays this Saturday at 3 PM at the stage at KDHX.

Danielle Beverly: Yes, and that’s a great place for it to play because there are some college radio archives in the film, so when I heard that it was playing at the local independent radio station, I thought that that could not be more perfect.

TS: Yes and it’s a nice venue as well.

DB: That’s what I hear.

TS: There are two documentaries about record stores playing at this year‘s St. Louis Film Festival.

DB: Yes, I know OTHER MUSIC is playing there. I know the filmmaker who made that.

TS: They are very different films.

DB: Yes they are and I’m glad you get the distinction. That film, from what I understand, has a lot of interviews. It’s interview-driven, while my film is observational. Also, Other Music, the record store, is no longer around while Dusty Groove is doing very well.

TS: You have Rick Wojcik at the center of you film. He’s a fascinating guy. How did you first meet Rick?

DB: I’ve known Rick for a long long time. We worked together at a store called Reckless Records. I worked there a long time ago and put myself through graduate film school by working as a clerk at a record store. Rick taught me everything I knew about soul music and jazz music. It seemed like his destiny was to open his own store. He’s a used vinyl record buyer but he’s really one of the only people at his place of business that can go into someone’s home and assess a collection just by looking at it. The guy is like an encyclopedia. He knows so much about music and he never tires of learning about it. He’s really a remarkable man and an inspiring one. He will be at the screening this Saturday.

TS: Rick seems rather low-key, which I think makes a good subject for your documentary. He’s clearly a hard worker and incredibly knowledgeable.

DB: Indeed. When I was trying to think of how to describe the film, I thought that he’s kind of like the spindle of a record. All of these stories spin off of him, then we come back to that spindle. He’s the center of the film, the locus of the film. He walks us, the audience, into all of the stories. He’s going into people’s homes and their private spaces and that kind of access is so rare for a documentary maker.

TS: Where does he find these people that have these collections?

DB: Oh, they find him! Often people will call him and say they have these collection of records. It’s not in the film, but people will call him and say they have a lot of Beatles records, or Eagles records. Stuff that is really common, but he treats everybody with the same amount of curiosity and respect. I’ve heard him take these calls. He also has a pretty good nose and understands the history of what he’s doing and knows if somebody has something that is worth his time to come out and look at.

TS: I deal in vintage toys and have for many years. What I think your film captures well is the ‘thrill of the hunt’. I can remember, before eBay, going to dozens of rummage sales and garage sales and flea markets and digging through boxes. Sometimes you can get discouraged, but there is an excitement to finding things that you collect out in the wild. And I also recall the local record buyers. It seems there was a big box of records at every garage sale in the 80s and 90s and I would see the same guys jump out of their car, flip through the boxes, buy one or two, then run back to their cars to hit the next sale. Your film reminded me of those days. In DUSTY GROOVE: THE SOUND OF TRANSITION, you seem to meet some really interesting people just following Rick around.

DB: Yes, and not all of these people are just having a garage sale, though there are a couple of people in the film that have that sort of spirit. The film takes you into their storage spaces. These are all people who are selling their records for very distinct reasons. They are in some sort of transition. They may be dying, they may be divorcing, they may be, like in the case of Ricks co-founder JP Chill, blossoming into a new person. JP was essentially cloaking himself with this persona and when he let go of all of that, he didn’t need the records anymore.

TS: There’s the one guy who had 30,000 records and he had a half million dollar figure in his mind that he wanted for them. I found that the negotiation scene between him and Rick was actually sort of suspenseful. There was real tension in that scene.

DB: I’m so glad to hear that. It was suspenseful for me too It was definitely an interesting thing to film because there was a lot of posturing going on and a point-counterpoint type of discussion. I also felt the tension, which is really what is fun about being a documentary filmmaker. I just keep my mouth shut.

TS: And then there was the 92-year-old man. That was a real melancholy sort of sequence. He was fascinating.

DB: He was also a really underappreciated jazz musician. He had made the choice to be a pharmacist. He did both but he could have better known. When Lester Young calls you up and asked you to put a band together, that means he was really traveling with people in those circles. He could have really had that career, but he chose to be a pharmacist in Chicago for his children. He had a jazz career as well, but didn’t travel as much as he might have

TS: Were are there other adventures with Rick that you filmed but left out of the final cut?

DB: Yes, the typical ratio of a documentary is that for every minute of screen time, there is an hour of footage that was filmed. The film is 84 minutes, so you can imagine that there was about 100 hours of other footage. You pick and choose. Certainly there is always what we call our “darlings“. You try to put them in, and you move them around, and they just stop the flow of the movie. So, there were plenty of those.

TS: Let’s talk about the music that you used in the film. Was it difficult making those choices, picking the songs you ended up using?

DB: It was for two reasons. One, just imagine how much music you could choose from. For some scenes it just makes sense. Like in the case of JP Chill, he’s referencing hip-hop of the time. For me the most important thing was that for anytime there could be any sort of timestamp on the music, that the music was accurate for that time. There was one exception. For Grady Johnson, he’s talking about being in the Army and his first forays into jazz. He recorded Satin Doll but that song is impossible to get the rights to so I had to substitute something that was from a few years later, a song I could get the rights to. The second part of my answer is that gaining the rights to this music was a real undertaking, but I was committed to having music that had been recorded. Several people suggested that I just have someone compose a score. That would have been a lot cheaper and is typically what is done for documentaries. I thought that would absolutely be in contrast to the spirit of the film. It’s about these collective things that are passed down and is music that people know and that they have a relationship to.

TS: Did Rick help you pick some of the songs for the film?

DB: He did not.

TS: What is your filmmaking background?

DB: I’m a feature film documentarian. I primarily work as a one-person crew. In the case of DUSTY GROOVE: THE SOUND OF TRANSITION, I don’t think it could have been made with a crew. That intimacy just does not happen when there is more than one crew member in the room. This is my third feature documentary as director, producer, sound person, and camera person. I teach documentary in the Master’s Program at Northwestern University. I also teach at Northwestern University in Qatar in the middle east. I’m making another documentary there right now about a girls rhythmic gymnastics school. Very different topic.

TS: Have you taken DUSTY GROOVE: THE SOUND OF TRANSITION to other film fests?

DB: Yes, it premiered at SF Doc Fest in San Francisco. There’s this thing called the Southern Circuit, actually all have my films have been selected for this, and what is so special about it is that it takes a selection of perhaps 16 features on tours throughout the American south, in small towns with some very engaged conversation around the film. I took the film to Louisiana and showed it to 35 people, all record nerds who showed up and were very eager to talk about it. We had the local store playing the music in the audience for the screening. It was really great. DUSTY GROOVE: THE SOUND OF TRANSITION played in Sweden and will be touring throughout 2020.

TS: When you are in town with Rick this weekend try to stop by Vintage Vinyl on Delmar. That is probably the best known vintage record store in St. Louis.

DB: I’ll bet Rick already knows about it. He knows about every record store. It’s his business. He never gets sick of records.

Here’s the trailer for DUSTY GROOVE: THE SOUND OF TRANSITION :

Dusty Groove: The Sound of Transition – documentary official trailer from Danielle Beverly on Vimeo.

WAMG Interview: Josh Samuel Frank – Author of GIRAFFES ON HORSEBACK SALAD, the Marx Brothers/Salvador Dali Unmade Film

Josh Samuel Frank will be speaking Monday November 11th at 1pm at Jewish Community Center’s Staenberg Family Complex in Creve Coeur (2 Millstone Blvd) as part of this year’s 2019 St. Louis Jewish Book Festival. Ticket information can be found HERE

Giraffes on Horseback Salad was a Marx Brothers film, written by modern art icon Salvador Dali who’d befriended Harpo. Rejected by MGM, the script was thought lost forever. But author Josh Frank found it, and, with comedian Tim Heidecker and Spanish comics creator Manuela Pertega, he’s re-created the film as a graphic novel in all its gorgeous, full-color, cinematic, surreal glory. It is the story of two unlikely friends, a Jewish super star film icon, and Spanish painter, and the movie that could have been.

Author Josh Samuel Frank took the time to speak with We Are Movie Geeks about this project.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman October 28th, 2019

Tom Stockman: This book GIRAFFES ON HORSEBACK SALAD sounds like an absolutely fascinating project. Did you come into this project as a fan of the Marx brothers?

Josh Samuel Frank: My book career started with my interest in lost histories and telling lost histories of artist who inspired me when I was growing up. It started with my book on the band The Pixies. My books since have been like this highway with on and off ramps, connected in one way or another, like a journey. This is where my journey has led me, after my third book, in which I incorporated a lot more illustrations, I approach my books is sort of like these movies that you could read. One of my white whales was always finding a project to do about the Marx Brothers. I thought a good start would to look at some of the great movies that were actually never filmed. That was a perfect template for what I have been working toward, how to tell a movie in a book. The catalyst for my project was to find a great unmade movie and make it. I looked at all these list of “the best movies ,ever made“ that I found online , and this movie GIRAFFES ON HORSEBACK SALAD is on all of them It was not only an unfilmed Marx brothers movie but it was written by Salvador Dali. I’m a huge fan of surrealism and absurdity and was really fascinated with that.

TS: So that was right up your alley. Why was that considered a lost screenplay and how did you go about finding it?

JSF: It was thought that the script was long lost. When you would find information about it online, it was always this one paragraph excerpt. There was this assumption that there was more at one point but no one had ever seen it. I spent two years trying to find more before anything could move forward. The only way I was going to be able to do this book is if I could find enough material for me to adapt. What I discovered was that Dali had never written a full screen play, but unlike what was previously believed, there was more. The big break in my pop-culture case was when I discovered that a museum in Paris had purchased a large lot of Dali’s ratings. This was over 30 years ago. The paragraph that is often cited came from that lot. When I got in touch with the museum, I talked them into sending me PDFs of Dali hand-written notes with the outline of the film.

TS: Was it in English?

JSF: No, it was in French, But there was 80 pages of it. I couldn’t read them because they were in French but that’s when I realized this could be enough to adapt into the book that I wanted to do. My delusion of grandeur idea was that I could complete Dali’s Marx Brothers movie with him, sort of co-write it with him. Fortunately, I had a contact in Paris who was able to translate it for me. While I waited for him to do that, I worried that it might be a big disappointment, that he would send it back and that only maybe two pages had material and it wouldn’t be enough. Or maybe that 80 pages of Dali-speak might just transferred to perhaps four ideas. But when I got the translation there was a good 50 pages of ideas having to do with the movie and it was absolutely enough to create the scenario for the whole idea. I took all of that writing and spent about six months with it until I got to a final script.

TS: But the genesis of this whole project was a friendship between Salvador Dali and Harpo Marx. Why do you think those two men bonded so well?

JSF: One of the exciting things working on this book was that I learned some things about these two incredible artists that had not been previously confirmed or explored. I feel that the book, other than just being fun and surreal and entertaining, sheds a lot of light on both Dali and Harpo as people in ways that we hadn’t seen in previous writings about them. Dali was obsessed with the Marx Brothers especially Harpo because he felt like they were the living incarnation of surrealism.

TS: Dali would’ve been relatively young in 1937.

JSF: Yes, in hindsight, we think of the Dali who was older and so sure of himself. But in his 30s, he had just as many insecurities as an artist as anyone of us, it was actually quite relatable. Through the book I felt like I was able to share this insight into the fact that someone as grand and untouchable as Dali was in a very unsure place in his career, even though he was already famous. There was a struggle going on inside him and when he met Harpo, it was at the height of that. His short but important time with Harpo was a turning point for the next chapter in his career. Even though the movie didn’t happen, I think that you can see how that journey transformed him to the next phase of his career and helped him gain confidence. There were giraffes in GIRAFFES ON HORSEBACK SALAD and even though there was no such movie, the giraffes became one of the most well-known symbols of his work. He used the image of burning giraffes for decades to come. Many of the ideas from GIRAFFES ON HORSEBACK SALAD became staples in his art. People really don’t tie it back to that time, but they very much came from that time. I feel that says a lot about how important that period was for him And Harpo was truly honored that this famed artist was such a big fan.

TS: Now Harpo and Dali wanted to make this film GIRAFFES ON HORSEBACK SALAD, but what about the other Marx Brothers? Did Chico and Groucho read the script,? What did they think of this idea?

JSF: They weren’t classical artist like Harpo was. Harpo was an artist in his personality and his soul. He painted as well, and that was one reason he was so honored with Dali’s attention Harpo and Dali really didn’t care how marketable the film was or how well it would do at the box office. They were coming at it from a classical artist sense, but for Chico and Groucho, it was more business and from that point of view, it was a terrible idea. There was no money to be made with it. People would probably not get it. Given what the Marx Brothers meant to society at that time, there simply wasn’t a place for it. My book events are not the typical book readings and signings. It’s more like a show, like a journey coming from a theatrical background, and the subject matter, I wanted to be more whimsical than just a podium reading from the chapter of the book. One of the things that is a big part of that presentation is that I talk about how important it is to recognize the difference between how the Marx brothers were viewed in the 20’s and 30’s and how they are viewed now. Their resurrection in the 1970s came from the sort of hip art community. The Marx brothers were very subversive. They had timelessness to them and they were surreal. Back in the 30’s they were zany and funny.

TS: They were ahead of their time.

JSF: They were, so it made sense back then and the other brothers and the studio knew that this movie wouldn’t play which just goes to show you how ahead Dali was, because what he wanted to do in the 30’s would fit in perfectly now.

TS: I know that Dali designed some dream sequences for Hitchcock’s SPELLBOUND, but were there other Hollywood projects that Dali was interested in getting involved in?

JSF: He really wanted to. I think one of his biggest regrets was that he didn’t become the most important person in Hollywood. He wanted that. Even at the end of his life he was bitter that Hollywood didn’t embrace him like he was embraced everywhere else. He definitely wanted to make his big Hollywood movie. Some historians have wondered if maybe the point of writing GIRAFFES ON HORSEBACK SALAD was that it would never be made, but after working on this book I feel very strongly that was not the case.

TS: Do you think Dali and Harpo had a certain director in mind for this film?

JSF: Yes. I think the studio would have wanted to get one of the Marx Brothers regular directors but Dali wanted Cecil B. DeMille to direct it. He wanted it to be a big extravaganza. He had very big dreams for this. He wanted Cole Porter to do the soundtrack. We went on and actually completed the soundtrack.

TS: Yes, I was wondering that. Who wrote the songs? Were they inspired by the Marx Brothers?

JSF: When I wrote the book, I added in a big musical numbers to it because Marx Brothers movie always had to have songs. It had to have a love song, it had to have funny song. I reached out to an old friend of mine in Austin, who has now since moved to Japan. He was a jazz musician and composer. He knew Cole Porter backwards and forwards and I put it to him to see if he wanted to compose music for this project. He did such an exceptional job on it, going far beyond the call of duty. He got a full orchestra and a chorus and recorded it in a top studio and I found a top-notch record label to release it. The soundtrack was released a couple of months after the book came out.

**Comedian Tim Heidecker** **and artist** **Manuela Pertega**

TS: What was comedian Tim Heidecker’s role in this project?

JSF: I needed someone who could really help me nail the Marx Brothers banter. I thought finding the best modern day satirist would be a really good anchor for that. I reached out to him and he was just weird and crazy enough to decide that it was worth a little bit of his time. He get it as close as it might have been to a real Marx Brothers project.

TS: Tell me about Spanish artist Manuela Pertega and how she got involved in this project.

JSF: She’s a genius. I found her and wanted to go for complete authenticity on how to make it the most believable vision of what could’ve been. I found her portfolio online and she had not done anything major, but had done a number of illustrations for art magazines in Barcelona Spain and I wanted to find someone from Spain, where Dali was from. She jumped on board with me and she is now my full-time collaborator.

TS: Did you have a chance to speak with Harpo’s son Bill about this project?

JSF: Yes, I went out to his home a number of time and showed him some early sample pages and got his overwhelming approval. He’s just so happy with how it turned out. The greatest compliment I ever had was when Bill Marx told me he loved the book. In some ways he’s the last living Marx brother. He has the soul of Harpo and he’s kept the spirit of his father alive.

TS: Do you think there’s ever a chance that the screenplay may end up being filmed in some way?

JSF: Well we have created it as something of a ready-to-go project. If the right production company was really excited by it, It could really happen.

TS: I could see someone like Terry Gilliam directing it, or possibly as an animated feature.

JSF: Yes, I look forward to that day.

TS: Good luck with GIRAFFES ON HORSEBACK SALAD and we’ll see you at The St. Louis Jewish Book Festival.

WAMG Interview: Actor Bill Moseley – Star of Rob Zombie’s 3 FROM HELL

Tickets for the September 16th/17th/18th nationwide release of 3 FROM HELL are available at FathomEvents.com/3FromHell

Bill Moseley is a film actor and musician who has starred in a number of cult classic horror films, including HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES (2003), REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA (2008) and as Otis Driftwood in THE DEVIL’S REJECTS (2005). His first big role was in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 (1986) as Chop Top. On the HBO TV series Carnivàle (2003), Moseley had a recurring role as camp cook Possum. He’s also released records with guitarist Buckethead in the band Cornbugs, as well as featuring on the guitarist’s solo work.

Bill Moseley took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about his newest film 3 FROM HELL, director Rob Zombie’s long-awaited sequel to THE DEVIL’S REJECTS

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman September 5th, 2019

Tom Stockman: Hi Bill

Bill Moseley: Hello Tom

TS: I’m calling from St. Louis. I met you hear about a decade ago when you attended a screening hear of REPO: THE GENETIC OPERA

BM: Oh right, I remember that.

TS: And I’ve met you several times, the first time being close to 30 years ago at a Fangoria Convention do you like doing those type of conventions?

BM: Oh I love them. In fact I’m here right now in Louisville Kentucky for a convention called Days of the Dead

TS: Are you surprised at how many Otis and Chop Top tattoos you see?

BM: I’m not really. When you get the idea that people get a tattoo like that to memorialize or commemorate their love for a certain character that they saw at a certain time in their lives, It’s humbling. It keeps me from being more of a dick! If someone is committed to having a tattoo of you on their arm or whatever, you don’t want to be a jerk and make them think they’ve done something they’ll regret. I get really excited when I see those and I wanna make sure that they are happy with those

TS: Let’s talk about 3 FROM HELL, I’ve seen it and I think it’s a worthy sequel to THE DEVIL’S REJECTS. Have you seen it yet?

BM: I have. First I saw a rough cut, and then finally I ended up talking to a lot of people in the press, and realized that they had seen the final cut, and I hadn’t! So I finally got a link and watched the final film

TS: You said you saw a rough cut. It’s only showing here in St. Louis for three nights. Did they have to cut some of the violence out of it for this version that will be showing at theaters soon?

BM: No. The rough cut was missing a lot of it’s soundtrack and wasn’t color-corrected. So the final film was a lot different than the rough-cut, especially with all the music which gives the film much of its atmosphere, but nothing was missing between the rough-cut and the final film in terms of violence.

TS: Are you excited about going out and promoting this character Otis Firefly again, and why did it take 12 years to get a sequel?

BM: That’s more of a question for Rob Zombie. I really have no idea If had been up to me, I would have done a sequel right away. I was very happy with the way that he decided to do it. I’ve been going to conventions now for years with Sid Haig and when horror fans would walk up to us and ask if there was going to be a sequel, I would turn to Sid and ask “Hey Sid! Is there going to be a sequel!?“ And Sid would say “No“, then we’d say in unison “Because we’re fucking dead!“

TS: Rob Zombie performs with his band a lot so perhaps that had something to do with the delay.

BM: Well there’s that but I think it really has to do with the poor marksmanship of the Ruggsville Sheriffs Department I mean here we are hurtling towards them in the Cadillac and they’re shooting their hearts out, but they couldn’t quite bring us down. Really because they were shitty shots! That to me was the most logical way to keep us alive and well. Or if not well, at least alive Also, consider the alternatives. Did somebody awaken for the dream? The cheesiest of all Hollywood devices?! Another alternative could be that we did die, then went to hell and the Devil rejected us, hence the title. But then we’d be supernatural! I think it’s best to just blame the Ruggsville sheriff department and their lousy marksmanship

TS: Yeah, Baby Firefly doesn’t seem to be hurt at all, dancing around and such.

BM: Well, you figure we’ve been in prison for 10 or 12 years when this new film starts, so that gave us time to heal. And I will say about the Driftwood and the Fireflys, we have regenerative power!

TS: Were you involved in the script for 3 FROM HELL? Was there much improv involved in the film?

BM: Not really. The script was pretty tight There wasn’t really any need for improve. There were a couple of things that I improvised in THE DEVIL’S REJECTS. Not that much though. If you compare that to my role in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, in which I think about 50% of my lines were improvised. But in this Rob zombie trilogy, we pretty much stuck to the script.

TS: Yes there is some really good writing in this new film, especially in some of those scenes where you and Richard Brake are having some conversations that are so dark and funny.

BM: Richard Brake did improvise some of those lines. When he started going off about Salami Man, That to me was so funny! That was Richard just coming up with stuff! Everybody in front of and behind the camera was cracking up during that stuff. I hope when the film comes out on DVD, there will be some sort of behind the scenes so we can show some of that footage of that. I’m sure there were some time constraints on how long the scene could be, but he was so funny. He was awesome. And a great addition to the family I might add.

TS: Between Chop Top and Otis, you have had so many great lines. Do you have a favorite line that you have said on screen?

BM: Well with Chop Top, I would definitely say it was in character “Lick my plate you dog dick!“, Which I did make up on the spot back in Austin Texas in 1986. My family made us eat all of our food and I had to be part of the’ clean plate’ club. That kind of inspired that line With Otis I would have to say “I am the devil. I am here to do the devils work“

TS: Well, I am honored that I am hearing these lines from you over the phone. That Devil was line was used recently in ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD.

BM: Yes but Quentin used what was Tex Watson’s actual line which was “I’m here to do the devils business“. Rob simply changed it from a two syllable to a one syllable word with “The devils work“, which I like better actually

TS: I do too. Good luck with 3 FROM HELL.

BM: Thanks and let’s hope there are more films in the series.

WAMG’s Conversation With Composer Christopher Lennertz On His Super-Hero Score For Amazon Prime’s THE BOYS

When Hughie (Jack Quaid, “The Hunger Games”) suffers a devastating loss at the hands of a reckless Supe his devastation turns to outrage when he discovers there is no legal recourse for victims of collateral superhero damage. While still reeling from his trauma Hughie meets a mysterious operative, Billy Butcher (Karl Urban, “Star Trek”), who recruits him to join in his pursuit of some vigilante justice against the Supes—who are not exactly what they seem.

“The Boys” is a fun and irreverent take on what happens when superheroes – who are as popular as celebrities, as influential as politicians and as revered as Gods – abuse their superpowers rather than use them for good. It’s the powerless against the super powerful as The Boys embark on a heroic quest to expose the truth about The Seven, and Vought – the multi-billion dollar conglomerate that manages these superheroes and covers up all of their dirty secrets. The Boys are rounded out by Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso, “Detroit”), Frenchie (Tomer Capon, “Hostages”), and The Female (Karen Fukuhara, “Suicide Squad”). Simon Pegg (“Mission: Impossible – Fallout”) guest stars as Hughie’s father.

The Supes of The Seven are led by Homelander (Antony Starr, “Banshee”) who is joined by Starlight (Erin Moriarty, “Captain Fantastic”), Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott, “House of Cards”), A-Train (Jessie T. Usher, “Independence Day: Resurgence”), The Deep (Chace Crawford, “Gossip Girl”) and Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell, “Supernatural”). Academy Award® nominee Elisabeth Shue (“Leaving Las Vegas”) stars as Madelyn Stillwell, Vought’s Senior VP of Hero Management.

Based on The New York Times best-selling comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, “The Boys” was developed by showrunner Eric Kripke (“Supernatural”), who also serves as writer, executive producer and directed the season finale. Joining Kripke as executive producers are Point Grey Pictures’ Seth Rogen (“Preacher”), Evan Goldberg (“Preacher”), and James Weaver (“Preacher”), Original Film’s Neal H. Moritz (“Prison Break”), Pavun Shetty (“New Girl”) and Ori Marmur (“Preacher”), as well as Ken Levin and Jason Netter. Ennis and Robertson also co-executive produce. The pilot episode was directed by Dan Trachtenberg (“10 Cloverfield Lane”).

The score is by Christopher Lennertz. He is one of the most prolific and diverse composers working today, creating music in virtually every genre. He has spent weeks on Billboard charts, received an Emmy nomination for the cult hit Supernatural, a Grammy for his arrangements on Ozomatli’s album Street Signs, and won 14 BMI Awards to date.

Recently the composer and I spoke on the phone about creating music for THE BOYS. The show and Lennertz’s score are astounding. I love superhero TV shows and movies, and being a huge fan this skewed twist on the genre has made it my new favorite series.

THE BOYS reunites Lennertz with the series’ creator Eric Kripke, creator and producer of CW’s Supernatural, which Lennertz has scored since the show’s inception in 2005, and for which he received an Emmy nomination. The duo also worked together on the NBC series Revolution.

My previous conversations with Chris have been about his work on Agent Carter HERE and THINK LIKE A MAN TOO here.

During our conversation this time we talked about the Amazon Prime series as well as his recent projects UGLY DOLLS, SHAFT and his return for a second season for NETFLIX’s hit sci-fi show LOST IN SPACE.

WAMG: How was the COMIC CON Anatomy of a Superhero Panel which you attended in July?

CL: I couldn’t believe how many people were there – it was a blast. There were thousands of people there.

WAMG: Over the weekend we binged watch THE BOYS and Oh My Gosh!

CL: It’s really something isn’t it? It’s insane! You think to yourself, ‘I can’t believe they just did that.

WAMG: I kept saying to myself, okay it’s not going to get any crazier… and then it goes right off the rails! Who approached you about working on this project?

CL: I heard about it quite awhile ago when I was working on SAUSAGE PARTY with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and that they were making a show based on the comic about corrupt superheroes driven by greed and power and the team of badass misfits that try to take them down. Then I received an email from Eric Kripke who mentioned it to Seth and they both said they wanted me to do it, so we said, let’s do this!

WAMG: You worked on the Marvel limited series Agent Carter, so you’re well acquainted with composing a musical voice for the superhero genre. The tracks for “Starlight” “Hospital Shootout”, “BOYS” are amazing. Your score had to make these “the Seven” kinda horrible!

CL: Kinda? (Laughs) Your heroes are not the heroes. The music for The Seven, our corrupt hero team, is traditional orchestra and electronics done in as corporate a way as possible, trying to feel like it was created after one too many focus groups…but then we used processing to warp, mangle, and sometimes crush that sound to feel like it was ‘going wrong’ as the perfect stereotypes of comic book heroes begin to shatter. It starts out great but by the end you realize the superheroes are betraying everyone’s trust.

For “The Boys” Eric said he wanted the music to have all the dirt and grime of a messy garage band with the energy of British punk, and that he wanted to poke fun at traditional superhero clichés… Its supposed to sound sloppy on purpose.

WAMG: I love how much percussion runs through the show. What instruments did you use?

CL: Lots of drums and metal – banging on broken instruments. Old amps that we tried to use to get a mix things going horribly wrong. We went with ‘garage band’ sounds of cheap guitars, lo-fi gear, broken cymbals, and… looking for as much noise and feedback as possible.

Listen to Chris’s score on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1KzVgZutMfVuz4lTcYws7F

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Boys-Music-Amazon-Original/dp/B07V9JV4J5/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+boys+soundtrack&qid=1565013586&s=gateway&sr=8-1

WAMG: How did you transition between THE BOYS to the recent UGLY DOLLS and then SHAFT?

CL: SHAFT came first. It had that 70’s sound, so that was a lot of fun. Music has always played a key role in the “Shaft” films, beginning with the instantly recognizable theme from the first film in 1972.

And then at the same time I was working on UGLY DOLLS. I did that score plus recording 8 original songs with Oscar nominated and Tony Award-winning lyricist Glenn Slater (Tangled, Broadway’s School of Rock) for the soundtrack sung by these amazing artists Kelly Clarkson, Nick Jonas, Janelle Monae and Blake Shelton. It was funny going from an R-rated Shaft to a family friendly UGLY DOLLS, and then kicked back into gear with THE BOYS. It was never boring.

Finally, Chris and I spoke about Netflix’s LOST IN SPACE, one of Lennertz’s best scores of 2018. During its initial release Lennertz said, “From the beginning, the producers wanted a classic main title sequence to play during at least some of the episodes,” said Lennertz. “I wanted to tease the show’s premise with a hint of the Alpha Centauri program theme, then a full statement of the new LOST IN SPACE theme, followed by a triumphant finish that showcased now legendary composer John Williams’ original theme from season 3 that people are so familiar with. It was such an honor to be able to incorporate such a classic melody from the man who made me fall in love with film music from the very beginning.”

WAMG: Being a huge sci-fi geek, I loved your score for LOST IN SPACE on Netflix. The first season was so great, especially for fans of the TV show. I loved how your score was interwoven with the classic music of the 1960’s science fiction series. You recently updated your Instagram account with info about scoring the second season of Netflix’s Lost in Space. Can you give us an update on how it’s coming along?

CL: I just finished a cue for episode 10 for Season 2 as we speak – I finished it, saved it and closed it just before I took your call. We are well into the next season with the score. There are ten more episodes coming out right before Christmas this year so I’m about 80 percent done. They are really good too! Everyone is back plus there are new characters and its really going to be great!

View this post on Instagram

WAMG: What other projects do you have in the works?

CL: I’m working on Tim Story’s next movie for Warner Bros. Pictures and the second season of THE BOYS in October.

Follow Christopher Lennertz on:

Website – http://christopherlennertz.com/

Twitter – @CLennertz

Instagram – clennertzmusic

ST. LOUIS FILMMAKERS SHOWCASE INTERVIEW – Daniel Blake Smith, Writer of SAFE AND HAPPY

SAFE AND HAPPY screens at the ST. LOUIS FILMMAKERS SHOWCASE as part of the Narrative Shorts – Drama: Volume 2 Sunday July 14th at 6:15pm. The films screen at Washington University’s Brown Hall. Ticket information can be found HERE

Daniel Blake Smith took the time to talk to Stephen Tronicek about SAFE AND HAPPY and his other films.

We’ve all read and seen examples of films big and small being created in the large film capitals of the world. We know what it is like to read about the creation of a film in Los Angeles, New York or Europe and many other locations around the world. We know the trials, tribulations, ups and downs of productions outside of St. Louis…but what about St. Louis? There are a few articles speaking about it, but not many that give a film the same respect that a higher production value film would get. In this business, unfortunately, attention is respect.

So that led me to want to explore the history of a smaller production in St. Louis. It would need to be something bigger than my own productions (which for all transparency, are also playing in the Showcase), made by somebody who knows the difference between St. Louis productions and other locations, and further it would need to highlight the work of St. Louis filmmakers that deserve the credit for how far they’ve come. It would need to be Safe & Happy.

Safe & Happy focuses on Ray (Clayton Bury), who following some horrible news must face a secret he’s been keeping for years. Writer/producer Daniel Blake Smith called it a story of telling lies in order to reinvent one’s self. He was also the source I had for the information concerning production.

Safe & Happy was written by Smith in 30 minutes, something any writer should be familiar with. That fit of creative rage that tells you that you must write, create and show the world what you’re thinking.

Following the necessary revisions that come with writing a short, Smith finally had a finished script by October of last year. But a finished script, a short film does not make. Once that is over, the difficult part begins: the pre-production.

Or it would be difficult if not for Smith’s savvy ability to read the St. Louis market and his previous experience. Smith has produced seven feature-length projects including Texas Heart (Mark David, 2016) and is currently in pre-production thriller Blood Born (Mark David). On top of this, his first produced short film, Memory Box ( Karl Shefelman, 2018) is also playing in the Showcase.

I asked him why he decided to start doing shorts after having produced as many features as he did. To the layman, it would seem to be a step backward and to Smith it also seems to be: “Festival shorts are disturbingly seductive,” he mentioned, speaking of the people he’s seen get trapped in the circuit. “Shorts are a wonderful appetizer, [and] I love em’ but you need more in there to tell a fully explored story.”

With all this experience and more Smith set out to get the film made.

Production in St. Louis has an interesting give and take, but according to Smith, there’s a, “…strong talent pool and a large crew if you can find the right people.” That strong talent started to show when Smith started looking for people in November of last year. It was then that he brought on Richard Louis Ulrich to the project to direct. Ulrich, fresh off the success of his 2018 short Steve ( the continuation, Who’s Paisley?, is also debuting at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase) always seemed like not only the best choice but the most interesting choice. Whereas Ulrich’s last film was an ethereal glimpse into the life of a man who barely even spoke, Safe & Happy was dialogue laden and only set in a few locations. With Ulrich comes Jesse Bader, one of the best cinematographers in town. Smith recalled the contribution of Bader, “I loved his hand-held camera work and design which helped amp up the urgency and sense of precariousness that we wanted the audience to feel about Ray’s mental and emotional state.”

The next step was to bring actors into the mix. This was another place where the, “..strong talent pool…” helped Smith. Two actors of three leads were cast quickly, Jessica Ambuehl having worked with Smith on Memory Box and Don McClendon just being a charismatic legend, meaning that the only role to cast was the main character: Ray. This led to auditions which led to Clayton Bury. Bury is a St. Louis actor in a couple of projects this year, who apparently, “…didn’t so much play the role as he did inhabit it.” With this, Smith and the team had their cast.

Production lasted only one day in March at the Medici Mediaspace, but that day would be one to remember. When you’re on set, the name of the game is to stick to the schedule and try not to fall behind. A few minute delays could mean an exponential amount of time spent on set. So, when you get to set and realize that there’s a party in the room next to your shooting location that is going to be heard on the microphones, that becomes a large problem. What was there to do but wait? For almost two hours. For a director it’s mind-numbing, for a producer it’s an anxiety attack, for the crew it’s a time crunch but for the actors…it’s an advantage. Smith recalls that “When we finally began the hallway sequence…I noticed that rapidly vanishing available time and the palpable tension surrounding all those limitations actually HELPED [the] performances.” The anxiety of Safe & Happy could be perfectly captured thanks to the anxiety on set.

That intensity fell significantly with the post-production process which stretched itself comfortably over the next two months, ending in mid-May. The biggest challenge that arose in this section was the edit, where the dialogue-heavy piece proved difficult to whittle down to its base elements. Eventually, footage shrank to a 15-minute film, which shrank to a 9-minute film. This paired with the strong work of Sean Kilker (a brilliant St. Louis soundman) and composer, Tyler Wilkins, eventually delivered the final film.

And that’s where you, the reader, comes in. One of the most important parts of any films life is who sees it. You can see Safe & Happy, playing in a shorts program on July 14th at 6:15 pm at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase. Come support this film. Support St. Louis filmmakers. Support festivals because, as Smith would put it, “The graveyard of all short films is Youtube.”

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