Two important things happened this week. One day I woke up covered in termites. Another day, I finished my movie.
First the termites.
I don’t like bugs. The Great Ant Wars of Thugz Mansion had me curled in a corner in a fetal position rocking back and forth and near tears, lines of ants haunting every minute I spent in that hell hole. That morning, I spent a good hour in that uneasy haze balanced on the line between asleep and awake swatting at small ticklish things on my knees and face. My dreams were disturbed. I awoke to come face to face with a long, slender ant-like insect with wings staring me down. As my eyes gradually came into focus, I noticed a number of them in my bed with me.
As far as sights to wake up to, this one happens to be an especially unwelcome one.
So unwelcome that I screamed like a little girl getting stuffed into a wood chipper and danced around trying to get the hell beasts off, waking up Max, who wondered what the fuck was going on. Winged termites were all around the window, and crawling in through some godforsaken crack somewhere, entering our room, and flitting about. “Relax, you’re not made of wood,” Max assured me as a ran out of our room in my boxer shorts, grabbed a bottle of 409, and proceeded to spray wildly at the swarm.
The 409/Windex trick is a great alternative bug spray that has the added side effect of cleaning up the surface you’re attacking a little bit. The chemicals in those household cleaners are not conducive insect survival. As I stood there, a half-naked half-assed recreation of a hip shooting cowboy sheriff armed with a spray bottle and drawing on a gang of ‘mites spraying wildly, I cursed silently, because that morning I secretly was hoping to sleep in – a luxury I haven’t been able to afford much of these past few months. That it was only 9:30 AM when I had to get all old west on the window by my bed and that my cell phone alarm clock had been optimistically set for a nice 12:00 noon didn’t alleviate what was turning into a bad start for the day.
David W. told me, upon hearing of my shitty morning later on in the day, that it sounded like a bad acid trip. The difference of course being that, in an acid trip, it’s all in your head, and in real life, shit actually happens to you. The little consolation you get from saying “Hey remember that one time you tripped on acid and thought you saw…” is quickly obliterated by the sheer gravity of reality, and the agony of existence itself.
Originally, my morning was going to be spent waking up bright and early at 8:00 am, in order to finish up my sound editing work on my movie, getting into the editing labs at 9:00. The night before, I told myself “Fuck that shit, I need sleep,” and as such, embarked on the journey of slumber rest assured that tomorrow I would awaken refreshed and energized and not screaming incoherent obscenities.
And as is always the case with my careless assumptions, Mother Nature seemed determined to prove me wrong.
Allow me then to begin a reflection of sorts on the entire process of directing a 310, starting from, not surprisingly, the beginning and working my way chronologically onward in the sort of aimless ramble and recounting of events that most of you are probably accustomed to by now.
Last year, as spring gradually started to give way to summer (at least, I infer that based on the month, seeing as seasonal transitions in Los Angeles can only be inferred), our 310 class assignments were posted in the Lucas building. I remember relief, mostly because 290 (5 short digital movies) was finally over, and frankly, I don’t think any one of my classmates had even given much thought to 310. As far as we were concerned, that was a fall semester class, and fall semester might as well have been a thousand years away.
The first buzz around 310 came when it came time to pick a partner. Kevin, fellow floormate and current roommate, and I approached each other with our respective propositions almost concurrently, so that was never a problem. In fact, most of the drama bombs that could possibly be set off this early in the game were narrowly avoided, but the stress of what’s to come often was the undoing of any game pair of bright eyed students. Legends, whispered in the darkest of corners in hushed tones, told of late night arguments, physical assault, involvement of the LAPD, and restraining orders. Secretly, everyone wishes their partnership would be free of such drastic woes, but secretly we all wished that someone in our year would experience it. After all, filmmaking is war, and there’s nothing quite like the sight of drama bombs exploding and lighting up the hazy Los Angeles night skyline.
And so summer vacation came, and I tactically retreated back up to Seattle with the goal of completing a rough of my script at the end of July. “No problem,” I thought, “Five and a half minutes is five and a half pages of script. Piece of fuckin’ cake.”
July came and went, and my goal shifted to the middle of August, before school started. “Definitely get it done by then,” I said as I locked myself in our empty house for two weeks for an intense retreat of writing, recording some of my tunes, eating lunch at QFC, and using Starbucks’ wireless internet. And while my album was finished and Jo-Jo potatoes consumed liberally, my script languished in a dusty corner of my hard drive.
The original concept I had been working on started as a seed from a conversation I had with Ana at The Grinder one late afternoon. We were talking about 290 ideas, actually, and I was wondering out loud about the ultimate form of entertainment, which I think would basically be full sensory playback of pre-recorded dreams. Furthering the idea, I thought what if only the minds of children could be manipulated into dreaming dreams marketable to the public, and that the corporation that marketed those dreams, which would of course be very powerful, went around buying up children from mothers who would otherwise abort them for the sole purpose of hooking them up to machines, pumping them full of drugs, and harvesting their dreams.
The general idea for my story was this – a man, fresh from med school, and his pregnant wife get into a major car accident. He survives mostly unscathed, but his wife is knocked into a coma. Their child survives as well, and is thrust into his care. But he doesn’t want a kid, and needs the money to continue to keep his wife on life support so badly that he sells this child to the corporation that harvests dreams. His wife dies anyway, however, and wracked with guilt, he infiltrates the corporation as one of the doctors who performs checkups on the children, hoping to track down his daughter, which he finally does. Seeking to right the wrongs he has committed and unable to allow her to exploited as such, he kills his daughter.
As with all sci-fi concepts, the first thing I did was check if Philip K. Dick wrote a short story with a similar storyline (He kind of touches on the concept of dreams as entertainment as a short story). He didn’t, so I felt I was basically in the clear. People seemed to respond positively to it, and one night, in a straight up binge from 11 PM to 5 AM, I wrote my first draft, which like all first drafts, sucked major balls.
The problem was that the original idea was an admittedly sci-fi concept, and sci fi requires establishment of a completely alien world, which takes time. I realized would be impossible to sell and setup in the allotted five and a half minutes. Five and a half minutes is just enough time to tell a very simple story, and my script had too much complexity, passage of time, and required extensive voice over as a crutch to keep the plot points in order. So very late in the game, after classes started at USC in fact, I scrapped it. As much as I loved it, it wouldn’t work.
But still, there was something in that overall idea – a m
an selling their child to pay for his wife’s life saving operation, that appealed to me, and though the prodding of Kevin and my script class, we sought to boil it down. It changed to Chinese immigrants in America who get into a car accident, but very quickly we ran against a major logic issue – America, despite all the criticisms leveled at its healthcare systems, would never refuse to treat a pregnant woman, nor would any hospital deny life saving operations to those who need it, no matter what the income level. Sure, later on, you might get hit with the massive bill if your insurance wouldn’t pick it up, but the idea that he has to get money immediately was completely improbable in our society.
There is, however, one place in the world where this might possibly happen, and that was good ol’ China. The poorly privatized healthcare system there resulted in a very profit-oriented medical system, wherein if you couldn’t pay for your treatment, you were shit out of luck. I read stories of people dying on the steps of the hospital after they were denied treatment because they had no means to afford the procedure. Here, then, is a place where a hospital might deny service to someone without much money.
I had loads of misgivings about setting the movie in China – ones which Kevin eventually convinced me otherwise about. He made an interesting point – setting it in China wasn’t just a dumb meaningless stylistic flourish – by doing so, I was at least giving the movie a little bit of political commentary by simple fact that the fictional narrative that takes place could only take place here, where healthcare is so fucked. “Screw the other people if they think it’s a meaningless detail – this way your movie will actually say something,” is what basically Kevin was telling me.
So the story underwent one final change into a movie set in China about a man and his wife who, after delivering their child starts bleeding internally. The hospital will not do anything until he coughs up the cash to stabilize his wife, and the man is under a great deal of time pressure to get the money. With nowhere to turn, he takes his daughter, who in his eyes is almost worthless anyway as she is a girl, and sells her, not to a dream harvesting company, but to organ harvesters. His wife lives, but his actions have destroyed whatever relationship they had.
Finally, two weeks into the start of school, we had a semi-solid script that we could start throwing around and casting for. It boiled down the essence of the original concept fairly well, and had an ending I liked, as I’m not one for nice quaint endings, especially in short films or stories or songs.
“The hard part’s over,” I thought, “Now for the hard part – making people actually think this damn thing is taking place in China.”
It’s easier for me to post these up a little bit at a time, so I’ll keep throwing up updates as I finish them.
