Oak Street Films

September 22nd, 2008 by Jarrod Whaley — Filmmaking, Politics

The fact that most most films made today border on complete unwatchability is probably due almost entirely to rigidity; producers seem to have collectively agreed, perhaps against their better individual judgment, that the making of films is a paint-by-numbers affair, and that the only viable course of action consists of adhering to a regimented and “tested” checklist of procedures. There has to be a script. It has to be revised, gutted, and re-written by at least seventeen different people. The scripts themselves must follow a structure which is so precise that “new” scripts might as well simply be scripts from 1982 with superficial changes made to the names of the characters, the setting, and the profession of the protagonist. The script must be the ultimate “blueprint,” and changes made to it once a camera has begun taking pictures are to be frowned upon. “Small” productions must cost a minimum of $1 million, and must employ more people than an aeronautics factory. In the midst of all of this rigidity, minor common-sensical deviations are hailed as bold experimentation, and a film produced with recourse to any minuscule amount of such common sense is dubbed “an iconoclastic tour de force of free-spirited, free-wheeling creativity.” To put it differently, producers have lowered their own bar so far that they can leap balletically over it while in a coma. This makes a producer’s life easier in some ways (and harder in others). It also happens to make for terribly predictable and intellectually vacant movies.

The stone-carved checklist mentality may be suited to modern Hollywood’s nightmare factories, but why should the rest of us–those of us who make movies rather than manufacture disposable cultural gewgaws–feel obliged to tick the same boxes? Adherents will say “because the established model works.” But does it? Can anyone really say with a straight face that the vast majority of today’s movies don’t flat-out suck? Should we really be heaping praise on producers who stray minutely from this model? Shouldn’t we be condemning them for their essential validation of it in not throwing the whole thing to the curb? Why is the act of tailoring a production model to the needs of that which is being produced viewed as an act of creative bravery? Should we not be viewing the opposite as creative cowardice?

My current project has no script–in fact, there’s not even a written treatment. It’s all in my head. The crew consists of…me. It will cost almost nothing, the “budget” being limited to the cost of occasional reimbursement of my cast for gasoline and the odd lunch. Traditional “wisdom” holds that these aspects of the production are limitations, but in fact they are beneficial structures. I am not working this way because I have to, or because I want to be a bad boy who breaks the rules. This rejection is not a rebel’s nose-thumbing at established principles for the sake of doing so; it is instead a pragmatist’s embrace of creative flexibility. Creativity and rigidity are essentially at odds with one another; by way of analogy, let’s imagine Don Rumsfeld and Jane Fonda together at a cocktail party.

In not working from a script, I can allow the project to morph and evolve as its production progresses. I can make extensive “re-writes” instantaneously in my head without the need to spend hours with the over-priced word processing software designed to help scenarists shoehorn their stories into the inhuman gridwork of “acceptable” screenplay structure. I, the filmmaker, can make the film instead of taking orders from someone who has neither operated a camera nor helped an actor find a character in him- or herself.

In not hiring 65,000 crew members, I can make my actors feel more comfortable in the situations I put their characters in. I can make my locations feel less like sets and more like places where humans interact. I can avoid spending vast sums of money on the salaries of others, who are supposed to be there to make things easier but who ultimately only bloat and bog down the production due to the concurrent need to coordinate all of that labor. I can focus more fully on telling a story, because I avoid the necessity to delegate every insignificant task to individuals who have made a career out of specializing in insignificant tasks.

In working without a budget, I can ensure that my collaborators actually want to collaborate–they aren’t here for a paycheck, so they must be here to make a film. I can feel absolutely free to work as I and my collaborators see fit; large budgets do not make a producer more free, as most of us reflexively assume–the more money being spent, the more the filmmaker is beholden to those doing the spending (who rarely if ever have any passion for or knowledge of actual filmmaking).

The traditional production model is bloated, arbitrarily delineated, and absurd. Its widespread acceptance even among independents is utterly nonsensical. Fudging at its margins while essentially upholding it is not a reformative or dissenting act; a true rebel can’t obey the big rules and flout the small ones. True rebels–in politics or in filmmaking or in any other context–aren’t doing anything particularly virtuous by rejecting an absurd extant order. Common sense is not a lofty virtue; it’s the default mental process of any reasonable human being. As such, true rebels don’t call themselves “mavericks” or revel immodestly in sycophantic praise of their so-called transformative actions. They instead methodically set about the task of doing things in the way those things should have been done in the first place, simply because the other way makes no sense whatsoever.

Tags: directing, flexibility, independent film, production, rants

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Filmmaking, Politics. The comments left in response to this post have their own RSS 2.0 feed. You can make a comment, or trackback from your own site.