My Time as a Human

Mark Gill (former president of Miramax) is the most popular prophet of the end of the indie film world with his now famous sky is falling speech. What he said was nothing particularly new or surprising, but it sums up what has been happening of late. Where once there was a dim hope of having a career of some sort as an independent film producer, that dim hope has become the candle that just went out: if I close my eyes and focus I can still just maintain the illusion. In many ways struggling to become a filmmaker has become more like fighting the odds to become a rock star.

I’ve previewed enough film submissions to know that even though 5000 feature length films were entered into Sundance this last year, it’s doesn’t mean that many were, despite their two million dollar and up budgets, even watchable. Statistically only about five of those have a chance of making money. But it does mean that there is so much noise in the system that it’s almost impossible to be noticed.

Admittedly, I spent far too long working on other people’s projects before doing my own. This has put me a bit behind the curve, but what I’ve seen is that many of those friends who’ve produced a lot more and better work, have had successful festival runs, and even received small theatrical releases still aren’t bringing in any more food money than I do. In a quick informal survey after a recent shoot most were living off of about $9k a year. I felt like a wealthy baron with my $13k and health insurance.

This is the moment when you wake up and realize that you are not building a career, but are in fact living much more like a painter. (Although, sadly, the brushes are far more expensive.) It doesn’t make me want to quit making films. On the contrary, I feel liberated. If I don’t have to fuss about the potential commercial success of projects I work on, I can focus instead on making things I care about. Their value is determined entirely by my own metrics, and not where they might take me.

I’ve also been repressing my other artistic outlets, like writing and music, so that I could focus on film projects. This shift also means that taking time to work on music, either for one of my current film projects or an album of children’s music, becomes more viable. Without profit there is only art.

Kevin Bewersdorf comes from a different world. Despite his work in indie film, he considers himself to have been in the realm of painters and installation artists from the beginning. We exist in a new era wherein individual copies of an artwork have no inherent value. Everything digital is immediately pirated and available for free online. So borrowing from the world of prints, he made limited edition DVDs of one of his recent video installation projects and sold them, with certificates of authenticity, for extremely high prices. The buyers know they can get a copy of the work itself for free online. What they are buying instead is a piece of the artist’s work that may increase in value as a collectable over time and, more importantly, they have the opportunity to support a valued artist’s continued productivity.

I should also note, for the record, that Kevin’s deadpan, playfully sardonic artwork has been hugely inspirational to me lately. Highly recommended are his photographs and his Four Sacred Logos bit.

So while the road may have become rough with the remains of broken dreams fallen to earth, it doesn’t mean that I have to stop and turn back. If the sky really is falling, I can finally take my head out of the clouds and realize that what remains to be seen is just as beautiful.

The story sounded simple enough. Four filmmakers drive down to San Antonio to shoot a story about ghosts in a crumbling old mansion… just as a massive hurricane begins sweeping across Texas. It was as we began loading the van that I first noticed something odd. “Gee Bryan, I don’t see any lights,” I said. “Of course not,” he replied, “There’s no electricity”.

The house had been falling apart for many years. The massive grecian columns were shedding the last of their sun-bleached paint to reveal the cracked wood beneath. The old chain link fence that wrapped the front of the place was completely overgrown with an ivy bursting with purple flowers. Bees swarmed around and through them and danced about the metal sign that read, “No Trespassing”.

The porch was a nest of rotting teeter totter boards that groaned and cried quietly beneath my feet as I heaved camera equipment to the door. Just inside I swung the sound mixer off of my shoulder and dropped a handful of sand bags. The owner of the neighboring restaurant had bought the house out from under the previous owners after the trouble started. Now he seemed to be using it as a storage space, as I was surrounded by tall, thin metal mushrooms of the sort used to heat an outdoor patio during the winter. Stepping through the little forest I had to climb around a pile of fat CO2 canisters squatting in the corner and past a huge rolling metal storage container.

The modern tools of the restaurant trade were loathe to extend any deeper into the house than the front room and I left them behind to explore. The railings had all been removed from the massive staircase and I could already see the evidence of the young woman’s chainsaw work. She had stripped the house of all drywall or plaster and left only the bare skeletal structure. Next to the stairs the floor had been torn away as well, and I could see through the lines of boney ribs to the earth below. Under the stairs, protruding only halfway up through the remnants of a floor was a sink, still installed and complete with copper pipes running off into the bowels of the house. It was as though it were designed for babies to crawl across the floor to the bowl to bathe. Equally as mysterious, a toilet sat resting, isolated, on top of the exposed floor supports.

I climbed up past the outline of an archway to the second floor where the damage was much the same with the exception of one room. Some of the ceiling and three of the walls had been covered with new drywall and painted a bright pink color. The remaining wall was no more than exposed studs, and light shone up past the ends of the floorboards. At the center of the room a brand new ceiling fan hung down into the room. It was like a guest in a tuxedo showing up for a barn raising, dangling from on high to survey, with nose held high, the piles of old nails, rat feces and raw wood thick with years of dust.

I left this odd oasis to climb a metal ladder into the attic. Here the low roof sagged inwards towards me like a wet blanket. Instead of supporting or repairing it, they had popped in a new skylight that protruded from the tired wood like a pimple. Again all of the wood structure was exposed with the exception of but a fragment of original plaster, from which a tuft of pink insulation dripped towards a hole in the floor. Despite this, absurdly, to one side was a set of sliding glass doors that opened onto a tiny, exposed portion of the roof.

The dreamers who had come to this house years ago had arrived with great vision and little skill or money. The tall bamboo helped hide the eyesore from afternoon diners, but at some point the little mexican restaurant next door couldn’t play their music loud enough to cover the screaming as the young couple began throwing each other’s clothes out onto the street. Their fights grew louder and more frequent. It was the chainsaw being taken to the walls that finally lead the restaurant owner, fearing for his business, to buy them out.

No one really knows what happened to bring them to that point, but anyone who has tried to rebuild an old house (including Wendy Spies and myself) might have a few ideas. Our fearless director Bryan Poyser had a few ideas of his own, and you can see how they play out when he completes this next film.

Sadly it didn’t turn out, as I’d hoped, that a big budget reality film was being shot of us. I kept waiting for the moment that the door wouldn’t open and we’d be forced to spend the night in the place, or for something to grab my leg. Instead we had absolutely incredible natural light that made each shot look like a million dollars. At one point, watching Kevin walk up the staircase into golden light filtering through light clouds of dust, we all swore we’d just seen him ascend into heaven.

Soon this old house with all of its history and mysteries will be rolled off into another young couple’s dreams and the land left behind will become a parking lot. Even then, it could well be the place that a pair of future newlyweds emerges from a romantic dinner at the restaurant next door to share a first kiss. I’m glad we were able to add one more piece of history, and capture a bit of the soul of this place before it moves on.

All photos by Kevin Bewersdorf

While many frolicked in the high winds and long dusty white outs in the Black Rock Desert this last weekend, some gathered to commemorate the event here in Austin at an event called Orfunner. (’Cause we’re all burn orphans for the year!) It was like a little “taste of Burning Man” with one flame throwing car, one thump throwing DJ, a couple of fire spinners and two small chill domes. At the center of it all, like something flown in from another time and place, was the glow of the outrageously overdone Blue Moon Roadhouse featuring live mad-lib sock puppet blues karaoke and, among others, me.

As my last film project has been winding down I’ve been allowing the long stifled and barely contained musical Kai to emerge. The result has been a slew of song ideas and a nearly insatiable desire to play guitar. I was struggling to get some tech work done the other day but I kept finding myself mired deep in guitar porn, checking out old videos of Stevie Ray or websites of minutia about the history of the EVH Wolfgang guitars. This was intensely frustrating because web surfing for guitar porn wasn’t anywhere on my priority list. I wasn’t getting tech work done and I wasn’t playing guitar either.

At last I just picked up my old Strat and played my heart out for the last few hours before going to bed. The lights were out and I’d just dropped my head onto pillow when I could almost hear the snapping sound as the relays clacked over in my brain. Suddenly I knew just how I was going to restructure my tech solution and solve my problem. Brains are mysterious things that way.

So I decided that it would be worth heading out to Orfunner for a day to do nothing else but play guitar all day with my friends at the blues bar. I pulled up, loaded my gear into the tent, and we started practicing immediately. Everyone left for a break and I goaded Nobodobodon up on stage to tell some really terrible jokes, in part so that I could keep vamping away behind him.

When night arrived to drape the Blue Moon Roadhouse in the more appropriate robes of murky darkness, the bar rose to take it’s place in a long history. The walls were dipped in blue light and the bar tables were moons. A hand painted, full sized cityscape backdrop filled in behind the band. Along the pilers were framed photographs of BB King, Jimmy Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn and, of course, Patrick Swayze who appeared in the film, “Roadhouse”.

The first notes chords of Red House punched from the ancient speakers, leapt out into the night and immediately began grabbing people by the ears and dragging them in. Soon the club filled with tiki-cup wielding patrons and hooting tutu clad cowboys. With Michael’s heckling and my reassurances we were able to get quite a few people to step up to the mic. Some were actually quite good vocalists and improvisors but most made use of the stacks of cue cards written mad-lib style by the audience members. They were everywhere, intently scribbling out tales of their deepest woes with sharpies. Lost cats. Shaving cuts. Embarrassing unintentional bowl movements.

There were swing dancers and guest musicians. We even took things down a peg for a few jazzy spoken word numbers. The band sounded good, gelled well and did a great job of working together to come up with off the cuff musical bits, dropping right into grooves and playing off of each other. The sound system Aaron put together was fantastic, and I couldn’t get over how well my old friend, my pink ‘62 re-issue Strat, was singing. My playing is a hundredfold better when I sound good and can hear myself well. My friend Jose had been out of town for quite a while and despite my having grown a beard and lost the glasses, he claimed the reason he couldn’t recognize me right off was my playing. “You were playing so much better than I remember that, combined with the hat, I thought you were some great seasoned old blues guy!”

In trying to duck out quickly the next morning I was only waylaid once for an hour or two, and it was time well spent getting to know some people I’d been wanting to talk to for a while. I loaded up the van and cruised back to town to be welcomed by my projects now freshly infused with life and proceeded to knock out both code and video editing progress like they were the best things in life.

There is an update on Andrew’s story. Hopefully he will be home in America with all of his footage soon. I’m happy to see that the translator was also released!