Chop, Chop

In the digital age, you can cut a movie, send it to your friends, endure a little electronic work-shopping, and get back at post-production--all without setting up a projector in a screening room at MGM, without, in fact, even sitting up out of your tilt-back office chair in remote Oak Glen.

That's pretty much what I'm doing these days--making a movie, or a television pilot. (There's a thin line between the two.) To me, it looks bully good--even after hearing the same dialogue over and over and over again. Parts of it still make me laugh out loud. One part got me weeping, but if you know me, that's pretty easy to do. (The same scene got Mallory crying, and that's not quite as easy to achieve.)

I've learned a few things: never cut a scene so that a character laughs at his, or anyone else's, funny line. If you let a character laugh, on screen, that cues the audience to laugh, and it's not really honest. I know that sit-coms depend on a laugh track, but that's something like taking aspirin when you don't really need it. It mutes the senses. To be honest, I violated this rule a few times, but only when the available material demanded it. I still have one painfully long, five minute talk-talk-talk scene in the dreary cavern cage, which is very authentic looking but still in need of art direction (lesson #2). I have to figure some way of chopping it, but the rest of the production--if you're even remotely curious--looks like it has at least as much potential as the standard network pilot-season mock-up. (lesson #3: never compare yourself to Hollywood; the big studios have enough money to put out some really boring stuff and still sell it: if you want to make it as an independent, it's got to be so great no one would dare reject it.)

Lesson #4: the exterior world, even in the country, is not quiet. It's full of wind, airplanes overhead, screaming u-pickers, and delivery trucks on the highway. Just film it and do the dialogue later. Hollywood calls this ADR (automated dialogue replacement) or looping. The actor comes back into the studio and re-speaks his lines, a phrase at a time, until they match the original production. They say Marlon Brando preferred looping, and would even mumble during the original shoot, so that he would get a chance to perfect his performance voice later. When you're filming out in the hot sun, waiting for a plane to pass by, you can understand its merits.

Lesson #5: telling a story is its own best reward. Take up the fiddle. Learn the piano. Memorize a few lines of Byron. Sing your own song. Otherwise, you'll just be out in the cold, in a crowd somewhere, buying political souvenirs, and hoping for a glimpse of the latest false-prophet.

And that is just too depressing to contemplate.