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April 23, 2008 by Dave.
As a writer, part of my job is to figure out what project fits into what form. There are stories the can be told in almost any form— song, poem, short story, theatrical play, etc; and there are some stories that only work well in one form— could Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” ever survive outside of the film medium?
Last May, I was allowed to participate in a pitch session to NEHST Studios and their founder Larry Meistrich (Shooting Gallery) at Rutgers University. I pitched them my strongest script to date (about the homeless situation in NYC) in hopes to get funding for the project. It was a 2-3 minute pitch that went pretty well. However the problem was the project itself. As I was the last pitch, Mr. Meistrich talked about the new company. From what I gathered from the talk, 10 years ago my pitch would have sold an independent studio on the film. Today it is too risky a venture. In fact, the pitches that most piqued the new company’s interest were pitches for internet based ventures. Having worked on that script for a year and spending another 10 years trying to get it off the ground, I spent the first half of the drive from New Jersey pissed and depressed about the state of film today and my dwindling chances of getting my scripts produced. However because I am a writer, I spent the second half of the drive back to Boston trying to understand the format of writing for internet based productions and figuring out how to crack it.
By the time I got back to Boston, I had the strains of two different ideas in mind. One was a sitcom based on vlogs, and a drama about a soldier overseas communicating with his family back home. Nothing was firm; I just had the vaguest of ideas. I spent a good part of the summer doing some research and prep work for the sitcom idea, but I also approached a friend of mine at work, Bryan Ferreira, about working on the military drama idea together. What made the war story an interesting prospect would be that it would really use a bunch of different mediums into one. It would be done on the internet so that’s video/film production. I thought that it would work best if it was done in a split-screen “computer’s eye” view of the action format, so that was more the realm of TV/film. And I felt the best way to get that done was to do it all in one take, live to tape, so that brought in live TV and/or theater where anything could happen.
When I looked at how to do the war drama, I was torn about how to do it. Normally I’d try to get a Latino character in the lead. But if I did that, I would also have to deal with the immigration issues that were at its height in 2007. It would be hard enough to get an honest portrayal of the interpersonal dynamics of a US soldier’s family and the dynamics of pro-war and anti-war conversations, that if I had to deal with immigration on top of that I would lose my mind. So I went back and forth as to what to make the lead character: White or Black? Plus should the family be in the Boston area or somewhere else? Each posed its own problems as well as their own rewards.
What I did then was ask Bryan if the family should be White or Black and where they should be from? Of course, Bryan said they should be Latino from the Southwestern US. I was so ready to kill him at that point. However when I confronted him, he made this point about his choice: the idea is dramatic in that you’re seeing a person being sent to fight for his country when the country he’s fighting for is changing out from under him. That concept stuck with me and soon possessed me. What I thought would be a huge headache for me turned into a fascinating challenge, one that I was willing to take on.
August was spent figuring out who these characters were and creating biographies for them. While the soldier is the main character, I had to figure out the family dynamic as well and the only way I was able to do that was to figure out who the father was. Having the parents come, not from Mexico but from Nicaragua, really opened more avenues for me. We could bring in the whole US history of covert military campaigns and ways their actions destabilized countries in the past, as well as dealing with the 1987 amnesty, both during the Reagan administration, and how those actions (and the administration) reverberates within national policies today. Also we would set the story in the start of the war. This was also one of Bryan’s suggestions. The brilliance of this would be that the drama of the piece is caused by hindsight. We would look back on the way people reacted to and recounted events back then with knowledge of what has happened in the following five years of armed conflict, as well as the escalation of the anti-immigration fervor from small rumblings to a mass movement. Yet I still had to tie all this in within the microcosm of one family.
During this time, I also got back in touch with my town’s public access station, Arlington Studio. I worked with them years before and wanted to look them up to, not only see if there was any way they could help me, but to see if they were still around. At one point they were being run by Comcast and there was some discussions about not renewing the contracts with Comcast and going non-profit and independent. At the town day in Arlington, MA, I was walking around and they had a booth up. They were now officially a non-profit and doing their own thing without Comcast to serve the community. And they were an HD studio. I signed up with them a short time later and basically had an HD studio at my disposal as well as a distribution outlet (they could both help me launch it online and show it on their cable channels)—all for an annual fee of $20. When I went to the IFP conference in September, which was heavily geared towards explaining and demystifying the whole internet/DV production and distribution side, getting this series written and off the ground was all I could think about.
Once all the bios were finished, I started working out he pilot script. I kept showing the progress to Bryan, as I considered him a co-creator of the project. He gave me notes and I worked everything out. All this writing was being done while holding down a full-time job and being a father to a fussy five-year-old. I got very little sleep but it would all be worth it. By the time December rolled around, I had the pilot script ready to go. It had everything that I was hoping for. However I would discover that with all the hard work of research, creating a “bible” and a time line, this would be the easy part of the whole endeavor. My job as a writer was over and my job as a producer/director was just beginning.
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April 1, 2008 by Dave.
One of my favorite moments of the NALIP conference happened on the very last day at the very last luncheon, which was really the last thing I expected. The luncheons were held outside the main restaurant of the resort. They set up a tent overlooking the Pacific and the Laguna hills. If there is one thing I love about this conference is that it’s the one film conference I’ve ever gone to where they feed you—meals are included in the registration price! No one ever does that. I love that they go by that old film crew mantra: you don’t have to pay ’em, but you have to feed ’em. Of course it could also be a another thing: who ever heard of any Latino get together where there isn’t food?
Anyway I was hoping to sit with the other volunteers (check out my last blog to understand why), but that table was completely filled up. I looked around and sat down at a fairly empty table except for three older gentlemen sitting and finishing their meals. For the most part, I ate in silence but I could hear their conversations. The three of them were talking about acting. The first day of the conference was an actor’s fest put on by Back Stage, so every Latino actor in town was here for that, too. All three of these guys— Ramon Hilario, Henry Vega, and Louis Olivios— were busy joking about people they knew on the sets or stuff they auditioned for. They were relatively new to the acting scene. From their attitudes and conversations they were too busy living life to worry about acting until recently only being around it for, at most, the past eight years (at least on film). These guy reminded me—and almost sounded like— those older guys sitting on the stoops back in Brooklyn who drank maybe a little much, always smoked too much and always had some sort of fun and wild tale to tell to anyone who would listen. They were chatting away about acting and auditioning, when one of them mentioned an actor that guested on the TV show Cane. I thought I knew who it was that got the role but I was wrong. Still I told them what I thought and jumped headlong into their conversation. I couldn’t tell you a lot of what was said, but I was laughing most of the time.
As this was the final luncheon of the conference, the heads of the conference were up thanking everyone from the executive directors on down. Of course us volunteers were thanked as “all the volunteers who made the conference happen.” I knew the guy at the mike saying thanks to everyone that he could see, but I wasn’t going to say anything to him. The next thing I know, my name is being screamed out by Henry, Ramon and Louis behind me to the guy on stage. My friend on stage looks over to the table, says my name, and those three guys behind me start cheering and clapping—and I’m pretty sure only those three in the entire tent clapped. But that was the nicest applause I think I’ve ever received in my life. Hands down it was my favorite moment of the conference.
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