Freelancing Funny People

So there's a billion different ways to start a career in the picture business. George Lucas was a student observer on Francis Ford Coppola's early film sets, and his ideas caught the great Godfather's attention. My friend Kailey Marsh (who'll probably run a studio one day, only to get fired when she produces one of my scripts, land a sweet development gig and win Oscars) was a development intern like me, then moved on to become a producer's assistant. My cinematographer buddy Ryan Elwell works at Entertainment Studios. (And if I know him at all, he's patiently, determinedly watching for his break)

Me, I'm finally picking up work as an editor. I just came off of an editing project for some grad students at Singularity University, located on the grounds of the NASA Research Center in Palo Alto. A day after completing my work there, I landed a one-off PA gig on a public service announcement-type project. That week alone was enough to cover my half of our rent here in the Land of Oak.

Freelancing seems to be the type of dice-rolling, edge-of-your-pants, palm-sweating goddam lifestyle that keeps things interesting. It's like working on MY NAME IS KHAN: every day is a new place, a new set of hysterics and problems and headaches, and is never anything less than damned strange and fascinating. I seem to be shying away from the staid, day-job existence I once sought out as a writer. And let's thank all the holy-rolling cosmic forces for that, yeah?

Or maybe I've become accustomed to this type of work-life. I certainly missed the fun after KHAN was over. Not the most stable of stabilities, right? After the funhouse ride of L.A., though, I must have decided deep down that life doesn't have to be boring, and normal is a make-believe standard that only applies if you're scared to explore all of life's funky little possibilities. And shit.

Which brings us to Judd Apatow's FUNNY PEOPLE. Seth Rogen's struggling comic, Ira Wright, sleeps on a pull-out couch in his buddies' living room. He's a funny man and a talented comedian, freelancing – emphasis on the free – for five minute spots between featured acts at the Laugh Factory until he takes a gig with the devil, AKA Adam Sandler playing a very Adam Sandler-ish sell-out Hollywood douchebag named George Simmons. Yes, it's Sandler's best performance, right up there with it's polar opposite, his nebbishy, insecure basketcase from P.T. Anderson's great PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE. It's also comparable to Jack Nicholson's Viagra-popping, skirt-chasing music exec from SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE.

They both play characters remarkably like themselves. Sandler in FUNNY PEOPLE is isolated, lonely, and takes advantage of the loose tail constantly falling into his lap. Nicholson doesn't date anyone younger than thirty, and his conceited Jack-ness masks a deep streak of self-loathing. Both are brave, stellar performances, in movies that are very good and strangely uneven.

Still, compare FUNNY PEOPLE to Judd Apatow's debut as a director: 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN is a terrific comedy, lauching Seth Rogen's career and Steve Carell's star into orbit. (Aside: a buddy of mine used to at the Border's book emporium on the Promenade in Santa Monica, which is strangely popular with celebrities. Harrison Ford stopped in, as did John Landis for a Q&A, as well as, uh, the bad guy from TWINS. And so did Steve Carell, who sauntered in dressed in the utterly clichéd tabloid uniform: dark blue windbreaker with the collar turned up, sunglasses, a "how DARE you recognize me!" attitude. I'm not saying he's a prick In Real Life... but I'm not saying he ain't, neither.)

But VIRGIN, for all it's charm, humor (the classic "Know how I know you're gay?" sequence) and real love for its characters, remains firmly two-dimensional. Within the first half-hour of FUNNY PEOPLE, the main characters become fully fleshed out and believable, apparently inspired by Apatow's experiences as Sandler's roommate during their starving days of beer and pizza.

FUNNY PEOPLE struck a deep chord with me for some reason. Maybe because I'm starting to write a broad comedy for the first time. "Comedy is for funny people," Sandler's George tells Ira at one point, after Ira has overstepped his boundaries in George's life during the third act. My wonderful girlfriend Sarah thinks I'm funny, but do I make you laugh? Lord knows I try.

High Desert Legends

Oakland reminds me of Inglewood. It reminds me of downtown L.A., parts of Koreatown, the neighborhood where Sarah and I used to go for Dim-Sum, and it reminds me of the way I looked at the world before I moved to Los Angeles.

While I working on the Bollywood film MY NAME IS KHAN, we had a few shooting days in Sacramento. When I first hung around that town, it seemed impossibly city-ish to me. I was raised in Rio Vista, California, for the love of whatever god can help me get a spec script read. During the second day of the Sac shoot, I found myself looking for Vitamin Water for Manish's assistant around K Street, which is the closest thing to south Beverly's The Grove that Sacramento can offer. Years ago, the place was bigger than life. Now, it was a deserted stretch of mid-town strip mall in a mid-size city in California. Capital or not, Sacramento is forever an afterthought.

That in mind, try this:

HIGH DESERT LEGENDS (PART ONE)

or

The Making and Near-unmaking of Andrew Wright's Thesis Film

We really should've known. Should've seen it coming. We all sensed it those first days, scouting the location in the horribly bright, terribly hot sun, running around a patch of desert that Andrew Wright's grandfather may have owned in name, but was clearly its own entity. I felt it the instant I stepped out of the cool, air-conditioned backseat and reeled back a step, slugged with the full force of the desert at high noon. Later, DP Ryan Elwell would confirm a communal sense of dread: "I was walking through the shots with Andrew and looking at the sun, the sky, the snake dens... I remember thinking, We're going to try and shoot in this?"

And it's the very senseless essence of such an idea that attracts me to this kind of thing.

I hadn't been assistant director in a long while... aside from a pickup shot-reordering while shooting Mary's narrative elements scene, I hadn't done it since we all shot our portfolio short films, that grand and ancient, epic span of days long gone (and perhaps best forgotten)... the summer before, roughly. Living in Santa Monica. The house with the spare room, left empty since day one... acquiring rats and neglecting them until the poor neurotic things had to be left to their own devices...

"As must we all," I couldn't help muttering. It's Day Two. One twelve-hour span of Student Filmmaking in the high motherfucking desert down, about three more to go. I open the motel room door, take a few steps outside and stop dead in my tracks.

It was five in the morning. The sky the day before had been a smooth and healthy blue at the horizon, deepening to purple, then maroon, then a sheen of black at the very height of what I could see of space. The sun was up and grinning down at us by seven – by nine or ten, we were suddenly seeing the true, crushing nature of the high desert. That was on Friday, Day One.

As AD, I had done the most complete schedule I could come up with... with the exception of Ryan (our DP) and Tammie (his girlfriend and our production designer), the vast majority of us had no frame of reference for filming in a desert. We'd been in high, dry country before, shooting Script Supervisor (and part-time member of the art department, by default) Mary Stasilli's roommate Casey Fergeson's thesis, but as Ryan pointed out, that was different. That land had been tamed. It was used to our kind and not only tolerated our presence, but had been long since cowed by that blind, dumb, indomitable force, human willpower. And making a movie takes a whole shitload of that, on everyone's part.

The hot days on Casey's shoot were unpleasantly bright, with a weird, dry humidity that doesn't make sense trying to describe but no matter. The first day of shooting "Legend of the High Desert," Andrew Wright's thesis film, was brutally hot. I had checked the weather for that Friday... 104° Fahrenheit. Fine. I'm from NoCal, and will match your evil, sweltering afternoon in high August 405 traffic with any windless, cloudless summer day in downtown Sacramento, nearly paralyzed by the heat, humidity, the hot stench of baking asphalt and exhaust dripping from your skin and clothes... or any late-July, 101° mid-morning on the levee, with the sand and mud drying out and stinking to high heaven of the decades of swamp rot and sewage flowing down the Sacramento River... but those were still places that you knew, felt comfortable in. The desert was something else.

I stepped out of my motel room on the second morning and looked at the sky. I couldn't believe it: it was raining. Of all things. Of all fucking things imaginable after that miserable, hot, demoralizing, hot fuckin' hot as fuck day... This must not happen. It can not happen.

"Is it fucking raining?" came a low voice to my right. Danny Puckett had his room's door open and was peering at the sky through his glasses, black horn-rims almost identical to my own.

"Yes." I said. He just shook his head, turned around and slammed his door. There really wasn't much else to do at that moment. I felt the same way.

This is where the rational, reasoning world of basic, common human logic begins to break down. Only pure fools would try and film in that desert on a day like this. And this is when I truly, really discovered that if you want to call yourself a filmmaker, you not only have to attempt the impossible, but slap impossible's bitch-ass face and sit it the fuck down. Nothing's impossible. What one man can do, another can do. This is David Mamet and his judo fixation, Darwin, I. Ching, fuck it man, you got to roll with it...

Besides, somehow, this is my fault. As the AD, everything's your fault. And there's a rush in that when things are rolling smoothly: the DP and ACs are just truckin' along, the actors are troopers, cool to work with, totally cooperative, and all the while delivering pitch-perfect performances while getting clobbered by the blistering sun... the director's happy (for a change, and who could blame him), and the crew hums with a great, positive vibe... this is thanks to you, too... but like every other component to making a movie, if you're doing your job right, no one should notice.

There's a natural high in this that maybe only I could feel. God knows I’m not a pro, but I kind of felt like one by that last day, running up and down a desert road, hollering at the crew to get the shot while promising these leathery, sun-happy, tweeked-out redneck locals that we'll be out of their way in just five more minutes...

I'm certain everyone feels a different version of it. Saturday morning, I was feeling the day's early chill – absent the morning before; the heat had already been in the ground by sunup – and, in my head, drastically revising the shot schedule I'd typed up last night. The High Desert Motel is our base camp for this shoot, which already feels as epic as most of us figured it'd have to be... we're talking about Andrew, after all... there's a sense of endless scale to the stuff he directs, even when it's two people talking in a room... so it's only fitting that as I bustled around, waking up the crew (I've had to do this before... the sadistic Scorpio fucking asshole in me relishes their disgruntled growls... thank God Andy Klun, key grip and practiced smoothie, took it on himself to be their example and popped right up whenever I opened the door), printing out a shot schedule that would be slashed to bits in good time, I was thinking of the motto paired with Andrew's Wrench Head logo: More Epic Than Your Mind Can Comprehend.

Indeed.

Reels

Are we happy? Content? Searching for everlasting meaning in a mad, mad, mad, mad world?

Naturally. And so on, and so forth.

Here's my editing reel:

http://vimeo.com/3758252

And just for the sake of the good, clean American fun it always is, here's SKILLET, a chilling little horror short I wrote and edited, for last year's 48-Hour Film Project... (we didn't win, but it wasn't my fault... I don't think.)

http://vimeo.com/4139474