Jobbers was the most complex labor of love I ever had the displeasure, (and sometimes pleasure,) to make. It cost me over thirty stitches, (not all at one time,) thirteen doctor visits, a girlfriend, a couple of friends, a good landlord reference and a large chunk of my sanity. I'd give you the short story, but with this project... There ISN'T one.
In 1999, I was a wrestling freak. I loved wrestling. I loved the story lines. I loved the larger than life aspect of it all. This craze had also help me change my life. I stopped smoking and started in hard on the gym thing. I had never aspired to be a wrestler, (more a behind the scenes kind of guy.) I had been toggling with ideas to make a Christopher Guest inspired "Mockumentary" of some kind for my next project. The three chip video camera had just dropped from the sky and everybody was suddenly doing documentaries on the Sony VX-1000. I had made a deal with the devil to get me one.
Well, I had a girlfriend at the time. One of those ones you only get to experience once or twice in a lifetime. She had walked by where I worked and I couldn't take my eyes off her. I had to have her and with a little persistence I got her. Had her for about three months and she dumped me. Heartbroken, I brushed it off... Well kind of. I used a bottle of Cuervo and my martial arts buddy, Justin that night to do so. After way too many we decided we were going to go down in the basement and beat on each other for a little while, Tyler Durden style. We beat on each other for forty-five minutes. So much I ended up in the hospital with twenty one stitches across the head. Here's where the story of my movie was inspired. We had filmed this whole ridiculous half wrestling, half fight and I had bloodied myself so badly I almost wasn't able to walk to the car to go to the hospital due to the loss of blood I had succumbed to.
HERE ARE THREE OCCASIONS WHERE PRODUCING, DIRECTING, STARRING IN, AND EDITING MY OWN FILM COST ME ALOT OF SKIN & BLOOD
On the way to the hospital, Justin swerving, me talking, I hit him with the idea of a bunch of educated older men getting together to back yard wrestle and were dead serious about it. How ridiculously funny, I thought it could be. Like Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman on steroids. Justin agreed. Heck, we already had a scene in the can. The carnage never ended and working with only an outline and needing more and more footage to tell the story, I kept shooting for two years while shooting porn to fund it and save little by little for an edit suite. With over 50 hours of footage I was going to have to have my own system. I could barely afford the two year production, much less rental time on an Avid suite.
POST PRODUCTION
I had only edited one other complex project in my life. I had 50 hours of footage and only a 40GB hard drive to do deal with. This was 1999, so fast externals drives were not heard of in those days so I literally had to capture three tapes at a time, put together the little clips from them and render them as Quicktime movies. (Thank goodness we shot the movie in sync or those tapes would still be collecting dust in a shoe box somewhere.) Every scene and shot had to be signed off on, a little at a time. I had to know what I was going to do ahead of time. No, mix and match. I had to do it all in my head or sketch out detailed storyboards, limiting the creativity to my first instinct. I decided to go the long way about it. Why? Because I had no money. I copied all the DV tapes onto VHS tapes and edited the movie from VCR to VCR like a crude telecine... Mixing and matching shots and scenes until I found the right mix and then I did the final cut on the Mac. Again, the non efficiency of the post production process came down to money. You’ll hear me bitch about this all the way through this book but ultimately it’s the thing that makes films better and faster. Forget what you’ve been told. A client told me one time, “I want my project done cheap, good and fast.” I told him to pick two, because whichever two he picked the third one it would not be.
So under that theory, Jobbers should have been the Cheap and Good. Honestly two years after the project began. It was only cheap so I guess I just squashed my theory.
The first run of Jobbers on the West Coast received less than average reviews. The first run on the the East Coast. (same movie,) got incredible reviews. I went home took some time off, then went back and made some major and minor adjustments, of course there were no minor adjustments because everything had to be reverse engineered and completely recut to make any changes. The second run was the exact opposite. The West loved it. The East hated it. What gives? So I cut back the major and did away with the minors and had a premiere. It was the night of my life. Then reality set in and I woke up two years later to have nothing. The movie was rejected from twelve film festivals, including the The Bad Film Film Festival. No shit and to add salt to the wounds, (literally,) my insurance refused to pay for my several doctor visits so I was stuck with $4000 in ER visits. I had starved for nearly ten years. During the Jobbers period and before, I had shot and cut porn to fund my films while using a trust fund and wages from the Olive Garden to pay my bills. (Neither income was enough to facilitate either life I was leading.) My father was tired of seeing me “piss my inheritance away” and quite frankly I was too. I was released from my job because my crappy attitude had carried over into my glamourous waiting tables job.
One night, after all was bad, I called my father and asked him to send me $500. I was coming home. He showed up the next morning and drove with me back to North Carolina. I had thought at the time I was just taking a break, anywhere from six months to a year off and then I would go back. I promised myself I would train myself the craft of filmmaking while in North Carolina and when I returned to LA, I would be better prepared to work my way up the ranks on Motion Picture Studio Films. I had the gear at this point. I thought being back in North Carolina may inspire me or at least make it easier to make films than it had been in Hollywood. I began teaching myself the way of the samurai whether it be making little films with friends, doing documentaries, weddings whatever for pro bonno prices. I had lacked a mentor or a real job in the profession where I could learn from somebody better than me. I knew there were plenty of those guys out there; Just not in the small town I lived in. The best learning experiences I had were seasonal trips back to Los Angeles to help my partner in crime shoot and cut adult films. From editing techniques to lighting hacks, I learned a lot in those week trips. Well, that one year turned into six years and then I found myself in Orlando where everything “amateur” about me would change almost overnight. I compare the Florida experience to Batman Begins where Bruce Wayne traveled far and away to Ra’s Al Ghul’s temple to learn how to master his talent. Then Bruce Wayne would return to become Batman. Mike McDaniel, of Havin’ A Beer With Mike, a small late night television show would be my Ra’s Al Ghul. I learned everything about camera, editing, marketing, and all aspects of production in that short year I was employed by him. He worked me to the bone everyday all day. There were somedays where the sight of a camera would make me cringe in fear, but I learned it and my sacred talent that had been stirring deep within me peaked to the surface. To emphasize my talents, I got Final Cut Pro Certified. As I began making preparations to return to Los Angeles and claim my crown, my girlfriend, (wife now,) became pregnant with our daughter, so as quick as I found the confidence to go do this thing is as quick as I realized raising a newborn on Ramen noodles while Daddy chasing a dream in the biggest most expensive city in America, wasn’t the most realistic thing to do. We moved back to North Carolina where our support was. I thought getting a job in the area in my field would keep me tied down for the moment and I found a job as a Producer for an advertising agency only to lose it after it was offered to me because of a blemish on my background report from my senior year of high school. I went to work for myself and my work was glorious. Everything I shot and cut looked great. I had become a professional and knew it. It was my time. When I knew I was going to be in North Carolina awhile I decided not to wait any longer and began to plan making a film.
In the winter of 2003, I began writing Meter from a conversation I had with a disgruntled gentleman at a local bar in Hickory, North Carolina. Three years later at a chinese restaurant, I put the finishing touches on it and locked it down for shooting. Throughout those 3 years I had taken bits of conversations here and there I had with different people and incorporated it into Charles' or Randle's, (the two roles,) thoughts. As bad as it sounds I never really took Meter very seriously at first. I just wanted to do it to see if I had really learned anything from my crash course in Orlando. I knew it was a twelve page script of nothing but dialogue and in the grand scheme of things just thought it wouldn't be the sort of thing people would get into. I just decided to shoot it because I knew it would be cheap and it would allow me to an extent to “shake the dust off.” Everyday life and paying commercial jobs continued pushing back my "weekend project," I found myself worrying about making Meter a quality film as opposed to a straight to You Tube Video. My thoughts at first were just to con a couple of my friends with a bottle of liquor to go out in a parking lot somewhere and shoot it but the more time that went by trying to secure a schedule, the more I realized that if I was going to spend all this time on it, I might as well do it right. Of course I had no money because my daughter was seven months old and I couldn’t sell my wife on the fact that spending a couple grand on this film would be good for my already non-existent career.
On the coldest night of the year, November 4th, 2006, Two actors, and three crew guys went downtown and shot the film from 6pm to 5:30am in its entirety. We had all sorts of issues from lights catching on fire to people walking right through the shot during a solid take, to the bass of the band playing at the nearby bar messing up all my audio to the cab owner indian giving us the cab halfway through the shoot. On my way home I was dead set I had just wasted everybody's time. It was the first time where I felt that had I invested some real money into this film it would have been really good, but again I had none and had no idea how to raise it and well, had just froze my ass off to shoot it. I wasn’t shooting it again. As post-production progressed, I found (along with Phil’s great lighting and Freddy and Mark's excellent performances,) my years of editing since Jobbers were all getting ready to pay off. After over 60 days of Post, (most of it on fixing the audio and removing the now infamous faint bass thump from the nearby bar,) Meter was done. The leads, Freddy and Mark and I previewed it and when the credits ran I think for the first time we all realized that despite the $500 budget, problems with location, absence of direction from me due to lack of time and man power, we had made a very entertaining hard hitting film. I remember Mark turning around as the credits rolled with this look in his eyes as if to say, "Damn, we did that?"
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