Further thoughts on Crooked Arrows

Let's see, it's been... three days since I saw Crooked Arrows, and I've been continuing to digest the experience of seeing the final product and subsequently news has come out that it banked $280,000 in 55 theaters which for a film in it's size in it's range of distribution is pretty strong, so expectations are positive that it will do well in wide release and after screening at Cannes (that's right, a movie I was in screened at MOTHERF@#%&!G CANNES OH YEAH) it's been picked up for international distribution to Europe and so forth, all of which is good news.

While I was mentally penning a note to send to the director, producers, etc congratulating them on the success of the film, I started to think about how culturally significant and remarkable it is that a film essentially oriented to such specific niche audience, the lacrosse and by extension Native American community, could be made on what is in film making terms such a modest budget (I think something like $10 million dollars total, don't quote me on that) could go on to be successful in a traditional model of distribution. What I mean to say is releasing it to movie theaters instead of just putting it out on DVD and video on demand services, which is increasingly the route many small and independent films are taking. The way that they've been able to make that work is largely through viral marketing using Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and you know, the internet.

This is process I've been aware of since I first started reading webcomics as an adolescent, which I think will go down in history as part of the really initial wave of "new media" before Youtube and all that stuff made it convenient to post movies to the internet. Back when dial up was still the norm guys like Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik of the comic strip Penny Arcade or Scott Kurtz of PVP (two of my favorite webcomics, and also two of the longest lasting and most successful franchises in the webcomics world) were able to turn posting pictures they drew onto the internet for free into a very viable business model. If you're not familiar with Penny Arcade, today it's like a multi million dollar company and one of the major voices in the world of... wait for it, video games. And it was by feeding into a demand unmet by big conventional media companies (and I should also add doing it very well), which is to say video gamers, they were able to turn their creative project into a fairly big thing culturally and monetarily (at least in their specific niche) without having a big publishing deal. Love him or hate him, Tyler Perry has been able to pull off a similar thing by catering to the values of a very specific and underserved niche group, middle class African Americans, by telling stories that cater very strongly to their world view and giving them to them on a regular basis.

If I'm not mistaken, Crooked Arrows is one of the first films post Tyler Perry to take another audience, again the Lacrosse community who has money to spend on movie tickets and will probably be willing to buy DVDs as well as t-shirts, ball caps, lacrosse sticks, etc and made a product catered to that community and offered it up to them again not on the internet or on DVD but in a movie theatre and telling them about it through very specific low cost marketing strategies focusing on the internet.

I mean Jesus, do you realize how much money goes into marketing a film like The Avengers or Transformers or your typical summer block buster like say Battleship which is in the process of rapidly sinking under it's own hubris while Crooked Arrows is looking to make a profit? Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. The ten million dollar quote I made earlier for Crooked Arrows I believe includes marketing. So I think it's very exciting that a small, independent group of creatives will have the ability in the coming decades to create a product catered to a specific audience and deliver it to them. And hey, I'm a part of it! Wow, that's pretty cool.

So there's all that, and upon further contemplation of the work I did in my own role... I have such a long way to go. As an actor, it's so easy to be super hypercritical of your work, and there's some of that in my reaction to seeing myself in the movie. And the desire to go back and rerecord everything. But what's done is done, and I guess what I failed to realize is how incredibly in over my head I was doing  a role that size in a feature of that scale, having just done a bunch of parts in like web series and student films and stuff, to say nothing of the amount of voice over work that was involved of which I had no experience or training. So looking at it from that perspective, I did pretty good. But I've had to scale back my expectations about what happens next. I don't think based on this performance, Judd Apatow is going to be calling me and offering me a role in the next Superbad. But at the same time, I've demonstrated that I can pull something like this off without having ever done any of the smaller kinds of roles you usually do in film and television before it's like "BOOM you're a principal, go". Which also speaks to the kind of risk that the director and the producer took by casting me, and how grateful I have to be to them for that opportunity. Once again, the task now is pulling together a reel that shows what I can do, figuring out what that thing is going to be, and honing it and perfecting etc. And what an exciting journey that will be.

The Arrow Flies It's Path (Full Circle)

Tonight I saw the finished product that is Crooked Arrows, the completion of my first journey into professional acting and feature films. Where to begin? It was an incredible stroke of luck combined with the actor's only true ally, preparedness, with which I found myself in this role. Filming it was kind of grueling, but also a growing experience where I met a lot of people and made friendships I hope to carry with me for the rest of my life. And at the end of the day, here is the document of that experience.

How is it as a film? Well, if you read most of the reviews, they're pretty much accurate. Formulaic, yes, but highly entertaining and with some really interesting original elements and a meaningful introduction to the culture and lifestyle of contemporary Native Americans, that isn't blanketed by tragedy or in the shadow of genocide. In the context of the film, they're a vibrant people, and it tackles the issue of reservation casinos with surprising depth... right up until Brandon's character tells Tom Kemp's evil developer that he can't sue because they're a soveregin nation... which I don't think would really hold up in court but WHO CARES THE CROOKED ARROWS WIN THE BIG GAME!

In case you couldn't tell, that was in my Chad Bryan voice. How was it watching Chad up on the big screen? Pretty surreal. Anytime I was on screen, I was basically counting the seconds thinking "OK that's about ten seconds of reel material right there..." To be honest, I'd been coming face to face in the last few weeks with the film actor's ultimate dilemenna, that being an utter lack of control of what of you gets up on screen, the opposite of theatre where you have nothing but control at the end of the day, because your in the room doing it from moment to moment.

So you can have someone in the editing room use only your worst takes, or you can be cut from the film completely. Much of my anxiety had been caught up in the latter possibility, from a conversation I had with the producers, it had crossed their minds. But thankfully, I wasn't. Not all of the lines I recorded made it in, in fact maybe half, but I recorded a lot of lines so that's a pretty good ratio. And most importantly, some really fun moments made it into the final cut which will then be making it onto my reel which will then be the basis from which I'll hopefully begin to develop my screen acting career.

Before I can do that, I have to do a lot of other things first. Like get the footage from all the other projects I've shot in the past three years or so, or as much of it as I can. And begin to strategize, where can I get representation, and how will I go about it? Which market do I want to go for, New York? Los Angeles? Do I stay in Boston? At the very least, this summer and fall I'll be doing theatre. Then this winter is pilot season (which is when there are the most auditions happening for all the upcoming TV shows being shot as pilots, etc you know that scene from Pulp Fiction), and if I'm going to make a move it has to be then. And you know I'm going to be blogging about it when I do!

Long Overdue for a... Blog Post!

Hello my poor neglected blog, how do I blog you? Let me count the ways. Actually I guess I probably blog about once a week. 

So let this be my weekly blogging. Seen a lot of theatre! What have I seen, let's see, 28 Seeds, Much Ado About Nothing with a Twist, Trog and Clay oh and Troilus and Cressida. All of which I enjoyed for different reasons, and which I could find things to criticize. Actually I think this is an interesting excercise, I'm going to compliment sandwich them one by one, meaning a positive note, a critique and a positive note. 

28 Seeds, I liked the music. Great songs and great instrumentalists who played with panache and style. Ok critique. I know the company spent some time workshopping the script, but I felt like it needed more. I felt the narrative was kind of disjointed and episodic, which was OK but I wanted a stronger narrative thrust to establish the characters, their individual conflicts and why we should care about them. As it was, they felt more like ideas and dare I say it cariactures although that feels harsh. Which isn't to say the actors didn't do some nice work. When I was in college Will Lebow had us watch a play and write two pages about a performance and if that actor had the three fundamentals be taught, intention, relationship amd high stakes. And they had that! So bravo. 

Next up was Fresh Ink. I thought this show was solid, with some really nice character work and especially strong use of lighting (all the light bulbs hanging from the ceiling were pretty cool, and I liked the sort of sepia quality they gave off like it was a live action black and white photograph). I did feel like the script was inconsistent, there was a stronger arc then in 28 Seeds and although the people in the play were quirky, they felt more or less like people and not just quirky character tropes. That said, the tone was very all over the place, and when it landed at the climax it felt like "OK this is the climax" but I didn't feel like the script earned the catharsis that the playwright was after or really landed the ending. Despite those flaws and inconsistencies, their were fun characters and funny lines, which the cast pulled off nicely.

I sort of feel like I just made the same review sandwich twice in a row, amIright? Liked this design aspect, thought the script was flawed, liked the acting. Well, to be honest, Troilus and Cressida is much harder to nail down to a culinary metaphor. I liked the idea of the production, and Troilus and Cressida is probably worth considering as the Bard's satire of war and the politics involved, and also it has some great pieces of text. But as a play, I don't think it was ever really finished, similar to Timon of Athens. According to some quote somewhere in it's Wikipedia entry, the version we received may have been edited or updated at some point to the fairly dark piece we have today from a previously lighter treatment of the Iliad, but who really knows. Ultimately, all of these pieces and plot lines get thrown up and Shakespeare starts to juggle them, then the action accelerates like something is about to happen, in this case Achilles kills Hector and then the play ends. Troilus ran close to three hours, which is just way too long, and in my opinion it had too many characters. I think for the production to work, it needed more of what ASP pulled out when it did Timon of Athens a couple of years ago, a whole lot of textual and structural rejiggering. In the case of Timon, they only kept a few of the characters and then the rest were portrayed by an ambiguous ensemble in painter's outfits (which I frankly never really got why that was, but whatever) and much of the story's thematic push came from sound design motifs and a really bad ass set. For this production, they had the Modern which they used in the round. Kinda cool, but I don't really know what it added. The set was some grey blocks that got moved around. There really wasn't much in the way of sound or lighting design. It had some nice performances, I liked Ross Macdonald as Hector, but many of the performances didn't feel lived in, more like some character traits and choices imposed over text. I think the solution was to dump as many of them as possible, pick one or two storylines and really tell those stories and make them work, as the play itself is just an overstuffed mess.

Then again, I'm talking like I have the recipe to make Shakespeare work, and I certainly don't, I'm a guy with a blog. And that's a tricky thing, because in Shakespeare's plays almost everything exists in relation to something else, so knowing what to cut and how to cut it without detracting from the whole is extremely difficult! I don't know how to make that play work, or how to make anything work, so I applaud Actors Shakespeare Project for bringing the show to the stage and I'm glad I got to see it, even if just to say that I have.

Oh, and the other show I saw recently was Bad Habit's production of Much Ado About Nothing. That was show was pretty much theatrical chocolate, it was just great. And I don't know what else to say about it! And also it was like two weeks ago that I saw it. Thinking back though, really strongly delineated characters, really crisp pacing and plotting, fun music, fun cast, really fun show.

What have I been up to? Well, I've been rehearsing Three Sisters and had the pleasure this weekend of delving into my big act four showcase scene, you know the one I'm talking about, with the declarations and the coffee. Man, what a fantastic scene. You know how sometimes theatre feels like a giant pain in the ass, all the commuting and memorizing and waiting around  but then you get to that moment where it's like "oh right fuck yeah this is awesome" and I had that working on this scene. So that felt good.

Oh and last week was the staged reading of The Last Jews by Larry Jay Tish with myself, my friend Chuck Schwager who brought me on board, the talented Amber Williams who I met that night and oh yeah BOBBIE STEINBACH who is of course awesome and it was kind of a dream come true being on stage with. I'm happy to say that it went really well, our audience of 30 or 40 people laughed a lot, had some great feedback and seemed to enjoy themselves throughly. For my part, I didn't blow it. So good on me!

Most immediately on the horizon... Crooked Arrows comes out this Friday. I'm excited and nervous to see myself, and also wondering how much of me you'll be seeing in the final cut. Whatever else happens with it, it will be a great cap to what was a fantastic experience. My fantasy of course is that it comes out and immediately Hollywood starts calling, but more likely it will give me some small piece of ammunition should I head that way, which I am actively considering. We shall see!