Floating: A Swim in the Woods - A Preview

"A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the Earth's Eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."

-Henry David Thoreau

With the following series on the film Floating, on which I was the First Assistant Director, I am breaking with one of the tenets of this site; namely, not using real names (no pun intended).

A large part of what made the experience of making this film memorable for me was working with two, then, young actors: Chad Lowe and Norman Reedus (much more on both to follow). A few other actors from the film also went on to notable careers.

It would have been awkward and inconceivable to transmit the experience of working on this film by creating pseudonyms for the two leads, and referring to them as "Actor A famous for (x)" and "Actor B famous for (y)." While I allow my posts to digress at times, cumbersome references are to be avoided.

Norman and Chad were great, and both endured a lot working on a physically demanding film. As the AD, if anything, disagreements with either had to do with them wanting to do too much (again, more later).

The relationship between a 1st AD and a director is always a tricky one, and, on this production, it was not best fit in the world. For various reasons, Bill, the director, and I got off on the wrong foot and the relationship just got worse, being saved in the end by a line producer who came aboard that I had worked with in the past and who I really respected. Having named the film, it's pointless to try and keep the director anonymous. Understand that in keeping with the tone of this blog, any negative comments regarding that relationship are offered with no malice toward Bill. I wish him nothing but the best, and, I'm sure he would agree, there isn't a chance in Hell we would ever work together again.

A little background.

The film took place in Concord, Massachusetts, on a small pond not very far from idyllic Walden Pond made famous by Henry David Thoreau. We filmed in the early Fall of 1996. Those who have followed this blog know that I have worked on a few films that shot in the Fall in idyllic settings, and the results were not always the best.

Floating is an emotionally brutal coming-of-age film on many levels, and features Van (Reedus) as a teen dealing with difficult circumstances. His alcoholic father is responsible for a car crash that killed his mother and left his father an amputee, dependent on Van for everything. Van, an accomplished swimmer, finds true friendship and someone he can relate to in Doug (Lowe), but even that friendship produces problems, as Van, Doug, and Van's friends try to find a "perfect life" in a place where everything seems perfect, but is far from it.

The idea of doing a film with actors in their late teens and early twenties in remote woods in the Fall left me with images of hormones gone amok, a woodsy version of Spring Break. That turned out not to be the case, though the surroundings had other challenges.

At 39 years old at the time, a number of features under my belt,  Floating was a film that had a lot of lessons in store for me. One of them was that while you bring all the tools in your bag, you have to learn which ones to use when, and just going to the same ones isn't always the answer. At that point, I was doing more UPM and line producer work than AD work, and putting on the AD hat, and being quite a bit older than most of the cast, a lot of the crew and the director, I sometimes fell into the role of "Dad," which was not always the best role as AD.

It was probably the first production where age really hit me. The terrain was uneven and difficult, which was a challenge, being a bi-lateral amputee below-knee. Flex feet work best by doing what a real foot does, transferring energy from the heel to the toe as you walk. That works best on flat, solid ground. On Floating, I was dealing with hills or walking on sand, neither of which are strong points for flex feet.

Add to that being older than most of the rest, and that first time you feel the aches of age (any of you who are approaching, or have reached, "middle age" know what I mean). It was my first sense of mortality since my operation.  Up to that point, I had been able to meet every physical challenge and feel great, and while I did on Floating as well, it was now not without drained energy and those few aches.

This is a moment we all hit, a place we meet differently. Like an athlete who has physically lost a step, you start to put your experience to use, getting a good jump in the right direction to make up for that lost step. You start to rely more on experience than dealing with things by the seat of your pants, although there is always plenty of the latter on a film set.  For better or worse, you start to anticipate.

A little of the "depth of (your) own nature" Thoreau noted.

In the next post, an introduction to the cast and crew, as well as prep on Floating.

N.B. - You may have noticed that my posts on Floating are not quite in sequence with other films: Man of the Century and 1999 happened later. Frankly, the issue of how to tell this story took me some time, so I put it off until now. I hope you will find it worth the wait.

1994-The Wonder Year:The Ones That Got Away - Pt. 2 - "Welcome to the Dollhouse"

"Yo, Weiner, you better get ready, because at 3 o'clock today, I'm going to rape you."

-Brandon, Welcome to the Dollhouse

I can't swear that the line above was exactly as it appeared in the movie, Welcome to the Dollhouse, when I received a script to consider, then entitled Middle Child, in 1994. I remember there being a reference to meeting  by a tree, but, in any case, it was not the mere appearance of the word rape that caught my attention.

Other scripts, both theater and film, had dealt with the subject of rape, but rape was not the subject of this script. In fact, what caught my attention was not the threat of rape, but rather that, in the context of the story, it was not a threat at all, but more akin to a date with the hot guy at school, and a date that Dawn Weiner, the 7th grader to whom it was directed, was actually hopefully anticipating.

Coming of age stories are grist for the mill of films in general, especially indie films. One wondering about the insanity that is our business would also wonder if anyone who made a film actually had a happy adolescence, but I guess all those people went on to become CPAs, or something akin.

So many things made this script stand apart. First, this unattractive, unpopular girl is the victim of the type of emotional abuse both at home and at school that she makes Carrie look like a head cheerleader. Any attempt to deflect this abuse is only made worse by the fact that her older brother is almost, if not more, unpopular than she is.

I was being considered as line producer because I had a mutual friend with one of the producers (at the time), Jason Kliot. I had the reputation of being able to do a lot with a little, and producers Kliot and Joana Vincente had a similar reputation with their company, Open City Films. Ironically, I firmly believe that this would be reason why I did not get the job.

I had made good movies, mediocre movies, and, well, a few clunkers.  What I had not worked on was a movie that was a critical success on a big scale, even for the burgeoning indie movement. 

To put it in context, it seemed like the time of miracles.  All around me, I saw films with minuscule budgets and sometimes razor-thin plots succeed on what seemed like nothing more than an edgy "feeling". Brothers McMullen, Clerks, and El Mariachi were all examples of this.

My resume was starting to get long, and it was getting to that point where I started to think, "What am I doing with my life?" I was starting to feel like Jack Lemmon (or later, the actor his spirit invaded, Kevin Spacey) in all those mid-life crisis movies (which seemed to last forever, from about The Fortune Cookie to Save the Tiger).

It goes beyond the feeling that life is slipping by, that the hourglass on your masculine prowess (and, with it, your physique) is getting bottom heavy.  You are in a field where people make their mark in their twenties, and you are already past the age where you can be a wunderkind.  

What ever happened to those heady high school and college days, when you were often "the smartest guy in the room" (or, at least you felt that way).

It was with this unhealthy attitude that I approached my interview with Jason, Joanne, and Todd Solendz. 

A line producer needs to be a take-charge guy, and I'd learned to turn interviews around, to take charge of the interview by coming in prepared with how I was going to navigate this ship, asking more questions of them than they did of me. 

This often worked very well, giving the exact impression I wanted - "Wow, this dude knows what he's doing.  We better hire him"

If it were the right approach, it was the wrong room.

First, although I only met Todd this and one or two other times, anyone who has met him knows that it is unlikely that that are the smartest guy in a room with him.  Todd has all those things you expect in a great artist - both book knowledge and a keen insight into the human condition, a perfect compliment of head and heart, and certainly a very agile mind.

Jason graduated summa cum laude from Amherst, and was a Fellow at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris; Joana had  Masters Degree in Philosophy from The Catholic University of Portugal.

Beyond that academic prowess, all three were veterans of the film wars.  Todd had survived an unhappy fling with studio films with his first feature, Fear, Anxiety and Depression. Jason and Joana were two of the real pioneers of not only getting creative small budget indies made, but distributed with Open City.

To take the other side of that old poker maxim from Rounders, if you look around the room and everybody there can be the smartest guy in the room, well, you, are the "other guy".

I started by expressing how much I admired the script, which was not the least bit flattery. I had never read anything like it. It was clear that the writer and force behind the script had a great intellect, but also that this man who was only two years younger than me clearly had an ear for the cruel language of middle-schoolers in a way that seems familiar all these years later, but was rarely if ever seen in any film at the time.

When they got around to what I thought would be the difficulties of the logistics of the script, I mentioned the two that struck me; where would they find a school that would let us shoot there if they read the script, and where would they find a girl the right age who had the self-confidence during her own puberty to handle the image-shattering action and dialogue of the script.

The answer to the latter clearly came in a remarkable actress, Heather Matarazzo, who later has made public her own personal struggle in school with the lack of acceptance of her sexual feelings for other girls.  Clearly, this, and naturally strong character, had toughened her for anything the script offered.

More importantly, she saw, as Todd did, Dawn's strength and confidence and pride in being different.

My background in Dramatic Literature and love of structure usually makes me pretty good at understanding both the spine and themes of a script, but missing this was only one of my misinterpretations.  Upon meeting Todd, I immediately assumed that he "was" the character of the older brother, the "king of the nerds." 

Gender had confused me here, and I missed the obvious; that much as Tennessee Williams is Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, Todd is Dawn. He is not the victim older brother, but the fighter "middle child".

The school location did turn out to be a problem, but the line producer who eventually was hired, Priscilla Guastavino, was a tough lady who I would later work with on a few projects. She got it done.

There was one area that I turned out to be correct, and that was in questioning Jason and Joana's suggestion that it be shot on 16mm to save money. My work with JR and on other projects had convinced me that the cost-saving measure many used at that time - shooting on 16mm and then getting it blown-up to 35mm if it got sold - was a bad choice, one that seemed to invite failure.

I had a good deal of success shooting 35mm using resold raw stock, which has to be differentiated from the even cheaper "short ends" method.  I would only use stock that was still sealed and resold back to a broker that I knew, not those that were repackaged from full loads. I had a very reliable broker, and had never had one frame of bad footage  (a fear many producers had with even resold).

I made an argument for not shooting 16mm, and though I turned out to be correct, and the film was shot on 35mm, I could see in the eyes of Joana and Jason that if I hadn't failed the interview before, I had certainly lost them here.

Other producers ultimately came aboard; with them, a bigger budget and shooting on 35mm.

As a postscript, a few weeks later, Todd called me, asking for a reference for Van, the AD I had worked with on The Rook and the ill-fated Corman film. Of course, I gave him a glowing reference; of course, he didn't get the gig either.

Of all the projects that slipped through my fingers, I most regret not working on this ground-breaking film with a great indie pioneer in Todd Solendz.