The Rook - Part 6 - Crows and Confusion

'

'Do you realize they've distanced themselves from the church?'' he says. ''They don't even believe in the tempting. The spiritual reunion.'' This is the most detailed description we hear of the dominant religion of this time and place. 

NY Times Review (1999) 




The quote from the NY Times review above gives a good deal of insight into the end of production and the afterlife of The Rook, which, in terms of my career, was almost more important than the shoot itself.

Principle photography ended with our adventures in Mohonk, shooting not only along the mountain but in the  pristine wooded areas below, which worked for the sense of timelessness.

We came in pretty much on schedule.  While the original hope for the budget was even lower, the final costs after the first cut of the film was a lot less than films that are shot digitally today, this for a film shot beautifully on 35mm with great art direction that, to some extent, became a cult classic.

 I went on to do movies with  Van, our AD, and Zack, our DP.  Charlie, our gaffer, was an important DP and camera person with me on future projects.

What influenced me most for years to come, though, was my relationship with Eran one of those instances where things that seemed like problems turned fortuitous, beginning with the arcane state of petty cash accounting previous to my arrival.

I recently worked on a small art film project as AD where the line producer neglected problems on set, with the excuse that he was dealing with the budget, which should be part of the job, not the entire job.  I kept us up-to-date with our current expenses, made sure we had enough money to finish the project, and worried about where the money spent previous to my arrival fell later.

Once we wrapped production, I stayed on to help with post-production, and spent time finishing up the accounting.  Those days were less stressful than production, and where I truly got to know Eran, the director, as an artist and a person.

Eran had no interest in doing what others had already done, and while this led to a certain level of frustration for him, it matched elements of my personality.

All my life, whenever I got bored, I moved on; schools (transferred high schools after sophomore year because I no longer felt challenged), majors, apartments, relationships (sadly), and mostly jobs.  While freelancing has it's financial problems, it should mean each project is a chance to start anew.  Unfortunately, line producing can be a grind, especially when people's idea of being innovative is copying other innovators.

Eran was unique, and if he found something that worked, it meant it was time to move on.

He worked closely with the original co-producer Alan to edit the film, using a combination of intimidation and support that was his trademark.  That cut lead to a very successful experience at Mystfest, where The Rook took awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay.  Eran and the movie were very well received at that festival, and it lead to our first direct-to-video sale.

Like most filmmakers, Eran sought theatrical distribution.  In many cases, this means making the movie more palatable for a wide audience. Not Eran.

Reviews and reactions fell into three categories: the good, the bad, and the confused.

The  good sounded like this:

"This picture looks as though it were written by a committee, but not your usual group of Hollywood honchos brainstorming in the backlot of Universal Studios. The panel would be composed of Franz Kafka, Soren Kierkegaard, Jules Verne, Sigmund Freud, Edgar A. Poe, and George Orwell. They'd bat around some ideas for a fiction, cramming their signature elements helter-skelter into a one-hundred page manuscript. The novel would eventually fall into the hands of Richard Purvis, looking to compose his first feature screenplay, and Eran Palatnik, seeking to direct his first feature movie. A limited budget would allow these two fellows only eighteen days to shoot the genre-bender which, in just 84 minutes, could be classified as noir, sci-fi, horror, political, or what-have-you, but not comedy, as the dialogue lacks humor and its principal performer never smiles. "

and

Turns out "The Rook" is better than you might expect, an intriguing detective story whose pieces come together only in the concluding moments with a production design that mixes clothing from the early 19th century with outfits of 1950s design and positions a computerized office against the English countryside circa 1800. (Harvey Karten, PhD)

and

The Rook is effectively atmospheric, and there are occasional scenes that function as pointed political commentary...(Reelview)

and 

"The most inventive art direction since Brazil" (Village Voice)

The bad sounded like this:

But the narrative never comes through with the information -- any information -- so the experience of this generally soporific 84-minute film is that of being teased and abandoned.

and

...but the main story doesn't work. The film is dull when it should be engrossing, and the material is stretched ridiculously thin to reach feature length. Donovan, who typically plays understated roles, virtually vanishes into obscurity -- Cross has no personality. (Reelviews)

and

This sluggish bundle of stylized anachronisms is intended as a genre-leaping mind puzzle, but even the most patient auds will give up the game long before its drawn-out denouement. Look for a quick move to video.(Variety)

In both the good and the bad, there was the confused:

 We also never know who the revolutionists are, what the revolution is about or where (some imaginary country?) all this takes place. (Greenwich, where Abbott lives, is apparently not far from the town of Sutheridge, where the film takes place. And the murder victim is from Carmel, but something tells me that's not in Northern California anymore.) O.K., it's an allegory, but of what?  (NY Times)

Confusion continued with the title, and even this PhD gets it wrong (oh, how confused he is!):

Palatnik means for us to figure the significance of the movie's title, and if I may take a stab at it...a rook is the chess piece representing the castle, in this case the particular citadel of Kafka's story which was made into the film "The Castle" in 1968. Rudolf Noelte's movie starring Maximilian Schell is, like "The Rook," an appropriately vague filmization of the novel in which K, a land surveyor, is called to a castle for work but (like John Abbott, at least symbolically) is unable to gain admittance. (Karten/IMDB)

In fact, this is the inspiration for the title:

These members of the  crow family work as a unit to solve problems, but one of the more interesting aspects of their behavior is how they reportedly deal with dying members.  They will surround them, then kill them.  As usual, it had nothing to do with one might expect at first glance, namely, the chess piece, though chess would seem the more obvious reference for a mystery.

Eran's response to all of this was to completely re-edit the film with at least two different editors over the years, at no small expense, and the re-edit, if anything, made it more mysterious.

Eran and I went on to attempt other projects, but finding a script that inspired him was difficult.  Eventually, we wrote as script together, an erotic-romance piece called Avalon of the Heart, and I will document the experience of writing that and chasing the funding in a future post.  That would come way down the line.

Working with Eran was always challenging, but never boring.  He liked it that way - and so did I.

The next challenge I would face would be one of my few experiences as 2nd AD, a job that does not match my skill set well, and it was with the First AD on this film, Van.

The Rook- Part 3 - Who Killed the Chauffeur?

"One day Bogie came on the set said to Howard [Director Howard Hawks], 'Who pushed Taylor off the pier?' Everything stopped" 

-Lauren Bacall, By Myself and Then Some




Bacall, above, is referring to the maze-like plot of The Big Sleep, in what has since become a wonderful bit of Hollywood lore, spurred in part by the response from the author of the novel when Hawks and the screenwriters inquired into the answer.

"They sent me a wire ...asking me, and dammit, I didn't know either," Chandler recalled in Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane's The Raymond Chandler Papers.

I have always resisted the temptation to take this response at face value, not sure that Chandler wasn't being cute, or whether the question was irrelevant to the plot for him.  Owen Taylor's murder is just a plot device to keep detective Phillip Marlowe from dropping the case, and it clearly didn't matter to Chandler who killed him.

On one level, this story tells you everything about what is wrong with the Big Studios today.  I'm not saying that the Studios in their heyday did not interfere in negative ways; indeed, much of the confusion on the plot of The Big Sleep was due to the Hays Code, which prevented the story being told as it was in Chandler's novel.  However, today, some focus group would have sent this movie back to editing room based on its twisting plot, and a good deal of the fun of this noir classic would have been lost in the "fix".

Sometimes mysteries are good; other times, not so much.

Plot was something of a mystery on The Rook,  and, if you ask me, it's part of its appeal.  Oh, the "who-dunnit" aspect isn't all that hard to figure out, but exactly where and when "Sutheridge" may be is another matter altogether.

The plot of the film is something like this; John Abbott, a devout religious man who is serious to the point of seeming humorless, is a detective and an official from a central theocratic government.  He is sent to a dreary industrial down of Sutheridge  to investigate the murder of a previous female investigator.  He encounters a revolution and a number of cryptic clues ( the working title of the film, "The Circle in the Square", was a reference to one of those puzzles).  The story is set in an intentionally ambiguous time period, where horse-drawn carriages take people to places that have archaic versions of modern devices, such as computers, telephones and inter-office communication.

He is met in Sutheridge by the same local official who met the last investigator, Bob Brice, whose loyalties come into question during the investigation.  Abbot's ultimate fate is determined by his own rigidity.

Neither writer Richard Lee Purvis or director Eran had any desire to explain the contradictions that existed in the story; rather, they reveled in them as part of a deeper philosophical discussion.  This led people to either love or hate the movie, depending on how literal they were.

The pejorative term that both plots shared at one time or another is "convoluted", which often means the reviewer wasn't interested enough to figure it out, or that the film didn't entertain them enough to care.

Mysteries are good for plot, but bad for production people.  Whether you are an AD or UPM, your most precious and important time is prep, where you lay the groundwork for how the movie will be structured.  I previously discussed that in breaking down a script, I like to go over it enough times that I feel like I even know it better than the director.  (How To Be an AD in BC)

As UPM or line producer, I start with a budget I prepare that is not only a financial plan for the movie, but a blueprint that determines all parameters of shooting.

On The Rook, I was reading this crazy script before and after long work days, working with a schedule I had no involvement with, and a budget that was more like a rough draft.

I soon learned that there were better uses for my time than trying to decipher the plot.  One day on set, I was siting with Martin, our lead who played Abbott, and John, who played Brice.  I asked them a question about the plot, and both admitted they had stopped considering that particular point some time previous.

There were no cables to Richard Purvis.  I addressed a plot question to Richard some time after the film was shot, and his response was like one of the puzzles in the film; I got off the phone knowing less about the plot than before, if that was possible.  The closest I got to an explanation of the time period was "it's a vision of the future as seen from people in the past."

As a viewer, this makes it possible for me to watch this film endless times, and the DP Zack and production designer Sebastian created a look that the Village Voice positively compared to Brazil.

As production manager, I put deep understanding aside and satisfied myself with the elements of the script that affected shooting, and making sure we had all of those.

The less satisfying mystery was the budget, and the accounting.

One of the first things I would explain to students in discussing preparing a budget is that there is no line item known as "petty cash," or at least there shouldn't be.  Cash is a form of payment, like checks or credit cards, and you wouldn't create a line item for "checks", but somehow, people feel comfortable creating a catch-all category called "petty cash."   A more accurate term might be "those things I can't really think about right now, but I know we'll spend it someplace."  This is not to be confused with a contingency, which is, well, those other things you know will come up but you can't really think about right now.

I went about unraveling the mystery of our budget, which began with figuring out how much we had already spent, and Mr. Chandler would have been proud of the mystery there.  The checkbook was a bit confusing, but I could usually put vendor or contractor's name with a line item.  Credit card receipts were a little trickier, with some from places that could have been for any number of things, but this was just a matter of picking a line item.

Big costs, such as equipment, became a fun game of matching invoices, both paid and pending, with checks or credit cards.  This was like the Monday NY Times Crossword Puzzle, challenging, but if you know what you're doing, it can build confidence for subsequent days, which become increasingly harder.

If these big costs were like the Monday Crossword, cash expenditures, aka petty cash, was like Saturday's NY Times Crossword, a cruel invention of  the sick mind of Will Shortz where hyphenated hip-hop slang intersects with French interpretation of Greek mythology.

Eran had assured me that we had each and every petty cash receipt, and that turned out to be true.  When I requested these receipts of the production coordinator and her assistant, she was quick to hand them over.  Rather than the neat top sheets, numbered and listed by line item and followed by pages of receipts taped or stapled in order, what I got was two big, brown paper grocery bags, filled to the brim with streams of white paper that were, indeed, receipts.  Notes written on them?  Not a chance.  They pretty much looked like a larger version of your night table when you empty your pocket after a long day; I was just happy there were no gum wrappers.

Good

Very Good

Not Good

From Raymond Chandler at his home in Hollywood to Will Shortz in whatever leather-and-shackle filed abode he dwells in to my production coordinator, the look was the same, the look of "glad you're here, have fun figuring it out."

So, the priority was getting at least a big picture of how much was spent - Eran could certainly tell me how depleted his account was - and figuring how much we had remaining and how we were going to finish the film .  I did set up a two-fold system, one for accounting for past petty cash, and another for accounting for how we would track it moving forward.  The ladies of the production office became efficient versions of Bob Cratchit, assigning receipts based on a legend I provided and bringing those in question to me while also keeping the machinery of the movie, like sides and call sheets, in motion.

When you're in production, it's no time to look back, and no time to indulge in mysteries.  The mystery of the plot took a back seat to making sure we had what we needed to shoot today, then tomorrow, then the day after; the mystery of where the money was spent would not be solved before we figured out how to spend the money we had left.  It's not the way you draw it up on the drawing board, and it's not the way you teach people to produce, but it's the reality of making a movie under difficult circumstances.  You need to have rules, but you need to be able to adapt.

For the record, I have a pretty good idea of who killed the chauffeur.








The Big Sleep - Book Store Scene

Great artists can take limitations and turn them into advantages.  The Hays Code prevented writers from being sexually explicit, so the great ones found ways to to be clever and seductive in ways the censors would pass, but the audience would still enjoy.  The scene linked above from The Big Sleep has always been one of my favorite examples of this - do you really need to be told what happened during the time lapse?