Sabra finished shooting her Chinese girl scenes about 1:00 p.m. Sunday, and then drove me back to the city from the Valerios’ farm. When I got home, I took off all my dirt-covered clothing and had a shower. My wife Carole said, “You look like you could use a beer.” She was right.
So we went to our local pub and I was halfway through a salad and my second pint -- maybe about 4:30? -- when my cell phone rang. Brian McKee, the cameraman, wanted to know if I could do one last shot for the film. I had to go home, put back on the dirty clothes I’d worn all weekend, and rejoin Brian.
The script had called for a brief shot of my character sniffing the urine sample on his clothing while riding the bus home from work. Dan had planned to do a “guerilla” take on board a city bus, but that seemed too dicey, particularly given that we were only a couple hours from the deadline to turn in the film.
So we shot the scene at a Portland Streetcar station just outside Powell’s Books instead. Brian lurked at the far side of 10th Avenue while I planted myself at the stop. The other “passenger,” the girl, and the traffic were all fortuitous elements. You’ll see this sequence early in the film between 0:42 and 0:50.
Dan’s script for “A Hole Story” won Best Writing for the 2009 Portland 48-Hour Film Project.
Which brings us up to this year. At 7:00 p.m. on Friday, August 6, we received our assignment: character would be Pete (or Pam) Peterson, artist; prop was pistachio nuts; and line of dialogue would be “I have a surprise for you.” Our particular team was assigned the genre of Mockumentary.
We had a lively brainstorming session from 7:30 to 10:30. Several separate ideas that surfaced during that time would come together in the finished film. Dan was interested in the self-referential, post-modern idea of inserting videos within a video. Someone called pistachio nuts “addictive,” which raised the notion of bringing the prop into the story as an actual addiction. Dan’s team had worked on other stories in which a guru figure teaches a novice how to do something, and it was suggested our artist could be a video filmmaker who knew how to make viral YouTube videos.
It was only in Dan’s script that the character became a filmmaker who expressly could not make such a video, though he was trying desperately to do so. That would allow Dan to parody some of the most famous viral videos on YouTube, such as “the Numa Numa Dance” (Gary Brolsma lip-synching to a Moldovan pop song in front of his computer Webcam), guys getting injured doing stupid things, and cute animals.
When I was describing my thoughts, I conscientiously referred to the as-yet hypothetical protagonist as “Pete or Pam Peterson” -- but speaking quickly, I ran them together. The person next to me, Alex Huebsch, heard them as one word and suggested the character’s first name should be “Peteorpam.” This not only made for a great inside joke for the other Portland filmmakers who would recognize a slurring of what we’d all been assigned, but would sound like “Peter Pan” to a wider audience. Best of all, it set up a “who’s on first”-style comic dialogue with a package delivery person played by Dylan Hillerman.
I didn’t get the script in my email box until something like 9 a.m. Saturday, and arrived at Dan’s house well after 10. We shot some of the script in around his house: a sequence involving a TV repairman that Peteorpam arranges to have pushed off the roof (which did not make the contest-entry version), and the deliveryman sequence (which did). Then we headed out to the Valerios’ farm, site of last year’s imaginative film about digging a hole to China.
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I enjoyed reading about this project. Hope there is a sequel in the works.
ReplyDeleteYou read the first four parts, I trust. As for a "sequel," there is more to relate about 2010 film, eventually titled "Hit Count," which should take two or more episodes to relate -- plus a link to the film as it was submitted to the contest. That, of course, was limited to 7 minutes' duration, but I'm hoping by the time I have the next parts written, the director will have edited a "director's cut" which includes more mayhem, more footage of me, and will likely be 10-12 minutes in duration. Perhaps when I post the next episode I'll include a link to the movie as Dan submitted it to the festival, though.
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