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Hey mom. Glad you decided to visit my site again, considering you’re its only reader.

This is a picture of me and my mom that time we were Asian women.

Today’s post is a short and quick one. We just started casting on our sketch comedy project running in June, and the next two months will be filled with a lot of rehearsal and other time-consuming excitement. To your dismay, I won’t be able to write my normal novel-length posts which you find oh-so fascinating.

On to today’s oldieo!

BOSTON MEMORIES is the first piece I ever shot on film. It’s a 2 1/2 minute portrait of the city I schooled in and grew up near. I scrambled to put the project together as a present for my Dad’s birthday in October 2001. I love making creative presents for family members, and I tried to make this one extra-special for my big-lug-ova-pop.

My father Bobby lived in Boston when he was 17 years old for a few years before meeting Ma and enlisting in the service. He shared an apartment with a few buddies in the Fens, and I still recall stories he told of being able to watch Sox games from his living room window- frankly, I love to picture my father roaming the city as a youth. Considering I was about the same age he was when living in the same area, I decided to shoot my own “Man With A Movie Camera” Boston city-scape to evoke memories of old. I dragged J-Raff out of the dorm to be my cameraman as we bounced around the city one afternoon making this project for my pop.

This is a picture of me and pop on the set of IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY

BOSTON MEMORIES was shot on a 16mm bolex film camera I had purchased before any production class or real shooting experience, and needless to say it looks like something produced by a clueless kid. I had the option to either buy a digital camera or a 16mm, and decided that it was important to learn where film came from before blindly jumping into the digital era like so many other doofuses (doofi?). I bought the camera off ebay for a few hundred bucks- it was a Sweedish bolex with a viewfinder that provided a skewed view of the captured image. Translation: I couldn’t properly see the frame before filming, so I had to guestimate (oh fun memories!). After the camera, I purchased my first light meter for 11 bucks. The thing was from the 1960s and couldn’t register a reading if it were within 10 feet of the Sun’s scorching gases.

My first meter closely resembled this model from the 1960s. Aside from faking light readings, it also doubled as hair clippers or a police dispatch radio.

Having equipment in hand, I bought a 100-foot daylight spool of B&W positive to shoot on. I didn’t have any access to an editing bay, so I had to be content with an in-camera edit (meaning whatever I shot, I must live with). I don’t think I loaded the film in the camera correctly, hence the annoying flashes of overexposure running throughout.

So with these obstacles to hurdle, J-Raff and I pranced around town filming iconic buildings and landscapes the best we could. The little blip moving across the majority of the frames is me. My objective was to create a moving time capsule- something that would remind my father of the city, while capturing images of me as a youth in Boston. Who knows, maybe this site will somehow still exist when I have kids, and they can watch their pop running in an homage to his pop.

Anyway, fond memories of this one. I rushed out a print in time for my father’s birthday, but originally had to dub it to VHS and separately play a music track (A Bill Lee original piece from his son Spike’s SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT) on CD out of an old boom box. The music in this clip is a random jazz song tacked on for web posting- the original score was much more nostalgic and cool. A nice birthday present, a fair attempt at my first project on film, and good memories of a little snot running around his beloved city with a movie camera.

…NEXT WEEK’S OLDIEO will kick off a series of posts of my last project shot (*cough* 2006 *Jeez!! coughcough*)- a comedy pilot presentation reel I wrote and directed, starring my old pal Garrett Morris.

35 years later and the man hasn’t aged a day. It helps that he looked 65 when he was 20.

Talk to you soon, thanks friends!

Yours truly,
Brent Christo

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Bonjour, good Thursday to you.

Today’s oldieo is keeping true to this week’s sports theme. BOTTOM OF THE NINTH is my unfinished five-year-old opus that was never fully realized for a number of reasons. Seeing footage from this short pains me, but also forces me to crack a smile now and then. The backstory for this one is epic, so let’s begin.

IT WAS THE SUMMER between junior and senior year (yes ray.com, the “Summer of Summers”) and I was on top of da wohuld. RONNIE BUNUEL was the last thing I shot, and I felt pretty comfortable with my progressing film experience. The first part of the Summer was spent primarily with ray.com, T-Brady and Marc Andrade. Every single day the three of us went to the gym, played basketball at the old high school court, then ended up over Lt. Richards’s house for beers, cards and other mischief. It was your classic, lazy-guy summer o’ fun with some good old boys…

I was working production jobs here and there, and gaffed freelance where and when I could. An industry friend was producing a feature in Rhode Island in July and August, and she asked me to jump on board to light the thing. At the time it was a fairly big deal as it was to be my first feature as a gaffer, starring name talent, working with a known DP, etc. I originally got involved with freelance production to gain experience and meet creative people in New England (all 6 of them), but at this point gigs for me had morphed into a money-hunt; I was more concerned with my next paycheck than the love of the game. I mean the school year before, I was cutting classes to work fairly prestigious jobs for such a young kid, so needless to say I was riding a high and not really caring where it took me…

I get a call three days before principal photography in late July: the feature gets bumped back to September/October ‘03. I am fairly devastated. A big gig and huge opportunity for experience flushed down the drain. In good conscience I couldn’t skip the first two months of my senior year for a small indie feature, so I was left depressed with a wide-open August.

I’m in Bellingham moping around the house when my Dad smacks some sense into me. He reminds me that my goal in life isn’t to become a working gaffer, but to write and produce my own chuckly crap. I begin to agree, and he tells me to get off my ass and use my free time to shoot a killer short. His mini pep rally works, and all of a sudden I’m in pre-prod on a 35mm sports/art short that I haven’t even written yet…

IN A THREE-WEEK SPAN I finish a script with my old pal Federman, land a producing partner, cast 8 principals, 40 extras, 15 crew, land a 35mm camera, film stock, a 5-ton grip truck with HMI package, book a baseball field, and oh yea a 30-foot crane. I think about that now and wonder why this same d-bag has problems filing taxes with 2 W-2s. As far as the production value, I was and still am very proud of what I was able to throw together for 2500 bucks, a wing and a prayer.

Principal photography arrives. We have three days to shoot a complicated day/night 13 pg script. Let me take a moment to provide a quick logline as to better understand the premise. I wrote this for Dennis Lemoine’s website about four years ago, so I’m plagurizing myself:

BOTTOM OF THE NINTH (or 8 1/2 Innings) is a surreal, coming-of-age story about the pressures a young boy faces to succeed in the little league championship. The work is an homage to Federico Fellini’s 1963 classic 8 1/2.

Sounds pretentious, no? My balls were just a little bigger back then, what can I say.

Our first shoot day was a complicated crane shot a la the opening to 8 1/2 with the traffic jam. A really challenging set-up day, so we’re already behind right from the get-go. The next two shoot days are spent running around a baseball diamond with a ton of little leaguers. At the end of back-to-back 16-hour days, I addressed the entire production. It’s 1:30am Monday morning, and I’m practically in tears thanking everyone for their dedication and hard work. Like I said, it’s really impressive the amount we accomplished in such little time, and that experience alone inspires me to keep drudging along, no matter how rocky the path.

TRAGEDY STRIKES: The shoot leads directly into my senior year film and production studies at BU. First semester would prove to be my biggest and final film project at BU with FRANCO MUST DIE. I met Dennis Lemoine on a Harvard short film, and I knew I had to work with him as much as possible. I cast him as “The Coach” in BO9th, then again as “Franco” - something about his dry, smug wit that is so biting. The guy understands funny, bottom line. So I knew Dennis going into my baseball short, but hadn’t met CJ Sheppard until I noticed him on set a hilarious little league extra. CJ was constantly fighting for camera time and cracking good punch-lines left and right- it was obvious early on that this kid was an untrained start in the making. On BO9th, Dennis and CJ had great chemistry as Coach and Coach’s Lacky, so I decided to reunite them a month later for FRANCO.

Boy meets man, falls in love…

Starts a comedy franchise…

We’ve talked all about FRANCO, and school and partying took over my life 2nd half of senior year, so my plan for BO9th post-production was to have Nolan Reese, my future roomate in LA cut it together for me. He was on board (and still claims he’s on board 5 years later) to cut it once we moved out and were settled in, so it was a back-burner thing until then.

Fall 2004, one year since shooting the project with nothing to show for it. Nolan is beginning to despise working on my small projects in post at this point, and is generally too busy to attend to it. 2005 rolls around, and we decide to take a crack at cutting it. We find that 1) large parts of the storyline are missing from the unexposed can that was inspected, x-rayed and ruined at the airport, 2) there are major sync sound issues that are going to screw the rest of the project, and 3) Nolan is intimated by the workload and ultimately puts off the project (minus a few clips like this one posted) for…ever.

So five years later, and all I have to show for this project is a few strung-together clips and a bunch of soundless dailies. The final product wouldn’t have been anything mind-blowing, but still given the time and effort put into it, I feel it’s a real letdown not to have something half-completed. People have asked me about it over the years, and I run circles around any real answer - my laziness; my lack of finance; I’m surrounded by laziness; too little too late. So my homage to Fellini’s 8 1/2 turns into his unrealized Voyage of G Mastorna - the white whale of a project that somehow escaped him for over 40 years.

Now you understand why I smirk and cringe when watching this clip. It reminds me of a goal half-realized- I have way too many of those in my life, I really don’t need another. But then again I had a wonderful time running around like a madman, schmoozing, creating useless business, and befriending a great bunch of humans along the way.

Let me close with a fond and goofy memory from the shoot:

During lunch break of day two, all of the little leaguers gathered for a pick-up game of baseball. I’m pounding a sandwich and have a ton of things to do, but somehow I’m coaxed over to the baseball diamond for a quick at-bat. Mind you that the closest in my life I’ve ever come to organized baseball was when I quit on the first day of little league because it conflicted with my piano lessons (something I held against my parents for years, but thank them for now). So this at-bat against this heat-chucking 12-year-old was like my debut at Fenway or something. I step in the batter’s box wearing a really tight helmet to face off against this little pudgy ace. He blows his first two pitches by me for swinging strikes, and now all the parents and kids are laughing it up because the writer/director of a baseball movie is about to strike out in embarrassing fashion. I take a moment aside in an attempt to conserve any strength and dignity I have left, then ready for the third pitch. The kid hurls another fastball and I launch it deep dead center field into the trees out of the park. It…was my first homerun ever. So I’m mildly freaking and enjoying my gallop around the bases, feeling like a big man who just took some kid yard. The parents and crew are all laughing, yet mildly disturbed at how elated I was to hit a dinger. Not-so-secretly one of my favorite moments from the shoot haha.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the fragment from BOTTOM OF THE NINTH. This August will mark the project’s five-year anniversary, and I haven’t come close to that size of production since.

Maybe one day soon I’ll smack a dinger again…

Thanks for reading if you did!
#6

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 Yo! Hope your week is buzzzing along. I’ve had my share of ups and downs, but I really can’t complain.So this week’s oldieo video is a personal favorite called FRANCO MUST DIE. This short was my Production 2 final shot first semester senior year. My filmic landmarks over four years at BU are as follows:FRESHMAN YEAR: I drank and slept a lot.Back then I was the male version of Lindsay Lohan minus the 300 STDsSOPHMORE YEAR: I purchased my first 16mm camera - A Swiss Bolex that didn’t have a corrected viewfinder so I had to guess what the frame looked like. Also purchased an $11 light meter that couldn’t produce a reading if it were 10 feet away from the sun. Shot some embarrassing sample projects before knowing anything about film production (I’ll post those here when I run out of better material).Summer after Sophmore year I worked on former BU Professor Stephen Geller’s masterpiece MOTHER’S LITTLE HELPERS in Providence, RI. The film and Stephen are both giant pieces of shit, but on the shoot I made some great BU friends and really learned how to light for film and TV.I’m glad I spent $160k on college to learn film from a pervert, egomaniac, and apparent part-time traffic cop. Vonnegut is rolling in his grave, you hacky asshole!JUNIOR YEAR: Production 1 rolls around, I film LA CIUDAD EN VIVO with my long lost Spanish friend Joan as my portrait exercise. I’ll post this another day and rant all about it then. My final project for Prod 1 was RONNIE BUNUEL which you’ve seen here. I purchased my 2nd camera - a wind-up, 16mm from the Soviet Union called the Krasnorgorsk-3 (or K-3). I still have the ol’ K-3 in my possession and plan on shooting something small soon.The Honda Accord of 16mm film camerasThroughout the year, I was cutting class like mad to professionally Gaff shorts, commercials, politicals - you name it, I lit it. I’m 19 and making $350 for 6 hours of work lighting Bernie and Phyl’s furniture commercials. The crew on the Geller shoot really taught me well, and I definitely took advantage of my schooling.“I haid ah nightmahea Douctoa Phyl. Everyone’s tellin’ me NO! NO, NO, NOOOO”Summer after Junior year I was in line to gaff my first independent feature. It was a big deal at the time - Phoebe Cates and a few other names starring, a good working DP shooting - all the elements to yield promising future connections and work. However, in July they decided to push the production back to fall of 2004, which would cut into my Senior year at BU. In good conscience I couldn’t miss an entire semester of my last year in college, so I ultimately passed on the project. Completely heartbroken, I was wallowing in self-pity until my Dad kicked me in the ass and demanded that I shoot something for myself instead of working on other people’s projects. So in three weeks time, I scraped together a cast and crew of 30 people, 5-ton grip truck, HMIs, track, even a crane to shoot my half-realized 35mm pet project BOTTOM OF THE NINTH. It was most assuredly my opus to date, and I am quite proud of the fact that I was a 20-year-old kid who put together such a large production by himself, but the final cut of the short was never produced because of damaging sound issues. Still the fact that I produced and directed a project like that on a wing and a prayer inspires me to this day to keep struggling until I get the next opportunity to showcase my abilities. I have one clip of BO9 assembled, and I’ll post that in the future and further discuss.SENIOR YEAR: First semester is Production 2, and my first exercise shot is I DID A BAD THING. Our final project for the class is FRANCO and the only other thing I shot all year was the ever-goofy REGULATORS music video.Since graduating I really haven’t shot that much. We did ANTUANUA then the CLOSE QUARTERS webseries with Garrett Morris, but even that was about two years ago. I need to get behind the camera soon- with my recent studies and overall maturity in life(ish), I know the next time I shoot something serious it will be my best creation to date.BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME, LET’S TALK ABOUT YO…FRANCO MUST DIE!I nominated myself to write and direct our group’s final project like the pompous little prick I was. Our group consisted of Brent Christo - Dir, John Longino - DP (the guy with the “fuck you” glasses whistling in REGULATORS), Liz Berry - Sound, Producer, and Bridget Carbury - Set Design, Producer. The night before our story outline is due in class, I come up with the hairbrained idea to write about a 12-year old kid who travels to Chicago to kill Oprah for screwing up his family. Obviously I couldn’t use Oprah or else I’d receive death threats from Winfrey’s 140 million woman malitia, so I created an arrogant TV talk show personality named Franco. Essentially, FRANCO MUST DIE is an attack on mindless TV and its effects on a regular adolescent boy’s family. His mother is a zombie that repeats everything Franco advises, his sister is proud of her floozy ways, and his father loses his job because he pretends that he himself is a talk show personality. Danny (played by the incredibly talented CJ Sheppard of Medway, MA) decides to ride bikes with his neighborhood pal Jamaica across country to kill Franco at his studio - as if getting Franco off the air would solve his problems at home. Anyway, there’s almost a cute moral at the end, then Franco gets accidentally killed and Danny must take over as the new host. The initial ending was lost as the reel it was on didn’t process correctly. Instead of cutting to an epilogue, we originally filmed Danny’s family on their living room couch watching their son host, but still in the same brainwashed frame of mind they had from the outset (as if to sprinkle a little 1984-doomed mentality on top).Our talentless professor Sam Kaufmann not only disliked the story, but CHALLENGED me to shoot everything in two days time. He thought I was a baffoon (practically called me as such in front of the class) for thinking I had the ability to shoot 6 complicated scenes with different locations and designs in a matter of two days, but I argued that I had production experience and can “sew like the wind”. He ultimately signed off on the project, and weeks later chose ours to close out the production 2 screening of 8 featured films. At the screening, our cute product was very well-received, and I can objectively attest that it was the best production of the night. I recall my classmate Sarah Newbold approached me after the screening. Her uh art(?) film was panned by the audience, and she sulkingly belittled my project to my face. Provoking me, she argued that my film was a success only because of the cheap jokes that have mass appeal (basically labeling the audience as a bunch of morons for not appreciating her work of art). Similar to RONNIE BUNUEL, I had my fair share of critics and rivals on this project, but I personally enjoy the final product and look back on the entire production process fondly.FAVORITE MOMENT: Well two actually. The Danny training montage is classic - CJ is just so talented, a real diamond in the rough. He had no previous acting experience, but he took direction well and we got along swimmingly. The first shot we filmed on the project is when CJ tackles the shit out of a trash can when prepping to assassinate Franco. He nails it in one take, and I instantly knew we had something special with this little raspy-voiced charmer (By the way, CJ must be about 18 now, and probably wants to kick my ass for some reason…and can most definitely kick my ass inside-out). My second favorite scene is between CJ and his sister Debbie, as she pokes holes in her boyfriend’s condoms so she can get pregnant. Her dialogue and delivery, and CJ’s reactions still crack me up….Actually, the raw video footage of Franco (Dennis Lemoine), Artemis (Jason Raffile) and Shemp (me) on the Franco show is GENIUS. I’ve never EVER seen J-Raff more hilarious and on top of his game, even the talented Dennis was struggling to keep up with his sheer genius in improvisation. I emailed John Longino earlier this week in search of a copy of those dailies, and he said it’s a long shot, but he’ll try to locate it. I really hope that somehow surfaces so I can post it and prove to you I’m not a liar. There’s a moment where J and I fight like the white trash we are, and he is screaming, “I hate you Shemp!! You stole my pizza like you stole my baby-factory, we’re no longer freinds!!” If you listen closely during the credits, you can hear some of that amazing dialogue. Fucking priceless!It was a fun shoot, a solid little project and an important landmark in my ongoing affair with cinema. I think my personal big three (chronologically) are RONNIE BUNUEL, FRANCO MUST DIE (BO9 if it were completed) then CLOSE QUARTERS.Please encourage me to top them all with my next short - it’s going to be a real winner, I can feel it callin’ in the air tonight.Adieu,Brento Christo