OLDIEO #7 - (CLIP FROM) BOTTOM OF THE NINTH
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
April 21st, 2008 at 5:41 pm
I love the soft, shimmering quality of this clip - GREAT lighting. The coach looked like he’d been annointed by the Holy Spirit. I laughed out loud at the thought of you running around the baseball diamond as the parents tried to sort out their feelings about what was unfolding before them.
April 22nd, 2008 at 4:48 am
Funny you say that - I remember being pissed when I got the dailies back on that shot because of the lens flare. We were running around so fast between shots I’m surprised any images actually printed on film. But the homer off the 12-year-old…a true kodak moment.