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Stacey is not Chinese.
While his friends, the girls he tries to date, and all of China knows this, it somehow escapes his attention.
This is problematic because Stacey, who was born in Shanghai and lived there for three months, has returned to his birthplace in the hopes of finding a job, a girl, and a Chinese name for himself. Sadly, he only has a 90 day visa, so if he can’t make things happen in three months, he’s going home for good.
His American home isn’t a great place for him, as his mom is a European aristocrat who lives in America and has a predilection for screwing anything that sits still long enough. Meanwhile, his father is an extremely wealthy business owner in Shanghai, but Stacey wants to make his own way in the Orient without working for his father.
As his confusion about his own ethnicity, his inability to speak the language, and his own bungling nature continually get in his way, he must try and figure out who he truly is.
Thus begins Juan Vargas and Juliette McCawley’s first feature, 90 Days Visa.
Content
Nearly a hundred people helped out to make this film, which is really cool. And they all had a blast and were encouraged to make future films, which is awesome.
Unfortunately, because it was a first film for almost everyone, a lot of content problems arose. Of course, having an untrained crew this large could have yielded some or many of these problems as well. This is the reason that, when one is first learning to make films, it’s often advisable to keep one’s crew very small because everyone is learning the craft of filmmaking. A group of ten or fewer people can learn that craft and learn to work well with one another; a group of nearly a hundred will simply get in the way. Hollywood films use that many people because everyone already knows their craft and because they are paying everyone to be expert at their individual duties.
Probably the biggest content problem was the lack of a script. I see this a lot with new directors that are very eager to make their film. They believe that they don’t have the time to write a script or that a script will limit the improvisational genius of their actors. The truth is, when it comes to filmmaking, you don’t have time to NOT make a script. There is too much blood, sweat, and tears that go into filmmaking for you to let your actors just wing it and hope that their innate creativity will tell the story for you, especially if they have little or no experience in front of a camera. Even the funniest actors and comedians who are most known for improv, like Eddie Izzard, Bill Cosby, Bill Murray, and Robin Williams, never improv an entire film. Their genius comes because they are so intimately familiar with the script that they can draw outside of the lines from time to time, without breaking the storyline. (The only type of film that allows you to just film people being themselves is a documentary, which affords you almost no control of what the subjects actually do, requires hundreds of hours of tape, and consumes hundreds of hours of editing. And even documentarians set out with a basic angle that they pursue as well as a set of questions to yield that angle, which is in itself a form of script.)
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