An exotic looking woman who’d caught my eye twice before asks about our film. I tell her about it.
“You should come, it’s next!”
She sighs. “My short’s playing at 5 also!” She’s Lisa Fotedar-Miller, the director/star of 2 minute short short “A Good Scratch is Hard To Find” playing in the We Love Short Shorts grouping. She tells us that she’s just been picked up by Atom Films. We congratulate her. I tell her I’ll be seeing her film tomorrow as I’d decided to begin my Sunday with short shorts.
“I’m going to go in for mine, then sneak out to come see your movie,” she tells us. We both realize it’s time to go now. No more waiting, it’s time for our prime-time screening. You know, if prime time was 5. At a festival, it is.
The second White Out screening is in a smaller room and we manage to fill 95% of the seats. It's like night and day from the first screening. The intimacy of the room lends itself to the intimacy of the film and the audience really seems to connect with it. The laughs are bigger, the gasps when reveals happen, and my favorite moment watching my film with an audience: the quick flashes of sexual escapades (see fig. u), gets a huge reaction. Exactly what I wanted. I couldn't be happier.
fig. u
After the film, Mike, Jon, Michelle and I go up for a Q&A. My fears that we'd only get questions from the friends we'd invited prove to be unfounded as most of the questions come from festival goers, all interested in how we'd managed to pull off a film that appears to have a far higher budget than it actually does, and of course the positive comments about the actors themselves. Can't beat that high. Tremendous.
We stand around awhile, basking in the afterglow of our big day at the festival. Congratulating each other and talking about how well it went, how well it was received, etc. I'm stopped in the hall by Richard Propes, The Peaceful Critic himself, to tell me how much he enjoyed the film. We both talk about how wonderful Michelle Higgins is in the film, something that she'll never admit and will get quite bashful about if you bring it up to her.
“There will be a review,” he tells me, giving me his card.
“Should I worry?”
“You've got nothing to worry about.”
“I'm hungry,” Leslie, the gorgeous redhead who voiced one of the callers in my film tells me.
“Go get some food.”
“Where?”
“The filmmakers' lounge, it's free.”
“But I'm not a filmmaker.”
“You're with the filmmaker.”
She looks at the lounge, then at me, then at the lounge. I grab her hand and walk her into the filmmakers' lounge for some pizza.
fig. v
The last film of the day is Lake County's “Money Film” Wristcutters: A Love Story which stars Patrick Fugit (see fig. v) from Almost Famous and also has Tom Waits show up for a while. Zia, played by Fugit, kills himself before the end of the opening credits roll and winds up in a sort of alternate world where people who kill themselves go. In this world, there isn't much color, you can't smile, and, in the words of one of the other denizens of this semi-hell, "everything's the way it was when you were alive, just a little bit worse." Quite the punishment for someone who found the real world unbearable enough. This is brilliant high concept, the kind of thing Charlie Kaufman used to do before he blew his wad with Adaptation. The most fascinating thing about the film for me is that it plays, at times, like a wacky parallel universe version of The Wizard of Oz as Zia sets out on his quest to find his girlfriend (whom he learns killed herself after he died) and on the way meets up with several different people.
I really enjoyed a good deal of this meandering and lazy comedy, distractions were everywhere, like some really bad digital effects on a black hole in the car floor (don't ask) and a completely unneeded detour to see the King (Arrested Development's Will Arnett – And let me tell you, seeing G.O.B. up there on the screen, camping it up, I was very tempted to pull out my cell phone and play my Final Countdown[see fig. w] ringtone. But then I remembered I was at a film festival and I ought to at least appear to be a considerate filmmaker let, alone a consummately professional journalist.) Tom Waits is wonderful as a man who bears more than a striking resemblance to The Wizard. But then, in the end, it falls apart, with a quite literal deus ex machina. While my cohorts really liked the film, I found it got less tight as it unspooled. Becoming less and less coherent until there wasn't any clear purpose for what we were seeing on screen. (Example, random miracles) Unless we're expected to believe that this whole thing is an hallucination (but I don't buy that) there were too many unanswered questions at the film's conclusion.
