Indiana Dursin: Film Career in a Nut-Shell Part 2

I was inspired after writing this post yesterday, and felt that there was a little more story to be told, so I went digging and found some of the photographs taken from those three weeks in Indiana and scanned them.  Don't worry.  This hopefully won't be a Patty & Selma-style "What I Did on my Summer Vacation" slide show, but I realized that these photos tell a story themselves, and not just about the movie shoot, but about me (more on that later.)

So, onto the fun stuff:

This one is my favorite.  Not only do I have mountains of great hair, but it was the moment I was speaking of in the last post about how I had to clean the bird crap off of the tombstone we were shooting.  I call this photo  "The Glamorous World of Movie-Making."  This was as close to a moment of realization that I was going to get as far as my future in the movie biz.  But you gotta love the Venom shirt.

This one isn't very interesting, but it illustrates that one of my jobs was pseudo-documentarian for the movie.  I guess I envisioned that one day there would be a special edition DVD and this would be an extra, and maybe I'd get a credit on this.  This is me and the director's sister, who was one of the beloved caterers, and I think I'm filming what we would be eating after the day's shoot.  I say "beloved" because they were always on-hand with delicious food, which for a diabetic, was quite handy.  And somehow, I felt more of a kinship with the caterers than I did with some of the other crew-members because, as I stated in the last post, my passion for movie-making was lacking by this point.  It was certainly all my fault, of course, but the fire just wasn't there for me.

Here's really scrawny Matt Dursin, wading into the water to hold up a boom mic for the water scene.  Like I said previously, I don't remember what the story of this scene was, but I remember it getting really dark and the water was kind of murky.  I also remember feeling actually useful on that day, rather than just sticking a camera in everyone's face.  It's also very obvious that I wasn't hitting the gym very much.  But I did like those boxers.

These next two aren't much, either.  they were shot in the diner which was the location for a few scenes, including the final one.  That was the night that everyone was feeling good, because it was like a weight being lifted.  After a couple weeks of long days, we had reached the end.  Of course, judging by my face, I was still not happy, but that's just me not smiling in pictures.  I do that sometimes.

This one is Keri, my girlfriend at the time, star of the movie, and the one who got me into this mess.  Jokes aside, I was thankful that she would include in, knowing that I had gone to school for this stuff.  I think part of it was also not being separated from me for three weeks, but I guess it was win-win for us.  This was just a moment of free-time we had, so we were having a little fun with the Buck-Hunter game in the back room of the place.  It's funny to me that that game, or a similar one, is a tongue-in-cheek staple in bars all over Boston now, but back then, I took it as a hillbilly relic to entertain the truck-drivers during their drunken stop-overs.  I will say, though, despite all the trouble, Keri was pretty.

Now, the story of these photos is a little less fun.  I found these buried in a bin of old crap that I've been moving around with me since 2003, the year Keri and I moved in together and subsequently broke up.  They were once in a photo book she had made for, attached to a page labeled Indie-Anna, "Anna" being her character's name in the movie.  She had also written on the page "Who says you haven't done anything with your film degree?"  I guess that's true, and cutesy at the time, but to be perfectly honest, I think I probably could have majored in accounting and done the same job on the set.  I shouldn't grouse so much, because it was probably more the fact that I didn't know these people that I wasn't given more responsibility, and I should have felt lucky to be brought in at all.  Like everything else, it was a matter of timing.  At the time, three weeks without pay, and nothing to show for it in the end, does kind of sour the experience. 

However, one thing I never considered came to me when I unearthed an email from the director.  She mentioned that we was raising funding for a  short that she could shoot on one location, so she could "achieve the kind of quality that wasn't possible on Universe."   (Interestingly, I don't think I ever mentioned that the title of the film was A Universe Emerging.  I think it was a quote from... somebody.)  In retrospect, she maybe was editing the movie and decided it just didn't turn out the way she was hoping it would.  It was probably a good experience for her, and after googling her, it looks like she's still acting and creating, but maybe the reason I never saw a copy of A Universe Emerging was because it wasn't worth seeing.  I certainly don't go around showing people Dursin the Firestarter or the first couple issues of The Secret Monkey hoping that it would land me a job.  I mean, there are certainly worse movies out there than this one (Hell, there are worse films than Dursin the Firestarter), but she may have just not been happy with it and moved on to better things, as most creative people do.  Except Kevin Smith.  He's basically still making us watch Clerks over and over.

They say every picture tells a story, and I think every picture also has a story.  These pictures, rescued as they were from that photobook, have a story.  That photobook was given to me by Keri weeks after we broke up, I think on the advice from her therapist as a way to show me that we had been through a lot and I should realize that and give her another shot (I guess).  While that was certainly not happening, I appreciated the effort put into it, despite the fact that she had also put a lot of effort into ruining my life around that time.  A year or so later, she emailed me asking for it back so she could use the photos for a class project she had been working on.  When I emailed her back saying I would drop it by, I mentioned that time had allowed me to take some responsibility for the break-up as well, and I felt bad about the way things had gone down.  She responded by saying something about it was nobody's business, and then she wrote again saying, "Please don't respond."

The next morning, I received what legend now calls The Hate Email, a very long document saying that she was happy now, but she still watched the nightly news hoping to see a story about me dying in a car accident.  She said that I was weak, small and forgettable, and that I should burn the photobook, because she didn't want to remember herself that way.  I was, in fact, a blight on her new life, because while it was so wonderful, the one piece of anger she had left was reserved for me.  It ended (famously in my circles) with the line, "I hate you.  I truly hate you."

While floored, not angry, I did exactly what she suggested and burned the book, saving only a few photos of myself, these being some of them.  Fast-forward another year or so, and I received another email from Keri: The Apology Email, saying that I was right to break it off, I was right that the medications had changed her, that she was wrong not to go to therapy, and to take me for granted.  That she missed me and the "unique way in which I saw the world."  And most of all, she missed the hugs.  We also talked on the phone not long after that, and really cleared the air for good.  It was great to finally get that release, and finally move on.

Well, sort of.  I do think a lot about that time.  How could you not?  It was one of those times that forms you for years to come.  Now I can look back and realize it was what it was, and keep on keepin' on.

And reach for the corn.

3 Weeks in Huntington

I have often groused about my non-existent "film career."  I mean, when I was a kid, we took the family vacation camera around and made our own Super-8 Star Wars, and later a camcorder became the sole piece of film equipment (along with a lighter and a can of hair-spray) to make Dursin the Firestarter, but after film school, I thought it was time to get serious and actually make a go of it.  It never quite worked out that way, and now, ten years later, I think I'm ready to open the body and determine the cause.  I'm going to try and present an unbiased view, so maybe anyone reading this can determine for themselves if it was just me being whiney or if I just wasn't cut out for the movie biz.

After graduating from Emerson, I decided to give a serious go at this, but I was slightly disillusioned by my set experiences, so I concentrated on writing.  Then, life kind of got in the way, and girls and jobs came calling.  I shifted my writing to comics as a cool side project, and The Secret Monkey was my focus for awhile.  No one bought that, either, but it was damn fun.  My girlfriend at the time was then asked to play the female lead in a movie being directed by a friend who had just directed her in a community theater production of the Diary of Anne Frank.  There were two catches: one was it was filming in Indiana, and the other was that there was no pay.
So, Keri (my girlfriend) asked that I be included on the crew, and we were off to Huntington, Indiana (the birthplace of Dan Quayle) for three weeks.  We were put up in the house of an older, very nice, very religious woman.  The rest of the crew, unlike myself, were getting paid, so the 16 hour days didn't seem to bother them.  And not only that, but they were younger (I was only 25 at the time, but most of them were around 20), and impassioned.  I was not.  I one day complained about working into the next day after starting around 9:00 a.m., one of them said, "That's when you know it's a good day."

Not only were they long, arduous days in the sweltering July heat of Huntington, but that's smack in the middle of the Bible belt.  I don't have a problem with that, really, except that I curse a lot and have had lots and lots of pre-marital sex, which most of them did not agree with (One rule of the house was Keri and I were not allowed to sleep in the same room).  One of the guys, Tommy, who I found hilarious, used to say "stinking," where I would use a slightly different word.  I don't know why I have a problem with certain religions, but it was something that made me uncomfortable for some reason.  I think it was put best by one of the actors, who had traveled from Boston like me, to play the lead's father.  He asked if there were any bars around, and I responded I didn't know (and in fact, I doubted it.)  He said, "I gotta get out of this place.  Too much thumpin'"  I couldn't help but agree.

To illustrate how the movie was going, that actor was suppsoed to get beat up in a dream sequence by his movie-son with a baseball bat.  I found this to be pretty compelling when I read the script, and the prop girl had told me that she had to hunt down an old looking bat to make it credible.  In the actual filming, however, it was changed to simply fists, which I found less interesting.  Plus, he actually punched the guy.  A whole other definition for thumpin'.

*****

The movie itself was sort of a coming-of-age story about a young man living in, I assume, Huntington, IN.  He is asked by his best friend to take out his sister, who is dying of leukemia.  Why this guy had never asked his best friend to hang out with his sister before the leukemia kind of bugged me, but whatever.  This young man, who was played by the writer of the script, was apparently wrestling with all of the depressing issues that 20-somethings deal with.  I wish I could recall more at this point, because I'm hardly doing it justice, but as I recall, he had impregnated a girl in high school, had an alcoholic, abusive father and his band was floundering.  Although, I must say, the band scene was probably the most fun scene to shoot.  We had to do it in the wee hours, after the club we were using had closed.  There had been a casting call for this scene, and dozens of rowdy teenagers had shown up (probably all the ones who lived in the area).  I think I even got in the background several times as a club-goer.  Inexplicably, this punk band, who couldn't agree on what kind of music to play at their gig, played some sort of love song (Whitney Houston or something), and the crowd turned on them.

Beyond that, my memory gets sketchy.  I remember a scene in a zoo, one in a cemetery (I remember one of my jobs was to clean the bird-poop off of a tombstone), several in a diner, and one where I had to hold up the boom in some very murky water for whatever reason (I think Keri had to swim out to a dock to get away from her brooding movie-boyfriend.)  Other than that, I can't recall what it was about, except that this dude had to deal with the fact that his new girlfriend was dying of leukemia.  In fact, I now recall that, while filming, the disease she was dying from changed form leukemia to "unnamed illness."  I don't know why, except maybe that it was 2001, and Googling "symptoms of leukemia" to find out what the Hell to do with Keri would have been more difficult than it would be today.  As it was, my background in screenwriting told me that it needed a polish to add some drama, but the changes they made were subtractions that I thought took away from the script.

***** 

So, this is where things go a little... oogie.  This young actor/writer and I never got along for most of the shoot.  One day, he screamed at Keri during a scene when he was the one who missed the line, and she was so upset she wanted to go home right then.  I naturally was protective, but convinced her to stay.  To his credit, i asked him if we were okay, and he said, "Matt, you should just punch me right now."  In retrospect, I should have, but I think I saw a lot of myself in him. Now only was his name also "Matt," but he reminded me of myself at 21, except here he was trying to make his dreams come true, where, when I was his age, I was figuring it would just happen.  Maybe I was slightly jealous of that fact, and that's why I disliked him.  Although, he also swore at my girlfriend.

When taken in total, the three weeks in Indiana, staying in a house that resembled a church, not getting paid to work long hours, and not only disliking the man I was working for, but not even believing in him, it's probably obvious why I don't chalk this up as a "win."  Add to that the final nail in the coffin: I never saw the movie.  It was supposed to go to festivals, and I was promised as part of my contract that I would receive a copy, but it never happened.  A couple years later, one of the actors, a nice kid named Travis, who lied about his age to be in the movie, emailed everyone he could about getting a copy, so even the principles had not received it.

The real "oogie" was that, by the time I received that email two years after the shooting, Keri and I had broken up, so I responded to it with an embittered reply about how we were all promised things that were never delivered.  Obviously, this was my anger spilling over, and the director replied to call me out on it.  I apologized, and explained, and she seemed to understand.  However, that was the end of our communication, and to this day, I never did get that movie.

Since then, my film work has been sporadic at best.  Mostly extra work, although Darth Vader: A Day at the Office was a really nice return to my roots.  I'm not sure if it's really a case of "It never worked out," or more a case of I never wanted it to work out.  There was a great scene near the end of Six Feet Under when Clair's aunt, who had convinced her to become an artist, tells her "Maybe you're just not an artist."  Claire is incredulous, of course, but all her beleaguered aunt can say is, "I was wrong."  It's a tough pill to swallow when a creative person has to face the fact that they didn't become what they envisioned at 20.  I'm pretty sure the other Matt from Indiana didn't.  So, no jealousy there.  But I hope he's still working on something.  I hope they all are.

(That's me in the Vader suit.  Yes, that's my hairy chest.)

The Dark Knight Rises to the Top

In 2008, I had glowing praise for The Dark Knight.  If you don't feel like clicking on the link right now, that's okay, but one poignant thing I said was, "We'll see how it settles," comparing a good movie to a good meal.  I had thoroughly enjoyed The Dark Knight, but I wanted to see how it would settle in the annals of great comic book movies, and even great movies in general.

Four years later, and The Dark Knight has settled very well with me.  I pretty much have it memorized, but I still watch it and enjoy it often.  I have heard the criticisms,  like, "Why would they believe The Joker when he says that Rachel was at this address and Dent was at this address?"  (The answer?  "What's the difference?  At least one of them was going to die.")  I can forgive some minor problems because, to me, it is such a good screenplay and such a well-crafted movie (very little CGI, Lucas!) that one or two quibbles are certainly acceptable.

So, with that in mind, I was excited, but also slightly nervous, to see The Dark Knight Rises.  If it fell even just a little bit below my expectations, then would it be a disappointment?  Would it have to basically be perfect to be considered good?  Could it stand on its own, with such a great movie coming before it?

(These are simply the questions of a neurotic, over-analyzing film student and pop culture douche.  I'm sure most normal people just wanted to buy tickets and be entertained for a couple hours.  And to them, I say, "I envy you.")

This is the part where I am obligated to say I might spoil some minor parts of the film.  But if you are reading this and didn't figure that something would be given away, then more fool you.

So, not only was I blown away by The Dark Knight Rises, but I answered all of those questions as well.  For one, it did not fall below my expectations.  It was still phenomenal, even though I'm sure there were imperfections (some of the foreshadowing was heavy-handed, even as I was sitting in the theater).  And to my surprise and delight, it did not have to stand on its own.  In fact, it had several nods to both of its predecessors (I loved the Liam Neeson and Cillian Murphy cameos.)  Looking at it now, if this was your first installment of this Batman trilogy, then you probably didn't get as much out of it as you should have.  And why don't you get to the movies more often?

The thing is, to say it was good and why is redundant.  I could say i liked Bane, I liked Bruce Wayne's struggle to overcome all the odds, and, yes, I loved Anne Hathaway (especially from the back in her unexplained leather suit).  Basically, I liked all the little things that make a great movie great, and I think that covers it.  But when you really look at the thing, it is a Batman movie.  Granted, it is far better than any movie made by Tim Burton or Joel Schumacher, and maybe slightly better than any one made by Christopher Nolan (We'll see how it settles.)  This movie is about a comic book character.  The Avengers was about comic book characters.  X-Men was about comic book characters.  And those movies, no matter how good they are, are almost taken with a grain of salt.  When they're bad, they're bad.  But even when they're good, they are comic book movies.  They are enjoyable, but there is a certain drama that is always lacking because, let's face it, does anyone actually think that Loki is going to unleash an army on the Earth to take it over?

In my screenwriting classes, I was taught that the audience must believe the stakes.  Obviously, none of us know what it's like to travel through time, but Back to the Future is so well-made that the audience believes that Marty will actually cease to exist if George doesn't ask Lorraine out.  (When you put it that way, it's kind of silly, isn't it?  I've not asked out hundreds of girls.  Does that mean all our potential children faded away?  Deep.)  So, when you're making a movie about a man who dresses up like a giant bat to beat up criminals who dress as clowns, how do you make the audience believe that there is real danger?

Write the Hell out of it, I suppose.  I won't give anything away, but The Dark Knight Rises does that.  It raises the stakes.  Through the roof.  There were moments that I was pretty sure every character and every citizen of Gotham City was going to die.  With The Avengers, for example, my one knock was that I never really believed that the good guys would not win.  I know it sounds silly because the good guys win in all of these movies, but sometimes it's so well done that you have no idea how it's going to happen, and are impressed when it does.  It is usually fun to watch them win, but the stakes can't really be that high when you know it's going to happen from a million miles away.

Still, in the context of great movies, where will the Dark Knight Rises settle?  And where should it?  Should it settle at the top of the heap of comic book movies, which, as I've illustrated, can be pretty horrible?  To put The Dark Knight Rises in the same category of movies as Amazing Spider-Man would be doing it a huge disservice.  Christopher Nolan said he wanted to make a war movie, and that he was slightly influenced by the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Has there ever been a comic book movie that combined two such elements?  They're usually about some jerk who gets powers or a suit of armor and now has to learn how to be a hero.

So, do we consider it a great action movie?  A great war movie?  Or will it (as it settles) transcend such labels and simply be what it is?  And what about the entire trilogy of Batman movies?  Will they be the Star Wars or Indiana Jones of this generation?  Will it rank among the Harry Potter series and Lord of the Rings trilogy as the great ones of this era?  Does it matter? 

My opinion?  This is one of the great films of my lifetime, and that's it.  I guess since video stores are all gone, we don't really need to categorize movies anymore, so I'll just say it will be in my top ten favorite movies before long, and leave it at that.  I mean, it's like comparing great baseball players.  Pedro Martinez was the greatest pitcher I've ever seen, but was he better than Nolan Ryan?  I guess it comes back to the same question I asked at the beginning:

What's the difference?  

Annoying Spider-Man

I finally saw Amazing Spider-Man last night, and thought I'd share some thoughts and ideas about it before Clay and I discuss it on our podcast tonight.  (Oh, you didn't know?)

First off all, I may have gone in with the wrong attitude, because I was not impressed with the trailers, the preview footage, the leaked footage, the cast, the villain, or the very idea that this franchise needed to be re-booted in the first place.  So, what does that leave me with?  Probably not a lot, but with such low expectations, there's a chance I could be surprised, right?

Well, that didn't happen, unfortunately, but rather than turn this into another "bitching" post, I want to get into why the whys and wherefores.  it took me a little while even to figure out why this movie was so unimpressive to me.  Honestly, the changes to Spidey's costume didn't bother me, and in fact, it looked kind of cool.  And the other changes from the Sam Raimi-Tobey Maguire version were fine as well.  The fact that Peter was able to make his own mechanical web-shooters, complete with webbing, was a nicer tough than having the webs inexplicably shoot out of his wrists (and more like the actual comic book character.)  As my friend, Jay, pointed out in 2002 when the original Spider-Man was released, "If they wanted to make it more realistic, shouldn't the webs shoot out of his ass?"  And the change from Mary Jane to the much-beloved Gwen Stacy (played by the much-beloved though slightly-too-old-for-high-school Emma Stone) was an improvement as well.  I always liked Mary Jane better in the comic, but Kirsten Dunst just never had the pizazz.  Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield did have some chemistry, probably because they dating in real life.  And obviously, though it still has its faults, CGI has come a long way since 2002, so Spider-Man swinging through the city looks slightly better, especially that one POV shot where you could see his hands firing the webs and them catching on to buildings, so we get a sense of what it's like.  Video games at work.

That's about where the praise ends for me.  For me, that's actually pretty good, but something about this movie made it more than just bad.  It was somehow annoyingly bad.  Maybe because I had such a love for the character.  Maybe because I didn't see the need for a re-boot after only a few years since Spider-Man 3, although that movie was pretty terrible, too, so maybe we should all expunge that from our memories.  Or maybe because deep down I knew that Sony was only doing this one because if they sat on the property any longer, the rights would revert back to Marvel, meaning Disney would get their hands on this money-maker.


Told you he didn't have what it took...

Or maybe because Andrew Garfield kind of sucks.  For one, he's too good-looking to play nerdy Peter Parker, and any comic book fan knows that the real judge of an actor playing a super-hero is that you have to be able to play the alter ego (see: Stark, Tony).  But not only was he just not right for this part, I have never been impressed with his work, period.  Between The Social Network and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, and now this, the guy is 0 for 3 in my book.  Not that he had a lot to work with here, but he just wasn't nerdy enough or cool enough to make me believe in him, as Spider-Man or Peter Parker.  He seemed to just be saying the lines of dialogue fed to him like he was in some high school play and he was getting extra credit or something.  I never got that he mourned his uncle, or that he cared for his aunt, or that he felt any obligation to be a hero.  As I said, the only decent scenes were between him and Stone, and I don't know if that's because they are dating, because she's actually pretty decent, or because director Marc Webb (whose previous credit was (500) Days of Summer, which was a brilliant rom-com) has some experience with on-screen chemistry.

Beyond Garfield's performance, the movie itself lacked a lot of the drama inherent in even the comic book.  For example, in the comic book, Peter has already become the Amazing Spider-Man, and is putting in regular TV appearances when he allows the criminal who eventually kills his uncle to escape, so the guilt is more obvious because Peter was using his powers for profit.  That's where the whole 'Great power, great responsibility" line, which is in just about every Spider-Man comic ever written, comes from.  Why take out that whole dilemma and replace it with a fight with a convenience store clerk over chocolate milk, which elads to his uncle's murder?  Not to mantion that the scene in the Sam Raimi version where Peter is wrestling is one of the best in the whole franchise, featuring not only the great Bruce Campbell, but the dearly-departed Randy "Macho Man" Savage.

(Incidentally, not to spoil the movie for anyone, but did he ever catch his uncle's killer?  Did we ever get that "Aha!" moment when he discovers his blunder and decides to become a crime-fighter?)

When they do bring some drama into the movie, it's too ham-fisted to matter, like the scene near the climax where several crane operators are called in to give Spidey (who has saved exactly one kid in the movie at this point) something to web onto as he rushes to fight The Lizard and save the city.  I'm still not sure how those crane operators knew he needed that boost, but whatever.

I realize that this is just one bad movie among hundreds, but this one instills a fear in me.  Tobey Maguire, who, despite his faults, was a great Peter Parker, was replaced after three movies because they wanted a younger guy to appeal to the Twilight audience.  Will Tony Stark receive the same treatment in a couple years, despite the fact that Robert Downey, Jr, is Tony Stark?  Will Thor get re-cast as some young meathead in a few years time?  Will The Avengers simply get re-booted every few years with different people just to attract the next generation?

In the era of re-boots, re-makes and re-imagings, I fear the answer is yes.            

Sometimes, I Do Creative Things...

I finally decided to start a blog that wasn't just for me to rant and rave about my life.  I mean, I do have other stuff going on other than bad dates.  Currently, it's mostly comic book-related, but I've also dabbled in film and web-related fun.  One of the purposes of this blog (as opposed to my other one), is to keep myself honest.  If I commit to posting regularly, it will hopefully keep me working and help me turn things out.  If not, well, then I'll feel guilty and hopeless.

However, for my initial post, a little blast from the past: samples from a short comic I wrote for Andy Schmidt's Comics Experience Writing Class.  The assignment was to write a fave-pager, and it had to have a clearly-defined beginning and end, so that it could be a stand alone story and not just a piece of something else you had written.  Mine came out very well, I feel.  In fact, much better than I anticipated.  The artist, whom John and I had commissioned to do some work on an upcoming(?) project, is named Mark Vuycankiat, and you should go like him on facebook here.  He's pretty amazing.

Anyway, those are just the pages without letters since I only had those in pdf form, and I didn't want to give everything away for free.  If you like the look and feel like you have to read it for yourself, the class put all of our stories in an anthology called Out of Our Minds, which can be purchased here, which also features the spectacular work of Paul Allor, who was probably the only writer in the class better than me.  Just kidding.  I was better. 

I should point out that John Hunt also graciously handled the lettering.  You can find some of his awesome coloring work here.  And I'm not saying this because he's my oldest friend (well, that too), but he is an amazing colorist and can turn things around really quick, so if you need a comic colored or lettered, hire this man.  Plus, he'll owe me big time.

Okay, enough links for one day.  But it's a start on a new blog.  Hope you all enjoy the ride.  Both of you.