[Friday] Behind the Scenes: Strange Blood

I don't know when the project first started, maybe late 2010?  My business partner pitched me the idea of "a kitchen counter scientist turns himself into a vampire".  

"It's The Fly with vampires", he tells me.  Only his agent won't let him direct it because it's "too small".  

"You should direct it."

Now it's November 2011.  We had shot a movie called Dead Inside together--he as Director, myself as Production Designer--and were now at the American Film Market in Santa Monica do so some promoting and glad-handing with the film's Sales Agent, Bleiberg Entertainment.

AFM, for the uninitiated, is where a bunch of sales agents, and filmmakers get together at a huge hotel in Santa Monica, each turning their suite into a presentation room for buyers.  It is, for all intents and purposes, a giant meat market of deal making and schmoozing and a lot of back room shenanigans.

Nick greeted us at the door to the suite.  We talked a bit about Dead Inside (it was a complete disaster) and upcoming projects.  My partner noticed a one sheet for one of the upcoming films in their catalog.

"Hey, this your new one?  What's the budget?" My partner asks.

Nicks tell him $50k plus $30k in post.

"What if I told you we had a movie in that budget range that fits this mold?"

Nick likes the idea but he isn't the one to make those types of decisions.  We need to talk to Ehud.

Imagine a tall, old Israeli man worn by the years with a barking bite of a thickly accented voice.  Dressed in white linen, chomping on a cigar.  

Ehud Bleiberg.  The namesake of the company.  The big man.  The guy in charge.  Sitting on a deck chair overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  A Hollywood stereotype in full living color.

"Hello, Ehud."  My partner lights up a cigarette.

"Hello!  It's good to see you.  Now, what the fuck do you want from me?"

My partner glances my way.  I say nothing.  He goes into his pitch.  Twenty seconds in, Ehud interrupts.

"Shut the fuck up.  What do you WANT from me?"

A confused look, then my partner begins pitching again.

"Shut up.  What. Do. You. Want. From. Me?"

"I've got a movie I want to do.  I'm going to produce it, Chad is going to direct it.  We need $80k."

Ehud mulls this over.

"Does it have ghosts in it?  Ghosts are making a lot of money right now."

"It's got vampires in it."

"Will vampires make me money?"

"Yes"

Ehud is silent for only a moment, then "Yeah, yeah, okay.  Sure.  Have Nick start a contract.  Now get the fuck out of here, I have someone important to meet."

We're quickly ushered from the patio deck.  I've still said nothing.  My partner hasn't even finished smoking his cigarette.

In the hallway, I stop him.  "What the hell just happened?"

"I just got you a movie, asshole."

I'm stunned.  Seriously?  I get to make a movie?  Is this real life?

My only condition was that someone else write it.  I knew I'd be way too slow to complete a full screenplay in a timely manner.

Our first writer, who I'm fully convinced actually had Asperger's (like the movie's lead character), finished the first draft in a mere month.

It was terrible.  Not even remotely close to what I had in mind, even though we had given him a full outline to work from.  He cranked out another draft 3 months later.

Even worse than the first!  It was quickly becoming obvious that this writer was not right for the project.  A second writer was brought on to do a 30 page re-write.

Can you guess how I felt about it?  

DING!  (Hated it.)

The truth was this:  I needed to write this thing.

It's now April 2012.  My step-father is dying of cancer and Parkinsons with Dementia.  I head north to the Bay Area to take care of him with my brother.  Its during this time that I finally begin to write.  If anything, just to stay sane.

A few months later, my step-father passed and I returned to Los Angeles to try and finish the script.  The script writing process was long and difficult, though I learned a ton (and have learned so much more since then!).  

By August of 2013 the script was finally completed and the movie was put into pre-preproduction with filming scheduled to begin in December 2013.  The following four months were probably the happiest and busiest of my life.  In pre-production I felt like all the skills I had been learning over the years--writing, production design, lighting theory, conceptualizing, shot listing--were all finally coming into play in one big overwhelming wave of work.

The euphoria was short lived, however.  The closer we got to production, the more of a disaster things became.  The producers struggled to make the tiny budget work, the FX team was fired and replaced by someone who didn't even know how to make blood (among other atrocities), my actors--bless their hearts--tried their best but were miscast and just fell short of the material.   They also nearly froze in one of Tucson's coldest Decembers on record.

And I, the director himself, was way in over my head.  I blew it.  We all blew it.

The movie got done, but not without a lot of fighting, crying, blood, mutinies, friendships lost and, eventually, my removal from the film in post-production.

The movie was released on VOD in April 2015 and DVD shortly after.  

It's bad.  Really, really bad.  "What the fuck was I thinking" bad.

I'd like to say it was all their fault.  The producers who seemed to cause destruction and mayhem with their every decision.  But the truth is, I failed.  Completely and utterly.

And I'm okay with that.

Sure, not at first.  There were many bitter months following the movie where I had to do a lot of soul searching, but in the end, I've made peace with failing.  Like I said earlier, I learned A LOT.   And I couldn't have learned it without failing first.  

I don't know if I'll ever make another feature, but I hope I do.  I feel like I still have a lot to say with the medium.  In the meantime, even though I've returned nearly full time to photography, I still keep my toes dipped in the filmmaking pool.

So I'm not done yet.  Not by a long shot.  It might just take me a little longer than I had expected.

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View all the BTS photos here:  

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