In her comment to my post last post, How Deep Is Your Love, YogaDame offered:

“I suspect the story worked better for me than for you because of my strong empathy for the lead character.”

A playwright friend of mine once told me if you have an empathetic lead, you’re halfway home. I remember the lead performances in Revelations as being solid and engaging – well above what we expect from porn. But no, there probably wasn’t the same level of identification for me that there was for YD. (Ultimately, a filmmaker has precious little control over the experiences any one person brings to their viewing experience. The real masters of this art have an amazing ability to draw characters that are simultaneously real enough you feel like you could touch them, yet ambiguous enough that each of us can make them who we need them to be to connect with them in a powerful way. It’s a profound gift, one that I wish I had.)

So while it’s possible that a more personally compelling character would have helped, the two things I remember keeping me from being drawn into Revelations as far as I wanted to be were more related to that whole “inviting comparisons/ambitions” thing YogaDame mentioned in her review. Specifically:

1) I felt disappointed by the box-cover promise of a “35mm feature”. I expected that would mean seeing the sympathetic lead characters, having explicit sex, shot on film. Instead I got non-character driven vignette explicit sex on video (which I could have seen in many other productions); and then when the well-acted, sympathetic leads finally did the deed, while it was on film, it was simulated (which I also could have seen in many other, more fully realized productions).

Even in 1996 (when I saw the film) porn had long history of short-changing it’s audience and I felt deceived, which probably made me less sympathetic to the production as a whole. (I’ve learned some hard lessons of my own that porn audiences are less inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt than indie film audiences, and frankly I don’t blame them.)

2) Make no mistake, the Regan/Bush years were a time of considerable repression for pornographers, but by the time I saw the film in 1996, the phrase “New World Order” had be so thoroughly lampooned that it seemed a bit dated and a little “on the nose”. (For you youngsters, “new world order” was a Bush Senior catch phrase.)

These things underscore the considerable risk that a filmmaker takes in being ambitious.

I recently watch “Saturday Night Fever” with the director’s commentary. SNF was considered a low-budget production, but even still, the director recalls re-shooting a scene because when he was looking at the dailies he decided they had put the female lead in the wrong color costume. Can you imagine re-shooting a porn scene because one of the players was wearing the wrong color leotard? It certainly would never happen on the budgets I have to work with. The purr of a cine camera running is the sound of money flying out the window!

Whatever the problem with the unused film footage from Revelations (and there are a dozen ways it can go wrong without knowing until it’s too late!), the result was that the release was delayed, which may have made the theme seem less topical (though perhaps more topical today then when it was shot!), and necessitating a cheat of the “35mm feature”. You can’t very well go to the expense of shooting all that film and then not mention it on the box cover. (In fact, we find ourselves in a somewhat similar situation. Our upcoming titles are mixed format: sex on film, interview on tape, and I have every intention of marketing these titles as “shot on film”.)

Many years ago Peggy and I watched the fascinating Tokyo Decadence, an SM themed Japanese indie. While not nearly as porny as we had expected, it was utterly watchable (if rather bleak) – until the last reel. Suddenly a very credibly made film went completely off the rails, deteriorating in production quality and narrative to the point that it was completely incoherent.

By chance a few years after seeing Decadence I ended up meeting the producer (he kept a desk-office in the post house I used), and I had a chance to ask him about the baffling end to Tokyo Decadence. His response was simple, and delivered in a heavy Japanese accent, “Oh, we run out of money.” No excuses or justifications. Just a sly grin that said seemed to say, “You win some, you lose some.”

Unlike the writer, the filmmaker doesn’t have the luxury of infinite revisions. At a certain point the money runs out. And while a big studio might possibly shelve a project, an independent producer has no choice but to take what they have to market. There are bills to pay, and the only way to pay them is by selling your work, warts and all.

But it’s not all bad news for the filmmaker. There’s never any excuse for typos in a book, and they stick out like a sore thumb. But movies, even big-budget Hollywood movies are filled with the cinematic equivalent of typos, and worse. But somehow audiences understand that part of the bargain struck between director and viewer is to try to look past as many of those mistakes and miscues as possible. Films are watched as much for intentions as execution.

This is especially true for low-budget filmmakers like me. Blogs, behind-the-scenes bonus features – we use every trick of the trade to help you see our intentions, even if they aren’t always fully realized on the screen. When you watch an earnest little independent production, the most important character for you to feel empathy for is the filmmaker!

So when we take risks (and as we sometimes overreach), and it’s done with the hope that we’ll get little empathy from you; that you will understand and sympathize with our struggle to bring our vision to the screen.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2006 at 8:19 am and is filed under Candida Royalle, Filmcraft, Revelations, Storycraft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.