The Crack of Dawn

Volume #404

7/22/23

Newsletter #404

The Crack of Dawn

I guess it was about six years ago that I painted the interior of my house.  The ceiling is so low that I could comfortably reach up and paint it.  The acoustic tile of the ceiling was so yellowed and dirty and porous that I had to hit it with a few thick coats of primer before actually painting it.  All of this reaching straight up above myself was working the muscles in my shoulder and neck in such a way that I really felt fit and healthy and strong, with blood flowing unimpeded between my body and my brain.  And the repetitive action of painting — paint on, paint off — put my brain into a kind of clear, thoughtless state of Zen consciousness.

Then, for the one and only time in my life (so far), I dreamed up an entire movie from beginning to end, including all of the characters and who they were.  I could plainly see all three acts, which were: morning, afternoon and night.  Therefore, the entire story took place in one day.  OK. 

As I painted and painted, I ran the story forward and backward in my head searching for the reason why it sucked, and I could drop it.  But it all kept making sense.  However, the concept itself was, in its own way, not only not dramatic, it was anti-dramatic – nobody changes, and nobody learns anything, and that’s the point.  So then I thought, “What if all of the characters have some sort of substance abuse problem, which is causing all of them immediate problems, but nobody is even going to try to fix their big problem that day.  It’s not about fixing problems, or even trying. It’s the story of a community where everybody is hooked on something – coffee, cigarettes, vaping, pot, cocaine, heroin – but today is not the day they’re cleaning up.  Today is just one more day of getting by.  And I as the author will not cast a moral judgement on anybody’s behavior.  It is neither good nor bad that all of these people are addicted to all of these various substances; it just is, for one day.  So then I thought, “What connects them?”  It’s a community, but how do I know that?  And how do I stick to the theme of addiction?  How about the annual community Octoberfest beer bash? 

In Stephen King’s basically useless book, Stephen King on Writing, I did pick up one thing.  As he put it, “When you think of writing a story you have to find the ‘me’ guy.”  Who are you in the story?  Oddly, in this I cast myself as the 2^nd lead, the drunk history professor.  I cast my buddy in the lead, the high-end automotive executive with a fierce coke habit.  Then every other character fell into place: the pot-head girlfriend, the daughter and her friend on pills, or anything else they can get their hands on – and I was kind of like that back in college, at U of M, where I majored in drinking beer, and still got a D – and the daughter’s androgenous friend who’s into smack.

I wrote it all down by hand, in kind of an outline with hunks of dialogue.  Just then whom should I speak with but my old pal Bruce Campbell, and I pitched it to him.  He seemed very receptive and when I was done, he said, “And I like the title.”  I didn’t have a title.  I said, “What title?”  He said, “Morning, Noon and Night, that’s what you said.”  I had just been describing the three acts occurring during the morning, noon and night and he had misunderstood me.  Nevertheless, that’s how it works, and I said, “Yeah, I think it’s good, too.”

It was easiest script that I ever wrote, which usually means trouble.  I did three drafts. Writing this script was like I’ve heard songwriters say, I didn’t feel like I was writing so much as transcribing. It was being beamed to me.

And on some level, as a story it’s against everything I believe in regarding storytelling.  Morning, Noon & Night (I used an ampersand) does not have a cause-and-effect element, or a plot.  It’s simply a bunch of people with addiction issues who happen to run into each other at a beer bash.  That’s it.  But it was also rather simple and compact, and a reasonable script to shoot for a low budget.  And where better to experiment with dramatic forms than in low-budget movies?

The rusty gears of my independent filmmaker brain began to creak and turn, and I thought, “Can I make this movie for $100,000?  As fate would have it, I have $100,000.  Although everyone in my family thinks it’s a better idea to save it, I wonder if I could pull off a whole feature film for 100k?  Really cheap.  Non-union.  Digital.”

Here’s the thing – I hadn’t made an indie feature since If I Had a Hammer in 2001 and it put me into bankruptcy and was never released (although it will now).  It was 16 years later – much water under the bridge – and I really didn’t know if I could pull this off — a 100k, 3-week shoot.  So, I went to see my old buddy Dan Noga, the DP/blues guitarist with whom I had last worked on an ill-fated feature, Intent, in 2007.  Dan and I go way back.  He was the DP on the pickup shooting on my first film, Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except in 1985.  Dan’s two years older than me, and he was under this crazy delusion that he had retired from motion pictures.  I gave him the script, which he read, then we had coffee in Royal Oak, where he lives, and where I set part of the script, in the VFW hall. Dan was not the slightest bit convinced. he told me about sailing on Lake Michigan.

I said, “Dan, if I can convince you that I can make this movie, that will bring everybody else aboard.”  He wasn’t convinced.  His rock band, The Suspects, was going through changes and was now the 5 Suspects, but music was his thing, man, not movies.  I said, “Let’s go look at the VFW hall.”  Dan said, “The Suspects played there a couple of times a few years ago.”

Dan and walked over to the VFW hall and went in.  It was a dingy old bar, with a pretty big space, a hall if you will, connected.  The caretaker was a bent older man who showed us around.  As he opened the partition to the hall, he looked closely at Dan and said, “Aren’t you the guitar player for the Suspects?”  Dan blushed and said, “Yes.”  The guy said, “You’re great!  Your band is great!  When are you going to play here again?”  Dan said he didn’t know, and they were now called the 5 Suspects.  He turned to me and said, “I guess we’re making the movie.”

And we did.

It was so fast that it was kind of like it never happened.  Except that we made a movie, so there’s very clear tangible proof.

Good, bad is not an issue to me.  It doesn’t matter.  Morning, Noon & Night was its own magical experience.  It came to me as I painted. I proved to myself that I could make a feature film for 100k in three weeks.  And now I never need to do it again.

And there you have it.