The IMDB entry for Comando Zorras has been updated (not sure if it’s my update or not, since IMDB kind of sucks that way, but I’m guessing it’s not, since I added Leo’s credit too). That gets me another “official” credit, in the sense that if it’s not on the internet, it doesn’t exist. Yay. I just hope Bolas Chinas won’t take as long.
This is the music video I acted in a few months ago. It’s currently playing on latin music TV channels, and on YouTube for your viewing pleasure. I appear several times, although in relatively short flashes. I’m the tallest of the bad guys, the one who gets kicked in the face at the end.
Oh, and I’m back, I went to Norway for a month. Expect more soon.
Yesterday, I went to film a music video. People from Plataforma films called me about it, they didn’t have much of a budget, but needed someone to play a thug (I know, I’m horribly typecast). I’d never been on a music video shoot before, and they were friends asking for a favor, so I accepted. The video was for Naty Botero’s “Te Quiero Mucho”. She’s a Colombian pop singer, and this is her first song, which is currently at number three on the Colombian hit lists. She doesn’t have a web site, but quick googling of her name seems to confirm at least that.
Arriving, I realized the production was full of people I already knew. Miguel Bonilla, director of Comando Zorras, was producing, and several of the people who did art and props on Bolas Chinas were working too. Additionally, I ran into a couple of people from “Supercivicos”, a TV Azteca show that I went to do a little work on about a month ago, but where we couldn’t get the takes they wanted that day, and when they called me again, I was busy.
The video itself is a seventies exploitation movie spoof, where the star gets into a Barbarella-like suit and kicks the ass of some thugs in a bar (that’s us) before we break a bottle over her head and take her to the big boss. The big boss in this case was played by a midget named Chuchín, who they’d put into a shiny black vinyl suit, with a red pirate shirt and a cowboy hat. He was really good actor, though, I suspect that he was the only real professional actor on set. There’s another fight scene (in which Miguel makes a star turn as an actor, who karate-chops his way through the bad guys), and the good guys win.
All in all, it was pretty fun, in many ways fairly similar to Comando Zorras both in feel and basic idea. They were shooting on 16mm, on an old Arriflex, and the production was a bit rushed and basic, but I think it worked well. We did some interiors at the Plataforma offices first, then moved to Barney’s, a bar in Condesa, to shoot the bar fight. Several objects were broken over people’s heads in the duration, first a chair, which didn’t work so well, since it wasn’t really prepared well enough, and didn’t break (ouch). Then one of those fake bottles made of sugar, which I’d never seen in real life before, and which worked surprisingly well. Even the sound is very real.
Since there were hardly any professional actors, the whole crew did stints as actors. The makeup and costume girls were also backing singers/dancers in the bar, one of the producers was one of the bad guys, the camera assistant was the bartender, and so on, which made the whole thing feel like we were playing dress-up, with everyone in and out of various seventies costumes all the time.
In general, it was pretty interesting, and fun to meet the guys again. I also finished early, which is also a bonus.
On Thursday, I went with Øyvind to Rushes to watch the telecine of some material for a commercial. We were leaving a meeting and he asked me if I wanted to come along, since he was going directly there, and I hadn’t actually seen a transfer done before.
It was pretty interesting, but maybe simpler than you think. The hundred thousand dollar Da Vinci unit they use to color correct doesn’t really do much more than what a high-speced PC workstation could do, as far as I could see, and the interface was the typical early nineties “pro visual software” interface, a la Shake, a large screen with lots of buttons and widgets, no windows you can move, and things in tabs. And lots and lots of sliders. The big console the Da Vinci uses is certainly cool, and I’m told you can get those for normal PCs too, but they’re still overpriced (in the 10k dollar range, which is ridiculous for 4 large trackballs and a bunch of buttons and knobs). Brings me back to my rants about why good free software could blow this whole thing wide open.
The telecine itself is a pretty cool piece of gear, though, even though it’s also relatively simple, and overpriced, like much else in movie production. But the results look good (and this was a transfer to SD, even).
All in all, an interesting experience. I hung around the Da Vinci operator and picked up a bit about how the interface worked, and prodded him on how to get the curves right (years of still image correction experience pay off). The best part was the included free food and drinks, though. They make really good sandwiches.
And, hot on the heels of Comando Zorras’ availability, comes the Bolas Chinas trailer, which director Alex uploaded to YouTube. It’s watchable here, but it’s not particularly good. I’ve seen the movie now, and that’s not particularly good either. There’s good material, but the editing and pacing is… off. Very off. Similar to the way it’s off in the trailer, actually. But oh well, there it is.
Yeah, well, don’t get too excited, since it sucks. But, it’s available for rent at Mexican NetFlix-like site MovieNet.
The good thing about this is that I can use that site as a reference to get it into IMDB, so I can get my credit and whatnot.
But seriously, don’t rent it. It sucks.
This is a screenwriting public service announcement, for your comfort and safety.
When writing screenplays about lesbian assassins, there are some simple rules that should be obeyed for greater enjoyment, fewer complaints about clichés, and fewer lesbians demonstrating outside the theater and setting fire to your house.
I’m sure there are more, but these should get you started. Subvert the dominant paradigm, damn you. Oh, and do it with style. And tits.
The script is quite possibly done. I mean, I still need to go back and re-read in a couple of days, I’m sure there’s some details here and there that’ll change, and of course, it needs to be translated. But it feels done to me. I read through it today, after putting some finishing touches on it yesterday afternoon, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t look like a decent movie to me.
Of course, I need other people’s opinions. So I sent it off today to a select few (well, 5 people) whose opinions I trust, in different ways, and who also have quite varying tastes. And they’re not afraid to tell me that my stuff is crap, if it is. So now we’ll see.
In the meantime, I’m going to start the treatment for my next mexploitation movie. Or, well, mexi-dyxploitation. The one with the lesbian schoolgirl assassin. I’m already having fun just thinking about it.
I ran into Alex, the director of Bolas Chinas, at a cafe today. Apparently, he’d just finished the first cut a few days ago, and it clocked in at 2 hours and 20 minutes, which is of course ridiculous for a script that’s less than 60 pages. But I kind of expected it, Alex is so in love with all the takes that it would be hard for him to cut anything, at least for the first cut. Now, he just needs to cut, well, an hour or so. He promised us that we could see the final cut in a week, but I doubt it’ll be that fast. Still, he insisted it looked great, and other people told me the same thing, so it’s going to be interesting.
As for my script, it’s almost done. It needs an action scene in the second half of the second act, and while I know who it should involve and what the outcome should be, I’m having some problems maneuvering the characters into the right situation without changing earlier scenes that should ideally be left alone for purposes of characterization. But I’m sure I’ll figure it out within a few days. After that, it’s just polish and dialogue work, and then translation. I have to say I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
My writer’s block suddenly just… stopped on Thursday. I finished the long treatment, solving the problems with the end that I had, and then wrote 18 pages of screenplay, all in about 5 hours on Thursday night. Yesterday, I wrote 14 pages more, and also sent what I had off to Øyvind, to get a second opinion.
He basically said, it’s pretty good, and he liked it, but it had some problems. Which was basically what I expected. I’m going to write this more or less straight through to the end now, and then go back and revise. However, a very rough first draft should be done this coming week.
This is a semi-spec mexploitation direct to video script, semi-spec meaning that I’m not paid to write it, but the production people specifically asked me to write something, because they were interested in what I could do. So I have hopes. If nothing else, Øyvind and I agree that it’s a lot better than the script for Bolas Chinas.
Wish me luck, I’m going back to writing.