FRAME UP

In the spring of 1992, while researching and writing for The Bed You Sleep In, I was staying at a motel in Newport Oregon, a collection of old blue cottages perched on the bluff overlooking the Pacific. I'd go meet people, nose around for settings, and do some research on unemployment, the lumber industry, child abuse, and other not-so-pleasant things, and then head back "home" where I found myself spontaneously writing away like mad on my Toshiba. What I was writing was a sequence of monologues and some dialogue, darkly funny, and as it came out, with no direction or intention. It might have been a short story, or a play, or I didn't know what. It seemed to me I was writing mostly to amuse myself after each day of utter seriousness. At some point I found out that Ken Kesey used to come to this motel to write, sitting on the second story of a little tower of a cottage with a nice view of the ocean. And then as the material seemed to flesh itself out I thought maybe it could make a good film, and I asked Kate Sannella, whom I'd found at the local community theater during an audition and had enlisted for a role in Bed, to come and listen to me read it. She found it funny as well and agreed maybe it would make a good film. Then it got set aside as we got busy to make The Bed You Sleep In, which was shot in May, and edited back in San Francisco in June-July. Following a trip to Europe I came back and decided I wanted to go ahead and make Frame Up. We had enough money from sales the previous year of Sure Fire and Vermeers to make a film. Well, a peculiar kind of film - for absolutely rock-bottom money we decided to make it in 35mm, for about $40,000. A pittance in film industry terms, and something that would require cutting every corner I could imagine - except, of course, quality. Panavision loaned me their best camera and lenses, along with one of their two can-go-backwards magazines, a Worral geared head, all for free for 10 days.

Looking for actors, I was reminded of Howard Swain who'd worked with me on a failed film in Montana back in 1984 or so - he had the right look and qualities for my Ricky-Lee. I found him at the Berkeley Rep, and he was interested and happy to do it, even given the lousy pay - $500 for a week, I cover travel and food. I told him I needed someone to play Beth-Ann and asked if he knew anyone and he suggested Nancy Carlin .... his wife. So we met and bingo, she was perfect, an actress herself, and equally happy to do it. So we were pretty set.

While figuring to do the film at rock-bottom, shooting 35mm still required a little crew, so finding Rita Roti, who'd done camera assistant for BED was not available, I checked with Film Arts in San Francisco and found Anne-Marie Miguel. She'd done a little bit of 16mm camera assistant work, none in 35mm, but seemed to have a nice practical sense to her, so I signed her on. She and I were the crew, period. We did camera, sound, production management and whatever else (Mark Eifert and some other folks in Newport also lent some help). Two of us. 35mm. 10 days. She was great.

Given the minimalist funding, I thought to find every means possible to cut corners. One of these was to construct the entire aesthetic of the film around the then new reality of digital sound, which allowed for pre-mixing without picking up analog tape hiss. Through this I decided to by-pass a traditional mix - usually a costly and slow process - and to organize the shooting so that we would be able to mix in background sounds, voice-over, music into the actual shots, do all the EQ'ing, left-right balance, levels all at the digital level, and then (no NLE's yet) transfer that to 35mm mag and edit directly so that once we'd done the edit, the sound would already be "mixed". To do this required a particular mode of shooting, a bit rigid and formalized, so the entire film was imagined for suiting this kind of aesthetic. Similarly other cost-dodges were done - voice-over, long controlled takes, a lot of graphics/animation in which what normally would be optical printing jobs was accomplished by using the Panavision camera's reverse capacity and doing multiple passes in the camera. All of these things ended resulting in a virtual 1 to 1 shooting ratio (I threw away a few shots, maybe 5 minutes out of 100), and a total film cost of about $40,000, most of which went to Kodak and the lab for processing and printing.

The basic shoot was done in a week which included a very fast (picked up a speeding ticket in south eastern Oregon on a long empty desert highway) run up with Ann-Marie to the Idaho panhandle and a shot in Kellog. We did shots enroute, and then coming back equally fast to rendezvous with Howard and Nancy in Newport Oregon. We lucked out in the Palouse where there was a major dust storm, giving us some dramatically moody skies and shots. In two days we had gone, shot a mess of things for the opening passage of the film, and gotten back to Newport - about 2000 miles of driving....

In Newport the first order of business was to get Nancy and Howard into their roles - it took some doing to flatten their delivery to the dead-pan I wanted, and especially for Nancy to shift into a high-pitched loath-at-first-sound voice, coupled with a terminal dumbness guaranteed to lose all audience sympathy at the outset. It was my intention to make a kind of parody of that All-American classic, "the road movie;" to turn it inside out and show it for what it really is: Charlie Starkweather and Cheryl are not Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. In the road movie the audience goes in knowing well what they are getting - they'll follow some romantic losers to a dead end, plain and simple. And they'll enjoy it. It was my intent to make it a lot less enjoyable, to hang the spectator on their own guilty pleasure. So from the outset I want two really stupid assholes with whom no one would sympathize. Getting Nancy and Howard into this was a bit of a chore, but we managed. Once that got sorted and we booked into whatever cheap motel served, we got rolling fast. We recruited a sharp lady from the local search and rescue outfit who provided a guerney, needles and did the injections for us on the execution scene. A lady in a local convenience store gave us the nod for a stickup and turned out to have a little story of her own on that matter. Shooting was basically fun, quick and painless. Thanks to Howard and Nancy being married we got one unscripted shot, that in which a full-screen cock tatooed with "WOW" is rotated 180 degrees to read "MOM" - they still haven't shown the film to their daughters....

In five or so rushed days we were done with Newport and headed quickly back to San Francisco, shooting in the redwoods area along the way. The whole shoot had been just over a week. In the city we did a few animation/graphics sequences, and in the one extravagence of the film, did the "redwoods" sequence in an optical job that cost $5000, a rather large slice of our budget. But it was worth it.

Finished, the film was sent to the Berlin Festival Forum, which took it and The Bed You Sleep In. Frame Up also went to Sundance where it was in competition and was passed over almost as if it hadn't been there. Way too droll and dark for the "hip" audience there.

What happened afterward I cover elsewhere on the website.