Last Chants for a Slow Dance (dead end) was made for $3,000, shot
in a single week, using about 110 minutes of film for a 90 minute final
length. One shot (the killing) was done once and a half, only because
the camera battery ran out in the middle of the first attempt. The ratio
was virtually one-to-one. (Some of the film was overprinted on itself
so the footage shot was really virtually 1 x 1, despite the numbers
there.) It was about a 50/50 mix of written material and improvised.
I happily crawled far out on a limb, learned a hell of a lot, and luckily
came away with - I’ll be frank about it - an amazing film. It
is necessarily somewhat technically crude, though at the same time rather
aesthetically sophisticated. Many critics consider it my best film,
or one of my best. I’d be happy to put it in the latter category,
and, being a materialist in the way I see things, including film criticism,
I’d have to say, "Well, for $3,000, a one week shoot, and
a week or so edit, etc., it’s one hell of a film." And wouldn’t
be bad at all if you put a few more zeroes on the budget.
I had lived in Oregon and Montana for 5 years,
and the rural west was very real and familiar terrain to me, a place
in which I felt at home and comfortable, nevermind its many rough manners.
Despite the gun-racks, the macho sexism and the overall conservatism
of the west, it is generally a place where people are genuinely friendly
and helpful. For shooting a no-budget film like Last Chants
it was ideal: ask for a bar, you got it, no questions asked, no money
exchanged. Aside from Tom Blair, whom I’d met when living near
Kalispell when he was the theater department of the local community
college, and Jessica St. John, a type-cast hooker sort in Hollywood
TV productions who I’d met in LA, the rest of the cast were locals
who I gathered in the space of a week. Places, trucks, people - what
little I needed fell easily in my hands for the asking. True west.
I’d written the texts for this film quickly,
a bit before shooting. The script was a simple schematic listing sequences
1, 2, etc., and a handful of pages of dialog, and some very little sketches
of the sections in which cinematic devices would be used. It was maybe
five pages total. My friend Swain Wolfe lent me a CP16mm camera and
cassette recorder rigged with a synch pulse generator, and a few people
who worked in his laboratory, Bitterroot Films, in Missoula, made for
my crew: a sound recordist and a young woman whose name I don’t
remember offering some general help. (What I do remember is Tom doing
the typical film-set deal of bedding the girl and reporting back her
post-orgasm comment, "Boy, did I need that!.")
With less than a week of preparation we started
shooting, as usual for me, trying to stay in order of the story, first
shot to last.
Some anecdotes:
Opening shot, Swain and I sitting on the hood
of a banged up pickup, not tied down with anything, going for about
5 miles distance at 35 or 40 mph, me praying no cops would pass by,
and having instructed Tom that whatever else, don’t stop abruptly
- otherwise Swain and I would slip off the front and get run over. Luckily
no cops passed, no fast stops were necessary and we got our shot in
one try. Tom had little cue cards placed around the cab of the truck
and while he sees that in the shot, the viewer doesn’t. It was
basically a long monologue mostly written and a little improvised.
Arguing in the mirror. This scene was fully
written, every "fuck" included. Swain wanted to shoot it,
but I’d seen him do some unrequested zooming in the opening shot,
and decided I better shoot it all myself. He wasn’t happy but
he let me go on. We did a dry rehearsal, just to make the timing come
in on a single 400 foot roll, and for me to work a bit on the camera
movement in the visuals, and then we shot a single take. I find it a
wonderful piece, mixing hard-core realism with a compression of time
and psychology which is what art is about - in this case a marriage’s
worth of hatred and passion is condensed into a single 10 minute take
with an argument that could never happen in real life (some teeth would
fly first), but which succinctly and painfully conveys the "reality."
Cafe: I shot the red cafe sign at night with
color stock, loaded up a roll of black and white reversal and then slept
with the locked down camera (just gaffers tape doing the job) overnight
on a hard floor, and set up at 6 am or so when the cafe opened, plopped
my groggy actors in place, having prepped them earlier with some ideas
and one joke I’d just read in the papers, and let it roll, purely
improvised. Wayne Crouse was very sharp about picking up everything
I’d told him and the dialog came out great, slipping in neatly
for later events in the film. The cafe was open in reality, a working
place we just set ourselves up and shot - with the owner’s easy
permission, of course.
Bar: I asked for an OK to shoot, screwed a 250
watt tungsten lamp in the fixture above the actors. The film stock was
a 100 ASA reversal, Ektachrome EF (for Extra Fast!). At the time it
had the fastest speed available in reversal color. I very much liked
it, and its slower 64 ASA companion, MS, for rich saturated color and
a hard emulsion base that let one edit original with minimal risks of
scratching. The original materials have been very stable and are as
if out of the lab today - no color loss on originals or reversal prints.
I asked the bar-tender if he’d like to be in film - getting a
very predictable answer and an extra flourish on his job, had them turn
off the juke box so I could lay in my own music later (you can hear
a voice in the shot yelling to ask when they can turn the music back
on), and shot, again, a single take. Actors did a nice boozy-floozy
job, though I think maybe I flailed about a bit too much, listening
to the music for the track with a walkman while shooting/dancing. When
the shot was done I noticed in the dark that my 250 watt lamp had melted
the styrofoam ceiling cover for about 4 inches around it. It was dark
up there and the barkeep didn’t see it and I kept quiet - though
I doubt he would have given a rat's ass about it.
Mary’s apartment: A very long - about
14 minutes - very calculated shot, starting at night in B&W, with
a color TV set sitting in the middle of the B&W. A couple - Tom
and Mary - are screwing in the adjacent room, their writhing legs visible,
sex sounds audible. On the TV a late night national talk show (Johnny
Carson) drones on with the predictable sexual innuendo littering the
discourse, the image visually sitting just where the heads of the couple
would be if the wall were transparent. The viewer mentally tries to
look around the door to see the full action. Using ABC rolling, the
shot dissolves slowly into morning time, the TV still on and finally
going off minutes later with a sign-off national anthem. Tom in the
far room sits up and calls his wife and argues with her; Mary, the one-night-stand,
having gone to make coffee, sitting in the next room overhearing. She
passes the still-running TV screen and turns transparent and ghostly.
Tom screams at his wife, and the call ends. He enters the front room
and lies to Mary about it, and leaves. Mary sits, then gets up and makes
the bed. In its droll, understated manner, this shot visually and verbally
compresses a whole life-style into a shot. It seems to me a highly cinematic
continuum of Edward Hopper’s view of Americana. For a 14 minute
static shot it crackles with energies and tensions, a textbook case
of how much can be done with how little if only one uses the nature
of the medium intelligently.
Police rap sheet: in a montage, we see Tom on
early morning streets, something discreetly disorienting about the composition
and oblique golden light. Then a close up of a police mug-shot book
borrowed from the local post-office (with OK); Tom’s voice reads
the rap sheets as he flicks the pages, the camera showing close-up the
battered faces and finger prints of the wanted men. The short stories
read like a B-grade thriller, but are dead real, concise little bios
of the criminal world. After some minutes the sequence cuts to a close
shot of a rabbit being knocked out and killed, the body laying twitching
for half a minute at the close. I was the one killing the rabbit and
a friend, Peter Trias, who’d never seen such a thing, was behind
the camera (I had raised rabbits and for a few years probably averaged
killing about 4 a week). Anticipating problems, I had bought two rabbits
just in case. On the first take Peter visibly jumped quite a bit when
the head got chopped off and we did indeed need a take two. Many in
the audience do the same thing.
The killing: at the end of the week of our shooting,
with just a half-day before Tom would be leaving, our crew and cast
had come down with some kind of stomach flu. I got up real early to
go scout a location, which I got an OK on - a gas station by a highway.
I was going to have Tom do a hold up. I went back to Missoula, roused
my people up, and off we drove. When we got to the station, my somewhat
hippiesque crew seemed to offend the husband/owner of the station, whose
wife had given the OK. Rather than argue we drove off in search of another
place and indeed found a visually even better station, isolated from
traffic, tucked off in the woods. It was closed, with no one around,
and we discussed doing it quickly but decided that being seen, especially
with a gun visible, might be too big a risk in gun-toting Montana. Time
flying, I decided to dump the gas station hold-up idea, and instead
have the victim be off on a dirt road with his car broken down.
We’d rehearsed a bit the idea of the hold-up,
but Tom and John Jackson, himself a detective novel writer, cooked up
the revision as we drove to find a place. With the sun dropping fast
we ran to do a practice run at it, just to make sure the whole shot
fit into a 10 minute roll of film. The shot involved me shooting while
getting out of the back of the pickup Tom was driving, Tom pulling over,
going to the man to chat, going back to his car to get his gun, going
back, talking some, and then taking the man into the woods where he
shoots him, and then saunters back to his truck to drive off. We then
began one take and about halfway through the camera battery ran dead.
Luckily we had another roll of film since I felt both dramatically and
morally that this had to be a single shot sequence, and any cutting
would read false. We loaded a new battery and as the light dropped we
got our scene, beautifully done by the actors. (In preparing the scene
I’d had a harsh disagreement with John, who felt that he should
resist, whereas I thought someone faced with a gun would most likely
just go along to get along; John’s hard-ass detective novels I
think tilted his sense of reality.)
For the film’s last shot I loaded up some
very slow (and very cheap) hi-con titling stock, layed on the hood of
the truck, shooting Tom’s face as he drove away, dropping into
his own thoughts, now a killer. Time for the viewer too to linger over
the sense of this film.
Tom left the same day, and a few days later
I drove down to LA, unprocessed film in hand, track on 3 tape cassettes,
and jumped to editing on a friends flat bed in Santa Monica. Slept on
the floor, and crammed a quick edit in, while scrambling to also do
the rest of the music. I’d promised the Edinburgh festival this
film (to go along with Angel City) back in April or so, and
their deadline was less than a month away, end of August, as I dug in
editing in late July.
I lucked out, my exposures were on the nose,
and no other technical problems lost me any footage. I edited the original,
no workprint being economically feasible (and besides I had grown used
to this way of working.) Being very simple, with long single-take sequences
leaving very little room for choice, the editing went fast, and I had
it ready, ABC rolled, in a week or so, to give to the lab. I did my
own timing charts for it.
The music on the film was my own, with my voice
doing the singing. Some of the songs were things I’d already written,
and a few were done specifically for the film. In Missoula I rounded
up a few musicians and recorded some of the songs with Kaysa Ohman;
back down in LA I did the rest, including the peddle-guitar, with others
there. In both cases I felt the long look-down-the-disdainful-noses
of professional musicians as they tolerated my very amateur efforts.
Still, for the most part it came out OK (except for one song which to
me is far too slow, being myself a bit slow from a heavy painkiller
used courtesy of an injury from a car accident I had on returning to
LA, but the percussion guy had layed down the track and left before
I realized it).
Getting the first print, seeing really for the
first time the film with its composite images, sound mixed with music,
all in order, I was a bit taken aback. I’d never seen a film like
it, not structurally or aesthetically, or one with such raw powerful
performances coupled to what, after the crude financial and technical
circumstances it was made with, were rather elegant and sophisticated
aesthetic means. My friends all thought it was rather weird and didn’t
really know what to make of it. I don't think Tom liked it much when
he saw it, though I think he changed his mind after a few years. In
Edinburgh though it went over nicely, and as time went along it got
some serious attention, sold to UK TV, and otherwise did alright. Some
critics seem to regard it as some kind of American classic, and while
I know one shouldn’t say such things oneself (bad form), I would
have to say that yes, I think it is certainly up there with the best,
albeit one should look through the materialist prism while making such
a judgment: nevermind the money and so on, it is a damned good film;
taking the material side into account, it is a lot more by far.
With this film, having taken great risks in
its making, I found myself shifting from an earlier assumption that
very low-cost work required a rather certain, prepared and predictable
systematic approach, and I began to lean strongly toward improvisation
inside a normally somewhat formal setting. Most of my subsequent work
was done in such a way, though in hindsight I would have to add that
before taking such an approach one should probably have considerable
experience (and talent): in 1977 I’d been making films for 14
years.
"Watching Last Chants is a disconcerting experience,
the harrowing intensity of the long takes almost aggressively unpleasant,
the final murder almost self-consciously "unmotivated."
But the very absence of a reassuring sense of conventional motivation
- and therefore order - is essential to a film about a man totally
disconnected from his surroundings, his numbness preventing him from
doing more than passing through the action, with the power to change
nothing, to feel nothing, to understand nothing."
- David Coursen, Film Quarterly
