I think, in the process of still recoiling from any interest in
taking a Hollywood-oriented path, and certainly picking up on my sociopolitical
beliefs and past, I found myself in the early 80's bouncing around geographically,
personally, and in terms of filmmaking. As a habitual low-budget minded
person, I had bought at a ridiculous price (about $7 a roll when Kodak
would have cost $50), 100 400 foot rolls of Fuji 400 Reversal stock,
a rather nice fast reversal stock, with rich warm colors, if rather
grainy. A lab in London apparently had stuck themselves with a warehouse
full of this stuff and probably thanks to the graininess nobody was
buying. At that price though, I did, and ended up shooting 4 features
with it for a grand cost of $700 in stock!
In that time I lived in Berlin, Frankfurt, San
Francisco, Los Angeles, more or less knocking around. At one point,
inspired by having lived briefly in a building in Emeryville (across
the bay from San Francisco) in which a cryogenics company was reputed
to be holding Walt Disney's iced body, I blurted out a partial script,
a vitriolic satire on all things Disney. Along the way I read 3 bios
on the man (apparently a rather awful person was Walt, whose Mr. Friendly
demeanor I remembered well from his 1950's TV series). Returning to
SF all primed to make the film with a zero budget and my cheap stock,
I found my would-be lead actor had gone south to UCSD to get a degree
in philosophy. Rather wired to do something, instead of casting around
for a replacement I did something else instead: replaced the idea for
the film, and in short order asked a few friends if they'd be in it,
layed out a few basic ideas, spent a few weeks of casual time talking
with the actors, Marshall Gaddis and Roxanne Rogers, nudging them toward
developing characters. I did not though let them meet each other, knowing
that Marshall hadn't been laid in a year, and thinking perhaps I'd catch
a spark of actual romantic interest, or at least erotic interest.
Marshall - whom I'd met in Montana - had never
acted in anything before, and had taken to a reclusive life in the Sierra
foothills, caretaking someone's house and trying to write a novel. I
chose him as I wanted rather deliberately to make a film about the kind
of people who in general are either simply deemed as unworthy of cinematic
presentation, or, if presented are usually made to be caricatures to
be ridiculed. Roxanne had worked a bit in theater (her brother is Sam
Shepard), but never in film. It was my intention to shoot very quickly
- about four days, to improvise off of a skeletal outline, and roll
the dice. The "script" was two pages of diagrams and notes
to myself, and the hatchmarks of dozens of cribbage games. My view was
it was a big gamble and if the first sequence didn't work out, we'd
stop and consider it a lousy idea.
We started on a Friday morning, shooting (no
permission, illegally) in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, with
Marshall sauntering up to get literally a first glimpse of Roxanne.
I thought the scene went nicely and we rushed along to the Potrero baths
area on the ocean, and again it seemed to go well. Same evening we shot
the next major sequence, in which they were supposed to have lived together
already six months. For two people who had in reality just met 12 hours
earlier I think they did a very credible job of it, though I, in an
effort to avoid long takes, managed to paint myself into a few editing
corners. It was part of my intention to try to find a style and way
of working that went fast and fluid, so the actors could get a bit of
the advantages and virtues of long takes, but the viewers could get
something more akin to what they are accustomed to - a fair amount of
cutting. So the scene in the kitchen, which is perhaps 12 minutes or
so of screen time was shot, improvised, dialog being made up as we went
along, with numerous shots, just zipping along. Took maybe 90 minutes
to shoot. Next morning we all drove out to the Sacramento Delta area,
to shoot in a little once-Chinese railroad worker town; en route I noticed
the light and stillness of a channel we were driving by, threw myself
and camera onto the hood of Marshall's Buick and got a long gorgeous
tracking shot of trees mirrored by water in a canal. I had figured to
shoot such things, knowing my narrative might be full of holes in need
of filling, and thinking to shoot various kinds of material for this
purpose, sort of spaces left open to absorb some narrative linkages.
We shot the snapshot sequence in the afternoon, checked into a local
very cheap hotel, and as the next night-time sequence was to be a bit
drunken, we all (except sound recordist Rick Schmidt, who's not a drinker)
quite literally got very drunk on beer and bad whiskey. The subsequent
scene accurately catches the boozy reality. Next morning I had a splitting
headache and frankly thought maybe all the scene would be out of focus,
wobbly and otherwise indicative of my state while shooting, but no,
it's all on the nose, with only the odd verbal cue that indeed we were
all factually drunk. We moved along to the Sierras to shoot the final
scenes.
The penultimate scenes were done on Sunday.
Monday morning, with the best luck imaginable, there was a fierce rainstorm,
buckets coming down - which made for the perfect ambience for the last
scene, shot in a little country store where a supposedly “crazy”
man refused to move out of the way, and in an impromptu bit of improvising,
seeing him sit there 2 feet from my camera, I made an unplanned 360
degree pan, him placidly reading a book while Marshall lay dead on the
floor, blood oozing, Roxanne crying over him, as the camera laconically
surveyed the mundane stuff of the store. I couldn’t have dreamed
up such an ending - rain, indifferent guy, and a great performance from
Roxanne, if I had planned a 100 years. I notched another one up for
the virtues of improvising, going with the flow.
We went back to San Francisco and I got the
stuff processed, and one scene simply didn’t work. Along with
spending a half day with each one of them doing pickup shots - Marshall
cruising State offices, Roxanne talking to a friend and working in the
box office of a theater - were-shot a scene on the Bay, endlessly better
than the original version which was completely different. Editing took
perhaps a month or so, while at the same time I figured out how to do
the camera obscura shot, which, after some real complicated thoughts
of building a machine to emulate the image one gets in the place itself,
a flash of intelligence came, and with the permission of the guy who
ran it, I removed his lens, aimed with a modest zoom into the 45 degree
set mirror that reflects the image down to the table, and let his machine
do its usual movement: for me utterly simple, and on screen about as
close to the feel of the real camera obscura as one could get. (For
this one shot used Ektachrome, a slower but much finer grained stock
with rich wide latitude).
"Jost has a keen camera eye and a marvelously prickly feel for
relationships poised between the plain-spun and the psychotic. This
bumpy California love story between two emotional down-and-outs is
teasingly scripted, tightly acted by Marshall Gaddis and Roxanne Rogers
and is probably the best value-for-dollar film in London."
- The Guardian