SLOW MOVES


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