April 4-10, 2002
cover story
Shorts Stories
 LETTER Man: Chris Mich shoots Character. salted nuts: The wild and crazy duo from Mark Brodzik's Joey and Mickey. house of the rising sun: Jeremiah Zagar's Delhi House profiles an organization which helps "the poorest of the poor."  |
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Four FestIndies filmmakers talk about how to make an impact in 20 minutes or less.
The features might get the fanfare, but this year’s Festival of Independents is rich in short-form goodness. For some filmmakers, short subjects are just a springboard on the way to long-format success, but that’s no reason the films can’t be enjoyed on their own. Let’s face it: Most feature-length films barely have enough ideas for a 10-minute short film, so why not cut out the fat and save those parking-meter quarters for laundry? Below, four of FestIndies’ best tell us how they kept it short and sweet.
Joey and Mickey
Among a number of shorts that pay tribute to the glory of Philadelphia, Marc Brodzik’s Joey and Mickey stands out for its off-the-beaten-path subject, sharp humor and economical editing. Brodzik is no stranger to City Paper readers -- he appeared naked on the cover of earSHOT riding a Big Wheel -- but the 10-minute short shows a side of the tongue-in-cheek artist that’s practically sincere. That may just be because when it comes to over-the-top humor, there’s no way to compete with his subjects.
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For the benefit of those who’ve never experienced one of their thrice-weekly gigs at Ninth and Christian’s Kathleen’s, a brief explanation: The gray-haired duo specialize in nightclub music with a heaping side of raunchy humor; one minute they’re swinging their way through “Summer Wind,” and the next drummer Mickey is donning a pair of novelty sunglasses with a rubber phallus dangling between the eyes and calling out, “Any of you ladies care to blow my nose?” (If the film whets your appetite, be sure to stop by the Festival of Independents’ closing-night party, where Joey and Mickey will be the musical guests.)
Brodzik recalls the first time he saw them: “I walked in and the first thing I heard was Mickey saying, ‘Hey, this song goes out to Frankie -- you douchebag,’ and I just started pissing my pants. From then it just got funnier and funnier.” Shot about a year ago as part of the pilot for a still-in-development arts show called Activate, the film mixes clips from a typical night at Kathleen’s with the duo’s reminiscences of their more than three decades in show business.
“The thing that blew me away,” Brodzik says, was “when you see them perform, there’s just something about them that is so hilarious and so natural -- it’s totally the real deal. That’s what I love most about them. They’re so genuine, so funny, there’s so much stuff there that people needed to see, and people that do see them love them. In a way, I could see them being stars, because they just are who they are.”
Proving once again that Philadelphia is the biggest small town you’ll ever live in, Brodzik even managed to find connections between his subjects and two members of his family. “They used to perform down in Wildwood when my dad was a teenager,” he recalls, “and it turns out they kind of knew each other. And when I told my aunt that I was planning on doing this piece, she kind of freaked out. She was like, “Dirty Mickey? Ask him if he has a tattoo of lips on his ass.’ It turns out he was her first kiss.”
Welcome to CB Land
From that creepy guy next door who never seems to leave his window to the folks upstairs who leave their stuff in the dryer for days, we’ve all had our tussles with the people who live nearby. But try Cheryl Hess’ problems on for size. For upward of five years, she (and housemate/fellow filmmaker Maria Rodriguez) were plagued by a next-door neighbor who, with nothing more sophisticated than a CB radio, could eavesdrop on their phone calls and send his voice blaring over phone, television, stereo and computer speakers -- essentially any household item designed to broadcast sound. She tried confronting the neighbor, with no success, and tried getting the phone company or the FCC to intercede, likewise without result. “As a freelancer, I was around a lot during the day,” Hess recalls, “and he, as an unemployed person, was around a lot as well -- and he was just on the damn CB all the time. I’d be on business calls, and this other voice would come over the line. I turned into this complete South Philly person -- I would scream out the window, and get into these screaming matches in the street. Finally, I said, if getting mad doesn’t work, I’m gonna get even.”
Hess, a documentarian best known for her waitress-themed In the Weeds (co-directed with Melissa Thompson) turned to the tools of her trade and decided to document her own situation. But her neighbor, not surprisingly, didn’t exactly want to be interviewed (even though she offered to pay him), so she ended up crafting a curious hybrid, part confessional, part film noir (and with a final reality-bending twist that’s far too good to reveal here). Hess’ struggles are laid out before the camera, while fantasy sequences explore the identity-shifting allure of CB communication (which brings to mind Joy Ride’s description of CB as “prehistoric Internet”). The film’s balance between realism and fantasy is particularly interesting given that Hess spent some of the time between In the Weeds and Welcome to CB Land making what she calls “the narrative film I don’t talk about.” She will say this much, though: “I just tried shooting fiction, and it really didn’t work. I still call [Welcome to CB Land] a documentary, although when I watch it, there’s very little in it that’s true documentary. I wasn’t planning on making a fiction piece. Whenever I enter it into festivals, I always put down ‘documentary,’ and then they can decide where they want to put it.”
The film’s most overly non-real sequences find Hess and the neighbor dressed up like characters out of a gangster movie, until the latter finally gets his just deserts. “It’s like the revenge fantasy,” Hess explains. “I couldn’t shoot him or follow him around in real life, so I had to do it through proxy. At the same time, I was watching film noir and reading a lot about it. The fact that the protagonist in film noir is always someone who’s got a moral dilemma and isn’t your typical hero -- that’s me.”
While the movie turned out “darker” than Hess expected, the real-life story has a happy ending -- maybe even two of them. Hess moved to Toms River, N.J., where she’s remained CB-free. And the neighbor? “All of a sudden this baby started to show up [next door] -- the neighbors said it was his grandkid. His interest [in CB] started to die down after that. I couldn’t put that in [the movie]; it’ll have to be in the sequel.”
Delhi House
What distinguishes Delhi House from any number of groaningly sincere exposés of Third World poverty is the film’s sense of wide-eyed concern -- it’s as if you actually are seeing such things for the first time. So it’s not surprising to learn that 20-year-old Jeremiah Zagar had never been to India before, and in fact had never really put together a documentary before he made it. He recalls, “I just happened to go to India without the intent of anything -- but with a Bolex and a mini DV.”
Zagar, the son of mosaic muralist Isaiah Zagar, actually went to India on the recommendation of his mother Julia, who owns South Street’s Eyes Gallery. “She went to India to buy crafts, and she was addicted -- she said, ‘I’ll pay for your ticket if you go.’” Zagar’s aunt was working at the American Embassy in Delhi, and the contrast between the embassy’s cushy confines and the poverty in the streets was immediately apparent. “Just the vision of people living in the streets was so devastating -- my idea of poverty was people struggling to make payments on their car. I’d go out during the day and take pictures, and I’d come back to the embassy and go to the Stars and Stripes bowling alley. It was just bizarre. I ended up feeling very uncomfortable.”
One event in particular sealed Zagar’s desire to document his surroundings: “We were riding in a rickshaw and we stopped in the middle of the market. This woman took her baby, put it in our laps, and started making motions from the baby to her mouth, like it was hungry. We gave her some money, and when we got back, they said, ‘We never give those people money. Those babies are rented, and they dope them up on opium so they don’t fuss.’ We had wondered why it wasn’t crying.” Zagar was, needless to say, devastated. “I figured there had to be somebody doing something somewhere.”
That ‘somewhere’ turned out to be Delhi House, an orphanage/clinic/rehab center devoted to helping Delhi’s “poorest of the poor.” Though initially planned as a documentary in the Errol Morris mode, Delhi House changed shape when Zagar discovered that the more impressionistic footage from his Bolex had been ruined going through security on the flight home. Even so, the result is still visually striking -- the color of raw flesh on a junkie’s arm where the rotted skin has been stripped away is almost mesmerizing, which is not to say that the film aestheticizes suffering, but that it pulls you in almost unawares.
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Zagar, in his last year as a film student at Emerson, is trying to put together a follow-up feature on the organization’s head, a dreadlocked former Amsterdam gallery owner and drug dealer who had a religious conversion when a customer traded him a Bible for a bag of heroin.
Character
Chris Mich never wanted to be an experimental filmmaker. By his own token, the 1994 University of the Arts grad was “one of those guys in film school who said, ‘Let’s make Scorsese movies; I don’t want to make Peter Rose movies,’ even though he was one of my teachers.” Mich, whose whimsical Character strings together images of the letters of the alphabet drawn from billboards, street signs, graffiti and anywhere else you might find them, fell into the genre almost by accident.
Mich was “ready to hang it up -- I wasn’t going to pay for anything out of my own pocket” when composer Paul Oehlers asked him to create a film to accompany a piece he’d just written (inspired by, of all things, a mathematical theory). “Basically,” Mich recalls, “I just shot stuff I wanted to shoot and put it together.” The result was MFL, a short that exceeded the response to anything Mich had previously filmed, including screening at the Berlin International Film Festival and a spot on IFilm.com. “That was my wake-up call,” Mich reflects. “I thought, ‘Maybe I should be doing this kind of movie.’”
He was still determined, though, not to spend his own money on projects anymore, which is where Mich’s day job comes in. For the last six years he’s been an employee of QVC, writing for its website and doing corporate video work on the side. Last year, the West Chester company started a program called “Super 8s” to fund filmmakers within their midst, the catch being that the budget would be a less-than-grand $888, and projects had to be completed within 48 hours of inception. Initially, the plan was to fund eight filmmakers, but after Mich completed a short comedy called Bathroom Boardroom through the project, he found himself up for consideration again when the sought-after seven other filmmakers failed to emerge. Thus, Character.
The film, Mich says, emerged out of an abiding interest in the strangeness of written language: “I’m just fascinated by the fact that we’re still amazed by hieroglyphs, still amazed that this is how people communicated, when we have a form of it, and we just take it for granted. I really wanted to explore, ‘How are these individual symbols really objects of art?’ You see a McDonald’s M and it conveys a whole history, but it’s really still just a letter.” Given Mich’s reluctantly experimental background, it’s not hard to see why the resulting film is more playful than pedantic, as much a celebration of the form as a linguistics lesson. Mich still thinks of himself as a writer, and can only see the humor in his reversal of fortune. “I’m a writer by nature, and now I’m kind of discovering success in experimental films, which is extremely ironic. Now I’m a writer by day, and an experimental filmmaker by night -- and by weekend.”
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