Making Bullion

"Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes." - John LeCarre


This past weekend Malarkey Films shot two days worth of The Ex Factor web series.  The script for The Ex Factor, as it stands now, is 91 pages or the equivalent of a full-length screenplay.  After the first day of filming they had filmed approximately half of it.  They expect to finish shooting next weekend.  Even though I had written the web series to be as simple to produce as possible, the efficiency of the process they've developed is kind of astonishing.

I was able to sit in on the first day of shooting, in which they shot all of the Studio scenes.  The extreme speed is made possible by how they're shooting the studio scenes.  The two actors are shot by three cameras.  They run through the scene a few times, first playing the scene as written and then a few times improv-ing their way through the beats of the script.  In the editing, they'll choose among the takes to create the full episodes.

A few days before we started filming, the lead actress asked me if I minded that the plan was to stray from the words I slaved over for so long. It's a real question.  The final result will almost assuredly not contain many of the lines that I liked, ideas that I included, things that have been important to me that I've been working on for a year.  As I sat in the back of the room watching the scenes being run, there were times that the final result resembled my script in only the most cursory ways. It brings to mind the John LeCarre quote that started this blog with.  Is this something that I can live with?

In this case, yes.  For one thing, I wrote the characters to be improv comedians who take an idea or phrase and riff on it.  It's important for the scenes to feel natural as spoken and not feel like they were written, with the flubs, incomplete thoughts, tangents, dropped threads, bad jokes, awkward pauses, mumbles and everything else that comes with real people who talk to each other.  If I tried to write out every "um" and insisted on the actors executing everything as written, the result would be stilted and dead, and also draw out the shooting process interminably.


It's also the current trend in comedy to let the actors improv scenes.  Every comedy out of the Judd Apatow tree is said to do this, for instance, but it's not like this is new, either.  Someone "wrote" all of Buster Keaton's movies even though Keaton pretty much used the premise of the script as a framework for his physical comedy, most of which was invented on the set. 

In the movies the writer is often the lowest guy on the ladder. A writer who writes a play that is produced can feel secure that the company that produces it will produce his or her script down to the last syllable.  A writer who writes a screenplay that is produced can't feel secure in anything, as writers working on studio projects are replaced like used socks.


The shooting of The Ex Factor is different, as I was the driving force behind the project.  I could have, from my perch in the back of the set, insisted that the two characters sign off on the show "I was Josh" as I had written instead of "I'm Josh", as he said. I could have interjected any number of times, but I didn't. In large part it's because of the people who are working with me on this project. I actually really trust these people.


In my experience of working with groups doing film projects, it's rare to find a group in which everyone is actually happy to do their assigned role.  For me it's only really happened with Malarkey Films.  In other groups, it's always a thing that an actor wishes he had a bigger role, or a techie wishes she was directing, and in a 48 Hour Film Project situation, everyone thinks that their idea should be the one that is used on Friday night.  When I first joined up with Malarkey last year for their 48 Hour Film Project, it was only to be a PA as they already had a writer.  It was a profound shock when they explained to me that they were planning to shoot whatever the writer was going to write.  Really?  There was not going to be the traditional four hours of intrateam bickering? Seriously?  They were serious, and they did it. The writer wrote, the director directed, the actors acted, the techies teched.  This is not the way it usually happens, trust me on that.


Working with them twice more as the writer cemented my trust in their working process.  They get things done quickly and without rancor because everyone works well within their roles, and they're all good at what they do.  It doesn't even matter which of the two possible directors is directing, the one that isn't directing ably supports the other.  When I explained this to my wife, she asked whether it was because they had a lot of experience working together that they're able to do things that way, but I don't think that explains it all.  Some of the groups I've worked with might not get to this level of trust if they were to work together for another decade. It's never been my personality to make waves, so trusting the team to do what I know they can do wasn't a big decision. The end result won't hew completely to what my vision was, but it's going to be good. It might be like seeing my oxen made into bullion, but from past experience I know that they're pretty good at making bullion.