Ourmageddon: A Musical in 48 Hours

First off, I haven't blogged much recently as I hadn't written much due to life circumstances.  That has changed, and I should be making a few posts on things I'm working on right now, as I'm working on a lot.

When the time approached for the 48 Hour Film Project for Boston, I was pleased to hear from Malarkey Films, the team I've worked with successfully on three previous entries as well as The Ex Factor web series (which is still in editing, believe it or not).  Talking with Jack beforehand, it was a surprise to hear him testing the waters about the idea of doing a musical. Now, typically for the 48 Hour Film Project, you're randomly assigned a genre and most teams dread drawing the musical or Western genre.  This time we were going to do a musical on top of whatever genre we were actually assigned.

Was this insanity on Malarkey's part?  As it happens, it wasn't.  They've simply worked out the logistics of making films and have now built enough of a team that this project was perfectly doable. One of the Malarkeys was a composer and routinely put together an eight piece band to play original music for these movies. The only question was: were we going to be able to put together an actual script with workable lyrics in the time it usually takes a team to simply decide on a project?

Even though I once wrote a short play which was a musical (that the producing company would have to write the music for), it was an open question as to whether I'd be able to write lyrics within a 48 Hour Film Project situation. "Oh, so we have three, maybe four writers lined up," the director said. "Do you have any thoughts on how that might work?" The prospect of writers butting heads with one another notwithstanding, I suggested having one writer be responsible for the "book", the non-sung part of the script while the other writers each be responsible for one song.

As a writer, I'm always worried about the writing portion of a 48 Hour Film Project piece devolving into total chaos, which is why I came up with the idea of having a short writing session and having all interested writers present completed scripts, which the director would choose from. That wouldn't work in this case, given the amount of writing we'd need to accomplish in order for the composer to start working as soon as possible so that we'd have a working version of the music for the actors to lip sync to on Saturday. (The final version of the music would be recorded on Sunday. Logistically, the whole thing was topsy turvy.) No, this time we'd have to have a true collaboration, which is the usually just code for "no fucking plan at all" when used by 48 Hour teams.

So on the Friday night of the film project arrived, I went to our filming location, the kickass artist's space in Somerville called the Artisan's Asylum. We'd have a whole warehouse space to work with. Besides myself, there were two other writers on this team, both of whom are accomplished playwrights. I knew and had worked with one of them, Vladimir, and knew that he was a quite talented playwright. The director, the composer, and a few other folks were also there.  People like the cast and crew were nowhere near the room, which in itself was a very good sign.  They don't need to be there.

At 6:30 or so, the required elements started trickling in.  We had drawn Mockumentary, but were going to jettison it in favor of a wild card.  Mockumentary musicals did seem to be a tough fit. Eventually we got "Buddy Film" and learned the other criteria that every team would have to deal with: the character of Ivan or Ivana Wright, decorator; the prop of chocolate; and the line "You're Making a Big Mistake".

What followed was the organic, collaborative process that every team thinks they are going to have but few actually do.  It became clear that the director was jazzed about doing something out of the box. Having a decorator as a character had led me to thinking of some sort of home decorating show, but the idea of doing something post-apocalyptic was bandied about. The shooting location we had committed to may have had something to do with that. We had a huge industrial space that we couldn't light terribly well. The team wanted to build their sets, but if you have a warehouse that's going to look dingy, you might as well write something that would fit in in that atmosphere.

It'd be pretty hard to make this look like a cheery apartment.

So we had to have buddies. We had a pool of actors recruited mostly through trying to find available folks with musical theatre backgrounds. I contributed a bit, contacting friends of mine who work in college theatre and chorale departments for students who'd be interested. So we hadn't work with most of them, but had them send their headshots, youtube links to them singing and descriptions of voices. I knew, generally, that we had a number of kickass female singers and so the buddies should be two women. So, two women, one of whom's a decorator, in a post-apocalyptic fallout shelter. The decorator tries to cheer up her friend by making the shelter look nicer. Since we need at least a little conflict, the friend isn't having it, and needs to be convinced. She'd have her song in which she'd say the required line "You're making a big mistake." The required prop of chocolate would be the thing that would convince the friend that the post apocalyptic life is still worth living. And they'd have a happyish ending where they'd make the shelter look nice.

It's hard to remember who contributed what at this point. I think I came up with the use of the chocolate, but I could be wrong.  After we had that much of an outline, we split up lyric writing duties between the three writers, and I was given the ending sort of as default.  It was decided by the sound recording guy that it would be a whole lot easier if the entire piece was sung rather than mixing spoken and sung dialogue. (A really wise move, as it turned out, since we were next to a room of power tools that were used all through filming and didn't care as we weren't recording sound until after filming anyway.)

So now it was time to actually write happy lyrics about an objectively horrible situation. "Always look on the bright side of life" came to mind. I would have everything that came after Katie, the name we came up with for the reluctant friend, accepted the chocolate as salvation. I started writing, hoping that something had sunk in from trying to cram Sondheim's book Finishing the Hat in the previous week and that the lyrics I wrote weren't laughable on its face.

Katie

     (slow and melodic)

There's enough for everyone here,

We all can have a taste,

There's enough, if we just share,

Have nothing go to waste,

New York's a smoking crater,

LA fell into the sea,

But together we'll make the end of the world,

The best end it can be!

A brand new world has risen,

In this dingy catacomb,

This shelter is not our prison,

Katie & Ivana

From now on it's our home!  

That brought us to the point were we could have the big finish, so much as we were capable of it. I wrote it as a song and dance number. We even recruited a choreographer on Friday night. Stuff like that is why I love the 48 Hour Film Project.

All

     (upbeat)

1! 2! 3!

We know the bombs have dropped,

And that the world is screwed,

But we're still here,

so just lighten the mood,

Of course we're gonna miss,

The world that's outside,

But still that's no reason,  

For a mass suicide,

Even a little Armageddon

Can't make us feel blue

Because the end of the world

is not the end of the world

as long as I've got you!

Then everyone grabs cleaning and painting implements and dances.

You've got to grab a brush,

You've got to grab a broom,

And just sweep away your fears,

of our imminent doom,

If you can just make the most,

Of what you possess,

Then remember good times,

And forget about the rest.

Survivor 1

Now the Apocalypse

May seem like a bitch,

That much does seem true.

Survivor 2

But the Apocalypse
Ain't nothing can't be fixed,

With a fresh coat of blue,

Now this I think was the key line, the one that made me confident that this was going to turn out alright.

The end of the world

is not the end of the world

as long as I've got-

Katie

You!

Ivana

You!

All

As long as I've got you!

    

That bit of wordplay, using the literal phrase "the end of the world" to contrast with its melodramatic usage, just struck me as the right tone.

By 9pm, after just a few hours, we were ready to read our segments, hoping that they actually fit each other. And they did! One flowed into the next almost seamlessly. It was much too long, so we each outlined parts we felt the composer could cut. When we got the script in the morning set to music, we found out there were those cuts and more, many lines had been adjusted to fit music. I fully expected that, though I was sad at some of the adjustments. I read through the script at the whole, and made suggestions on ways to strengthen the "buddy" aspect of the main relationship. If I was the only writer, I might have made more drastic changes, but that wasn't the case this time around. In any case, they had to get to the actual filming and they did. The results of which you can see here:

So, there it is. A whole, real musical made in 48 hours. It's over the top. Hell, it's over the top of over the top, a little overcrowded, and completely ridiculous when Katie pulls out the stick of dynamite (I wish I had won that argument).  But man, is it fun and audacious that we pulled off that much in that amount of time, and utilized that much talent. That's not even to mention the credits singalong sequence in gratuitous cgi at the end. It was named one of the 12 finalists, and after it screens next Wednesday we'll see if it actually wins or at least gets some awards for the music and ensemble.

A last note: As it happens we weren't even the only team in Somerville to be making a 48 hour musical that weekend. These guys were making their film called Los Locos Manos just minutes away. They were psychological rather than bombastic, the music was good, the movie well produced, and I wouldn't have blamed the judges one bit if their film had made the finals instead of ours. The field seemed very strong in general this year, judging by our group. I'm still dumbfounded that ImprovBoston's Dark, Chocolate didn't make it. The strength of this year's entries makes making the Best Of even sweeter.