Check out this week’s Feedback column for some notes on projects like the Performers Exchange Project, and the Flying Words Project. The latter features a deaf and nondeaf poet who will perform together tonight as part of UVA’s ongoing American Sign Language/Deaf Culture Lecture Series.
Those who have been following this blog may have noticed that I’ve been looking at film incentives that were traveling through state legislature, and were recently passed. As part of that research I traveled with a local film producer and casting director named Erica Arvold last week to the set of a project she’s been working on with filmmaker Eric Hurt. It’s a feature-length film called House Hunting, which Hurt wrote with input from his friend Pat Cassidy, another producer on the film. The "psychological thriller" is loosely based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, the play that contain’s the famous and sometimes true phrase, "hell is other people."
Director Eric Hurt with a big ol’ Red One camera.
My trip provided interesting insight to what it takes to make an independent film in Central Viriginia. The first and biggest takeaway lesson was that making a bona fide film here is, by necessity, a labor of love. Those of the crew that are not from around here are staying with those who are. Arvold says that her home laundry facilities are doing double duty. And donations have been pouring on set from places that range from Boylan Heights to Rebecca’s Natural Foods. (Somebody had to buy the Spudnuts.)
There was a heavy rain the day before I went, and the entire set was covered in mud. Even without the mud, it was hardly plush: the production office is a big orange van der Linde recycling container (One member of the crew is the son of the van der Linde who owns the recycling company) with two little tables inside, and a mess of call sheets—shooting schedules that tell everyone on set where the need to be and when—in manilla folders taped to the metal walls.
This is why we can’t have nice things!
Arvold says that, as the producer, House Hunting was doable because it required few lead characters—although they did fly at least two of the leads from Los Angeles—and a modest setting. To make a great film about people stuck in a house, all you need is a house, and the house can be anywhere. Plus, thrillers tend to have low overhead and post reasonable returns.
Cassidy told me that he took off from work, at a film production company in Austin, the time it would take to make the film. He said that if his boss wouldn’t have given him the time off, it would have been like "not letting someone who works at Home Depot go to the Olympics." Another project that Hurt and Cassidy worked on together was a short film, Lullabye, which you can watch in its entirety here. Last year, the short was picked up by a company called FEARnet, an online subsidiary of Lionsgate and Sony Pictures that distributes horror films. Cassidy says that it was an unlikely triumph for a short film like Lullabye, since there is no profit model for shorts unless they’re picked up by, say, a traveling film festival, or marketed in some package.
We’ll have to wait to see what happens to House Hunting, but one thing’s for sure: it will be spooky. This is all part of a broader attempt to spin a yarn that will be printed in next week’s C-VILLE.
To bleed or not to bleed?
