Wild About Movies publisher Tim Nasson recently asked "Let Them Chirp Awhile" director Jonathan Blitstein to tell you, Wild About Movies devotees, all about his first movie - in theaters December 5, 2008.
We didn't want to burden him with having to write an epistle, and hoped he'd be able to give us the time required to write an intelligent, engaging 500 word essay; which, for you non-writers, knows takes even a writer with years of experience - at least - an hour.
Well, do we have a treat for you... much more than we expected... and a lot more than you did, for sure. We're certain that you'll be running to Fandango, or whatever online movie site it is you use to buy movie tickets in advance, to snatch up your tickets for "Let Them Chirp Awhile," before the seats are all gone...
“Blitstein Unbound”
So, I had gone to film school but was all mixed up and working at a marketing agency in December of 2005, bummed out and feeling low, sitting in a cubicle depressed and stuff. I knew that I still wanted to make that first feature film, as it had been my dream since I was about 15 years old. So I quit the job. My dad told me I was nuts and at this point I’ve just gotten used to that, people tell me that all the time. But I quit the nice paycheck, health benefits, 2 weeks paid vacation, you know, those things that people used to have when jobs were easy to find and the economy wasn’t in the toilet.
Speaking of economy, that’s a solid way to describe the way I think about filmmaking. Even though we ran out of film every day on set and I had to do the film in 1-2 takes for almost every single shot, I think I’d still shoot 15 takes or less even if I had a bigger budget and more time. I care about making sure my crew is happy. It can get tedious and hot on set. And it’s much easier on the editor with less takes. Additionally, I think economically not just in terms of time and budget, but in form and style. I like to determine the fewest shots necessary to cover the scene effectively without drawing the audience’s attention to the camera. I learned that from Hitchcock and Spielberg I think. So, I storyboarded about 450 drawings for the film. These look like something a one-eyed sixth grader would draw, I’m terrible in that way, but I know what the pictures mean, and my DP could decipher it without holding them up to a mirror. Because of the boards, I was able to pre-edit the film in my head. That was the only way to make the film in the few days that we made it in. And it also freed me up, because I came to set knowing exactly what we needed. We never just shot “coverage”. Coverage is what you shoot when you don’t know what you’re doing.
Anyway, lets back up a bit. So I was a free man, broke and eating PB+J and Ramen all day, and started working as a production assistant, pouring coffee and whatnot, and reading a lot of books. I think I re-read a favorite called Hitchcock-Truffaut and also a lot of Dostoevsky. There’s a lot of time to read and worry and question your life when you’re fire-watching a truck filled with equipment. Anyway, I had written some stuff, not really a full screenplay yet, but the last three or four years of my life had been nuts. I saw a lot of my friends struggling, paralyzed and burnt out from fear of failure. The plane that flew into the World Trade Center flew over my head and I saw people jumping out of windows about 10 days after I started NYU as an eighteen year old wide-eyed midwesterner. Not fun stuff. So, the story for the film came out of real life, but none of the characters are “me” and I never took care of no dog in exchange for a sexual favor. And I wish I had so many girls after me like “Bobby” does in the film, but I never did. People always ask that.
I had been thinking about my first feature in theory for four years. The process of developing the actual script was 4 months, and the actual sitting at the computer to write it was 27 days. Let me make something clear. My first choice for an independent debut feature was never a movie about young people in NYC, talking. Man I wanted so badly to make The Godfather or E.T. I just could not afford to make an animatronic robot alien, so my E.T. 2 script just went in the garbage. And Brando was one foot in the grave at that time. I was acutely aware that in order to make a first feature I had to use what I got. “Make lemonade out of lemons” my grandmother would say. I wasn’t gonna sit around and wait for a bunch of money, or move to LA and work my way up by kissing ass to suits so that by the time someone wanted to pay for me to direct my first movie, my soul would be compromised. Hell no. I was dead set on making an indie feature no matter what. If I had to do it on 8mm, I would have. Even when I was doubting myself and thinking of working as an architect or going back to law school or something, I always wanted to be my own boss. That’s something I learned from Bob Dylan very early on in life.
So, right about then, I started obsessing over Kubrick’s Fear and Desire and DePalma’s Greetings, and Cassavetes Shadows, and Fellini’s I Vitelloni. Fantastic early films by some great dudes. I started studying them and thinking about how to make a low budget movie. I kind of enjoyed the fact that it would be a personal film, at least in the thematic stuff. Really I knew at that point I realized I had to make a talky movie with people talking a lot. The budget which at the time was like $12,000 dollars dictated the genre for me. I had to shoot in New York, I couldn’t afford to fly somewhere else. NYC would have to be my set, cuz I couldn’t afford to build one. I have to admit, I tried to come up with a science fiction idea that could take place in one room, but I just couldn’t, so I turned to “slice-of-life” comedy. That’s a natural progression you know, really it is.
The plot came later.
I wanted to make a black and white film, man. I really did. I had a bit of money saved from a waitering job at a restaurant in my hometown, and I was dead set on shooting b+w 16mm. I’m still reticent to do HD. I thought to myself, if it ain’t Kodak, it’s not a real movie. So here’s what happened, I started thinking of casting my friends and making this weird little tale in my apartment and in maybe 2 or 3 locations. I was thinking about Cassavetes and kept telling myself I could do it, I could it. But I still wanted it to feel different than just boring realism. I wanted to make a Hollywood stylized movie on a 12,000 dollar budget. I started sniffing around for some more money and some free equipment and stuff. All the people I ever worked for crawled out of the woodwork like glowing white rabbits and hooked me up like crazy. It was unexpected and I was shocked and grateful. And family and friends threw in some dough too. Suddenly I had a truck full of lighting, vehicles, walkie talkies for my production team and a dude at Kodak was all like “I’m gonna get you a bunch of 35mm color negative” and suddenly this movie was a 35mm color feature.
But I wanted to keep things small, so we had a tiny crew of about 30 people, and there was some cash left over in pre-pro and I thought to myself, “Self, why don’t you get on the horn and see if you can get some real actors in this thing” …but let’s come back to the actors in a second …See, something that people don’t know about me (yet) is that I love style and lighting and camera work. I used to want to be a photographer and there was a while there when I wanted to be a cinematographer too, and a magician like Houdini. And while I love talky movies, I really grew up on Zemeckis and Spielberg and Hitchcock and Lucas and I like stylized action packed stuff. That’s not to say I don’t love a slow paced artfilm. Man, I worship the slowest paced movies like Blowup, but in my deep child-soul or whatever, I like watching Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Back to the Future II.
So look, this was back in 2006 when the landscape of indie cinema was different. No on was distributing straight to iTunes, and Jimmy takes the Elevator or The Squishy Couch or whatever movies hadn’t been on anyone’s radar. Juno hadn’t even been written yet, I don’t think. In fact there were still a lot of indie distributors still going to festivals and buying movies. (That’s over. They’ve all folded this year due to stupidity and wasteful spending, and bad scripts mostly). So I wanted to make my film really stylized and weird. So my movie has wall-to-wall classical music. It’s lit in a cool way thanks to a wonderful DP named Andy Shulkind who also went to NYU.
The world of Chirp is a crazy heightened reality man, where people steal each others ideas and it’s the end of the world. Anyway, back to the actors…so here’s what happened, I hadn’t heard of this Bujalski dude or Funny Ha-ha, but I had been writing to this teacher at Boston University because I was obsessing over Cassavetes and Herzog films and he was the Cassavetes master and had written a couple books on him.
This professor dude Ray Carney, a really brilliant guy told me I should meet this actor Justin Rice. I looked up his band Bishop Allen, and I saw one photo of him and I said, “that’s the dude to play Bobby”. He was like Jason Schwartzman’s long lost brother meets young awkward Nicolas Cage (see Coppola’s early films). I met Justin for dinner in NYC. We got along and he liked the script and that was that. This was all still before Mutual Appreciation came out and stuff. Had I known then how big Justin and Mr. Bujalski were going to be, and all the stigma attached to the mumblecore movement as a movement, I may never have gone after Justin, but I shouldn’t even say that, because his performance is great and unique and more neurotic in my movie, and I really loved working with him. He’s very talented and took direction quite well. He is also a director himself and a Harvard grad. Working with bright people is always a pleasure. So anyway, I had this leftover cash and I realized I could shoot my film in 18 days and stack the actors on certain blocks of shoot days, so like only needed the “Michelle” character scenes to shoot for 6 days and then “Hart” character for 3 days. So I started cold-calling agents of actors I loved who lived in NYC and talking to their assistants and lying and whatnot and telling them I was going to be the next big important director and they had better read my script because I was a badass dude of some kind. Anyway, they read it and liked it and passed it along and the script got passed to the agents and then the actors.
This was the first point in the making of the film that I actually felt like my script might have actually been good. Cuz at this point the actors started wanting to meet me for a drink. I remember meeting Galligan, and I was a HUGE, I mean HUGE Gremlins fan. I had to drink two glasses of straight scotch to be able to talk to him. I know that may sound silly but I grew up in this really quiet town in Illinois, and like, I’m still starstruck sometimes. But Zach was a personal favorite of mine. Zach, Downey Jr. and Michael J Fox. Love those guys. Anyway, the actors all thought I was this precocious little psychopath but since they only had to be on set for a few days and since they liked the script, and since they were actually paid and the film was affiliated with the Screen Actors Guild and all kosher in that way and stuff, they were eager to work on it. One of the actors later told me on day four of shooting, that it was about as indie as you could get without it being a student film. I took that like a man, I swear I did.
Once I had actors I started cold-calling companies and trying to get them to let me use their logos and stuff because I hate when you see blacked out logos or fake stuff like Cheerios is written as “Cereal-ios”, it’s so phoney and takes you out of the story. Anyway, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer let us use their logo, and we are the first indie to ever shoot in American Apparel which was pretty neat. I also had to ask Neil LaBute (The Shape of Things) to use his name in my film for this one scene, and he ended up liking the scene and he added his own line of dialogue for Galligan’s character. It was super cool. LaBute is awesome. We actually studied under the same scriptwriting teacher at NYU but about 10 years apart.
So bang, I had my actors and we shot the movie, with about 2 production assistants and we stole shots guerilla style when we had to, and did practically the whole film in a couple takes per shot. And we got it in the can…AND THEN – on the Sunday night before day 12 of 18, I thought I was getting sick, so I gulped down two Airbornes and Emergen-C and then some vitamin-B12 I think and I had a big black coffee from Dunkin and then I took a nap. I awoke 8 hours later and raced to set, and was feeling really bad. It was like my stomach was being stabbed by the Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels…little men with spears, poking me. And we got the scene lit and then I collapsed. My UPM took me to the hospital nearby and they put me on a big morphine drip, a huge needle right in my veins, and I was like high man, and seeing little dumbo elephants flapping around in circles above me like some cracked out mobile, and I ruined my girlfriend’s birthday and I was in bed for 8 hours. The doctors told me I had like a minor ulcer and I needed to chill out with the coffee. And then they told me I was born with one-kidney which is actually common, and thankfully my other kidney is slightly large so it’s like one awesome bigger kidney. From that moment on I have been reluctant to both go snowboarding, ride motorcycles and get really wasted.
So I talked the entire time to my DP and I directed one of the scenes from the gurney, no joke. I had the DP tell me over the phone what was seeing in the frame from top to bottom. I mean, I trusted him because he’s very bright and he knew what I wanted, we only had a few days left of the shoot and he knew my style by then. And the actors and I had rehearsed. It was like playing back a tape of what we already had done. That scene came out great. I’m not going to tell you which scene it is. You’d never know I wasn’t on set. I figure that ain’t half-bad, since you always hear about a lot of stupid directors letting their DP’s direct their movies anyway and they get the money all the credit for it. That’s not fair. So if you ever meet Andy, you can thank him for his fabulous direction in that one scene which I’m not going to mention. Anyway, I came back to set and finished the film and ate only bread and water for 6 days and lost about 20 pounds or something. And then I edited the film in 47 days straight on a 12 inch mac laptop that kept crashing. And then post production took forever. And then sales agents from a few big companies told me my film wasn’t commercial enough for sundance because it wasn’t like Little Miss Sunshine enough… and blah blah… that’s a whole nuther story. But then some cool people saw it and said they loved it …I sent it last minute to the Woodstock Film Festival and they loved it and premiered it on opening night, packed the house. I got some great reviews.
Buzz happened, then more festivals…then months of lying in bed wanting to just just take a bottle of sleeping pills cuz I was waiting and waiting for someone to buy the movie, and I dealt with shitty people all along who tried to screw me. Watch out for lawyers who want you to pay an advance, make sure to tell them to buzz off. Anyway, I went out on my own to LA and found a distributor who was amazing and loved the movie but didn’t have any money for the actual distribution. So then I went out and found investors. I figured if I could make a feature, I could find more money on my own. And I did. Maybe my psycho excitement just convinced people. Anyway, I put the investors in touch with the distributor and bang. Movie in theaters December 2008. And the best part is that I still own my negative and all the rights. Not a bad deal yeah? Anyway, that’s the story. You’ll have to excuse me, though, I’ve got to get back to my 450 page screenplay about nanorobots bringing on the singularity. And I’ve got a big pot of ramen on the stove and I’m burning copies of the New York Times to keep the fire going, no heat in my building. And sorry about the 500 words, I guess that’s about 2500 words instead. Sorry, I got carried away I guess.
