Saberfrog Road Trip-Final Report

So this was it. It was time to re-enact the fictional road trip depicted in the movie.

On a Saturday afternoon, I left Rochester to drive to Hartford, Connecticut, the starting point for my road trip. The drive was beautiful, and it always feels good to get away from home and hit the open road.

I had wanted Josh, the main character in Saberfrog, to be living in a fairly middle-class and corporate area before he goes on his quest to find himself. After some research I decided to pick Hartford, Connecticut as the city from which his journey begins.

When it came time to research venues, however, I discovered that Hartford actually had more of an art scene than I expected. Real Art Ways was an art gallery / movie theater that seemed like an ideal choice, but I ended up going with the more economical choice of The Outer Space, a smaller venue in nearby Hamden. However, I decided I would pay a visit to Real Art Ways while I was in the area.

There I watched a documentary called Reality is Embarrassing, about an impish artist best known as a puppeteer on Pee-Wee's Playhouse. It seemed fitting to see that film, since I was making a documentary – or at least a video diary – of my own as part of the trip. Before leaving Real Art Ways, I was able to record my first interview. I happened to be there on the projectionist's last day working there before taking another job near Boston, and he was an aspiring filmmaker himself. This was a ridiculous stroke of good luck, and he proved to be a great interview subject.

While I had been very determined to book a showing in Baltimore, I had been unable to find a venue that was both affordable and available in the time frame I was looking for. But for the sake of my trip, I wanted to visit the city anyway.

In the film, Baltimore is where Josh's friend Terrance has made a new life for himself. My prior knowledge of Baltimore was pretty much limited to its status as John Waters' hometown, and in real life I found the city agreeable funky.

Again I went to a movie at a venue I'd considered – this time it was The Charles Theatre, and I decided to go see Liberal Arts, a comedy-drama about a thirtysomething trying to reconnect with his own college-age optimism. Despite its quasi-pretentious title, I'd read a couple interesting reviews that made me decide I should check it out, and I'm glad I did. The film touched on a number of the same themes as Saberfrog, and though reviews have apparently been mixed, I found that the film spoke to me deeply. In an age of so much bitterness and sarcasm, here was a movie which showed people still yearning for beauty and meaning, while struggling to come to terms with the past and moving forward with their lives. I loved it.

I'm not sure Liberal Arts ever opened in Rochester, so seeing it at The Charles would have been enough to make the trip to Baltimore worthwhile. But as luck would have it, Creative Alliance at the Patterson (another venue I'd investigated) was holding an open screening the very evening that I was in town. And I just happened to be carrying with me a DVD of the Saberfrog trailer and two short promos of myself and John Karyus, a DVD which I'd prepared for my presentation to the Buffalo Movie-Video Makers group some weeks earlier.

So in a limited sense, I did get to have a Baltimore screening after all. My videos were well-received, and one of the audience members turned out to be a friend of Rochester-area filmmaker Chris Seaver, and recognized Karyus from his roles in Seaver's films.

I also got to record two more interviews, one with a filmmaker working on a documentary about an irreverent priest that he admired, and one with a woman who worked at the Patterson as a bartender but was also a singer in an R&B band.

In each city that I visited, I tried to investigate the local arts scene as much as I could in the time that I had. When I originally wrote the script, I knew very little about Pittsburgh and really only associated it with George Romero zombie films, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover what a thriving arts scene it seemed to have. The Pittsburgh portion of the movie was filmed in Buffalo, at a club called The Shadow Lounge, and I was amused to discover that the real Pittsburgh also has a place called The Shadow Lounge!

Saberfrog was booked at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, which is an awesome place – by Rochester/Buffalo standards, it's like Visual Studies Workshop, Squeaky Wheel and the Little Theatre all rolled into one. The venue houses a cafe as well as a screening room, and offers filmmaking classes, equipment rentals, and screenings of classic movies.

While in Pittsburgh, I tried to go to the Toonseum, which seemed to be a museum devoted to cartoons and/or animation. I never actually got to go the Toonseum, unfortunately – I couldn't find a decent parking space anywhere near it – but along the way I got to see the gorgeous architecture in downtown Pittsburgh.

This would prove to be something of a theme during my trip – not completely succeeding at my original mission, but having positive experiences along the way that I would never have had if I hadn't made the attempt. While I sold a few copies of the movie on DVD, neither the Hamden screening nor the Pittsburgh screening drew the crowd I was hoping for. This took the wind out of my sails a bit, somewhat hampering my efforts to publicize the remaining screenings.

The Cleveland showing at Cedar Lee Theatre was competing against at least two events I knew of – a Browns game and a local stage performance of the Rocky Horror Show, so both jocks and nerds would have had other things to do. The Buffalo showing at Hallwalls, though it turned out to be on the same night as an election debate, gave me the chance to reconnect with an old college classmate who came to the show.

Toronto seemed like the biggest canary in the coal mine as far as the status of independent cinema. The Toronto Underground Cinema – an alternative venue that I've always wanted to visit – announced back in August that they were closing their doors. The Bloor Cinema, apparently due to financial struggles, has been taken over by the Hot Docs film festival and been rebranded as a venue mainly for documentaries, meaning that the kind of cult film showings I'd so often enjoyed there (including Troll 2, Hobo with a Shotgun, and Poultrygeist) will now be much more rare. Most surprisingly, the NFB Mediatheque – a viewing center that I only just discovered in my previous visit to Toronto a couple months earlier – has also shut its doors and is now open by appointment only.

Fortunately, a few alternative film venues still survive. One of these was Trash Palace, which shows 16mm film prints on Friday nights. I went to their showing of an old black-and-white film called Stakeout. One of the attendees was an aspiring filmmaker himself, who said out loud what I'd been forced to realize – that the ease of access to moviemaking tools has somewhat devalued the status of low-budget films, and that you now have to be more creative in order to put on a show that people will attend.

While in Toronto I also encountered a group of stilt-walking street performers, two of whom I got to interview. They too were articulate and enthusiastic in explaining why art is important to them.

Saberfrog screened at CineCycle, a funky hole-in-the-wall venue that typically shows experimental films. It strangely fit the Canada-set finale of the movie (which I won't spoil if you haven't seen it). Each time I watched the film on a big screen one more time, it seemed more and more like a film made by someone else. It started to feel like a movie that belonged in the world, not just in my own head.

I'm glad I went through the process of trying to self-distribute a movie. It was a learning experience, and an opportunity to try and create the kind of underground film screenings that I always used to go to when I was a student. But I think the era for this kind of event may be nearing its end. People now expect to be able to consume media where and when they want, and when you commit to a single showing you're competing against whatever else might be going on in town at that time … which can be a difficult thing to know about weeks or months in advance.

I originally wanted to book these kinds of screenings over a year ago, when the film was newer, but as usual I had ups and downs in my own life (including a new job) that made this impractical. Failing that, I should have booked these shows a few months earlier than I did, so that I could have spent more time and effort on publicity, but there too I had some events in my personal life that put me behind schedule. Having all the shows so close together in time was possibly a mistake – although it made the trip seem more like a continuous journey (despite being spread across three weekends), it gave me less time or energy to promote the individual shows separately.

The biggest thing that I learned the hard way, though, is that I wasn't prepared for the amount of self-publicity that would be required. I became a writer and filmmaker specifically because it was a more indirect way of expressing myself. But in the social-media age, you're supposed to be an aggressive self-promoter, which takes me somewhat outside my comfort zone. I'm of the older school where the artist stays remote – it's the work that's important, not the author. That older approach is, depending on your point of view, based on shyness (“I don't want to put myself out there”) or arrogance (“I will only deign to communicate with my audience on special occasions”) or both.

In a previous post, I said that when I see a film, I hope to see something that will blow my mind. But having that kind of epiphany is an inward, solitary journey. Art – as maker or as consumer – is no longer a solitary journey of discovery. It's supposed to be social. You have to “engage with your audience” in order to make friends, so that you have someone to invite to your show!

When I was a kid, oddball short films would play on 16mm in classrooms and libraries, and as filler on cable TV. Those obscure, eccentric films played a large role in inspiring me to become a filmmaker myself, but I think this road trip helped me to finally close the door on that obsession. In the age of YouTube and streaming, perhaps there's no longer anything really underground about making movies. The idea of making something unique and original and personal still appeals to me, but you can't afford to think of yourself as a unique snowflake. You have to think like a salesman, and aim at a specific audience.

I'm also ready to let go of the 90s nostalgia which seems to permeate the indie film scene currently. It may be a while before that scene consists of newer guys who are fully at ease with how things are now, rather than struggling to unlearn outdated expectations from the Miramax era.

Perhaps the most tangible benefit from this trip was the handful of interviews I conducted with artists that I met on my journey. I asked each of them what I personally found to be highly challenging philosophical questions – why do we make art, how do we justify the sacrifices required, how does one balance the inner compulsion to be an artist against conflicting responsibilities? To my surprise, each person I interviewed had clear and articulate responses to these questions.

I guess the biggest thing I've learned is that I can no longer afford to be a loner. When I was young I felt like a loner, and it was that sense of alienation that drove me to become a filmmaker. But after the experiences and accomplishments I've had in my life, I'm not that person any more. I have to come to terms with living in a more socially connected world.

When I got home from this trip, I thought for sure that I was done with filmmaking, that I could divide my entire life into before and after Saberfrog. But within days of coming home, there was a networking event and a “how to promote your film” seminar (both at Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo), neither of which I wanted to pass up. And I still have ideas for the tie-in novel … and another screenplay … so I guess I just can't turn it off.

I do feel that I've raised the public profile for Saberfrog just a little bit, and met some new people. And the trip forced me to finally complete a decent DVD. So on a personal level, the trip has been a (qualified) success. Now I just need to do what I should have done earlier – send the film out to various websites to get it reviewed, and get the film online so that it's commercially available.

The Saberfrog road trip may be over, but it seems the Saberfrog journey is just beginning.

Saberfrog Road Trip – Tour Dates!

An idea came to me one day, for a movie that I had to make. A story about a guy named Josh, who goes on a road trip across several cities, to find old friends and recover his own past.

I thought I'd left my filmmaking dreams behind me, but this story came from my soul and demanded to be made. It would be full of comedy and drama and weirdness and deepness.

I got the film made, and the film had some showings in Rochester and Buffalo (the two cities in which it was filmed) and it got into a couple of small local festivals. But the demands of normal life could only be kept at bay for so long, and the film was sidelined once more. For a while.

But you can't make a movie just to leave it on a shelf. Films are meant to be seen, and shown. And I feel a need to complete the journey I began.

So I'm re-enacting the journey that Josh takes in the film. I'm going from Connecticut to Baltimore to Pittsburgh to Cleveland to Buffalo to Toronto. Along the way, I'm going to show the film, talk to people, make new friends, and come home with a record (and a video diary) about the experience.

Sunday, September 30 - Hamden, Connecticut. The Outer Space, 295 Treadwell St, 3 pm.

Monday, October 1 - Baltimore, Maryland. No screening scheduled, but I'll be in town!

Tuesday, October 2 - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Melwood Screening Room, 477 Melwood Ave, 8 pm.

Sunday, October 7 - Cleveland, Ohio. Cedar Lee Theatre, 2163 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights, 2 pm.

Thursday, October 11 - Buffalo, New York. Hallwalls, 341 Delaware Ave, 8 pm.

Saturday, October 13 - Toronto, Ontario. CineCycle, 129 Spadina Ave, 8 pm.

So if you're in one of those cities this fall, I hope to see you, and I hope you enjoy the movie!

Saberfrog trailer shown in New York City (and other adventures)

PART 1: THANKSGIVING WEEKEND

I spent the weekend after Thanksgiving in New York City, visiting my old NYU classmate Greg Draves. It was the first time in a while that I'd managed to make it down to the Big Apple, as the demands of my day job have kept me from traveling much.

There's something about New York City that toughens a person up. I don't exercise much at home, but I have no hesitation about running like hell to get from one destination to another in NYC, even if it's many blocks away. NYC traffic also gets me to drive like a cabbie, which I would never do at home.

On Friday, November 26, I got to show the Saberfrog trailer at Millennium Film Workshop. Millennium has a monthly open screening of short films, and the holiday weekend presented a rare opportunity for an out-of-towner like me to participate.

The other films in the program that night were a mixture of formats – film and video, Super-8 and 16mm, sound and silent. A technical problem that evening unfortunately resulted in all of the videos being shown in black-and-white.

Most of the shorts being screened that evening were abstract and experimental. I saw films of shaky street footage, and videos of abstract computer-generated patterns.

One of the few narratives was called Erica Wexler Is Online, and was presented as a fake documentary consisting of staged interviews. It told the story of a college student who had died, but whose Facebook account is still active and still sending and receiving messages. None of the interviewees can say for certain whether the messages are being sent by a hacker, a family member or someone else, but most seem to prefer to believe that Erica is still there somehow, still participating in their lives.

The other narrative was an erotic cartoon – actually a series of still images, like a comic book – depicting a scantily-clad female demon being fought over by two scantier-clad male demons, to the tune of Duran Duran's “A View to a Kill” (“Dance into the fire...”). Interestingly, the projectionist was the director of this particular film.

The Saberfrog trailer was the final work to be screened. Several shots in the trailer (mostly flashbacks) are in black-and-white for dramatic effect, and it was unfortunate that the impact of this was lost by the entirely black-and-white projection. But these things happen.

My memories of NYU film school, plus the fact that all the other films that evening were experimental, led me to expect that a New York crowd might be unsympathetic towards a genre comedy. But the trailer got several laughs, and a couple people told me they looked forward to seeing the whole movie at some point.

It wasn't a huge turnout that night, but knowing that an arty Manhattan film-buff audience had watched and/or heard J.D. Edmond, Reuben Tapp, Wendy Foster, Liz Mariani, John Karyus, John Sindoni, Jahaka Mindstorm, Mary Criddle, Jesse Conklin, Val Perkins, Jes Gonzales and myself (plus Derrick Petrush if you looked quick) was definitely cool.

On Sunday it was back to Rochester, and time to promote the next showing of Saberfrog, this time at the Screening Room in Amherst.

PART 2: THE WEEK AFTER

The Thursday after Thanksgiving, I drove to Buffalo to do some advertising, and to see if the latest issue of Artvoice carried a listing for the screening (which it did).

It was a long way to drive just to put up a few flyers (I made it to the Market Arcade theater, Guerrilla Gallery and Just Pizza before it got too late), but I was lucky to do even that much, as the Thruway (Route 90) was partly shut down due to a huge amount of snow.

Then, on Friday, December 3, I reached a milestone: I PAID OFF THE CREDIT CARD DEBT from the movie. That only took two-and-a-half years ...

This past Saturday, December 4, I returned to Buffalo to post more flyers on Elmwood Ave and Main St, and also got to have coffee with Liz Mariani, who I hadn't seen since the October screening. From there I drove to Toronto to view a program of films at a space called CineCycle.

I've been researching various offbeat spaces that might be open to showing the movie, and CineCycle was one of several spaces in Toronto. That night, CineCycle was playing host to a curatorial group called Pleasure Dome, and it seemed as good an opportunity as any to check the place out. I had no idea what kind of film I'd be seeing … and there was no way I could have predicted what I got.

If you've ever been to a modern art gallery, you're probably used to seeing some placard basically explaining at length what the artist intended and what s/he was trying to say. Sometimes, whatever aesthetic pleasure you get (or don't get) from the art itself is contradicted by the political statement hammered home in the artist's statement. I kind of got that feeling watching this show. The program notes seemed to threaten a lineup of dull political propaganda, but the films themselves were actually quite entertaining.

This particular show consisted of two longish short films, Home 2 and Blondes in the Jungle, plus the seventh and eighth episodes of a British video series called Paul and the Badger.

Created by a cheery bloke named Paul Tarrago (who also stars), Paul and the Badger seems to be a parody of children's puppet shows – sort of like Pee Wee's Playhouse, but done in the more deadpan style of Wallace and Gromit. It's proudly low-tech – the sets are blatantly greenscreened, and the puppets are clearly puppets – and I found it very enjoyable. In fact, it's one of the most creatively inspiring productions I've seen in some while. It made me go “Yes!!! I want to make something like that!” (Warning: I just might.)

Home 2 (a 2007 sequel to a 2004 film Home, according to the program notes) was a 30-minute mockumentary about a lanky, curly-haired, overenthusiastic American doofus visiting many foreign locations and making a fool of himself. Imagine a cross between Napoleon Dynamite and Borat, but a lot more hyper.

This character, played by Brian Kerstetter, was never given a name onscreen as far as I recall. He had weird beady eyes that, according to the program notes, are contact lenses meant to suggest his “inability to truly see and understand his surroundings.” This, and other statements in the program notes, imply that we're supposed to condemn the character as a boorish Ugly American, but I must not be that politically correct because to me the character's joy and awe at the world around him seemed quite infectious. The on-camera locals seem to enjoy his antics, so it's hard to fully buy the idea that it is he who is exploiting them.

It's also hard to be sure how many of the locals might, in fact, be actors taking part in the joke; there's one scene, in which the hero pretends to kidnap four Arabs, that was almost certainly staged. If the main character is actually meant to be culturally insensitive, it raises the question of whether the filmmaker – jaunting around the world to provoke on-camera reactions from local people – is in any position to judge.

Anyway, the film was quite funny, since the protagonist is clearly out of his mind and never seems to calm down at any time during his journey. The variety of location work was also quite impressive – the bulk of the film takes place in Papua, New Guinea, but various (equally goofy) flashbacks show the character in other locales such as Japan and Switzerland. The audience was still chuckling for some time after the film finished.

Blondes in the Jungle was made last year and shares Home 2's theme of “honky fools in the Third World”. Set in 1987 and filmed in the Honduras, this film follows three American adolescents (two male, one female) on a quest to find the Fountain of Youth. A fourth character, looking and acting like the Harold and Kumar version of Neil Patrick Harris, also makes sporadic and not-really-explained appearances.

Whereas Home 2 used a handheld-vacation-video approach, Blondes in the Jungle was shot more conventionally; the celluloid photography and slower pace went a long way towards selling the 1987 setting. This film was also more condescending towards its childish protagonists than Home 2 was, and their relentless dumbness (while true to my memories of the 1980s) got old well before the 48-minute running time was up.

The film did have one killer line, though. During the night, the girl in the group has a sexual dream, and in the morning she deduces that she was visited by a Mayan jaguar god. When the two guys express alarm at this, she mocks their fears: “Gods don't have AIDS!” I don't remember the last time I heard an audience roar so much at a line of dialogue in a film.

What follows is a spoiler for anyone who thinks it's remotely likely they might get to see this film at some point, but … our heroes finally find the alleged Fountain of Youth, and go swimming in it. What happens to them next can only be speculated upon, since the remaining half of the film consists of the previously glimpsed Mayan jaguar god giving a John Cleese-like anthropology lecture to the camera.

Again, the program notes hint that all of this is a political statement – this time about the Reagan era – but the possibility that the filmmaker was simply eating coke by the spoonful should not be entirely discounted.

In fact, the oddness of this entire program was quite impressive. I've been slowly resigning myself to the idea that truly idiosyncratic filmmaking was dead, and that everything now was just remakes, sequels, and comic book adaptations. Yet these films were not only defiantly weird, but comedic as well, which made them entertaining rather than pretentious.

After the screening, I gave a DVD of Saberfrog to one of the Pleasure Dome curators, in the hopes that they might be interested in screening the film at a future date. We shall see. Until then, there's still the showing at The Screening Room - tomorrow!