Crime & Punishment

For those who are interested, I'll give a quick update on the latest ups and downs of my first and greatest film project, the horror-musical Night of the Lobster, written by me and produced by Flaming Guerrilla Studios.

Pre-production moved slowly but steadily throughout December and into January, and we all had good reason to be optimistic; casting was near completion, several letters were sent to the Connecticut Foundation for the Arts, and our production assistant and location scout Tim "Piker" Gabble found an abandoned wire mill which we could use as a makeshift studio. Regarding the last, let me just clarify that we did make an attempt to discover who owned the derelict building, but upon repeatedly dialing the phone number penciled onto the faded sign on the gate producer Darren Truett said that the only response was an answering machine recording on which could only be heard the barking of bipolar lap dogs.

The first setback was the jailing of the young man slated to play the lead role, a college student named Corky Lamour. Apparently in between his drama classes he had offered to sell pep pills to an undercover police officer, an incident which was complicated by the fact that she had been dressed as a schoolgirl at the time. Rather than contact his disciplinarian parents for the bail money, Corky preferred to remain in the pokey, spending his time making new friends and learning to play the harmonica. Darren briefly considered using part of the film's budget for the liberty of the male lead, but Herschel, the roofer who will be writing and performing the score, desperately needed a new wah-wah pedal, and so the shooting schedule was simply delayed until the rehabilitation of our star. One good thing did come of the incident, however, which is that Darren signed on the arresting officer to play one of the supporting roles. It was a nice little coup, really; she is in sufficiently good athletic condition to perform the stunts which the script demands, her duties as an undercover police person have required her to learn something of the dramatic arts—in some cases better than our college students—and on top of all that she has a certain physical charm which was a little unsettling framed in a Catholic school uniform but which will be right at home in a film about violence and totalitarian shellfish. The only complication will be, of course, that we have to make sure that our illegal occupation of the wire factory is not a topic of conversation within earshot of our winsome representative of the law.

One other difficulty presented itself when I was introduced to the director, Brian Eggorian, who is the pompous ass that runs the Ridgebury Community Theater and the Ridgebury High School Drama Club. He immediately started referring to me as "the scribbler," and by the time I had made it home from the meeting he had already faxed me several pages of notes on the script, the suggested changes accentuated by both underlines and exclamation points. For starters, he was campaigning for the eradication of all the political subtext, in particular the reference to Karl Marx. Additionally, he demanded that the dialogue of the female lead be given more "pepper," a term which I found somewhat vague. When I later pressed him for a more articulate accounting of his concept of "pepper," he hemmed and hawed for a while, muttered something incoherent (it sounded like he said "flammo," perhaps another obscure theater term) and then hung up the phone.

I have recently tried to meet Mr. Eggorian halfway and make the script a little less political and a little more peppery without destroying the feel or the underlying message. Unfortunately my attempts at "pepper" seem to come off as either abusiveness or Tourette's Syndrome; I may have to watch a few Katherine Hepburn movies to get the tone just right.