Establishing Shots

Comics. Music. Dance. Three DIY filmmakers filter their passions through a digital lens. Grit City plays a part, but the real star is art — and the art of the deal.

Is Corina Bakery Tacoma’s answer to Abbot’s Habit in Hollywood, a hangout where screenwriters spend hours nursing cups of black coffee and fine-tuning scripts? For some, the idea of a parallel universe, where Tacoma mirrors LA, is a bit of a stretch. Philip Cowan, executive director of the Grand Cinema, sees potential but not a true filmmaking community just yet: “It’s more like pods of independent activity,” he says. But on a spring morning, guys in black T-shirts are hunched over laptops with scripts on their screens. Intrigued by the scene, I decide to seek out local filmmakers willing to shed light on their respective “pods.”

KING'S BOOKS: Several scenes in Rick Gratzer’s Bestsellers were shot at King’s Books in Tacoma. Gratzer, who works at another local bookstore, says he’s an avid reader: “I have to be. I buy five to ten books every week at work.” His literary heroes include Kurt Vonnegut, Haruki Murakami, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Cowan assists with an introduction to a regular competitor in the Grand’s 72-Hour Film Festival. Soon after, a night of experimental film at the New Frontier bears fruit with a second filmmaker. A third prospect comes by way of an invitation from the BareFoot Collective to Dance Film Night. I now have a trio of filmmakers, with three potentially different points of view. Though none has met, and their styles are diverse, thematic strands in their work suggest a mutual interest in art and music and reflect, if not a unified filmmaking community, the influence of a strong creative community. The conversation begins with a meeting with local filmmaker Rick Gratzer at that charming hole-in-the-wall with the killer pastries.

Two years ago, Gratzer, a native of Fircrest, was like the writers sitting at nearby tables at Corina Bakery: busy tapping at the keys. Today, the twenty-six-year-old takes a moment to relish the fact that Bestsellers, his first ninety-minute feature, premiered in March at the Grand. His smile speaks volumes, especially when he reveals the film’s minuscule fifteen-hundred-dollar production budget. Gratzer raised the money by selling his record and DVD collections – and a few choice comics from his collection.

“When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Marvel Comics and dreamed of being a comic book artist,” he says. In eighth grade, reality struck. Realizing that his drawing talent was lacking, Gratzer says he decided to become a filmmaker. He nurtured his ambitions in the video lab at Curtis High School. After graduation, he enrolled in the media design and production program at Clover Park Technical College and also took night classes at Seattle Film Institute.

After making short films each year for the 72-Hour Film Festival, with collaborator Jeff Bass, Gratzer decided the timing was right to try a full-length feature. Gratzer wrote the screenplay for Bestsellers in February 2008. Casting was followed by a month of fast-paced shooting. “Because the actors were working for free, there wasn’t time to sit on scenes or play around.” Editing and mixing the sound track took most of 2009. Finally, after two long years, his film was complete. Is it flawless? “Noooooo!” he insists, “but I didn’t expect brilliant cinema. I did it as a learning experience.” With low costs and few hurdles, Tacoma is a good place to learn.

Bestsellers was shot around town using popular local hangouts like King’s Books, Hi-Voltage Records, Atomic Comics, Bob’s Java Jive and the Hob Nob. But don’t take the location either as a tribute to the city or as a critique. Sure, his main character has some harsh words for T-town, but Gratzer is adamant: he has no beef with Tacoma. One viewer had a different impression: “After my screening, there was a woman in the audience who felt I’d cast Tacoma in a negative light. She wanted to know why we didn’t shoot at the Glass Museum!” Though he was surprised by her strong reaction, Gratzer says he appreciates an attentive critic. Still, the plot doesn’t depend on the specific location.

“I think it’s important that it’s a city like Tacoma. It has to be set where it’s plausible for the character to want out. But I didn’t write Bestsellers thinking it had to be shot here. It was just practical because I live here.” It’s not the city but the theme that really matters: “It’s a story about not selling out,” he says.

The film’s protagonist, Bernard, is an aspiring writer and bookstore clerk, desperate to make a break from his hometown. Learning that Frederick Stone, a former local boy and best-selling author of fifteen political thrillers, is coming to town to read at the bookstore, Bernard abandons the coming-of-age story he’s working on to write a political thriller of his own. He sees easy money as the answer. Soon, he’s grappling with the consequences.

Gratzer is an entertaining writer, and the plot is multilayered, with two screwball characters making a film-within-the-film. Amid all the twists and turns, the most elegant device is the “subtext” related through “Pearl’s World,” a comic book penned by Bernard’s friend, Odessa Pearl. “She’s not a girlfriend,” says Bernard repeatedly. Throughout the film, the comic is Pearl’s way of mocking Bernard and expressing her feelings for him and about the things he does. She is the antithesis of a sellout.

Hmm … the filmmaker works at a bookstore, loves comics and wears a Batman wristwatch. Is this autobiography? “Absolutely not,” says Gratzer, shaking his head. But he does use bits of dialogue to express his disdain for cliché. He mentions a line in Bestsellers involving a pregnant girl and a corncob pipe: “I’m taking a shot at Juno,” he says, alluding to the $6.5 million production that garnered an Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature in 2007 and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2008. When Juno premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, it received a standing ovation. Gratzer sounds like he would have stayed in his seat. He thinks Juno and a rash of other indies in the last five years are every bit as formulaic as some of the big-budget Hollywood films.

Gratzer says he’d be happy to see Bestsellers on the festival circuit. To date he hasn’t had any takers, but he’s hoping that the Seattle True Independent Film Festival (STIFF) and the Rainier and Olympia film festivals will give him a chance. Asked if he would consider posting scenes on YouTube, Gratzer says he’s open to the idea: “That’s the nice thing about self-financing – you own your film. You can do whatever you want.”

Kris Crews is another local filmmaker with a DIY philosophy, using available means to create his work and distribute it through social media. In a thread on Facebook, he shares links to videos by other Tacoma filmmakers. Whether they are writing, recording or producing, “there are a number of capable creative minds in our area doing it on their own,” he writes. Crews, who turned thirty-two in April, moved to Tacoma in 2008. Through his interest in music and art, he’s formed some deep friendships in the community. In the last few months he’s been popping up around town at venues like Fulcrum Gallery and the New Frontier. His work includes documentary, short narrative films and dreamy experimental montage replete with sacred geometry patterns and super-saturated color.

THEA'S PARK: Kris Crews enjoys the views, and the skateboarding, at Thea’s Park. He also shot the closing scene of his short film The Persistence of Beauty here. The film quotes a line by William Blake, an artist Crews admires: “As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.”

Normally soft-spoken, Crews has to shout over a boisterous crowd of pool players in the backroom of the Parkway Tavern to relate his tale. Like Gratzer, he was drawn to video at an early age. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, he got his first camera in junior high. Later, in high school, Crews attended a summer filmmaking session at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. “It was a really cool program. But that experience showed me that I did not want to work as a grip or a best boy,” he recalls. “I wanted to make movies – but not industry movies.” Later, at Cape Fear Community College, Crews studied liberal arts. (“It’s where David Lynch filmed the hospital scenes for Blue Velvet in the mid-’80s,” he says.)

During this early filmmaking phase, one of Crews’ favorite subjects and avid pursuits was skateboarding. Crews used an old-school process with two VCRs to edit his footage. He says he didn’t get into digital editing until he was twenty-one. Between the increasing affordability of video equipment and computers and the proliferation of online sites where work can be shared, things have come a long way in the last decade.

While it now seems hard to imagine a world without YouTube, its launch in 2005 was a quantum leap forward for DIY. Crews has worked diligently to create a Tacoma music presence online. “The Nightgowns. Going Shopping. Humble Cub. Motopony. Paris Spleen. Friskey. The Drug Purse. Makeup Monsters. Tacoma has a lot of important bands. I offered my video services because I wanted to help out. Now the world at large can home in on Tacoma and see kids dancing and singing in the Warehouse ... it’s what Hollywood tries to achieve in a teen movie, but this stuff is real.”

Though Crews is reluctant to describe his documentary style, what stands out about his work is the way his video skills serve the spirit of live music. The visual and audio quality is there, and his cuts shift to the beat. The results look fun and sound good. Interesting camera angles give you a first-person perspective. It’s not quite like standing at the edge of the stage, but there’s a sense of the way things went down. And if you aren’t a house show habitué, or feel a little too old for the scene, Crews’ videos may induce nostalgia.

His pursuit of the burgeoning music scene recalls the work of Charles Peterson, the photographer who became famous during the grunge era. Crews isn’t familiar with Peterson and doesn’t necessarily see a connection. He says he has accomplished what he set out to do. He’s not planning to be out every Friday and Saturday “messing up the vibe with his cameras and tripod.” He’s done his documentary thing. And while he envisions putting all the footage together at some point, for the moment he’s looking forward to blending in with the crowd and enjoying some camera-free shows.

Crews’ ongoing non-documentary film projects suggest that the local music scene, and his own musical talents, will continue to influence his creative direction. Recently, he has been screening new experimental work in live performances with the band Going Shopping. And on the night of this interview he is planning a brief guitar performance at an underground open mic. Maybe someone will make a video of Crews covering Syd Barrett? Or maybe, you just have to be there.

The chance to preserve a fleeting moment is one of the reasons that Michael Hoover is passionate about dance films. The thirty-six-year-old artist’s talents include filmmaking, choreography, musical composition and codirectorship of modern dance company the BareFoot Collective. Sitting at a picnic table on a sunny day in Wright Park, Hoover recalls his first experiment with the genre in 2001 while he still lived in his hometown of Provo, Utah. He’s been hooked ever since. With a degree in visual arts but little formal training in film, Hoover credits Mac computers for making it easy for people with limited experience to create video and music.

DICKMAN MILL PARK: Michael Hoover at Dickman Mill Park on Ruston Way, the location for his film Incongruent Atrabilious. The filmmaker finds inspiration in “just about everything” and says that he isn’t afraid “to borrow great shots” from the films he admires, such as The Kid by Charlie Chaplin and the Grindhouse double feature by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.

According to Hoover, the dance film genre blossomed during the ’80s, thanks to greater visibility through the PBS show Alive from Off Center. “The program often featured contemporary choreographers and modern dancers collaborating with filmmakers,” he says. “Dance was created specifically for film rather than for a live performance.” In Hoover’s experience, filmmaking techniques expand the potential of choreography and storytelling: “Film adds an amazing 3-D aspect. I can move with, above and around the dancer and focus the viewer’s attention in a way that isn’t possible in a live show.”

Risk in Expectation, a dance film by Hoover and his frequent collaborator Marianne Gary, illustrates the difference between watching a show on a stage and watching it on a screen. Especially striking are the angles and unusual perspectives made possible through the camera’s lens: bird’s-eye views and close-ups that capture the dancer’s facial expressions and gestures. Whether Hoover is shooting or editing, the medium opens up creative new pathways.

While each of his film-related projects is different, it’s not unusual for him to employ “chance methods,” a style of artistic exploration embraced by creative luminaries such as choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage that employs such techniques as rolling dice, casting the I Ching or simply playing with random circumstance. “It’s a fun way of working and it takes the pressure off. I like being able to say that the I Ching made me do it,” he says with a laugh. Even big-time directors do it. Filmmaking lore has David Lynch incorporating several on-set accidents into the storyline of Twin Peaks. “The way Killer Bob’s casting was determined” – when set decorator Frank Silva’s reflection was accidentally filmed in a mirror and Lynch decided to cast him in the role – “that was a chance event,” explains Hoover.

One of the ways that Hoover incorporates chance is in his approach to sound track design. He often composes music after shooting, as he did with Incongruent Atrabilious, another dance film he made with Gary. The filmmakers had the footage, but not the music. Hoover happened upon an abandoned piano in a state of decay on a friend’s property. “The strings were attached, but it wasn’t playable in the traditional sense,” he says. “I went out there with mallets and a hammer, banged on the wood and plucked the strings.” When the final composition was layered over the choreography on film, he says it fit perfectly: tense, discordant music in tandem with gestures depicting a fractured relationship. Recorded at Dickman Mill Park along Ruston Way, the sound track also includes environmental sounds: water lapping against the pilings, airplanes, trains.

Hoover wants to film more work like Incongruent Atrabilious with nontraditional local venues as backdrops. The Nalley Valley viaduct is of particular interest to him. “I’ve recorded the cars going over it – thunk, thunk, thunk. I would love to do a site-specific dance there amongst the pillars and incorporate that into a film.”

Upon hearing that Gratzer’s film, Bestsellers, includes a scene with a viaduct, Hoover considers the idea of future collaboration. It’s interesting to consider the possibilities if independent pods of DIY filmmakers were to join forces. Where might it lead?

Perhaps to more stories with comic-book-drawing, guitar-wielding, modern-dance-making characters – or characters with similarly artistic inclinations. Watch out, Tinseltown. Grit City’s cameras are rolling. The next David Lynch may be here in our midst. Seemingly on cue with this vision, a chance actor, with his basketball, enters the conversation in Wright Park. The basketball, bouncing in 4/4 time on the cement court, is like a metronome in synch with Hoover’s voice. A glowing orange sun sinks low on the horizon. The outdoor light on the court switches on. The credits roll. Fade to black. •