Congratulations! - Photo by Blake Tyers

Atlanta has some excellent Film Collectives.  Obviously, Film Collectives are nothing new, they’ve been around for years and in many places but in Atlanta they occupy a special place in the independent film scene. We’ve had a relatively recent history of success stories that came from film collectives from Atlanta .

The thing with collectives is that it often seems hard to maintain a high level of commitment and energy to keep them going. From famous collectives like Zoetrope to Atlanta’s own Pop Films, film collectives often energize a group of filmmakers to achieve more together than they can working separately. Fake Wood Wallpaper is a collective that has been working together for a few years on Atlanta ’s film scene. With shorts like The Adventure which screened in film festivals such as Rotterdam International Film Festival among others as well as their cult-favorite feature Blood Car they displayed a unique style and commitment to quality productions.

I recently was able to visit the set of their latest feature film, Congratulations!, and got to talk with Writer/Director Mike Brune and Producer Alex Orr about Fake Wood Wallpaper and their latest film.

Mike Brune:

In Fake Wood Wallpaper’s first feature film Blood Car you play the lead role. Now you’re taking the reigns as a director, what’s the biggest difference being behind the camera this time?

The biggest difference is that I have much more influence over the film as a whole – how it looks, feels, sounds, etc.  I was able to collaborate with every department and build and shape the film from scratch.  Even though I was the lead actor in Blood Car, I didn’t have much creative control over the project as a whole.  If your character is being urinated on in a movie, you’re probably not in charge of what’s going on.  That’s the general rule of thumb I believe.  But bear in mind I’m working with many of the same people involved in Blood Car: Alex Orr, Tony Holley, Adam Pinney and Chris Campbell.  So even though I’m in the director’s seat this go round, the same creative voices (plus many wonderful new ones) are present.

What is Congratulations! all about?

It’s Fake Wood Wallpaper’s second feature film!  It’s an absurdist crime thriller comedy.  We have several clever pitches we’ve used to describe it, too.  Antonioni meets Airplane! Michael Haneke does The Naked Gun.  Animal House without the jokes.  I’m not sure which, if any, properly describes the movie, but they’re fun to throw around.  The story is about a boy, Paul Ryan Gray, who goes missing in his own house and the search that is taken up by veteran Detective Dan Skok of the Missing Persons Bureau.  In order to solve the case, Det. Skok and his team move into the house to search for the boy, slowing becoming part of the Gray family’s life as they search for their missing son.  That’s a good start.

Fake Wood Wallpaper is a talented collective, but you’ve all moved into many other avenues, is it hard to collaborate now that you all have established careers for yourselves?

Not at all.  With FWW, our first priority has always been to make movies together as a collective and we come together for that purpose.  We are great friends and still hang out together like we did in college.  We’ve all grown into various positions in the film/media industry and established careers which we like, but the reason we pursued this line of work in the first place was to make movies.  Because we love the cinema.

Mike Brune (L) Alex Orr (R) - Photo by Blake Tyers

What were some of the difficulties you faced directing Congratulations?

I feel like I’m singing an old song by saying this but the answer to this is simple:  Time and money.  We didn’t have enough of either, but I guess most filmmakers never have enough of those two things.  That being said, I tried to never think in those terms.  Something DP Nestor Almendros once said after doing La Collectioneuse with Eric Rohmer has always been seared in my memory.  ”With no limitations, there is no style.”  I think filmmakers should live that.  With La Collectioneuse, they couldn’t light their actors properly in the bright sunlight for the outdoor scenes so they just staged all these scenes in the shade.  Critics later remarked on the beauty of it.  I just paraphrased the hell out of that story, but you can read the whole thing in Nestor’s book, which is amazing.

What’s next for you? Fake Wood Wallpaper?

Fireworks City is next for me. It’s a feature film we’re planning for next year that I wrote and will direct. We also have another FWW feature slated to shoot this fall. It’s even more micro-budget than Congratulations! Two in one year? You are correct.

How did your work with Fake Wood Wallpaper earlier in your career help to inform what you’re doing now?

I learned two key things from working with the guys in FWW early on: collaboration and risk. My improve comedy training also constantly reinforces these ideas. Five Heads are better than one. If I’m ever lost writing a script or editing a scene or composing a shot, they can pick me up and show me the way. If one of my ideas is nutty, they will tell me it’s nutty, but they will always tell me to try it. They will never tell me I can’t try something. Collaboration and risk. We are great collaborators and we are not afraid to try something different. Our logo is an old picture of the Lumiere brothers, the first filmmakers. I don’t want to start a historical debate here because I know people made movies before them, but I treat them as the first filmmakers. Anyway, they embody cinema and making movies to us. Obviously, we’re not making the first movies, but we try to channel that sense of adventure and excitement and magic.

Alex Orr:

You directed the last Fake Wood Wallpaper feature Blood Car, what inspired you to decide to come back and produce this feature?

I just want to make movies with my friends. If I’m producing or holding the boom or whatever- you’re still making movies with your friends. That’s what is really important to me.

You managed to raise financing through crowd sourcing, how did that come about and what were the challenges?

I think the challenges of fundraising are being too proud to beg, which we are not. We got on the internet and begged for money and got to our goal. It was amazing.  I think the only way to go about it is to be relentless. I don’t give NPR money until they have beaten it into my head so many times and then I hear the pledge is ending. You really have to go too too far with crowd sourcing for it to work. So we made a video a day and bombarded people. We called them out by name and demanded money, had a couple live web-a-thons and an improv show fundraiser. We hit it hard and we made our goals. You just need the attitude that you’re making a movie …not IF you get some crowd funding and IF you can get this….you’re making it with or without someone’s help- and then it seems people want to help.

Do lessons learned from your previous feature help you approach this current one? Do you have a different approach or similar to the one you employed with Blood Car?

Congratulations! - Photo by Blake Tyers

You learn a lot making a movie and you take that to the next movie. It’s always that way. On Blood Car we came up with the idea and just kept moving until the movie was made. It’s not the best way to make a film- but that’s what we did. Wrote fast, then prepped and shot and never stopped. We had a very different approach with this movie, but I don’t know how to put my finger on exactly what that is. We really focused on getting the prefect cast together- which I think we did. The cast was amazing. The best way to describe the difference is that Blood Car was like a feral animal on a leash- it was wild. Congratulations! was well trained. It wasn’t this crazy-eyed insane animal that’s only plan was to move forward. It knew what it was doing. Maybe that makes no sense…but it’s how I see the difference.

What is your next project? Will you continue producing or do you plan to go back to directing?

I’m sure I’ll direct something again, but I’m not chomping at the bit to do it. I serve a movie better producing. If I direct something I need to do animals attack or silly comedy. I don’t have the patience for anything serious- I have never finished a game of chess. It’s too boring to me, too calculated- it can’t hold my attention. I feel that directing serious films and chess are both for grown ups. I’m not there as a director. Hopefully we will finish my dream movie, Pelican- it’s about a giant pelican tearing the hell out of a beach community. I would direct that. I’ll always produce. I can’t stop from doing it.  If someone in the same room as me talks about an idea I like- I start pushing to read a script. I can’t help it. I start thinking about how we can make it.

For more information about Congratulations! go to the website for the film here: http://www.congratsmovie.com/

By Paul Sbrizzi

Snow On Tha Bluff is a raw and vivid, hybrid documentary / narrative film that cuts through the hype and mythology to deliver a clear-eyed, uncensored look at gangsta life—and death—in the inner city. Director/writer Damon Russell teams up with co-writer and lead actor Curtis Snow, a charismatic, self-described dope dealer and robbery boy, to tell a story based on Snow’s actual experiences in the Bluff, the violent, poverty-stricken neighborhood of Atlanta . Far from bleak, it’s by turns funny, scary, warm and thoughtful, and Snow carries it with megawatts of star power.

It opens with naïve outsiders getting robbed—a multi-culti group of hip college kids who think they know how to navigate the Bluff to score drugs (and this frames a basic conceit of the film: for people who think they know the hood, here’s a strong dose of reality). Curtis talks his way into their car, robs them, and uses their camera to tell his story.

We’re instantly brought into the thick of the subculture: the careful planning and execution of a violent raid on rival dealers unfolds, the dialogue spoken in the rich cadence of the local dialect—Russell and Snow are committed to showing this world’s genuine texture and rhythms rather than streamlining it in any way. Next thing it’s morning and there’s been a murder (real cops, real cop cars, and the aftermath of a real crime are cleverly used here and throughout the film). “Like I say it just a regular day in the hood, know rah mean,” says Curtis, “back to your regularly scheduled program.”

A trip to grandma’s house brings Curtis a stern warning: “It’s nothing in the streets but trouble, and death,” she says, “there’s just one step between you and death: you never know when you’re makin’ that last step.” Cut to Curtis out on the porch with a liquor bottle, laughing: “That shit’s scary!”

He quickly puts grandma out of mind. A dope party, another armed robbery, and a surreal fight between two women in the back seat of an old car (one of them literally rips the other one’s pants off and then looks with concern at the state of her fingernail) are juxtaposed with Curtis’ cuddly visits to see his baby mama and his son, baby Curtis, who live in an incongruously quiet and tidy condo complex on the other side of town. “I had to make that move there,” confides Curtis, “let them folks know, know rah mean, hey hey hey I love my baby, I love her, everything good.”

In his asides we see his mind constantly plotting, strategizing offense and defense, always in the fight. The narrative follows an increasingly violent series of attacks and reprisals between Curtis and White Hat, his stealthy nemesis. In one chilling scene, Curtis, freshly out of prison, talks to his crew about going after White Hat’s family: “My heart gone right now. I got a heart but it’s gone.”

The film’s underlying theme is the reality of survival. “Well drugs kill now, but at the same time, shit, they also help you out, they pay your rent if you ain’t got no job,” says Curtis. When his baby mama talks to him about making money the right way, he drawls back “Ain’t no right or no wrong way—there’s the need way.” And there’s little hope that any of this will change: one of the film’s most intense and evocative images is baby Curtis repeatedly smacking his daddy’s plate of crack cocaine baggies with a Mylar “thank you” balloon, as Curtis reminisces about watching his uncle fill baggies when he was a child himself.

Still, you sense that stealing and selling dope, for Curtis, is also a bit of a compulsion. “When you need something, or you got to have something,” he grins, “only one way you gonna get it right then and there.”

The look of the film is appropriately gritty, the use of night vision adding to the intensity of the robberies, and the rough, hand-held footage of the chaotic night scenes contrasting nicely with the sober, reflective mood of daytime. Russell incorporates surprising elements like a playground peek-a-boo with baby Curtis, bringing a warmth and sense of space to the film. The non-actors are uniformly excellent, vivid as characters and utterly natural on camera.

The feat of combining staged and documentary footage is accomplished with great success, because the intention isn’t to moralize or sensationalize, but to accurately portray the lifestyle. Snow On Tha Bluff is in its own way an important movie—it’s the act of taking the camera back, and creating an authentic, uncensored self-portrait of a man and his community.

Paul Sbrizzi is a film writer for Hammer to Nail, and a features programmer for the Slamdance Film Festival.

Ryan Prows’ bio describes him, among other things, as a conspiracy theorist which brings us to his film .22 that won the 2005 Atlanta leg of the 48 Hour Film Project. The fact that his film capably took on a JFK-like assassination story also lends credence to his bio’s claim.

Questions

How do you like the AFI program?

 The AFI has been instrumental in my growth as a filmmaker.  Just having the dedicated two years to practice and hone craft has been incredible.  The people I’ve formed life-long collaborations with and the guidance and instruction I’ve gotten, and just in the way I approach storytelling differently now, has really been the greatest benefits to coming out here.  The experience has certainly informed me and my work.

What were some of your own personal highlights during your time as part of the Atlanta film community?

I love the support and sense of community and culture that the South in general and Atlanta in particular has given me.  I love that you can shoot pretty much wherever you want if you just ask for it, that I could always bum some equipment or time to create something.  People are extremely generous in Atlanta , which helped me tremendously as a kid coming up in the filmmaking community.  People really will just pitch in to help support your dreams and vision when you’re some punk kid with ideas and no money.  I’ve always been grateful that folks helped me get my start.  

Obviously the mentality is different in LA, which works in some respects, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said “back home we could do this, no problem”.  

Atlanta really supports and fosters its own, and as soon as I get a budget I’ve got to come back and shoot there.  If for nothing more than to get some barbeque!  Holy lord, I miss BBQ.

Tell us a little about your thesis project. 

We’re doing a short film on Narcocorridos, Mexican folk music concerning cartels and drug deals and murder and mayhem and all of that.  The word translates to “Drug Ballads”.  So they’re these polka-styled songs with accordions and tubas and whatnot, and they’re talking about someone having a shootout with the police.

The film is set in an Arizona border town, and is about a desperately sick Sheriff’s deputy who robs a drug shipment hoping to find enough money to get better and get out of the area.  It’s all couched in the framework of one of these narcocorridos.  It’s insane.  I’m really into motivated abstract and absurd stuff, which makes a kind of sense when you watch it over some nonsense art thing that’s just there for the sake of being weird, and this world and this story has that in spades.  Grounded in reality, a current social issue, and a culture/class clashing, the film touches on themes I’ve been interested in for a long time.

How can someone help you make it happen? 

Number one is that we’re still raising money for the thesis film.  We need donations to reach our goal, and you can go to www.narcocorridofilm.com to learn more about the project and the team, and to contribute.  We’re also hoping to continue spreading the word through facebook and twitter and whatnot, and we’re constantly updating with reference materials and production work.  So like and follow to stay updated on the film and to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the world we’re exploring and the process and work going into it.  

facebook: Narcocorrido – An AFI Thesis Film

twitter: @ateamwinfilm

After this project, what is next for you? 

Several of my team from the thesis film are working with me on my first feature film “Natural Law”.  We’ve been prepping for a bit now, writing the script and scouting locations and gather reference material.  The film’s set in Wisconsin in the dead of winter, so it’s going to be cold and difficult and beautiful.  We’re shooting this coming winter.  I went a month or so ago to scout around, and landed in Madison , and got to go photograph and march in the protests.  Come up off them collective-bargaining rights, yo!

Working on the script for the feature version of Narcocorrido as well.  I’m so in love with this world and want to talk about the border issue in a fresh way.  So that script will be ready to go by the time this thesis film is making the festival rounds.

“The music is recorded… I’m ‘bout the only thing live around here.” – Alley Pat

Those words were uttered into a microphone, charged through the airwaves and came alive on radios across Atlanta some time in the mid-eighties, signaling the start of three to four hours of conversation, joking, jiving, trash talk and, if you’re lucky, some good music from the 50s and 60s.

It was time for James Patrick, known to radio audiences as “Alley Pat.”  Georgia born and bred, Patrick arrived in Atlanta in the late 30s, attending high school and doing odd jobs before studying pre-med at Morehouse College.  It was there that Ken Knight, programming director of the first black owned radio station WERD, approached him with a DJ job.  Many trials and errors later, Patrick found his groove as a smack talkin’, straight-from-the-hip talk radio style DJ on indie black radio stations, until the changing face of radio ended his gig in 1990.  In between, he was a concert emcee, bail bondsman, civil rights activist and public access talk show host.

Alley Pat:  The Music is Recorded documents Patrick’s brilliant career on radio.  Producer/director/editor Pat Roche was turned on to Patrick’s radio shows when he arrived in Atlanta in 1983.  “A friend of mine said ‘You really ought to check out this guy Alley Pat’,” Roche recalls, “’He’s got an afternoon show and it’s just insane.’”  Roche, a former DJ and fan of jazz and R&B, listened and was floored, not by the technical sloppiness of the program, but the fun vibe of the show.  Wanting to save Patrick’s shows from vanishing into the ethers, Roche began recording them, amassing about 20 hours of the “found art-weirdness.”  Years later, Roche recalled his collection and decided to make a documentary.  His research lead to a discovery of a man who was more than a wise-crackin’ DJ.  What was to be a short documentary became an eighty-minute tribute to one of Atlanta’s greatest folk figures.

Alley Pat highlights Patrick’s career, as well as gives insight into the man and the era in which he lived and worked.  With the screen filled with images of 50s and the soundtrack with music of the day, radio historians, DJs, civil rights icon Andrew Young and Patrick himself tell the story of Atlanta’s greatest DJ.  And there are Roche’s recordings:  The no holds barred observations, the commercials (where he’d sometimes insult the sponsor and the product!), the friendly insults, the razzing of preachers (who’d try to convert him on the air!), conversations with callers and general jive talk.  What emerges is a man who plays a fool on the air, but is actually an intelligent and modest man.  “He is very smart,” is Roche’s assessment of Patrick from their meetings, “He’s just a very smart guy, but he knows the way to communicate with the people of the city is to get down on their level.”  H. Johnson, WABE on-air personality agrees with this view.  “I [began] to see through all the clowning around,” he says in the film, “I said this guy is deep.”

As seen in the film, Patrick’s appeal knows no boundaries.  Alley Pat’s intended audience was African-American, but he seems to have connected with white audiences as well.  Blacks and whites were treated to an eclectic blend of R&B, jazz, white boogie-woogie and novelty records.  Pat’s jokes targeted both races, and his on-air phone conversations crossed color lines also.  His manic style has crossed barriers of time and region.  According to Roche, audiences at the Macon Film Festival began laughing in the third minute of the film and continued throughout the screening.  Alley Pat was also selected for a film festival in Wales.

Despite the film and its subject teeming with universal appeal, Roche made Alley Pat for an Atlanta audience.  “This is my gift to the city,” he says.   It is a perfect gift:  A document of the city’s radio culture and history, a presentation of rare recordings, and a living portrait of one of her greatest historical figures.

Alley Pat:  The Music is Recorded has its Atlanta premiere on Saturday, April 17 at 7 pm.  Filmmaker Tom Roche and James “Alley Pat” Patrick will be in attendance.

A second screening is Tuesday, April 20 at 2:45 pm.

Stephen Hart is a Clayton County Georgia librarian by day, and a screenwriter and filmmaker night and weekends. He is a staff writer for CinemATL.