Friday, July 28, 2017

We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

If you wish you'd read this post a few days sooner, subscribe to my secret e-newsletter I WAS BIGFOOT'S SHEMP, which you can find on the right.

I just got back from the set of ISO (In Search Of), the Bigfoot movie I have been referencing for a while; the distributor posted the title on Facebook, so it's Facebook Official, which is the only kind that seems to count these days.  And of all the title iterations I think it's my favorite, because it plays off of both ISO as a film speed and also the old quasi-documentary TV show.

And that's where ISO lives, as a gang of Super-8-loving teens get tangled up in a mystery involving Bigfoot sightings, sinister hunters, and missing parents.  I think I was a good fit to write this one because I was a teenager in the late 70s-early 80s shooting Super-8 movies of my own, and I hope that if the movie doesn't explicitly give off that vibe I hope it implicitly does, with no cell phones and internet but with muscle cars and high fives.

In the late 70s I was drawing a comic book featuring me and all of my friends fighting a war against the Russians in the far-off 90s when a friend decided to do a couple of film adaptations.  I agreed because at that time I was admiring from afar a group of older kids making Super-8 James Bond homages and elaborate sci-fi films (and at least two of these guys went on to work in the industry, one being pretty successful).  Being natural-born Hoosiers, one of our films featured a basketball game between the Russians and Americans to decide the fate of a small town.  The other was I think something about diffusing a bomb and featured a soundtrack you could play on a cassette tape right alongside the silent film.

Christmas 1980 found Santa bringing me my own Super-8 set-up and me and my brother went on to make a ton of short films together, Star Wars and Ghostbusters and Batman parodies as well as G-men movies and vigilante pizza deliverers.

I tried to put nerdy, motor-mouthed me in the film, or maybe a cooler version, with all the things we talked and thought about with movies.  I also tried to thread in what it's like to figure out friendships and families and relationships.  But of course it's a Bigfoot movie, but it's not the most unbelievable thing in the movie because the lead guys both have girlfriends by the end, whereas I had barely talked to any girls at that time.

I just spend a few paragraphs telling you what I tried to put into it, but I would bet any of my loyal readers 20 bucks there will be at least one Amazon review that reads, simply, "It sucks."  If you can't deal with people thinking you suck, don't make a movie.

The other reason I really wanted to write this screenplay was because I would get to hang with two people I have worked with the most over the years, Mark Polonia and Henrique Couto.  Mark is a legendary b-movie director, hidden in the wilds of Pennsylvania, who cut his teeth as a young dude in the direct-to-video explosion in the 80s and has directed over 50 movies.  Henrique also busted out as a teenager and has been hot in multiple genres with close to 20 movies under his belt.  The first screenplay that ever got produced of mine was for Mark (also a Bigfoot movie!) and I have done seven movies for him all told.  I have done four movies for Henrique, who acted as Director of Photography for this one.  I was the first person either of them had hired to write a screenplay, having written all of their prior ones themselves.

My mind was kind of blown to think we were going to work on a movie together--my lucky 13th screenplay turned into a movie--that I referred to it as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in a previous e-newsletter, and loyal readers helpfully supplied me with a few GIFs. But the b-movie world liked it as well, with over a hundred likes on Facebook and Instagram of a photo of me, Mark, and Henrique, with comments ranging from "B-movie Expendables" to referencing the forming of Marvel Comics The Defenders.   I've always said horror fans are the most loyal, and it remains true.

Somebody smarter than me once said that working on a movie set is like being in a war--long periods of boredom with sudden bursts of frenzied activity.  I think that's true.  I spent a lot of time holding a boom mic or using giant foil-lined bounce cards to reflect the sun onto actors' faces.  But it's probably less boring to me because I got to see the movie come to life.  Meeting the actors who look exactly like you thought and the ones that are bringing something new to it.  What the director thinks you meant by certain scenes.  Everybody puts in a little part and makes it something that isn't just me typing at my little corner desk in rural Indiana but is a blend of everybody's thinking.




Being around means you get to answer questions too, like the young actors asking me what the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir was, who Boo Radley was, what Lord of the Flies was about, leaving me to wonder about the state of education for the youth of today.  Thankfully I was not there for the film club scene at the school, or I might have died a little inside if I had to explain some of my old movie references.



ISO is like nothing I've ever worked on.  It's PG, and features a largely teen cast.  It is ostensibly about what Super-8 films meant in my formative years, and what that was like.  Today they are finishing shooting in rural Pennsylvania, and I'm back home again in Indiana. I'm eager to see what happens next with this project.

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Saw Him Standing There By The Record Machine

Whenever I write a screenplay, I have a Secret Soundtrack in my mind, the rights to which would undoubtedly cost more than the movie itself.  You can check out the one I compiled for my last movie, CALAMITY JANE'S REVENGE, right here.  And here are some thoughts on ISO, the Bigfoot movie currently in production in Pennsylvania.

OPENING THEME:  The Alarm, The Stand

FIRST DAY AT THE NEW SCHOOL:   REM, Radio Free Europe

CORY'S THEME:  The Ramones, Blitzkrieg Bop

BOONE'S THEME:  Wall of Sound, Mexican Radio

SANDRA'S THEME:  Berlin, The Metro

MILLIE'S THEME:  ABC, The Look of Love

BOBBI'S THEME:  Joan Jett, Crimson and Clover 

HIGH SCHOOL FILM CLUB:  The Buggles, Video Killed the Radio Star 

BULLIES' THEME:  Ratt, Round and Round

BULLIES DON'T LIKE FILM NERDS:  The Fixx, One Thing Leads to Another

CAR CHASE THEME:  The Runaways, Cherry Bomb

HUNTING BIGFOOT:  Bauhaus, Bela Lugosi's Dead

THE TEENS SEARCH THE WOODS:  Phil Collins, In The Air Tonight

STANDOFF IN THE WOODS:  Red Ryder, Lunatic Fringe

FIGHT THEME:  Black Sabbath, War Pigs 

MORE FIGHTING!:  Aldo Nova, Fantasy

RESCUED!  Haircut 100, Love Plus One

CLOSING THEME:  Triumph, Magic Power

Hopefully it gives you an idea of what I was aiming for.  Enjoy!

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

We'll Leave the TV and the Radio Behind

In 2003 I wrote an article for b-independent.com about visiting the set of AMONG US, the first of my screenplays I'd seen turned into a movie and my first work with director Mark Polonia.  Happily, AMONG US has had some (hairy) legs and is still tromping around b-movie bins and streaming sites here and there.  Tomorrow morning I am leaving for Pennsylvania again, to make another Bigfoot movie with Mark, our seventh collaboration.

AMONG US WAR JOURNAL
by John Oak Dalton

SUMMER 2001: A JOURNEY OF A MILLION MILES
A co-worker brought me a movie he said I “had to watch.” It was the Polonia Brothers’ space epic BLOOD RED PLANET. I was mesmerized. Past the motorcycle helmet space masks and the water bottle oxygen tanks and the gravel pit moonscape and the hand-puppet monsters I saw a great sense of energy and fun and love for the genre. I looked up Polonia Brothers Entertainment on the Internet, quickly found Mark Polonia, and thought I would drop him a line. At that point it never occurred to me that I might end up sleeping on his couch.

DECEMBER 2002: FROM THE POLONIA MIND TO MY HAND
Mark Polonia and I had been writing back and forth and talking on the phone for some time, discussing projects and trying to get a few off the ground. Mark asked me if I would be interested in writing a Bigfoot movie based on an outline he and his brother John had worked up. I told him I wasn’t sure what I could do with a Bigfoot movie but that I would think about it. After I hung up with Mark the phone rang again a short time later. It was PBE actor, director, and general co-conspirator Jon McBride. He said, “You’re not going to write that Bigfoot movie, are you?”

JANUARY 2003: PEN AND SWORD IN ACCORD
My first draft of AMONG US was finished and sent to the Polonia Brothers with some trepidation. Deciding that there was no way to do a Bigfoot movie with a straight face, I channeled those weird stone-faced quasi-documentaries of the 1970s, Sunn Classics like IN SEARCH OF NOAH’S ARK and CHARIOTS OF THE GODS, that used to scare the skin off me as a pre-teen at broken-down Midwestern drive-ins. In my script, B-movie director Billy D’Amato (a Polonia Bros writing pseudonym), who has made a modest career churning out fare like BRIDE OF BIGFOOT and BIGFOOT HOUSE PARTY, ends up squaring off against the real thing at a remote cabin deep in the Pennsylvania woods, with an ex-lover and a weak-stomached cryptozoologist in tow. Fortunately the Polonia Brothers enjoyed the offbeat approach of my script and were eager to move forward. Now if it would only stop snowing.

SPRING 2003: “AND SO IT BEGINS”
Casting, FX by Brett Piper (PSYCLOPS, DRAINIAC), and some second unit and b-roll shots are done throughout the spring, in LA and Pennsylvania, with the changing seasons and locations hopefully giving the project an expansive feel. The bulk of the shooting was locked down for the end of May in Pennsylvania, and I agreed to come out and be on the set and try to pitch in. Little did I know then that “pitching in” would include everything from gathering wood to cooking food to putting on an ape suit to feeding my own script into a campfire. I was blissfully unaware of what was to come.

WEDNESDAY MAY 28: DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
I touched down in beautiful Elmira, New York at 11 p.m., and was quickly whisked off to Wellsboro, Pennsylvania by the Polonia Brothers and Jon McBride. They had been shooting all day all over Wellsboro with Bob Dennis and Hunter Austin, playing the leads Billy D’Amato and Jennifer Dempsey. Early in the morning we were going to leave for the cabin that is the centerpiece for the latter third of the movie and spend several days and nights living and shooting there, so everyone was ready to call it a night. But I did get a quick tour through Wellsboro, recognizing tons of locations from PBE films like FEEDERS, NIGHT THIRST, and others. At midnight we pulled up to the house that I last saw in THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED 2. I had the surreal feeling that the whole town was a giant Polonia Brothers backlot, and I briefly wondered why the humble people of Wellsboro had not risen up with pitchforks and torches and driven these diabolical twins into the river. A short time later I was lying on Mark’s couch and asleep.

THURSDAY MAY 29: “SURVIVOR: WELLSBORO”
For the first time I heard words that I wrote coming out of an actor’s mouth, and it’s a weird feeling...from my laptop in the cornfields of rural Indiana to an L.A. actresses’ mouth in a van bumping down a road in Pennsylvania. It is basically a funny little scene where Billy D’Amato is driving to the cabin and talking about the differences between shooting documentaries and shooting porno movies. At the end Mark Polonia turns to me as I’m crouching out of the camera line in the back seat and says, “Well, you’ve seen your first scene comes to life!” and John Polonia cheerfully chimes in with, “We haven’t even started raping the script yet!”

Before long we arrive at the location, a cabin miles down a dirt road deep inside “the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania,” with a raging river at the front and cliffs at our backs. The whole cast and crew piles out, soon to be joined by rats, snakes, centipedes, and whatever chewed on the legs of the outdoor chairs. Mark Polonia intoned, “They’re more afraid of you than you are of them,” a line that would be repeated often throughout the day and deep into the night. However, I also learned from his wife that he once chased a bear away from the trash with nothing to defend himself but his “tighty whities,” so there you go.

John Polonia gleefully told me that what is politely called “production assistant” in credits is more aptly named “prison b***h” on the set. But it was fun to be involved during the shoot, doing a little of everything from setting up lights to taping “behind the scenes” footage with my Digital 8 camera to shooting promotional stills to grilling hot dogs for lunch and washing up afterwards. At one point I was carrying the heavy tripod and camera across a rickety footbridge that would be considered too unbelievable to use in an “Indiana Jones” movie, with John Polonia right behind goading me forward, and I thought two things…one, at least if someone is rolling tape they’ll have something to sell to FACES OF DEATH; and second, I wonder what the WGA would think about all of this?

Later in the evening we set up for a major scene where the principals are sitting around a campfire and start revealing little bits of their backstories about what motivates them to find evidence of Bigfoot. Unfortunately, wet wood and five inept males could not get the fire started. Finally Bob Dennis took me aside and said apologetically, “If this offends you we don’t have to do it, but I brought an extra copy of the script…” I looked around at the fading “magic hour” and said, “light it up.” A moment later I was watching Bob feed the script into the fire and thinking, “Well, I know writers say actors send their scripts down in flames, but I bet William Goldman has never seen this.”

When we got going on the campfire scene, my heart started racing. With the night falling, the cabin lit in the background, the flickering light from the fire illuminating the actors, I looked through the viewfinder and realized for the first time that the movie was going to look fantastic. Then the next scene shot was a little away from the fire, the heart-to-heart between Billy and Jennifer, where some of their unexpressed feelings bubble back to the surface. I got a chill when it suddenly dawned on me that the acting was great too. At the end of the scene, Hunter had tears in her eyes, and the crew spontaneously clapped. John Polonia observed, “It was the first time someone cried making a Polonia Brothers movie, instead of just watching one.”

(Flash forward to a few days later, when I told Mark Polonia that I could remember the exact moment when I thought the movie would be great. He looked on, sleepy but sage, and said, “Be prepared for bad reviews anyway.”)

Fourteen hours after we loaded in gear at Mark Polonia’s house we were ready to wrap for the day. Bob Dennis, the Polonias, and I retired to an upstairs bedroom to look at dailies. When Hunter Austin joined us, she let out a blood-curdling scream. Although we assumed she was looking at the screen, she was actually watching a snake slither out of the rafters and dangle ominously over Bob’s head. More girly screaming ensued as two more snakes made an appearance, perhaps coaxed out by the warm movie lights we had used earlier. The sad part is that the girly screaming was evenly distributed among the participants, only one of which was a girl. It was loud enough that it actually woke up Jon McBride, who throughout the shoot showed the ability to drop onto any flat surface at a moment’s notice and instantly fall asleep. The fastest set breakdown in cinematic history had us bouncing back up the road to Mark Polonia’s house just a few minutes later. Quoth Mark Polonia, “I was there the day the courage of men failed.”

There is an ironically prophetic line in the script where Jennifer queries “counselor’s cabin at Crystal Lake or Leatherface’s living room?” Suffice to say, it did not take long for the Polonia Brothers to abandon their idea of the location as the center of a series called “Hell Camp.” John Polonia’s replacement idea: “Hell Yacht.”

FRIDAY MAY 30: “I WAS BIGFOOT’S SHEMP”
The whole cast and crew returned to the cabin in the light of morning, shaken but determined to go on. The entire day would be spent shooting the last few minutes of the movie where the Bigfoot creatures lay siege to the cabin. It never occurred to me to ask that with Hunter, Bob, Jon, and John Polonia in the film, and with Mark behind the camera, who might be called upon to put on the Bigfoot suit.

First there would be many intense scenes of screaming, running, smashing things, swinging meat cleavers and hot dog forks and rolling pins, running up and down the stairs, and so on. Basically, everyone drew on their real-life experiences of the night before. And the real, palpable fear on everyone’s faces when shooting the scenes where the cast barricades themselves in the bedroom (aka “the snake room”) only gave the sequence some extra spice.

Late in the afternoon we returned to Mark Polonia’s house, and were treated to a great home-cooked meal put together by the Polonia Brothers’ wives, giving a much-needed second wind. Then it was off to the home of the Polonia parents, a friendly couple whose easygoing manner made it hard to believe that they spawned the twins who made SPLATTER FARM, to shoot vehicle interiors for a climactic attack on Billy’s van. Although Jon McBride had “shemped” Bigfoot in the publicity stills shot earlier in the day and John Polonia shemped Bigfoot in the b-roll, it fell upon my shoulders to put on the heavy, hairy suit and throw myself repeatedly against the windows and doors of the van while screams and shouts issued forth. It didn’t take long to realize that there were no airholes around the nose and mouth, but I tried to bravely soldier forth, ripping off the mask in between takes to gasp blissful gulps of air and wipe the sweat from my brow. My head spun only once.

I peeled off the suit, leaving it uninhabitable for other mortals, and stepped away from it smelling like the inside of a flat tire. Then I looked around and realized that principal photography was over. Like the film’s antagonist, the shoot was hairy, noisy, smelly, and left a swath of destruction in its wake. But as the cast and crew congratulated each other and said their good-byes, it was a good feeling.

SATURDAY MAY 31: THE AFTERGLOW
With two of the main actors, Bob and Hunter, making their way home, the Polonia Brothers, Jon McBride, and I began to watch all of the footage, seeing the scenes we had shot over the last few days unfold before our eyes. Everything was there (a blessing, as John Polonia had an alarming tendency to leave the lens cap on), and not only that, it looked great. Over several hours I began to see in my mind how the film would piece together, and I thought, even if it gets panned from coast to coast and in every dusty corner of the Internet, I am still proud of what we did.

That evening I was treated to a great dinner at a nice restaurant with the extended Polonia family. There I saw a poster for the local “Rattlesnake Festival,” where denizens swarm the hills to capture and bring back rattlers to the baseball diamond in the center of town. Prizes are awarded for the biggest capture, and anti-venom and pork fritters are easily on hand. For myself, I would then apply a well-swung axe; but the fun-loving Pennsylvanians turn the snakes loose again. For the first time I thought I understood what in their formative years made the Polonia Brothers what they are today.

SUNDAY JUNE 1: PARTING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW
My last day in Wellsboro was full of odds and ends. I got to see John Polonia’s massive VHS and DVD collection, chockablock full of everything from rare Italian giallo to undistributed backyard slasher flicks to films I’ve never heard of from Russia and England to Mexico and Japan, a wall of horror titles that would make a fanboy weep and a Blockbuster rep quake in fear. I got to peruse the basement lair of Mark Polonia, where boxes of grisly props, alien hands and buggle-eyed masks and scorched spaceship models and gore-spattered swords, are packed in next to an AV nerd’s dream-stash of edit controllers and cameras and film equipment. I saw the row of PBE master tapes, NIGHTCRAWLER and FEEDERS 2 and SAURIANS and others, nestled in orderly rows in a basement, but already having a life of their own, in video stores and department stores and homes all around the world. I looked at them and wondered, would one day AMONG US be picked off a shelf in a store in a town in a country on this great spinning earth?

Later both Polonias and Jon McBride accompanied me to the airport. As I was checking my bags in the quiet terminal, the attendant inclined his head and said, “Your family can come up here and talk to you while we’re doing this if you want.” I began to muse on the idea…was this group of people more Partridge Family or Manson Family? Or was it something else, a family of artists and dreamers and technicians and of course filmmakers but above all movie lovers, who rose up from rich Middle American earth and followed their vision despite what those who cluttered the coasts might tell them was possible, embracing fans and ignoring foes while striding ever forward?

I was still thinking about it when the plane rose up into the sky.

John Oak Dalton
June 2003

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

Eating Chocolate Cake In A Bag

This post first appeared in my secret e-newsletter I WAS BIGFOOT'S SHEMP which you can subscribe to in the sidebar of this blog.

This week, I'm driving out to visit the set of the movie I have called TWICE SHY in my secret email newsletter. I should be there for the first couple of days, and my loyal newsletter fans will get first dibs on news from there.

I have pitched about a dozen titles, and the one that seems to be sticking is the one that, as it happens, I like the least.  I have called it TWICE SHY after the fashion of great newsletter scribe and author/comic book writer Warren Ellis, who gives code names to all of his projects under nondisclosure.  I wouldn't say this was under a nondisclosure, but more like it's never good to reveal to much until the cameras are rolling, and sometimes not even then.

Now that we are getting so close, I will reveal that I called this project TWICE SHY because it is the second official Bigfoot movie I wrote that is going to be produced.  I have wanted, for a long time, to be the only screenwriter to write two Bigfoot movies and I'm not sure how I could coax IMDB to back me up on it but I think it is true.

I say official because some years ago I was involved in another Bigfoot project that I should have known better about, but I got involved because I wanted to be that guy that wrote two Bigfoot movies.  Some producers had made a sixty-minute movie as sometimes happens and I was hired to write about twenty pages to wrap around it as part of a new shoot with new cast and crew.  Some search and rescue people go into the woods to find some lost hikers and instead find a notebook, and that notebook of course contains the plot of the 60-minute movie, and then my people come back into it and have their own little encounter.  Easy peasy, something I did over a weekend, except that I never got paid and never got a credit and I have never spoken to these people again.

The movie came out, but I haven't had the heart to watch it.  I suspect it is just as likely they put it out at 60 minutes after all.  The good thing is that the DP on this film I ended up making internet friends with, and we always talk about working together one day, but the bad thing is that is was part of a slew of problems that happen to everyone in the business but happened to me all at once and drove me away from screenwriting for a couple of years.

The first Bigfoot movie I wrote, AMONG US, is still knocking around the world.  If you see it, that's me playing the kid Bigfoot in the exciting denouement of the film. Not sure if I will be asked to suit up this time.

Stay tuned for updates from the set next weekend.

Friday, July 14, 2017

Funky Tornado

My swag from Days of the Dead in Indianapolis, showing off my love for the offbeat and the DIY world.



Wednesday, July 12, 2017

I See You've Got Your List Out, Say Your Piece and Get Out

This post first appeared in my e-newsletter, I WAS BIGFOOT'S SHEMP, which you can subscribe to in the sidebar.

I finally took my own advice and went to a horror movie convention last weekend, Days of the Dead in Indianapolis.  Many years ago I went on the convention circuit to meet people in the industry--not the folks you have to stand in line two hours to get an autograph from, but the ones stashed in the corner of the vendor room, burning their own DVDs.

I have always said in the b-movie world you need to prove you are a normal person, who can meet commitments and deadlines and get along with everybody.  The great filmmaker Alex Cox, whose film Repo Man I watched over and over at one time in my life, refers to it as kibun-- the Korean word that means a general harmony, respect, peace of mind, that you need to make a movie.

I had just walked into the lobby of this big hotel/convention center out by the airport when I bumped into a Polonia Brothers fan I knew from the interwebs but had never met IRL.  Not five minutes later, an actor who is going to be in this upcoming secret project I have called Twice Shy in my e-newsletter walked by as well.  So worth going already.

Days of the Dead provided a "Blue Track" for independent filmmakers, and I couldn't have been happier.  I got to watch an Independent Filmmakers' Panel and was surprised how many Indiana people were on it.  It was good to see, because I've never thought there was much of an Indiana scene, but this panel gave me some hope.

I could have broken the bank in the vendor room at just at two tables, Vinegar Syndrome and Severin Films, side by side.  These companies are doing heartfelt restorations of movies that, in the early 2000s when I was first on the scene, you would be thankful to find on nth-pass VHS bootlegs with handwritten labels.  I just had to by a restored Blu-Ray copy of Dolemite, which I first saw on loan from a friend in the early 90s, when I was first trying to figure out how to break into the scene, and inspired me to keep going.  I also bought one I had never heard of, the Axe/Kidnapped Coed Blu from two-and-out director Frederick Friedel, two 70s psychological horror films made for pocket change that pack a wallop, like the best of Andy Milligan or Jean Rollin.

Regional horror films, and films where people make something out of nothing, is where I always find my inspiration.  More recent films, like the all-in horror films from Bandit, like Harvest Lake and Plank Face, are current examples, and I got to meet these guys, who are making very challenging films physically and emotionally.

The guys who made Night of Something Strange were so friendly that I bought their DVD, and was pleased to find internet pal Wayne Johnson in it, as well as Michael Merchant who was in a film I wrote called Amityville Death House. It is as rude a horror comedy as you will find, so be warned.

And naturally I bought a homemade DVD with the title written in Sharpie, She Was So Pretty by director Brooklyn Ewing, who was so interesting on the Independent Filmmakers' Panel that me and my pal Brandon Bennett both decided we could spend five bucks to figure out what she was talking about.  It is awash in technical difficulties, but is such an unfiltered creepfest, featuring an unsettling central performance by Jerry Larew as a serial killer and Corey Rutter as a motor-mouthed cop, that it is worth a look for b-fans.

Some people I wanted to talk to didn't give me the time of day, which reminded me that people in general aren't that interested in meeting writers, but other people I didn't know existed did, so it was worth it to go.  I will be looking for some more opportunities for conventions this season, and see where it takes me.

See you next time.