This blog post first appeared in my secret e-newsletter I WAS BIGFOOT'S SHEMP which you can subscribe to from this blog to get this content sooner.
I have held off on saying too much about the first weekend of SCARECROW
COUNTY because I wanted Rue Morgue to have the exclusive details--and
they did a nice job of it, right
here.
The first week of January I went to Dayton to record the director's
commentary track for THE GIRL IN THE CRAWLSPACE with producer Henrique
Couto, and when we were done we took his dog Henwolf on a long walk
around the neighborhood. We were kind of high on having just sold the
distribution rights to the movie (the details of which I am hoping to
announce soon) and started talking about that old Hollywood adage that
when you have something, you have to be able to tell everybody what you
have next. Well, I had nothing next.
Henrique started spinning out this idea about a scarecrow, and I put in my two cents, and suddenly it caught fire.
On set this weekend, Henrique admitted that he didn't remember anything
much about this conversation. Luckily it was seared in my brain, and I
went home and wrote SCARECROW COUNTY at a feverish rate.
And it shows, as I have said since that the bus to Crazy Town passes
through Scarecrow County. There are psychic powers, talking comic book
characters, ghosts, dream sequences, people getting chased by pitchforks
and machetes, dutch angles, blue gels, a fog machine, and plenty of
what I call "dream logic." When people say on the set, "wait, what?" or
"that's supposed to be what?" I just say "dream logic."
My first movie was very cerebral, shot about 80 percent at my house,
with people talking about their problems; when we shot the denouement I
just said, "X has to stab Y, Y has to admit he is an addict, Z has to
shoot X, the rest we can figure out." Those were my blocking
directions.
This movie is much, much more pitchforky. I made my first day pretty
easy--the morning with a woman cleaning out her dead mother's house,
only to be visited by a strange presence; the afternoon featuring the
town's mayor, which I directed Jeff Rapkin to play "like the mayor in
JAWS, but with less empathy."
The next day we spent most of the day shooting the last act, littered
with jump scares and plot twists. It was the most challenging day of my
directing career as far as figuring out all the moving pieces.
At one point, Henrique was talking about an eleven day shoot he was on,
and it dawned on me that on my two movies together I had only directed
seven days thus far--still pretty new to it all. But I shot close to 40
pages and have close to the same to knock out over the next three days.
So I had today off work to do everything you do--try to dig a post hole
in the frozen earth to put the scarecrow post in, go and buy hamburger
buns for lunch Saturday, go to Goodwill and buy a four-dollar curtain
that we can burn when a candle rolls away from a Ouija board sesh and
catches it on fire (dream logic!), bake cookies as is my tradition, look
at some designs for a fake dating app you see in the movie that I'm
putting pictures of my son and son-in-law in, answer questions about
costumes, wash blankets and clean the toilets for Ohio crew staying
over.
My records are buoying me along this evening--The Stylistics, ELO,
George Benson, Glenn Campbell, John Denver. An old K-TEL album I found
for four dollars called "Gold Rush 79," right in the groove where I
live.
Speaking of Goodwill, I think the main thing I have learned as a
director so far is that when you are making a b-movie you don't have any
money, so the currency you are dealing in is belief. Belief and
trust. I believe in the people I surrounded myself with. Some of these
are old friends and some are new friends whose talent jumped out at
me. I trust and believe in my DP and Producer Henrique. It is a
tremendous feeling to gather a tribe and go to battle with them--to
write something and ask people to come act it out and help in other
ways, and then people do it. It exists in radio, TV, movies, and
theater, and if it exists somewhere else I don't know about, those
people are richer for it.
I
want to play "Masquerade" one more time on the record player and then I
need to go to bed, so next time I will talk about how I stayed up late
last night and got inspired by Orson Welles. In the meantime, watch all
weekend on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instragram for
johnoakdalton and #scarecrowcounty. Thanks for reading.
