THERE ARE NO “B” FILMS ANYMORE. Interview with JOSH HADLEY

You’ve got some first hand insight to the movie making process. You worked, for example, on the set of Project Solitude, starring Eric Roberts, and that’s not exactly the best or most ambitious movie ever made. What was the attitude of the director and producers? Did they know what they were making? Did they care?

It’s really quite odd how some independent movies can be so alike (in the production) and yet so different. Project Solitude for example had a MUCH larger budget and larger crew than Feed The Fish (another film I worked on) and it also felt more lax and even sped up than it’s lower budget cousin.

Project Solitude was a fine movie in theory, it was meant to be the first part of a trilogy of films that each built on the last one, which sounds ambitious, but it was just a tired old story with no real twists whatsoever (Eric Roberts the killer? Never saw that coming).

Now, don’t mistake what I mean, the director of Project Solitude was no lazy shitbird just skating by, he and his Assistant Director and the Cinematographer (whom I did not like at all on a personal level but on a professional level was great at his job) were very focused on making as good of a film as they could. That said, there were many shortcuts made as the budget was dwindling and as the crew was getting PTSD from the extremely uncomfortable shoot (that will happen when you have a movie that is 90% exteriors in the Wisconsin woods in Dec and in the coldest winter in the history of the state).

So yes, they cared, but like the filmmakers I alluded to earlier they did what they could with the resources they had, and really it’s not director Rustam Branaman’s fault the movie is… less than good. The script was pedestrian and a tad insulting and while Branaman is listed as a writer, it was really the baby of Tom Hillery… producer of such classics as Bikini Kitchen, Bikini Kitchen 2 and Bikini Kitchen 3.

Now, I am not trying to go with an Ed Wood analogy here but I know many people will make it if I don’t point this out… Ed Wood was famous for his “one take and print it” style of directing, sometimes getting 40 setups in a single day that way…

Well, on Project Solitude there were VERY few shots that had more than one take, it was rehearsed sure, but usually the one take that was rolled on was used. This led to a very fast production that if you remove the issues the winter cold and snow caused would have had the entire movie shot in 2 weeks which is a shockingly short time for a film like this. Due to this the tone on the set was tense most of the time and at the end the budget was run so low that many of the “non-essential” personal were let go and replaced with unpaid Interns/Production Assistants. Contrasted to Feed The Fish where the tone on the set was always jovial, always a tone of fun while still getting the shots and most of all a tone of “lets make a movie” compared to Project Solitude’s “LET’S MAKE A FUCKING MOVIE!!!!”.

Let’s talk about MPAA ratings. They seem to get weirder every year. On one hand MPAA seems strangely lenient towards torture porn, and on the other hand – more and more movies that’d get a PG-13 in the 80s and 90s are rated R and have to be watered down because of the younger audiences. What do you think about this tendency? Why does it exist and how does it impact the movies, their tone and reception?

My co-host on RadioDrome Cecil Trachenburg recently did something of an expose on this very phenomena which I will have to tread some of the same ground here. The ratings shift have no one real source but rather a conglomeration of causes stemming from Janet Jackson’s nipple ring being exposed on national television. That incident sent off a trigger effect through pop culture that is still being felt and one of the largest was that what the mainstream saw as “family safe” changed.

PG-13 used to be an actual middle ground between a film that is too harsh for a PG but not hard enough for an R and now PG-13 has, as Cecil very succinctly put it “Instead of pushing PG farther PG-13 pulled R back”. There is this myth that by making a movie (or cutting a movie) to be PG-13 that it “opens the film up to a wider audience” which is complete bullshit on every level. How did the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, the aforementioned Friday The 13^th movies or the entire slasher boom of the early 80’s make their money? Did they cut the movies to PG in an effort to “get a wider audience”? No, the audience came to them, as a kid in the era before PG-13 existed we found ways to see the movies and the studios didn’t pander to us the way they do now, the audience will find a way. At one point New Line Cinema (“The house that Freddy built”*) briefly considered making a PG-13 Nightmare on Elm Street movie, an idea which was almost immediately nixed as they figured teens always saw the movies before, why compromise the movies for an audience that is already watching them.

The R rating now has a somewhat literal Scarlett letter about it and so PG-13 is the new benchmark to hit with mainstream films it seem and that harms all of film in general as it homogenizes everything into a flaccid plane where every film must be palatable for every person. This greatly harms the very idea of film as it pushes the ideal that making and marketing a film is an opiate for the masses and not as an artistic endeavor.

Perhaps that is hopelessly idealistic of me but I feel a movie should be made as art first and as something to be mass consumed second. No movie should ever be made with a rating in mind, the movie should be made as it is made and the rating it is given being taken as is… but I know that not how this works nor how this CAN work given the vast amounts of money involved but that is how I feel.

Also, the very idea of a rating system is offensive to me on a personal level, who the fuck is this secret cabal that gets to decide what ART makes it to the people? The MPAA is a censorship organization, plain and simple, they see themselves as a kind of crusader for moderation but they are censors straight up. They will claim that since you don’t HAVE to submit to them or their whims that this exonerates them from being censors but it does not as they actively collude with the movie studios to make you reliant on them. If you don’t have a rating through them, you can’t advertise on TV, you can’t advertise in papers or on billboards and so if you want to make any money on your movie, you WILL submit to them. That is censorship.
*also the name of a documentary movie about the importance of the Elm Street series to New Line Cinema.

Nowadays it’s easier to make a movie and it’s easier to publish it, but the result is a flood of movies, mostly bad ones, and one just can’t follow them all. So, to sum it up, how do you perceive all those changes that the „B-cinema” is submitted to? How does it affect the aspiring low-budget movie makers, and where does it lead to?

Low budget cinema used to be a place where real movies were made… where any nutball idea could be put on the screen in a fashion resembling quality, that is no longer the case. In reality what I am about to say is blasphemy to any artist but I will say it anyway…

If you can’t do it right then DON’T DO IT. If your movie REQUIRES a budget of some sustainability then don’t just make it for the sake of making it. Why half ass it? You want to make a space epic that requires sets, models, effects, makeup and lighting but all you have is $10,000 and access to a junkyard… you can’t make the movie you want to make so to attempt a $100,000 movie on a $10,000 budget only cheats everyone involved, you and the audience.

Creating inferior art for the sake of creating art makes no sense. I see all of these low budget guys that were around in the heyday and they always, without fail, give the advice to not let budget stand in the way of your dreams, make the movie you can for what you can… this pisses me off as it is a bullshit ideal where a level of quality plays no part. Movies are art and art has built in requirements such as resources… would you tell a painter that if they can’t afford paints and canvass to just use their feces and a cardboard box? It’s still their art, right? No, it’s now a piece of shit on a pizza box. You would tell them to find the things they need to do the work justice or put off the art until they could bring it out as conceived. I can’t stand it when I see filmmakers of talent toiling away making shit, with garbage equipment just for the sake of “making something”.

But technology is so cheap and accesible nowadays. CGI, for instance.

CGI is one of the tools that has allowed people to make films on smaller budgets but it also has forced them to compromise on quality. Unless it’s done correctly CGI looks like shit and lets face it, 80% of the time it is not done right. CGI and the ease at which it makes things possible has fooled directors into thinking “close enough” is a standard they can accept. There were always bad practicals, don’t misunderstand, but CGI seemed to have force feed an entire generation of both filmmakers and film goers the lie that it’s okay as long as you tried. That Sabertooth Tiger looks like something out an N64 game and does not mesh with the live action at all… but we get the idea of what you meant and you tried so it’s good enough.

No, it’s not good enough. That sells the entire craft of filmmaking into a purgatory that it can never recover. Shit factories such as The Asylum have brainwashed an entire generation into thinking that crap for crap is what should be strived for. There has also been a strange defacing of how much work it takes to make something good. I saw a video recently of a kid, maybe 18 years old, bitching that Ray Harryhausen movies looked like shit and “I could make better and more convincing FX on my laptop”. They youth of today have no appreciation of the past and they think that since they grew up with CGI and HD that anything less is beneath them. That is the true film arrogance, that since it’s easier today that it is better… I don’t think that films of the past were better just because they were older… but I can appreciate the fact that in 1966 it was impossible to make a seamless matte and I can see they DID do the best they could… today when you make a shitty matte there is no excuse.

The field itself has also changed so greatly that even the term “low budget” has been affected. Back in the 80’s a film with a $100,000 budget could great released in theaters, look good and have “name” actors in it… today that simply can not happen. Today 5 MILLION dollars for a movie is considered a “low budget” film. Everything has changed, mostly in the negative sense. In an era where Paul Schrader and Terry Gilliam can’t get a film released and Charles Band is shooting movies in his office disguised as a dorm room you can not deny that film as an artform is in decline. Places such as Netflix have opened up film to a new audience but it also has cheapened and demeaned film to the point where nothing matters anymore. There are still films that are getting made that defy this, so make no mistake, cinema is not dead, it just has shed it’s skin and moves differently now.

I may be a cinema snob, I may be a cranky old shit that only views film through nostalgia goggles but I see only darkness on the horizon.

Thank you for your answers.

You can find Josh at his website www.1201beyond.com. If you like what you read, do yourself a favour and listen to Josh’s shows: Radiodrome and Lost in the Static.