Skip to Content
Categories:

Out of the Dumpster and into the Desert

What about this one?”” Randy holds up a pot of slightly wilted crocuses. We are standing in the dumpster of an unnamed grocery store at midnight, our headlamps shining out elusive treasures and possible movie props amongst the rubble. “”The Art of Filmmaking on a Shoestring Budget”” would be the title to this book, were I actually writing it. Did Picasso ever wade knee-deep in trash for just the right shade of blue acrylic, or have a friend pass stolen canvases over a chain link fence?

Film is an artistic medium shrouded in affluence. When $5 million is considered “”low budget,”” the majority of the population is removed from the creative process. Those who have money control what gets made, and we end up with films that advertise products, people and worse of all, ideologies.

But then there are kids like us, who don’t have one million bucks, let alone a thousand. In our world, a dumpster full of trash is a chest full of props, everyone’s day job is just an untapped after-hours resource and “”free”” on Craigslist is the store from which we buy our goods. We work from an intricate web of bartering, borrowing and stealing where resources shift hands but money is never exchanged. This should be a study for economics majors – a system that works successfully outside of capitalism.

This particular film is to be 20 minutes long, part of my senior thesis. A Wednesday night meeting consists of 10 to 12 of us in my living room, going through our resources over day-old bagels and two-buck chuck. Marlon’s parents have 40 acres of land in Temecula, Brian can get tools from his work, John will steal a bike, my uncle will mail walkie-talkies, Paul will lend me his battery converters and Norbert is acquiring the reflectors.

“”I’m really excited to work on this,”” said Salomon, my art director. “”I always wanted to work on a film with you. And you have a lot of really talented people on your crew.””

I’ve hand-picked them, and I too see them as the best. Some come for experience, others as a favor, others out of the desire to be creative, out of friendship or the hope of romance. But each person brings a particular knowledge or skill, which outweighs all other motives.

Crafty with making cool contraptions? You’re in charge of special effects. Good at telling people what to do? You’re the assistant director. No matter how much hard work you put in, talent is the intangible element that must be present to make everyone’s work worthwhile. So the important question is, do I have enough talent as director to carry this film?

I remember when the idea for this film first came to me – it appeared suddenly, like a shooting star – commanding my attention as I perused an old comic starring my namesake, Annie Oakley. It appeared in my mind only for a moment, and then was gone. But I had seen it.

I began collecting old $2 Western comics from the ’50s and ’60s, comics romanticizing cowboys and the Wild West – both long past at the time of their printing. Amid the yellowed, fraying pages of these once-bright comic books, my characters and the world they lived in were born: independent, maladjusted, animated antiques, pinned in a world of beautifully stylized movement and primary colors.

It would be months before I would actually be able to translate the pictures in my head to words, and then an entire script. Around third week of fall quarter, I finally had a moment of lucidity in which the characters and their conflict spilled out and left me with a 30-page script about three characters: Pow-Wow Smith, Annie Oakley and the Minnesota Kid. They’ve carved out a living on unpopulated land, land that is suddenly auctioned off to development companies. In disenfranchised eccentricity, they pull their lots together to take a stand against the infringement on their rapidly expiring way of life.

Five days away from filming, and we are hammering nails into a wall by car headlight at night in the middle of the desert. The wind is screaming through a broken weathervane and the stars shine the way you never see them do in the city. I think of a million other things that need to happen between now and Friday, when the cast and crew will drive to a location just outside Temecula – with no electricity, no bathrooms, no cell phone reception – for the first of three weekend shoots. My to-do list spans multiple pages, and sleep is way overdue – not to mention schoolwork.

Back in San Diego, I sit next to Christie, my cinematographer, and we go over the shot list for the weekend. It looks good. We are arriving at the stage we’ve been working toward for months, settling all the creative decisions that have been labored over and disputed diligently. This is the point of no return, the calm before the storm.

Donate to The UCSD Guardian
$2615
$5000
Contributed
Our Goal

Your donation will support the student journalists at University of California, San Diego. Your contribution will allow us to purchase equipment, keep printing our papers, and cover our annual website hosting costs.

More to Discover
Donate to The UCSD Guardian
$2615
$5000
Contributed
Our Goal