Trailer Park #1

For those who don’t know, I am a cast member of the feature film Trailer Park, which is shooting in Athens County, and on location in Michigan. I just completed my first weekend of shooting, and it was a blast. (That's me in the green cap at left...)

 

First, a little background—this is the first feature film to come out of the Ohio University film department. They have been leading up to this for a number of years, marshalling resources and assembling the right mixture of personnel. Frederick Lewis, the professor and progenitor of the project, told me they had been planning to move into feature production for sometime, and this year all the right elements of talents and personality coalesced. The students usually made 5 or 6 30 minute films each year, but department decided it was time to give them experience in the whole package, so the usual format was scrapped, and everything was bent toward one massive project. Seventy students make up the crew, from co-directors, producers, cinematographer, cameramen, sound engineers on down to grips, craft service personnel, costumes, makeup, and production assistants. They have a few websites to which I’ve linked at the left-hand side of the page, which include pics, blogs, and background, so I won’t spend much time on that. It’s fun reading though.

 

The screenplay is based on a book of short stories by Russell Banks, (author of The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction, among many others) which is set in a trailer park. Each story features a different resident of the community, and each of the featured characters reappear as minor characters in the other stories, so the work is unified around the life of this particular place. It isn’t about the clichéd trailer trash that we usually see—the characters of this piece are just people at a certain point in the journey of their lives—people who are just starting out in life (a newlywed couple), people who are there after their financial situations have forced them to harbor at the park till they can reboot their lives, and people who find themselves rather at the end of their journeys (my character could be considered one of those, though he certainly doesn’t see himself in that vein). The screenplay is episodic, as one might expect, being based on a series of stories. The writers ( four of them, 2 of which are the directors, Patrick Mulberger and Jonny Look), have chosen to feature just a few of the plotlines, and my character, Dewey Knox, a retired military man, is not one of the main plotlines. But he emerges as the antagonist, or one of them—more on that later.

 

The crew has been working on this project for a year—writing the script, scouting locations throughout Ohio and surrounding states, game-planning and storyboarding all the shots and set-ups. They meet constantly, organized into cadres and departments, and workshop all possible scenarios. They spent months negotiating with various local governments for access to locations, trailer dealers (the main set is at Lake Snowden in Athens County, a smallish campground/park, and they trucked in 8 or 9 trailers a month back and set em up around the lake, to create the Trailer Park. They have contracts with SAG, and agreements with ASPCA , Ohio EPA, local fire and police agencies, as well as hotels, and food providers. They are in touch will all the union rules of the various guilds, and seem to be on top of their game in all aspects.

 

I have always avoided doing student films. I’ve seen enough of them to know that the filmmaking looks good, but the stories and the acting are usually lame.  Plus, no one is out there writing scripts for 50 year old guys. If they need someone my age, it’s to support a 20 year guy.

 (This is why I also tend to avoid working with young theatre companies full of young actors—they choose plays for themselves and their age brackets).It sounds arrogant I know, but I consider what I’ve learned about acting over the years to be more valuable a commodity than to be used as a filler for someone’s else’s dream. Acting is essentially a young person’s game—by the time most actors reach my age, they’ve long since given up banging their heads against the wall and joined society as a productive, if disappointed, member. My head still rings, but I’ve learned to embrace the pain. And I have my own reasons for still playing the game, and I have my own rules, so I long ago outgrew the “ I just want to work” mindset of many actors. It has to be right for me. Life is too short to spend the time and emotional capital on something that doesn’t please me, and teach me.

 

So I was prepared to pass on this opportunity as well. While I have the normal narcissism of most actors, I never had the need to see myself on film. Certainly not in a film of poor quality and story, that would be out there for all time. Plus, I hate waiting, and on film sets, that’s what you do: some famous actor, I forget who, said “ They don’t pay me for acting, I do that for free—they pay me for the waiting.” Film, unlike theatre, is not actor-centric. It is director-centric, process-centric—long stretches of time are spent lighting and rigging and all that. Sometimes the acting portion seems to be something they attend to after they can’t think of any other technical thing to do first. I know that’s a vast over-simplification, but as an actor, that’s how it feels.

 

But I realized that while I am conversant in all things theatrical, my film knowledge is scant. And when I learned how large the scale of this project would be, I thought why not get in on it, and learn something new.

 

The directors had come to see Escanaba in Love at CATCO, in which I performed last fall, and sent me an email asking if I would read for their movie. After an initial, pompous spasm of “ I don’t read for 20 year olds”, I thought, why not? It’s their project, their rules, if I am going to do this I need to come in open, so I said no problem, and even arranged to read in Athens, rather than accept their offer to come to Columbus. So I read, poorly, and figured that was that. This is not modesty. I was awful, not very prepared, and still harbored a distrust and ambivalence about doing film.

 

To my surprise, they emailed me few weeks later, offered me the role, gave me the details (SAG, meals, driving, etc), sent me the final script, kept me in the loop with tons of emails concerning costumes, dietary preferences, call sheets and location info, and here we are at my first weekend of shooting, though the film has been shooting for about 3 weeks (they only work weekends, another plus for me).

 

More on the weekend’s activities in the next post:

 

http://www.trailerparkmovie.com/

 

http://trailerparkmoviephotos.blogspot.com/