Filmmaking That’s Fast, Cheap and Under Control

When I first saw a primer onindie filmmaking called Fast, Cheap and Under Control: Lessons Learned fromthe Greatest Low-Budget Movies of All Times, I was eager to find out whereRoger Corman fit into the narrative. And when I discovered that the openingsection was devoted to Roger and his protégés (soon-to-be famous directors likeFrancis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Demme). I was keen to knowwhether author John Gaspard had consulted my Corman biography. Turns out hehad—and credited me as the source of a key Corman-related quote from indiewriter/director John Sayles. So I can give Gaspard credit as a guy who does hishomework. He reads what’s out there to be read, and has also spent countlesshours personally interviewing indie filmmakers, along with those who’ve gone onto bigger and possibly better things. Like Steven Soderbergh, whose majorHollywood career was sparked by the dramatic Sundance success of his indiechamber piece, sex, lies, and videotape.

 True to the nature of itssubject, this is a low-rent book. Let’s put it this way: the book is so cheap thatmy copy lacks page numbers. And, though Gaspard gives thanks to a copy editor,there’s an egregious grammatical error on the very first line of the very firstpage. So English majors like me might feel some dismay. Still, there’s a verygood education to be had within these covers, both for those who want to makelow-budget films and those curious about the kind of wildly inventive cinemathat doesn’t require millions. Happily, Gaspard has a great appreciation for smallfilms, whether they are classy stylistic experiments (John Cassavetes’ Shadows)or gruesome horror flicks (The Night of the Living Dead) or outrageouscomedies that make a virtue out of cheapness (e.g. the clopping coconut shellsthat simulate horse hooves in Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Onesection is devoted to science fiction on a budget, another tomock-documentaries like The Blair Witch Project, a third to the growingfield of digital “filmmaking.”

 I particularly enjoyed thetips from ambitious upstarts like Kevin Smith (Clerks) and Jon Favreau (Swingers),who explain in detail the writing and directing choices they needed to make inorder to stay on schedule and within budget. For instance, Smith’s one-set filmtakes place in daylight hours in a rather seedy convenience store. But earlyon, a leading character who plays the counter man gripes that the store’sblinds are stuck shut, which means that, along with other workday annoyances,he has to do his job in semi-darkness. There’s a reason for this: Smith wasactually shooting after the store closed for the night, and didn’t want to giveaway the fact that there was no sunlight outside the windows. In Swingers,Favreau (directing himself) looks longingly through a batch of photos of a lostlove, instead of the usual Hollywood flashback to happier times. Such necessarymeasures often breed creativity. Longtime indie director Henry Jaglom (Someoneto Love) quotes to Gaspard a lesson he learned from the great Orson Welles:“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”

 I was pleased at theinclusion of Dark Star, a USC student film that gave John Carpenter astart as a Hollywood director of sci-fi and horror by using such inventivetricks as making an ordinary beachball into a space alien. My future husbandworked on that film, creating a good-looking space console out of plastic junk.Carpenter borrowed $50 from Bernie and promised screen credit. Eventually hegot neither. That’s another way to save money.