BEFORE: This one's a bit of an inside joke, because I found out about it through my friends James and Adam, who are two producers that I've worked with, and they both saw it. Adam is the producing partner of Matthew Modine, who appears in it, and he also supplied some archival material from Modine's "Full Metal Jacket Diary". During a podcast we were recording, they drew an analogy between my relationship to Bill Plympton and Leon Vitali's relationship to Kubrick, and said if they were casting "Filmworker 2", they would make it about me.
So of course I had to check this one out, eventually. See, I say that I don't take recommendations for films to watch, but obviously I do, I file everything in my brain in case it becomes important to keep my project going.
Matthew Modine carries over again from "Revengeance".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Room 237" (Movie #2,724)
THE PLOT: A documentary about English actor Leon Vitali, who came to work as an assistant to filmmaker Stanley Kubrick for over 30 years.
AFTER: Hmm, this becomes a difficult question for me to answer - do I identify with Leon Vitali? While it might appear at first that we followed similar career paths, with Vitali pledging himself to aiding Kubrick for 30 years, and me working for animator Bill Plympton for over 25 years now, I think there are some key differences. Vitali was an actor before finding work behind the camera, for example, and working for an animator has given me acting credits, rather than taking them away - and that's just one example. If I hadn't been working for Bill, I probably wouldn't have any voice-acting roles in his films - plus I wouldn't have been in the right place, right time to be interviewed for that documentary "The People vs. George Lucas". Bill recommended me to the camera crew that wanted to interview him, saying I probably knew more about "Star Wars" than he did himself, which is true. I might not have ever gotten a chance to meet some of my idols, like "Weird Al" Yankovic, or many "Star Wars" actors, if I hadn't been working for Bill.
But I can feel Vitali's pain, at least on some level. Often it feels like I've been working very hard behind the scenes on an animated feature film, for little recognition and for a salary that barely meets my expenses, and often makes me feel like it's costing me money to keep this job in the long run. But here's how I feel when I learn about Vitali's career - last week we had a bad incident where someone dented the door of my wife's car so that it wouldn't close, and we had to wait a couple hours for a tow truck. Later that day, I walked by a car in Brooklyn that had its whole front end smashed in, and I took a picture of it to text to my wife, with the words, "Well, it could have been much, much worse!" And you can say that about almost anything, whatever bad things come your way, just remind yourself that it could always be much worse. Vitali gave up his original career, had relationships that fell apart and suffered bad health because of all the stress involved with working for Kubrick. Getting into animation GAVE me a career, at a time when music videos were falling out of vogue and I didn't know which way to go. I've managed to balance jobs running TWO animation studios with a relationship, and I still have my health. Well, most of it anyway, some parts are starting to wear out, but just my eyes, ears, back and knees. I haven't had a kidney stone in over 5 years, so that's something - twice I had health problems on the first day of Comic-Con, so I think stress definitely plays a role.
Not everyone is cut out for a life in filmmaking - I remember that the biggest lesson I learned from film school at NYU is that I didn't really want to be a director, it's much too stressful and it takes a fair amount of ego, in addition to the creativity needed to come up with ideas. Who needs that kind of pressure? Just the Type A people, I think, and I'm just not one of them. So before my junior year (which became my senior year, I graduated as soon as I had enough credits) I did something of a pivot and I took courses in producing, animation, and comedy writing. (The comedy class is where I met my first wife, but that's a whole other story...) And I started to see that there wasn't just one road to working in film, there were many. An internship at a small production company gained me a look at the business side of things, and I learned how to do basic accounting, payroll withholding, basic video editing, and 100 other things, setting myself up as sort of a jack-of-all-trades for both production and office work. And all these years later, that's still what I am - I'm not really a producer, but I do a lot of the same jobs. I'm not an editor, animator or director, but I'd like to think I'm a good person to have around.
But I see the wisdom in Vitali's plan - approach the biggest, most famous creative person you can find, and work for them, volunteer at first if you have to, and then keep volunteering for more and more things. With time, and luck, that person will come to depend on you, and eventually you can get paid for that, and become someone they rely on, their secret weapon, their lucky charm. Plus, the more things you volunteer for, the more things you can get good at, and then it's a snowball effect that just makes you more and more useful as time goes on. Besides my reputation for planning Comic-Con appearances, I've become a whiz at booking airfares, shipping packages, writing tweets and blog posts in someone else's "voice", etc. etc.
Vitali took my plan (before I did, obviously) and ran with it - he learned about the editing process, then about color timing (this was in the pre-digital age, obviously) and set lighting, then all of the things that have to be done once the film is completed, like marketing in other countries, subtitling the film in other languages, the logistics of getting all the prints shipped to the theaters, and so on.
Vitali served multiple roles on the production of "Eyes Wide Shut", not only as Kubrick's assistant but also as his liaison with the lighting, camera and continuity departments, AND he had an acting role in the film in-between all that. Most people would need to work a 30-hour day to accomplish what this guy had to do for a 12-hour shoot day.
And then even after Kubrick's death, because of his extensive experience his services were still needed to properly archive all the materials from Kubrick's films, and supervise whenever there was a conversion to BluRay or 4K or whatever new format the industry came up with. I recently went through some of this myself because of that deal with Shout! Factory that I mentioned yesterday - to make digital copies of some of Bill Plympton's features that never got converted before, we had to release the negs of three features from the Academy, where we established an archive back in 2012 to properly preserve and restore negs (which had been stored improperly for five years in Bill's apartment). Also, there was one negative from 2004, a feature called "Hair High", that was mysteriously missing from the archive - it turned out that we didn't double-check the list for omissions, and it never came out of Technicolor New York's lab in 2012, when that lab closed down and released all its material to its clients.
One last "Hail Mary" play, and I was instructed to call out to Technicolor's vault in California, where all the material that wasn't picked up from the NYC lab was shipped for storage. Success, the missing negative was found, and coincidentally it was just a few hours' drive from the lab used by the company we signed the deal with. Sometimes, with enough persistence and luck, you can pull off what looks like a magic trick from afar. Once we proved copyright and ownership of that re-located negative, it was fairly easy to arrange shipping down to Los Angeles for a transfer to digital - we could have probably made a new transfer from another source, but going back to the original negative was the option that most likely could yield the best result.
Today I was tasked with finding photos of Bill with animator Richard Williams, who recently passed away. Bill wanted to write a tribute on his blog, and that sends me into detective mode - I've got all the photos from Bill's many trips, and they're organized, but only up to a point. But if Bill can remembers WHERE he might have been photographed with another person, that's a big help. Bill remembered running into him at the Annecy Festival (which takes place every June) and the Telluride Festival (a September event). Also, Bill's wife remembered meeting him in 2018, so it didn't take too long to find the photos on my computer from June 2018 and September 2013 that were needed. The better you can organize yourself at the start, the more efficient you can be going forward, that's true for any job.
But I also think that if you stay too long at any job, that job sort of stops being "what you do" and turns into "what you are". And maybe you find you don't want to be that thing any more, or you don't want to be JUST that thing, so then it becomes this dilemma that you face weekly, or monthly - do I stay and keep doing the things that I've become good at, or do I pack it in and try something else, before I get too old to re-train myself? Obviously I don't have a helpful cohesive answer for this, but I've found that it helps to go out with friends and enjoy yourself, it helps to go home and relax and spend time with your family and not work 13-hour days if you can help it, and it also helps to go on a vacation from time to time.
And if you can't get away for a week, you can always take a long weekend here and there and go on a road trip, those are fun too. Because the down side of making yourself useful is that you might find that it's impossible to break away or take any time off, because you've made yourself indispensable.
Also starring Leon Vitali (last seen in "Barry Lyndon), Ryan O'Neal (last seen in "The Main Event"), Danny Lloyd (last seen in "The Shining"), R. Lee Ermey (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), Pernilla August (last seen in "Trespassing Bergman"), Stellan Skarsgard (last seen in "King Arthur"), Brian Capron, Tim Colceri, Treva Etienne, Brian Jamieson, Lisa Leone, Warren Lieberfarb, Ned Price, Nick Redman, Marie Richardson, Philip Rosenthal, Julian Senior, Steve Southgate, with archive footage of Stanley Kubrick, Adam Baldwin (last seen in "Serenity"), David Bowie (last seen in "We Are Twisted Fucking Sister"), Scatman Crothers (last seen in "The Cheap Detective"), Tom Cruise (last seen in "Going Clear: Scientology & The Prison of Belief"), Nicole Kidman (ditto), Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Kirk Douglas (last seen in "If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast"), Keir Dullea (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451"), Shelley Duvall (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Salma Hayek (ditto), Steven Spielberg (ditto), Jane Fonda (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Michael Gambon (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Tom Hanks (last seen in "Quincy"), Paul McCartney (ditto), George Harrison (last seen in "Super Duper Alice Cooper"), Arliss Howard (last seen in "Concussion"), Mick Jagger (last seen in "Rush: Time Stand Still"), John Lennon (last seen in "Quiet Riot: Well Now You're Here, There's No Way Back"), James Mason (last seen in "Julius Caesar"), Malcolm McDowell (last seen in "Blue Thunder"), Jack Nicholson (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Robert Pattinson (last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Slim Pickens, Gordon Ramsay, Peter Sellers (last seen in "What's New Pussycat"), Martin Sheen (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Shelley Winters (last seen in "Alfie"), Rita Wilson (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2")
RATING: 6 out of 10 studio executives
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