EDITING 1st feature:--Solving the narrative structure (with help from Tennessee William's book, "Memoir"), a premiere at Bleecker St. Cinema/NY, and King Vidor's AFI grant for Film #2, SHOWBOAT 1988.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleecker_Street_Cinema

Stories excerpted from both 12 DEAD FROGS--A Filmmsker's Memoir, & SLEEPER TRILOGY--Three Undiscovered First Features by Rick Schmidt 1973-1983.

NO STORY (1973)

Back at Palmer Lab I had started to run out of money and had inadvertently slipped into charging my editing room fee ($320/month), as well as others mall costs, as I kept editing away in my small 5’ by 8’ cubicle. Soon I had beaten the lab record of in-house editing (none had stayed longer than a couple of months). Just like the little man behind the curtain in The Wizard Of Oz, I had traded real life for the satisfaction I felt controlling and manipulating those life-like images projected on a screen. I became a hermit, a cave dweller, trying desperately to extract emotion from plastic strips, but it just wasn’t working! It wasn’t long before I realized that I needed to get out of town again, to clear my head.

Arriving in Mendocino (I took the bus), I found it helpful to revisit the scene of our movie, to feel the cool ocean fog blanketing the red house on Kelly Street, the official address of our movie set. Walking around the chicken coop across the street, visiting the fields where we had shot several dramatic scenes, and wandering through other parts of town, I still felt the magic of our shoot. Of course, everything looked calm again, no cameras in sight demanding that life be forged into scenes, no personality clashes between filmmakers.

During those solitary hours on the California coast, it dawned on me that I just wasn’t smart enough as yet to figure out the footage. I realized that I would have to grow more as a human being, learn some new things I didn’t as yet know, in order to solve that complex filmmatic puzzle in which I was immersed. I figured that I needed to get out more (out of my editing cave), see some movies, perhaps read some books that could inform me of new ideas and options. My silent prayer, at that point, was that it wouldn’t take years to reach that necessary enlightened state.

TENNESSEE’S RESCUE (1974)

I must have prayed a lot in my sleep in 1974, because when I bought the book, Memoir by Tennessee Williams, around March or April at a garage sale, with its loose chronology of entries, I saw in its structure the clue to my editorial salvation. I learned that an author could be very creative with his time-frames. If Mr. Williams could jump from September,1941 to January,1964 and back I figured so could I. It seemed like I might be able to tell part of my story from one actor’s point of view, then jump right to another actor’s perspective, without apologies.

Back in the editing room I began to shift my Man, Woman, Killer footage around to accommodate this new concept. I also decided to divide the film into three parts, Act I – The Story, Act II – The Game, and Act III – The Death of Uncle Jim, playing off some of the monologue that Dick spoke into his tape recorder early in the film as he gazed out a window at the gorgeous fields of Mendocino.

These titles reflected the editing concept I was heading for, creating a film within a film. I asked myself the editorial question, “What is real (in the footage), and what is simply an invention from the mind of the Dick character. I began to play one scene off another, taking advantage of this distinction. I also decided to incorporate my old subtitling skills, and use English titles to represent Dick’s writings from his journal. Fortunately, we had run off a good deal of footage of Dick sitting at his desk writing, those scenes now vital for supplying enough screen time to accommodate my subtitled voice-overs.

Rolling through the outs (head and tail leaders and footage cut out from scenes, all thought unusable in the final cut), I discovered many glorious moments of Dick and Z interacting before the clack of the clap-board transformed them into characters for our scripted story. It was then that I admitted to myself that the real gold of the movie lay in those unconscious-of-the-camera moments. Suddenly it was a whole new ballgame. I brought the three lead actors, Dick, Z, and Ed into the Palmer’s Lab sound studio on separate days and recorded monologues from each of them, discussing each other, their real-life stories (where they were born and raised, etc.), and the moviemaking process itself. With these narrations edited into the footage, the film suddenly came alive before my eyes. It effectively intertwined the scripted story and the making of the film, keeping the gangster motif alive while revealing real-life romantic intrigues between Dick and Z. I’d never been happier or more relieved in my life. Somehow, I had broken through the ice, got the movie rolling.

Some of the best emotional moments during the shoot had been captured by the photographs taken by Ed with his 35MM Nikon, so I decided to have Palmer’s art department transfer some of the most beautiful stills to 16MM film, as part of a full-color main-title credit sequence that would appear about fifty minutes into the black-and white movie. Ed’s photographs, along with narrations, music, and titles, supplied a nice little five-minute interlude before the arrival of ACT III, and Z’s terrific “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” finale.

The film now seemed to reshape itself as the narrations and footage told me what to do next. For the first time (after an arduous year of failed attempts) I was really having fun in the editing room. Scenes were fitting. Dialogue was meaningful. Cuts had logic and power. As all the separate pieces began to coalesce, I felt a wave of happiness wash over me. It seemed like my entire life up until that point had prepared me for this moment – to construct my own universe on film.

60 CENTS POSTAGE (1974)
In December of 1974, I finally had a print (actually two copies) of my first feature, A Man, A Woman, and A Killer (75 minutes, B&W/Color) in my hands. With my last few hundred dollars I figured I’d better just fly to New York City and try to sell the movie to distributors. I still owed about $4,000 to Palmer’s Lab, and was in deep debt to my mother, who had gone the extra distance to help me finish. I figured that I’d better use the only asset I had – the film – to somehow recoup the money. Using the two prints, I felt I could give the top New York film people a chance to view the movie over a week’s timeframe Fortunately, I decided to phone ahead to make sure that these important film industry people had time to screen my work during that busy time, the last week before Christmas. I had no idea what I was doing, but taking that trip sounded about as practical as anything else I could imagine.

NEW YORK DISTRIBUTORS (1974)

In New York I needed a place to crash and called Anne Wehrer, a friend of Mary Ashley’s back in the Bay Area, who had connected us by phone. Anne agreed to put me up for a few days in her Bowery loft. Each morning thereafter I dropped off two prints, retrieving them either later that day or the next morning, repeating that routine for about a week. After seeing the film screened at a class taught by her critic friend Gordon Hitchens at New York City College, Anne said she could sympathize with my attempt to get a distributor, knowing full well the ‘impossible’ odds against it ever selling. As a close friend of filmmaker George Manupelli, she was experienced enough, she believed, to know that I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting my weird film distributed. She knew a lamb to the slaughter when she saw one.

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AFI application FLASHBACK.

Before I had left Oakland, my filmmaking friend Bill Farley had gotton on my case, suggesting that I fill out the American Film Institute’s grant application forms he dangled in my face, saying that I might win me an Independent Filmmaker’s award of $10,000. I declined, saying that I didn’t have any new ideas, or energy for applying. But he remained adamant. “You have a feature-length film as an example of your work. You have to apply!”

After returning my kids to school on a Monday morning, I read over the application he’d left at my house, and put it aside again. Finally, two days and three bothersome phone calls from Farley later, I came up with a second feature film idea. I decided to apply for the grant to shoot an audition for the remake of the classic American musical Show Boat, with Ed in charge. The film would be about Ed’s dream to be a success in music (he had studied at the Manhattan School of Music). When I mentioned my idea to Ed he didn’t shoot it down right away, which I took as a good sign.

A day or so later, Ed called me back, saying that he’d thought about it, and what he really wanted to do was, “bring the stench of death to the American musical comedy form. (Actors Dick Richardson and Carolyn Zaremba would also appear in supporting roles).

In any case, I finally wrote up my synopsis for Showboat 1988 (the date in the title stemming from my compulsion for double dates since making the short film, 1944), then quickly added the rest of the required information about my career and past filmwork, typing directly onto the application. Anything, I thought, to avoid the possibility of more harangues from Farley! But even though I had completed the application, I hesitated to mail it in. It just felt so dashed off and incomplete. When I complained to Farley that I didn’t have the 60-cent postage, he came right over to my apartment and jammed the needed coins in my hand. (Thanks again Bill!)

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The last day of my NEW YORK effort to find a showcase for my film resulted in a visit to the Bleecker Street Cinema on the recommendation of Gordon Hitchens, who said there was a new independent film series looking for work to present. I met a young programmer (somewhere around my age at the time) named Marc Weiss, who wanted to know who in New York had seen my film so far. I ran off the list of about ten programmers and distribution companies, adding that they had all rejected the film. I was surprised when he said that he still wanted to take a look. The screening was set for December 26th, the day after Christmas, at the ungodly hour of 10 AM. I left the print with him at the Bleecker and thanked him.

Back outside on New York streets I thought I should print up some free passes to the screening, so that the programmer wouldn’t be sitting alone in that large expanse of seats all by himself. So that afternoon I located a small printing company in the phone book and called them up, asking if they could help me make a movie ticket before the screening, two days away. They seemed to think they could, so with a little difficulty I found their small fifth floor office about a mile away. I walked up to an older guy at the small counter, and explained my dilemma. After getting his commitment to do the job I asked him if he had a small desk I could use to draw up the design for the ticket. Suddenly he was speaking louder, getting the attention of all the other ten or so workers there, saying, “He wants a desk! HE WANTS A DESK! I’ve been working here for 25 years and I don’t have a desk. SO, YOU WANT A DESK?”

When I went to retrieve my print the afternoon of December 26th, I was informed by Mr. Weiss that he wanted to show our film as a “New York Premiere,” giving it a week run in March, 1975. While it was nice to get a showing, the theatre didn’t look like much, sort of a dingy hole in the wall, and I didn’t see how it was going to help me dig out of my $4,000 lab bill.

Back at the loft, Anne was already getting drunk, bracing herself to educate me in the ways of the independent film world. Needless to say, she was shocked at the news. "A New York Premiere?"“ she said, mostly to herself. Her tone of reverence made me think that maybe I’d done better than I thought.

SOMETHING HAPPENED (1975)
Around late April, walking back to my apartment on Hudson street in Oakland, CA, I passed ex-roommate Wayne Wang, who had returned from Hong Kong and now lived across the hall from me. He blurted out words about seeing something stuck in my door, and said, with a strange stutter in his voice, Congratulations...you deserve it...you’ve earned it. I had no idea what he was talking about.

Reaching my apartment I noticed a yellow telegram stuck in the crack. I opened it to read that a selection committee of four judges at the American Film Institute (AFI), including director King Vidor, had awarded me $9,918 to make my new feature, Showboat 1988.

Pictured here on SLEEPER TRILOGY book cover,, I’m shooting final acts at SHOWBOAT 1988-THE REMAKE audition, on last night of 3-day auditions (July 22, 23, 24, 1975), San Francisco, CA. (Actually this photo was taken around 2AM, morning of 7/25/75, by our movie stills photographer Kathleen Beeler, as last few auditions refused to end!).

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