I will spin off of some of my Filmmaking & Video books (How my "Used-Car" book was created). U can create media for NEW Millennium's quarter-century/2025--There WILL B life after the Nov. election!

FEATURE FILMMAKING AT USED-CAR PRICES.

In 1987 I penned the first how-to version of FEATURE FILMMAKING AT USED-CAR PRICES. I’m including the chapter on how that first published book happened against all odds, became a VIKING PENGUIN BOOK ©1988.

The full story is told in detail ahead, as excrpted from new my 2020 book, “NEW DARK AGES––HOW A PUNK MOVIE EMERALD CITIES GOT ITS IMPROV.”

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MY BOOK DEAL
How a C- English Student Wrote a Filmmaking Book that Helped Launch Kevin Smith & Vin Diesel

At the completion of Emerald Cities, early in 1984, my feature was invited by programmer Linda Blackaby of Philadelphia’s International House showcase, to screen in their large 400+ seat theatre. I would receive a good rental fee and an in-person salary, so the paid gig was greatly welcome. When on the phone with Linda, she asked me if I’d like to earn an additional $100 by conducting a workshop. Of course, was my answer.

“OK,” Linda responded. “What title should we use for it?”

U m ... I had no immediate answer. “Let me call you back in five minutes,” I said. After hanging up, my mind for some reason turned to the sale of my old ’39 Dodge pickup. Obviously, that had been a somewhat emotional event for me. The truck had magically come into my life, in 1969,* when I was roaming around Berkeley one day with no address to my name following the breakup of my first marriage. The truck, bought for $25 from a total stranger, had been a faithful ride right up until the day I sold it. *More about this in my memoir, Twelve Dead Frogs and Other Stories. a Filmmaker’s Memoir; Section “Energy From the Ground.”

In a moment, a phrase to advertise the proposed workshop came to mind. What it would be about was, feature filmmaking at used-car prices. After all, my transportation for ten years had been my dear truck, and that was my car. I called Linda back and gave her my title. Because of completing my movie on the back of selling my used car, it helped create the title for my as-yet-unwritten book.

Flashing forward, to Spring, 1985, two years after Emerald Cities had premiered at the St. Marks theatre in New York as midnight fare, as well as having been selected for the Australian Film Institute’s Seven City Tour and Rotterdam International Film Festival in The Netherlands (they bought my plane ticket and supplied housing), I was again stuck with an impossible lab debt––and Julie, was expecting! I called up a friend, David Heintz, Chair of the Film Department at CCAC, and asked him, probably half-pleading, to please consider letting me conduct something I called, Feature Workshops. I proposed a three-month gig where a handful of students and I would complete a feature film within the summer college curriculum. I certainly needed the pay, but also hoped that my improv style could generate a real indie feature in a school setting, created by myself and people basically off the street. Amazingly, David said Yes, and I immediately begin to plan for and promote the 90-day production.

In support of the Workshop class, I quickly designed and placed an ad in Film Comment magazine to troll for my future collaborators. And, of course, I called it “Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices Workshop.” Lo and behold, the used-car filmmaking ad got me four paying students (You can see that the truck-sale kept rewarding me, years after the painful sacrifice of parting with it.)

At CCAC summer school we scripted, shot, edited and printed a feature-length 16mm movie entitled, The Last Roommate. But there were some unexpected hurdles between me and getting a student=based collaboration-style feature in the can.

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ART SCHOOL VOODOO (1984)

(Excerpted from “TWELVE DEAD FROGS AND OTHER STORIES––A Filmmaker's Memoir" by Rick Schmidt.

After the completion of Emerald Cities, which wrapped up my trilogy of films starring Ed, Dick, and Z, I felt satisfied enough with my efforts at filmmaking to switch gears for a while and apply for a teaching job at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC), where I had received my MFA 13 years earlier. The head of the film department, David Heintz, was a friend, so I felt a degree of confidence that he would at least give my proposal some serious consideration. I told him that I wanted to try a make a feature film in 16mm, start to finish, with a group of students during the summer sessions. I thought it was possible, if four students agreed to attend all three sessions (three months), and paid an additional lab fee of $650 each for film stock, processing, and other supplies. He agreed to give it a shot.

I spent my own money advertising in the magazine Film Comment, stating that “Rick Schmidt, director of three feature films, is looking for students to join him at a Feature Workshop.” Three students signed on, and I decided to give it a try even though I seemed to be short one person (and one $650 fee). Peter Boza, Tinnee Lee, and Mark Yellen arrived on the CCAC campus in June 1984, ready to write, direct, shoot and edit a feature film. Everything went smoothly at first, with a nice sympatico developing among us all. But then a fourth student matriculated into the class, arriving two weeks late from the Midwest. Since we needed the extra production dollars to pay our feature-length expenditures, I didn’t feel I was in any position to turn him down, even though he’d missed the foundational first couple of weeks of writing for the screen. How was I to know the level of disruption he would cause?

Before two days had elapsed, I found myself dumbfounded as I watched the new student filling the blackboard with his ideas for what our no-budget features should be about. He had rejected our group idea, about a woman who advertises for a roommate and selects the wrong guy – a feasible no-budget concept given its central location (her apartment) and small cast (just two characters). Instead he insisted that his (impossible-to-produce) science fiction epic was the way to go. Before I could understand what was happening, he had taken over my class, somehow snatched the leadership position (and chalk), away from me.

I guess his overtly authoritative behavior was something I had no tools to deal with, reminding me too much of my own father and my ex-wife. At any rate, I felt powerless to stop him. That horrible day ended with me finally blowing my cool, swearing at him with the class looking on, further eroding my status. I had come unraveled, ungrounded, and went home to lick my wounds. I was at a loss as to what to do next. Just being around this guy seemed to give me goosebumps. It was as if he had some kind of supernatural power over me. His mere presence seemed enough to throw me off-kilter, turn me into a babbling baby, hurt feelings and all. I dreaded ever setting eyes on that person again. Maybe I could just call in my resignation, I thought, just quit. Did I really need this much aggravation?

(Of course if I had given up, there would have been NO movie (THE (LAST) ROOMMATE, and NO book (FEATURE FILMMAKING AT USED-CAR PRICES). My life would have tumbled away from getting a book published, selling over 100,000 copies that helped KEVIN SMITH make CLERKS, and supplied my how-to manual that Vin Diesel used to begin his superstar career!)

Then a strange thought came into my head. Maybe I could counteract this troublemaker by making use of an exercise I had learned when filmmaker friend Bill Farley and I had attended what I’ll call “a psychic healing class” together a few months earlier. In the class, we had learned that the best way to neutralize an enemy was with love. By loving that person you took his power away, or at least gave yourself an opportunity to not lose energy by hating that individual. That sounded like the correct prescription for my ailment. I decided to give it a try.

First, I sat in a relaxed setting by myself and calmed down. Then I focused on someone I happened to love unconditionally. For this I picked my little half-Chinese step-daughter Bowbay, my kids’ youngest half-sister. While I had no actual blood ties with her, she and I just seemed to click, without complications. I envisioned her in a pink light, as I’d been taught, and focused my love on her while imagining her smiling back at me. I could really see Bowbay looking at me with a bright grin on her face.

Next, I would try to use that beam of love to neutralize the student. I slid her out of my imagined vision (as if she were on a slide in a slide projector), and slid in the student, brought him right into that same pink light. Because I was still focused on the pink light with my feeling of unconditional love, I found myself directing this love toward him as well. The first few times I repeated the exercise he didn’t seem to respond to my mental manipulations, but after a while, the ninth or tenth repetition, he started changing, with his threatening face taking on a completely new persona. He suddenly seemed nice and healthy. So I decided to risk returning to my class the next day.

I’ll admit I was pretty jittery as I walked onto the CCAC campus that next morning. Part of me dreaded the next interaction with you-know-who. But before I realized it, I found myself within twenty or so feet of a picnic table where he and my other three students were seated. When he looked over at me I found my lips parting into a warm smile, exactly like I had trained myself to do the previous evening. In spite of everything, I was sending love in his direction. And I watched his face as his look of superiority faded. Before I could even reach the table, he got up and announced that he was dropping out of the class. He then immediately strutted off toward the registrar’s office, to complete the paperwork and get his refund. It really happened that fast!

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By the end of 1985, collaborators Peter Boza, Tinnee Lee, Mark Yellen and I, with the help of our lead actors Jean Mitchell, Bruce Parry, and cinematographer Kathleen Beeler, had happily completed “The Last Roommate.” If I had cancelled the class, not only would I have missed the adventure of making that film, but I wouldn’t have had the workshop experience upon which my book, “Feature Filmmaking...,” was based.

I had religiously audio-taped each class session throughout the entire process, figuring that these recordings would help to produce a book.

Several months after the workshop, mid-December, 1985, when my second son, Marlon, was born, I found myself awake at 6AM every morning instead of the usual 7-8AM. At that earlier time, my wife Julie was getting dressed and hurriedly grabbing some breakfast so she could commute 20+ miles to her job as a graphic designer. And my new role of Mr. Mom entailed feeding, cleaning and dressing baby Marlon, while trying to figure out how to get my artistic life and money-earning back on track. Without payment in- hand to once again clear my lab debt, there was no possibility of any future filmmaking. So my options were limited.

Strangely enough, the only obvious tool I had at my disposal was an electric typewriter left over at the tail end of the $7500 National Endowment For the Arts (NEA) grant, awarded to complete Emerald Cities. To my desperate mind, the logical, and only path towards salvation was getting on that machine and writing that book. And the pressure of being a new older father certainly helped me overlook the fact that I’d never done anything remotely like that before.

I soon learned that to deliver a full-length book takes constant output, returning day after day after day to a writing desk. And, not surprisingly, the beginning days for me were very difficult. The job required showing up daily, for months on end (years, perhaps), until black-stamped letters of the alphabet had been typed onto reams of blank white paper, with bottles of White-Out corrective fluid within reach. A professional book needed around 100,000 carefully chosen words, resulting in 250-300+ pages. I found that my work-ethic was severely challenged during that initial first week-and-a-half. During that 10-day period of trying to become a working author, my mind concocted every possible excuse for quitting:

Why are you wasting this time?

You’re not a writer! This is stupid!

It will never get published!

Plus the ultimate: Just stop, before you make a foolof yourself!

Only the most obstinate (desperate) of mortals can overcome one’s own DNA, when it constantly challenges doing something this far out of their normal experience. And if you tell anyone what you’re up to, they will shut down your activity so fast it will make your head spin.

You’re doing what?

WHY!?

(TO BE CONTINUED)

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