PART 5––Completing "A Man, a Woman, and a Killer"––and a week-long WORLD PREMIERE, Bleecker Street Cinema, NYC, March, 1975.

SEE TRAILER: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/manwomankiller

(Excerpted from TWELVE DEAD FROGS AND OTHER STORIES, A Filmmaker’s Memoir, by Rick Schmidt ©2017).

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. At that time, there was nothing like the present-day Independent Feature Project’s Film Market in New York City, where screenings are pre-arranged for distributors and TV buyers for a small fee. Back then every independent filmmaker had to invent his or her own way of selling a film.

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.

But before I could get out of town, my filmmaking friend Bill Farley got 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 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. Finally, two days and three bothersome phone calls from Farley later, I came up with a second feature film idea.

I decided to use the same three characters from the first film and work toward a feature trilogy staring Dick (Richardson), Ed (Nylund), and Z (Carolyn Zaremba). Whereas the first feature had been about Dick’s real-life negative fantasy (becoming such a successful gangster that a hit man hunts you), I figured the second movie should be more positive and fun. I remembered Ed Nylund’s distaste for the musical comedies, and that gave me an idea. I decided to apply for a grant to shoot an audition for the remake of the classic American musical Show Boat, with Ed in charge. I imagined that he could play a sort of contemporary ‘Captain Andy’ from the original story. The film would be about Ed’s dream to be a success in music––he had studied at the Manhattan School of Music, but had dropped out before he could receive his Masters in musicology).

When I mentioned my idea to Ed he didn’t shoot it down right away, which I took as a good sign. He called me back later, 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.”

In my exhausted state I wrote 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 wrote 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!)

NEW YORK DISTRIBUTORS (1974)

When Farley learned that I was flying to New York City a week before Christmas with my prints of A Man, A Woman, and A Killer, he mentioned he was also heading to the East Coast to visit his mother, and suggested that we ceremoniously share a room at the famous Algonquin Hotel. I agreed, looking forward to his company. There was something endearing about this intense guy!

I remember that our room in the legendary hotel was small, and that we rode up to our floor in an elevator shared with Peter Ustinov and his wife. Once in the room, Farley asked me if I’d realized how much I had been staring at the famous man. I guess I just couldn’t believe it was really him (movie stars look so different in real life!). Sitting there comfortably with Farley, mixing with the ghosts of the Algonquin Round Table, I felt new energy begin to resurrect my fragile state. It just felt wonderful to have survived my editing ordeal.

The second day in New York, Farley helped us get housing at the apartment of his friend, artist Bob Harding, while I arranged for someone at the Film Forum showcase to screen the film. The director, Karen Cooper, said that she didn’t have time, but delegated the task of screening works by unknown filmmakers to her assistant. I was happy when I saw the sound recording team of Neelon Crawford and Lee Serrie show up to the little screening, hoping that they’d be satisfied with how I edited their tracks. Ms. Serrie wrote me a sweet letter later, saying many good things about the film, mainly how she “had never seen anything like it before.” I took that as a big compliment.

When Farley headed off to Boston to see his mother, I needed a new 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. At the time, she was surviving in New York by placing ads in the Village Voice, advertising herself as someone who could do “Opie-ology.” The customer would mail her a check and then she would talk to them for half an hour, about anything and everything. Her middle name was “Opie,” thus the name of her service. She said that she had paid the last month’s rent this way. I didn’t doubt it after I got to know her better. When I heard that she had lived with both Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, I realized she could give her clients their money’s worth.

At any rate, 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. The film got rejected by pretty much everyone of note: The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, New Yorker Films, New Line Cinema, New Director’s/New Films series, Cinema 5, etc. I was running out of showcases and distributors! 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 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.

One afternoon, when Anne and I were returning to her loft after lunch, we found the front door ajar and cautiously entered, slowly easing our way up the stairs. When our eyes were level with the second floor landing we peeked over the top to see a homeless guy, dirty clothes, unkempt appearance, sitting back on her couch, eating raw eggs and drinking beer. Spotting us, he got noticeably nervous, which made us even more nervous. I quickly went into action, to try and diffuse the situation. As I walked up the last few stairs into view I tried to put myself into his shoes.

“A lady lives here,” I said in a youthful, pleading voice, “and we’d better leave now!” I tried to imagine I was talking to him as his mother might have, letting “the little boy” know that he had made a mistake in etiquette. If a lady lived there he mustn’t be naughty. And it worked. He responded with an “Oh, oh, OK. Let’s go!” Together, he and walked back down the stairs, just a couple of bums.

The last day of my effort to find a showcase for my film sent me over 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, thanked him, and walked back out onto the New York streets, aware that one job remained before I left town. 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.

It always seemed that a film played better with an audience. 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.

At the printing company, I walked up to an older guy, 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?”

Twenty-four hours later I picked up the 500 tickets to the “Special Preview” of A Man, A Woman, and A Killer, with the date, time, and location of the screening (and the name of the theatre misspelled). In bold lettering it said, “Admit One.” Two hours later I finished distributing them at the Chelsea Hotel, nearby art galleries, restaurants, all around Soho where I thought the young crowd gathered.

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. She had known all along that no New York theatre would show my strange film, and had finally felt compelled to level with me. Needless to say, she was shocked at the news.

“A New York Premiere?” she said, her tone of reverence making me think that maybe I’d done better than I thought. I didn’t, as yet, understand how difficult it was to get any New York theatrical show for a feature-length independent film. I heard later that for the next couple of months people continued to show up at the Bleecker Street Cinema with my “free” printed passes in hand.

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Official Selection ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL.
WINNER, 'Director's Choice,' ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL

REVIEWS (from the Bleecker St. Cinema show).

“For lovers of weird movies, independent director Rick Schmidt is the king. A MAN, A WOMAN, AND A KILLER is one of the weirdest films you’ll see this or any other year.”— Robert W. Butler Entertainment Editor, KANSAS CITY STAR

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Recent REVIEWS: https://letterboxd.com/film/a-man-a-woman-and-a-killer/

Watch TRAILER here:

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Click below for FREE screening of FULL MOVIE:

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In late March, I learned that the film had won “Director’s Choice” at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. So that good news helped, even though I was still putting each and every bill I received into a desk drawer without even reading any of them. My landlord had let me go four months without paying rent by this point, and I really wondered when they would come and cart me away. (Isn’t this a wonderful ad for becoming an indie feature filmmaker?)

In my deluded state I finally decided on a plan of action. I decided I would fly down to Los Angeles each week (tickets were only $15), stay down there a few days at a time, trying to (1) sell the film, and (2) get a job in the motion picture industry. The only hitch in the plan was that I didn’t know anybody, had no connections, and obviously didn’t have any proven commercial filmmaking skills. Fortunately my friend Annette got me in contact with her Los Angeles buddy, Ruth Schaffner, a gallery owner, and it was arranged that I would stay with her.

Arriving at the Ruth Schaffner Gallery off Melrose, I waited to make my introduction while an older woman, who I supposed was Ruth, dealt with a young woman artist standing before her at a small desk. I knew the drill as soon as I saw a slide in the woman's hand. The artist was trying to get a show. And I watched as Ruth became tough as nails; authoritative, a wall of resistance. As soon as the woman departed, her draggy body language saying it all (defeat again) I approached and said hello. Ruth immediately shed her heavy side, lit up upon seeing me. It was “Hello, dear!” in a sweet, almost little-girl voice. And to think that that poor disheartened artist could have been me with my sculpture slides! The world for an artist is a frightening place, I thought. Our sub- species is always endangered, teetering on the edge of extinction.

I stayed in Ruth’s white-carpeted art-rich apartment for several days, wondering if I'd ever have a place of my own that was so well appointed. She even gave me the keys to her red Chevy Malibu convertible, completing my metamorphosis (I didn't really live in Oakland, did I?).

I remember at one point driving through a Beverly Hills neighborhood, with lush expansive lawns in every direction, big houses up and down the well appointed streets. Suddenly I found myself stopped at a quiet intersection, directly across from a Honda Civic. And in that small car I noticed a driver who looked identical to pictures I'd seen of the heavily bearded Francis Coppola! I glanced to my right and then left, but couldn’t see one other automobile or person for miles. Focusing back on the Honda, I realized that probably the only “connection” I would be offered while in LA. was sitting directly across the street. For an instant I actually considered ramming that car, anything to meet someone whose power and influence could help save me. Thank god I didn’t go to that extreme!

Before I left town, I was offered a homoerotic relationship by a head costume designer at MGM (some friend of a friend of Ruth’s, I think). When it was clear to him that I wasn’t prepared to go "around the world," he hit the brakes, instantly expelling me from his Cadillac (leopard-skin upolstery and all) about 60 blocks short of my destination. After a wait of about forty-five minutes I finally caught one of the rare LA city busses. Another "helpful" friend of Ruth’s said that she would have taken good care of me, offered her apartment (and obviously herself) while I ‘made my way,’ if only she had been 30 years younger than her present age of maybe 70. Is this how careers are made?).

Around late April, walking back to my apartment on Hudson street in Oakland, from the return bus-riding leg of my LA trip #2, I passed former roommate Wayne Wang, just back from Hong Kong, who now lived across the hall from me. He blurted out words about there being something 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 the recognizable yellow envelope of a telegram stuck in the crack. I took it out and opened it, to learn that an AFI selection committee of four judges, including King Vidor, had awarded me $9,918 to make my 2nd feature, Showboat 1988.

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