The making of my first films--collaborating with then-roomate Wayne Wang (Joy Luck Club, Smoke, etc.)

WHAT FLIRTING COST ME (1972)

Early one Sunday morning, about 9:30 AM, browsing at the Alameda Flea Market (located then at a drive-in theatre parking lot in the next city over from Oakland, California), I noticed a pile of old True Confessions magazines near my feet. Suddenly I got an inspiration. Maybe I could break my artistic deadlock by just shooting something out of an old magazine! I knew that I desperately needed to get back to work on something, since making scul[tures had basically dried up (no new good ideas!)

Reaching down I picked up the top one, with a date of 1933, and vowed to make a movie of whatever article I turned to, using the text as my script. I closed my eyes and flipped it open, my fingers sliding onto a page with the heading “What Flirting Cost Me.”

Contacting my CCAC tech room friends, Wayne Wang and George Chang, I was happy to hear that they would help me check out the school’s 16MM sync Bolex movie camera, a Nagra for recording sound, various lights, and even help with the setting- up of equipment. After all, I had never shot 16MM film before, knew absolutely nothing about it. And they didn’t seem put off at all that, inclusing that I was no longer enrolled at CCAC. They just said they’d handle it.

While I was returning the equipment one day back at CCAC, the head of the Film Department, Larry Jordan, asked, “Rick, are you still a student here at CCAC?” I answered, “No,” watching his face wrinkle with disbelief. Then he asked if I was checking out the movie camera. I answered in the affirmative. He said that was not possible. It was time to beg. I told him I’d been using CCAC filmmaking equipment for at least six months and needed just one or two more outings to complete my work. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Willie Boy Walker, standing there by my side. He asked Willie if he was part of my film, and upon hearing he was, generously agreed to let me continue shooting (Thanks again Larry!).

My choice of 16mm filmstock, a Kodak Kodachrome (which has since been discontinued) really popped the color, duplicating the pulp fiction look of the magazine layouts. And I even had a musical soundtrack, piano solos supplied for the film by friend Gary Thorp (he also supplied the musical score for my Sundance feature, MORGAN'S CAKE (watch trailer here, and read book about “the making of”), who performed in my East Oakland studio for a surreal scene where actors Linda Egar and Willie Boy Walker first “fall in love,” staged in front of a four- foot, red heart I made out of spray-painted paper roses. I had gotten back on the path, finally creating new work with my energies. It wasn’t exactly “art” – I wasn’t giving expression from the very depths of my being – but it felt good to break the ice and get working again. Maybe next time I would make a film that was personal, I hoped.

When I got a letter saying that we had won an award at the Marin Film Festival, I was happily shocked. Calling the festival I found that my film would be projected in a theatre with 800 seats, at a special awards evening. Wayne Wang, Phil Makanna, Ed Nylund, various cast members, other friends joined in the festivities, with leads Willie and Linda mounting the stage to receive the award from Bob Cummings of TV fame.

I remember standing in the lobby after the Marin County show afterwards, talking to Wayne Wang, who said that he had been impressed that I could make such a good film out of what he had considered a lost cause. He suggested that we get an apartment together in Oakland, and since I’d gotten to like him I decided to do it (I still hung on to my East Oakland studio for another series of months. And that was the decision that ultimately gave birth to our first movies together.

1944 (1972)

Around the time Wayne Wang graduated from CCAC, he and I rented a small apartment together on Hudson Street, just off of College Avenue in Oakland. Another friend, filmmaker William Farley, had lived in that exact apartment a few years before, paying a measly $42 per month for rent. Now the rent was $100 per month, but split two ways, to $50 each, wasn’t so bad (of course, costs much more now!). As soon as I had that kind of “normal” living quarters, my ex-wife Mary-Ann decided that I should start being responsible for our little kids on weekends, babysitting them Friday night to Monday mornings in the apartment.

The first project Wayne and I were involved in together was to shoot a little film with our mutual friend, actor Bruce Parry, about a guy in the process of breaking up with his girlfriend. While Wayne wrote most of it, playing out his influences from the French “New Wave.” A contribution I made was to use my subtitling device (English titles for the exact same English spoken words). I had used subtitles in two previous films, The Masseuse, and What Flirting Cost Me (since the dialogue originated from a magazine article, it was a natural step for me to present the words on the screen). I had come to understand why I was so fascinated by subtitles. I figured out that I had actually read my favorite films.

At a film appreciation class my sculpture roommate, teacher Charlie Simonds, taught at CCAC, I had seen Orphée, The Grand Illusion, 8 1/2, Breathless and other great classics (Wayne was the projectionist for the class, for his wor/study), all of which, being in a foreign language, I was compelled to read in subtitles. So Wayne wasn’t adverse to my experimentation with subtitling.

When 1944 was completed we entered it in the Ann Arbor Film Festival where it won a First Prize (they awarded six). Suddenly Wayne and I were riding high, members of a winning team.

FEATURE-LENGTH DREAMS (1973)

Dick Richardson, a mutual friend of ours who had scripted on Phil Makanna's indie feature Shoot the Whale movie, saw our 1944 film and loved it, saying that Wayne and I should do another, only bigger (feature-length), and better (using his writings, his performance, of course). I had around $11,000 left from my father’s inheritance, but it was obvious that this particular amount of money wouldn’t last long. It was my big gamble, to make a movie and hopefully become an earning artist, for myself and other kid-responsibilities.

Co-lead, actress Carolyn Zaremba, A MAN, A WOMAN, AND A KILLER (©1973 L.L. Productions. Photo by Ed Nylund).

By this point I was three years out of my first wife’s life, and I filled the apartment with my children Thursday nights to Monday mornings, including daughter Heather (age 5), son Morgan (age 3), plus a new baby, Bowbay (age 1), the child of my ex-wife and her new Chinese partner (later her next husband) Wayne somehow handled my ‘nursery’ scene. I was happily surprised when my ex, Mary-Ann, agreed to cover me for the weeks of babysitting I would miss during the shoot. And the kids seemed to enjoy the changes in the air, probably learning an important lesson from dad’s positive new energy. I’m sure my good mood was infectious.

PRODUCTION MIRACLE (1973)
After a week of scripting and compiling for our forthcoming movie, Wayne and I took off with Dick in his car, searching for some location that might make sense to the developing storyline – a gangster hides out at a farmhouse, waiting for a hit man to come and kill him. We ended up driving on California coastal Route 1, and reached Mendocino in a few hours, with its old hotel and Victorian houses. We wondered if this little town might be an ideal spot to shoot, but at a rental agency we quickly learned that all the affordable summer rentals were already taken. In spite of this, I asked Dick to just drive us over to the edge of town, near the bluffs.

At the corner of town, we noticed a great old house, red, with white trim, which I immediately sensed would be a stunning combination for our black and white filmstock. Imagining that interplay between the black (red) and white actually got my pulse racing. I knew that we had to film in that building! Noticing some people on the front steps, I told Dick to stop the car.

While Wayne and Dick waited, I got out and walked over. Talking to a nice woman with long brown hair (in her mid-thirties), who was out catching some sun on the porch with her young son, I explained that we were trying to secure a house for making a movie, “Not Hollywood style by any means,” I explained, “Just an artistic endeavor.” I mentioned we had attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and at that point she smiled, saying that she had once been a student there herself. Bingo! She agreed to rent me her house (for $400), if I agreed to relocate her family to a nearby motel for the two weeks. So for about $650 total, I secured the perfect house for our cast and crew to live in and shoot. So again, just as when I found my 1939 Dodge truck and free studio in Berkeley during my sculpting days in the late 1960s, just mentioning the name of my art school brought a wonderful gift to my life (see ENERGY FROM THE GROUND, Excerpted from my memoir Twelve Dead Frogs..

FIVE MINUTE FILM SCHOOL (1973)

Before we departed from Oakland to Mendocino to begin our 13-day shoot, I had to pick up all the film gear at Adolph Gasser’s in San Francisco. But the one thing I hadn’t accounted for was that I had never loaded film into an Eclair NPR camera, like the one I was renting. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that this would be a problem. But as I stood at the equipment window at Gassers on that July morning, it seemed insurmountable.

A young guy stared at me from across the open counter as I asked if he could show me how to load a 400’ roll of film into the camera. He said, “no problem” and pulled an exposed roll of 16mm filmstock out from beneath the counter. He said that the demonstration would take about five minutes. As he started talking about installing the core, threading the sprockets correctly, and measuring the exact size of the loop, I quickly understood the ramifications of what was taking place. It was obvious that if I missed any single point in his demonstration, and failed to repeat it by myself later, I could blow the whole shoot.

For maybe the first time in my life I had to really learn something of vital importance to my life. I concentrated with all my might, opened my eyes wider than ever before, and focused on each small detail he explained. I tried to memorize every word he spoke, so that I could duplicate this same procedure 45 times at the Mendocino, California farmhouse, 150 miles away (I had bought 45 400’ rolls of 16MM filmstock). It was an intense five minutes, and in the wink of an eye it was over.

Somewhat stunned, I watched as the technician now moved on to complete my billing, while answering questions from the next customer, closing lids of equipment boxes, lifting some gear to me over the counter top.

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