The MoMA, NYC, and the World Premiere

The Museum of Modern Art.  New York City.  What an auspicious rollout for The Death of Alice Blue.  We were very honored and elated.  Needless to say we were also pretty nervous.

The World Premiere of The Death of Alice Blue had finally arrived, late March 2009.  We were part of the Canadian Front programme at the Museum of Modern Art.  We were programed with seven other Canadian films, including ones by Bruce MacDonald and Denys Arcand.  It was the MoMA's opinion of what was happening in Canadian film this year.  After all the hard work and time, it was hard to believe we were finally going to have an audience, and at what a venue.

One of the actresses from the movie, Laura Thorne, was going to make the trek down along with some friends.  As it turned out, she and her friends had friends in New York, so we had our own cheering section.  Which was excellent.  

We had no way of knowing how the audience would react.  I've learned that audiences can be quite different.  They'll laugh at something another audience wept through.  And I've learned that different venues attract different audiences.  

The theatre was packed, some four hundred heads were poking above their seat backs as we entered.  Larry Kardish, senior curator, introduced The Death of Alice Blue by saying it was a post-modern deconstructionist vampire tale.  I had a feeling he was joking and it made me smile.  He then called Alex and myself up to the front.   I mumbled something about having spent some time in advertising and having spent some time as a vampire, a joke Alex gave me, and that seemed to go over well.  Alex and I headed to the far back so tense we could hardly walk.

It's different than when it's a live performance, you can't react and modulate for the crowd, you just sit and hope they're going to get into the swing of things, or else all fails and there's nothing you can do.  Fortunately this crowd was receptive, in fact they amazed me with just how well they got certain bits, bits I had even forgotten about.  They totally got the "quirky" humor, they reminded me of just why I had been so excited and amused in the beginning.  I noticed something of a polarizing effect, there were those who were literally slapping their knees with merriment, and there were those who sat bemused.  Anyway, I was thrilled with the reaction, and I told myself polarization was a good thing.

Then Alex and I were called up to answer some questions, we called up Laura Thorne.  We were still nervous but we did our best.   And the questions were good ones.  There was repeated interest in our theatre backgrounds and how that had affected what had just been seen.  This was something I had never thought about, and right there I began to realize our theatre background (and I might add experimental theatre background) had affected The Death of Alice Blue.  I had thought there was a feeling akin to Jim Jarmusch or Hal Hartley films, of awkwardness, futility, and absurdity - that out of futile attempts to communicate or connect came this great hilarity.  This was something in our plays anyway, but there was more.  The audience noticed the physicality of some of the acting which at times is Chaplinesque, or silent screen era, and then can be completely deadpan.  And we had used both stage and screen actors, and their styles could be differentiated.  All this is a good thing and and is a means to achieving the humor of despair I have described above.  There is also this sense of fun and experimentation in everything.  It is whimsical and has a child-like delight.  Narrative is not the be all and end all, it is the hangar on which we drape our coat.  So a lot of our sensibility in creating theatre transported over to The Death of Alice Blue.  This may seem natural, but it was never a conscious thought.

One lady made a comparison to another director which would happen again.  She cited Terry Gilliam and in particular Brazil.  This surprised me as while I have seen some of his films I hadn't thought of him for a long time.  From what I remember this makes sense and is a nice compliment.  Clearly I've got to check him out again.  

She also made mention of the feral animals in the movie.  This took me back a bit, but it is true that they are there, and are there to illustrate Alice's growing powers.  It was interesting she picked this out as one of our more obvious scenes involving feral animals, wild dogs, we had not been able to get.  I was pleased this story line was evident, and that in being evident it harkened to what a vampire is about.  There were other quite erudite questions, some about music and art direction, but these seem to have stuck out for me.

So feeling quite elated, with our heads in the clouds, we and our posse went off to celebrate at a discotheque high in the sky (the name of which I forget).

Our second screening went equally well.  As it was a Sunday matinee I noticed quite a lot of white haired heads in the audience.  I thought they might be put off, but this was not the case.  One kind lady smiled at me at the end and said since she had sat down her headache had gone and it had not returned.

Afterwards we did an interview with the vampire centric web show Twilight Vision.  You should be able to see it on the net soon.

Ah, New York, New York, you didn't disappoint.

The Building and The Blue Thing - Making The Death of Alice Blue

With blueprint in hand, it was now necessary that we begin the process of building this movie.  I say we as Alex Appel, producer and title character, was the other main instigator in the creation of The Death of Alice Blue.  Fortunately we had some collaborators ready to come on board.  These included Steve Thorne, Cinematographer,  Anthony Morassutti, Production Designer and Mike Stewart, Editor.  Together we had created several shorter format works which had gone on to win awards, screen at festivals and fill us with some sense of confidence.  These works were Elevator, a P.S.A., Everything Kills Me and I'm In, two independently made music videos, and a short called Good Stuff.  Through our working together we had developed a visual style and a sensibility.  We had also learned how to communicate effectively, in fact we had almost developed a whole new language.  We were lucky to find our line producer in Hartley Gorenstein, who had worked on I'm In.

We budgeted the movie at $300,000 Canadian.  A large sum for your average person, and we held no pretension that a government or other funding body was going to step forward.  Fortunately I had done well doing voice overs for commercials, and with savings from that, and a huge amount of credit cards, we had our first good chunk of change to go towards the movie.  Also fortunately several private investors came on board.  As is often the case with indie films, you think "if I can just get it into the can, I'll worry about post later".

Our location was key to making The Death of Alice Blue.  We had stumbled upon it during the making of I'm In, and it turned out the people in charge of this place were looking to get into the locations business.  They offered us a very good deal.  It was a beautiful old building at 100 Adelaide St. W.  in Toronto.  It didn't have too many tenants.  This may have been due to the fact that it was old: the elevators were slow and the decor was out of date.  It was perfect for our needs.  Furthermore we could occupy 4 floors.  This would save us money and time in not having to travel to various locations.  Each floor was dressed as a different location.  As an incredible bonus the building had an eerie and crypt-like basement, a location specified in the script, but one which would have proved hard to come by.  Within the basement was the oddest machine.  It looked like something out of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory.  I was told it was a "mercury refractor" from 1929 and it was meant to generate electricity.   Amazingly it was still operational, it powered one of the slow moving elevators.  The mercury refractor was a glass octopus contraption that held a blue jelly which would glow in bursts.  As soon as I saw this thing I knew we had to incorporate it, and we did.

We were not always lucky in finding ways to fulfill the script's demands.  As Alice's preternatural powers grow she unconsciously gains control over animals.  The script had it that after leaving a Goth club she is chased by vampires and local dogs come to her rescue.  This was quite a requirement for our tiny budget and timeline.  We found someone who had three dogs and asked the person to come to set with the dogs.  The dogs were never used, but the person was good spirited about it.  We covered Alice's control over animals using smaller and sometimes stuffed animals.  This is a reference to Dracula's control over feral beasts.

The Script and the First Alice Blue

The script took six months.  This, I have been told, is the least amount of time it takes to write a script, however I had been concocting the idea for sometime in my mind.  Like Alice Blue I had been a junior copywriter at an ad agency, I thought the advertising world might be something the average person would find interesting.  As for vampires, I don't believe anything need be said.  Writing a narrative feature length movie script was something new to me.  Previously I had written experimental, anti-narrative plays.   In the end it was interesting to see how my sensibility, affected as it was by theatre, came through in the movie.  The combination of theatre with cinema and the irreverent sense of the experimental are to me some of the best aspects of The Death of Alice Blue, which I never saw until it began screening for live audiences.  

I found it curious when I came across an old review for a play I had written.  I thought the reviewer's sentiment might equally be applied to The Death of Alice Blue.  The play was called (misspelling intended) Lanquisht and Pale and featured a young woman named Alice Blue (I had completely forgotten I had used the name before).  The reviewer, from Toronto's Eye Weekly summed up her thoughts with: "though stuffier folks might be put off by Bench's seductively silly artistic sensibility".

For further info on Toothin Theatre and our exploits, check out park-bench.info.