Smells Like Auteur Spirit

New York, Los Angeles, Austin…Seattle
by Adrian MacDonald

Seattle, 2007.

James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments, an independent documentary feature many thought would be impossible to sell in theatres, takes an Oscar nomination, thanks to Longley’s gorgeous cinematography and a shrewd marketing effort by producer John Sinno. The honor is the 12th the film has received since its premiere at Sundance in 2006.

Director Rob Devor and writer Charles Mudede show their second feature, Zoo, shot in striking blue tones with reenactments that blur the line between documentary and fiction, becoming the most-buzzed documentary at Sundance. The film, delving into the notorious 2005 incident in which a man in Enumclaw died of colon injuries after having sex with a horse, goes on to festivals around the world, gets reviewed in the New York Times, and is selected at Cannes.

The two films are the latest coups for a thriving independent filmmaking community in Seattle that has been picking up momentum for the last decade.

“Seattle is using film to discuss itself,” says Mudede, who has lived in the city since the mid-90s and remembers when the only serious independent filmmaker in town was Gregg Lachow, founder of the Seattle-based production company The Film Company, which has nurtured several Seattle artists. Lachow’s own narrative drama Money Buys Happiness won national acclaim in 1999.

Mudede says he sees Seattle in the wake of the dot-com crash exhibiting a new confidence about itself, in opposition to the sense of doom the city experienced during the recession of the 1970s that followed major Boeing layoffs.

“There’s all sorts of self-inquigry and self-realization,” he says. “Everyone is involved in developing a language for the city and the region…creating new visual codes, new visual meanings.”

Mudede’s 2005 crime drama Police Beat, also made with director Rob Devor and cinematographer Sean Kirby, established the palette of blues, greens, and grays that distinguishes Zoo and forms perhaps the most distinctive stylization of the Pacific Northwest landscape in film to date. Like Zoo, Police Beat was also a hit at Sundance, garnering a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize.

“When film buffs ask ‘What does a Seattle movie look like,’ Police Beat serves as the perfect answer,” wrote local producer Warren Etheridge in his well-known film blog The Warren Report, where the title of this piece originated.

Mudede says that, like many, he is curious to see how Cthulu-an independent horror movie by the local team of director Dan Gildark and writer Grant Cogswell-will depict the landscape from its shooting location in Astoria, Oregon. The film is expected to be released this year and, like Zoo and Police Beat, features the cinematography of Sean Kirby.

“Look at all the films from the 50s and 60s, where Paris was a character in them,” Mudede says. “When you shoot in Paris, you shoot against the gathered visual information about the city. You shoot with that in mind. Just as, how could you shoot New York without thinking about Taxi Driver? But in Seattle, shooting is a completely new thing. It’s open.”

While conversations continue about whether it is possible yet to identify a “Northwest aesthetic,” some see the beginnings of an artistic movement in Seattle unified by a focus on tragic/comic themes, a dedication to the art of film over commercial gain, and rich, absorbing, atmospheric imagery. Zoo and Iraq in Fragments, while their subjects could not be more different, are both documentaries with an unusually artful, cinematic approach. They also share a certain level of marketing expertise on the part of their creators.

“The cinematography of Iraq in Fragments was really the most brilliant aspect,” says producer John Sinno. “[Director James Longley] has a great eye for framing, and we had brilliant editors helping.” All of the film’s editing was done at 911 Media Arts Center.

But unlike Zoo, Iraq in Fragments failed to win a distribution contract, even after multiple awards at Sundance. Sinno attributes that to the film being a “foreign language documentary about a depressing subject,” and he ended up distributing it himself through his independent Seattle-based company, Typecast Films/Arab Film Distribution.

Sinno, who holds a Master’s degree in communications, attributes his success to simple business sense. “You have to think about, how do you present the film in the best possible light? You have to understand your audience,” he says. “With Iraq in Fragments, we highlighted it as a ‘work of art.’ As something you’re not going to get on CNN.”

The strategy worked. A year later, after a spectacular run in theatres and a nod at the Oscars, the film is set for wide distribution on DVD with extra features and an exclusive early release through Netflix.

“Iraq in Fragments is easily the most amazing thing we’ve seen happen in Seattle,” says Etheridge, also a producer. “If I didn’t know [Sinno] and you told me this atypical documentary about Iraq, without studio support, was getting out there in theatres…I’d want to know who this guy was.”

“The work here, the aesthetic, is for works of art,” says Adam Sekuler, a program director at Northwest Film Forum. “You have creative freedom and liberty in a town like this. You’re probably not making millions of dollars here. You hope you break even. But there’s a creative movement going on here. If you want to make Hollywood films there’s a place to do that, and it’s called Hollywood.”

Still, Etheridge says the arts scene here is often hampered by the value many of its auteurs place on a lack of formal training, a do-it-yourself ethic that eschews mainstream support, and-most damningly for filmmakers-a disdain for self-promotion. The sleepy, dreamy Northwest, with its pervasive modesty and rugged individualism, where an artist’s greatest sin is “selling out,” is a stark turnaround to the networking frenzies of New York, Los Angeles, or even San Francisco.

“In New York, it was like someone could crap on a piece of paper and have a press event for it,” says Etheridge, who came to Seattle from New York 7 years ago. “I remember coming to Seattle, I met this guy who had his script, unfinished, written in pencil, carrying around the film prints in the trunk of his car!”

Some see that sleepiness as exactly the reason why the area makes a great incubator for film. “Washington State is tucked up in the corner of the country away from the big big city hype and glamour of New York or San Francisco,” says Suzy Kellett, Managing Director of the Washington State Film Office. “It has a solid maverick, entrepreneurial image that matches our local film community. Our grey, rainy days create a casual, coffee, levi-driven community where writing, talking, exchanging ideas, and experimentation thrive.”

Linas Phillips, a nomadic filmmaker from Boston who graduated from New York University in experimental theatre, may embody the independent do-it-yourself Northwest ethic as well as anyone.

“It’s a good place to get stuff done,” he says. “It’s a combination of landscape and energy. The city has a lot to offer, but it’s not like NY, where you’re so overwhelmed by the social aspect you can’t focus.”

Phillips’ 2006 documentary Walking to Werner, about his journey walking from Seattle to Los Angeles to visit Werner Herzog, was a prize winner at the Seattle International Film Festival and at Massachusetts festivals in Northampton and Newburyport. He is now in production on his second documentary feature, Great Speeches From A Dying World, which features homeless people around Seattle reciting famous speeches from history.

“People in Seattle are just eager to help,” Phillips says. “It’s almost strange. It’s almost unbelievable. People are hungry to work on things that are interesting. You’ll just have a vague idea, and they’ll say, ‘yeah, I’d love to shoot that.’”

Cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke helped Phillips on his first film. In that same year, Kasulke also worked on local director Lynn Shelton’s acclaimed drama We Go Way Back and cult Canadian director Guy Maddin’s surrealistic Brand Upon the Brain!, shot in Seattle with Gregg Lachow as a producer.

Phillips also points out that for low-budget filmmakers, the Pacific Northwest landscape provides a ready-made backdrop for a film. “I focused on homeless people, and there’s a lot of them in Seattle, because it’s a mild climate,” he says. “It’s an exotic landscape to me, being from the East Coast. You’ve got mountains to the east and to the west. It evokes something different from reality. It’s magical.”

Mudede, a film critic and self-proclaimed urban aesthete who considers himself far from a rugged do-it-yourselfer, agrees. “The surroundings here, the quality of the light-it’s evidently cinematic. Point the camera at the world you are standing in. A lot of places don’t have that quality, that richness, that dreaminess, that atmosphere that you find in Seattle.”

Many around Seattle are looking for a narrative film from the area to do as well as documentaries like Iraq in Fragments, Zoo, and 2005’s The Heart of the Game, which followed the Garfield High School girls’ basketball team and went on to win a distribution deal from Miramax. Many say the documentary form lends itself well to the low-budget, do-it-yourself filmmaker, because a filmmaker can just start shooting with no money, and work out the film’s form in the editing stage.

“Narratives just have a different cachet, of creation,” says Phillips. “You get more excitement with narratives. It’s desperate that we get something really good, it’s crucial, to give energy back to all the filmmakers and all the crew.” For the most part, crews on independent films made in Seattle donate their time for little or no money.

Shadowcatcher Entertainment, a national production company based in Seattle that produced writer Sherman Alexie’s 1998 hit feature Smoke Signals, produced Seattle filmmaker John Jeffcoat’s 2006 comedy Outsourced following the adventures of a Seattle man who must move to India when his job gets outsourced. The film, starring Josh Hamilton and Bollywood actress Ayesha Dharker, was shot mostly in India, and is one of the highest budget features from the Seattle scene to date. Reportedly, Shadowcatcher has yet to sign a distribution deal.

One much-talked-about narrative feature in pre-production is by David Russo, a local director of short films. Warren Etheridge calls Russo a “needle-in-the-haystack genius.” His first full length, currently going by the working title The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, is being produced by Northwest Film Forum with backing from WashingtonFilmWorks.

John Sinno, who says he has distributed probably 150 documentaries in his 15 years as a distributor, says he is looking to make a change toward narrative features as well. This summer he is producing a zombie film with subversive political elements. “We want to reach more people,” he says.

The only thing the Seattle scene lacks to make some of its independent projects take off, according to Etheridge, is more producers like Sinno, Lachow, or Zoo’s Peggy Case and Alexis Ferris to nurture the prodigious creative talent of the area. He says too often, low-budget filmmakers attempt to do everything themselves, without the training, financing, or understanding of the industry to see the project through.

“Filmmakers should take a pause before they start, slow down, take classes,” Etheridge says. “The Seattle area has over 23,000 millionaires, there’s definitely money in town. But a lot of times do-it-yourself filmmakers burn investors because they don’t truly know what they’re doing.”

“Not too many filmmakers here know what a producer does,” agrees Andy Spletzer, a script supervisor for local films and a film critic for Film.com. “I think that comes out of DIY [do-it-yourself]. A lot of them think of a producer as a person who will give them money, or raise money for them.”

“It’s both more creative and more administrative than that,” he adds. “A producer helps make crucial, important decisions, about casting, crew, things that will shape the movie. They can make the movie more watchable, more enjoyable-maybe more marketable if that is the goal.”

John Sinno, who teaches at 911 Media Arts Center, says communicating a film’s message to people is one of a producer’s most important tasks. “You have to think of all the possible ways to make people want to watch it,” Sinno. “The image you choose for the poster and the description can be crucial. Sometimes the people close to the film are the worst to do that.”

He also points out that another key for a producer is to be able to understand and manage the industry’s rapidly changing technology, from the new Red Camera to internet distribution.

“All the technologies add certain advantages and contain certain pitfalls,” he says. “For example, the Red Camera. It is capable of doing 35mm on a very low budget. But if the hard drive fails, you lose everything.”

Currently, independent filmmakers in Seattle are nurtured primarily by non-profits like 911 Media Arts Center, Northwest Film Forum, Seattle International Film Festival, and WashingtonFilmWorks. The two big-league production companies in town, Shadowcatcher Entertainment and Vulcan Productions, are said to have a national focus, and don’t necessarily favor local talent.

“Seattle is a hotbed of directors right now,” says Jennifer Roth, a line producer who works on films around the country. “There is energy and talent, and there’s no reason we can’t have a great homegrown industry. But sometimes a lot of people have an unrealistic idea of how big-business and cutthroat the industry is.”

Roth sits on the board of WashingtonFilmWorks, a non-profit set up to help manage the state’s tax incentive for filmmakers passed in 2006. “We get all kinds of people with applications, but so many of them have no track record, and no financing,” she says.

“Think about it,” she adds. “For a half-million dollar movie, you need several people making $100,000 investments. They’re going to want to see a track record.”

Perhaps Seattle’s greatest strength as a filmmaking community is that it provides places to develop that track record. Phillips urges filmmakers not to get discouraged. “I think it’s important not to wait until you have money to start shooting,” he says. “Werner Herzog said, ‘Money doesn’t make films, people do.’ Or he would say, ‘these do,’ and hold up his hands.”

Adam Sekuler

Andy Spletzer

John Sinno

Warren Etheridge

Linas Phillips

Charles Mudede

Suzy Kellett

Jennifer Roth

SEATTLE SCENEMAKERS

James Longley
Rob Devor
Lynn Shelton
Linas Phillips
Calvin Reeder
Tyson Theroux
Matt Daniels
Sara Jane Lapp
John Jeffcoat
Eric Ostrowski
Galen Hanson
Dayna Hanson
Salise Hughes
David Russo
Mark O’Connell
Doug Horn
Rick Stevenson
Ward Serrill

Adam Sekuler, program director at Northwest Film Forum, helped us put together this list of Seattle directors who are picking up recognition beyond the confines of our mist-drenched neck of the woods. “That’s a hell of a lot of directors for a city this size,” says Sekuler, who moved to Seattle a year ago after several years as a festival curator in Minneapolis.