9/08/2011 The Big Trade

Gallivanting from coast-to-coast pushing people to produce my work, little did I realize that ten years later I would trade positions and become the person whose task it was to host writers while I turned their scripts into movies.  Bashing out scripts and screenplays I had been a professional freeloader since the late 70s, and now with the first filmmaking festival revving up in 2000, I found myself as a producer providing for not one movie, but ten.  It wasn’t, to put it mildly, an easy transition.

That’s not to say it was an abrupt transition.  I trained for the filmmaking decathlon by producing a couple of one-act play festivals at the Vortex Theater.  I held a “Quickies” competition and chose around eight short plays that would be performed in one evening.  Each play was given a different director, but the show had one stage manager coordinating rehearsals and the flow of the evening.  It was pretty chaotic putting the “Quickies” together, but by opening night everything gelled and for the two years I held the contest in ’98 and ’99, it was fairly successful. 

My experience with “Quickies” introduced me to the vagaries of working with eight different writers.  Some were local; some were from out-of-state.  Those from outside New Mexico that lived in production centers like New York, or L.A. tended to inflate their significance, but I had lived in both places and understood that such self-puffery was less to impress me and more to reassure them that hadn’t made a mistake in choosing their present zip code. 

Near or far, nervous or nonchalant, all of the writers at some point had demands.  Those for whom it was a premiere effort tended to want heavy involvement with casting and rehearsals but usually deferred to the director, and by opening night all they were worried about were comp tickets.  Those who had already been produced and were local were harder on their directors and often sought my intercession.  The out-of-state writers who had a resume weren’t a problem until the show opened, then they would phone me and ask why a reviewer had given them a bad notice, or why their play hadn’t been voted audience favorite; if their play had won an award, they wanted the check immediately. 

My favorite malcontent was a fellow who had sent in a play from New York.  It was set in the 1940s dwelling on a young woman having a picnic with her soldier husband who is really dead and transforms into different men.  I was one of the judges who gave the piece a low score, but the other readers seemed to have found something in it they liked, so it was picked to be part of the “Quickies” evening.  I knew I was going to be dealing with a long-distance pest when, after being informed his play had been accepted, he sent a letter on personal stationary (previously produced plays embossed in the margin) with notes for the director. 

The director who had been selected for the picnic-with-my-husband-the-ghost piece was a grad student from UNM, Matt Montano.  Bulky, with round soft features and long ebony dark hair hanging down past his shoulders, Matt had his own writing ambitions.  He would sweep into the Vortex dressed in loose, dark mandarin clothing and tell us how, after this production, he was on his way to New York.  From my perspective, he looked disturbing similar to Yoko Ono.  Perhaps, I thought, when he got there her bodyguards would hire him as a decoy.

Matt had fought to be chosen to direct lunch-with-dolly-and-the-dead-man, but halfway through rehearsals he was stymied when members of the cast pointed out that it was obvious from the get go that the soldier was a ghost and his wife came off not Blanch Dubois nuts where we’re wondering whether if she’s telling the truth, but Nora Desmond nuts where it’s obvious she stark raving bananas.  Taking a suggestion from the male lead, Matt changed the setting of the picnic to the psycho ward of a mental hospital where one of the attendants acts out the role of the dead soldier as a therapeutic exercise. 

In my estimation the change of setting it didn’t make the play any better or worse, but it saved on the expense of getting the correct WW II wardrobe, so I went with it.  The piece didn’t win first prize as best play of the evening, and it didn’t garner any audience awards, but when the Albuquerque Journal printed the review it was mentioned that the play was set in a mental institution.  This got back to the writer in New York and he went berserk.