Wedding Crashers Movie Making

I suppose you could call it the cycle of life. A proposition at a funeral turned into my earning business for a wedding. I contracted with a proud father to produce a movie short about his engaged to be married daughter. While the movie would be a priceless wedding gift, it would also be showcased for invited guests at the silver spoon reception.

The truck that pulled up in my driveway this past June speaks to the scale of this project that started from scratch. The father unloaded tote containers, cardboard boxes and shopping bags from his truck. The thought about his trust turning over precious memories overwhelmed my sense of responsibility. My library quickly filled with someone else’s possessions. Dismantled pictures literally taken from mantels, collages lowered from walls, thousands of loose and binded photographs, scrapbooks boasting report cards, newspaper clippings, artwork, writing samples…now all lined up next to my scanner for me to individually scan.

The shoeboxes of videotapes seemed the logical starting point. I had to become intimately familiar with the contents of each home movie on VHS tape. I had to overcome the awkward feeling that I was invading privacy. While our brains register a history stamp with people we know, watching a girl grow up before me who I never met played tricks on my mind. After remote viewing twenty-five years of a stranger's life, the VHS tapes had to be converted to DVD then uploaded to movie making software on my computer…where the real work began.

Other than interviewing the father in depth, the movie was a Rosetta Stone. The daughter did supply a preferred song list for the soundtrack but this project would be done without meeting the bride or the groom. I sat in a dark room taking notes on a clipboard trying to get a game plan of how to cover the life of a bride not at the exclusion of the groom. The challenge, the adventure, laid before me…Could my editing skills stream pictures and video together of lives who I had not met? Could I mold and tell a compelling visual story from this media?

I now know the answer to those questions but it took me four months of production work at my desktop computer to make a short called Big Days. At an upcoming wedding reception at The Mansions in Voorhees, NJ, my thirty-minute movie will premier on a big screen television. In retrospect, it was both a labor of love and a business deal. If I were ever to become a wedding crasher, this would be the event. I would bring plenty of tissues and business cards. I still get emotional when I watch it. The first movie I sold outright is a real tearjerker.

Star Trek : Out of this World

About a year after I became a fringe actor, I realized that watching movies would be forever altered. Understandably, my perspective now includes basic knowledge about the intricacies of how a movie is made and how scenes are staged and filmed. I will be the first one to admit that some of the magic has personally disappeared from movie watching. However, my knowledge base of breaking down film far exceeds any FX glitz lost due to my time spent on a set as an actor.

With that being said, this movie critic just got around to watching the 2009 movie Star Trek. I am not your phaser wielding traditional die hard Trekkie per say. My only allegiance goes to the original Star Trek characters because I enjoyed watching the TV show as a kid growing up. From there, my interest in the adulterated spin-off series fell off the earth so to speak.

I recently watched the Star Trek movie with jaw agape over its sublime excellence. The movie was flawless in terms of casting, acting, script writing, sound, musical score and post production editing. There was not one scene or dialogue line written off to exposition. Its sound was dynamic and moving. The transition editing was seamless. Every element of this movie fell into place for me like kismet symmetry.

I shudder thinking about how scripted this movie could have been casting younger versions of the USS Enterprise icons but it was delivered with such creative panache and fine acting that I am at warp drive now trying to conjure just superlatives. It was a visually stunning Roddenberry franchise on stellar parade. Spock it out if you get a chance.

Greatest Film Moments

I painstakingly compiled a delightful dozen favorite film moments. They appear in no particular order and the views expressed are only the opinions of one movie buff. Enjoy.

1)The park bench sharing scene in Good Will Hunting. It features the cat and mouse interplay between Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) and Will Hunting (Matt Damon). The human psyche of couch therapy between two genuises plays out masterfully against the backdrop of nature.

2)The tumultuous holiday dinner table scene in the Oscar nominated movie The Color Purple. Albert (Danny Glover), Celie (Whoopi Goldberg), and Sofia (Oprah Winfrey) give stunning performances in a holiday to remember. The knife in the turkey centerpiece cannot begin to cut the tension in this crowded room that is ripe with character development. This single scene is a solemn prayer for the soul.

3) In the rocking belly of the boat’s cabin in Jaws, Quint (Robert Shaw) describes surviving a man-eating shark frenzy after a shipwreck. If they never showed the terrorizing great white shark once in this landmark movie, people might have avoided the ocean just based on Quint’s guttural storytelling to Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Police Chief Brody (Roy Scheider).

4) The flash forward closing scene through the mesmerizing eyes of Claire (Lauren Ambrose) in the series finale of HBO’s Six Feet Under. It offers both haunting retrospection and closure to the outstanding cast in this Emmy award winning HBO series. It reminds us that life is indeed short then before you know it…six feet under.

5)Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) baiting Col. Nathan R. Jessup (Jack Nicholson) on the stand in the riveting courtroom testimony in A Few Good Men. The scene defines the gray area of taking orders in the military as a flippant Navy lawyer, trying to live in his father’s polished shoes, conquers the blatant arrogance of a colonel just by trying. Some people can’t handle the truth, Kaffee provokes it thus earning his pinstripes as an actor set on cruise control.

6)Tom (David Byron) confronting domineering father-in-law Phil Carter (James Sikking)on the staircase of his suburban home in the Emmy award winning Doing Time on Maple Drive. The patriarch is blindsidingly challenged for the first time in his life. That staircase might as well have been an elevator to hell because all of the seedy family secrets unravel like a tightly bound twine of morality.

7)A guilt-ridden Conrad Jarrett (Timothy Hutton) talking to his disconnected self-absorbed mother (Mary Tyler Moore) in the idyllic backyard in the movie Ordinary People. When you have to bark like a dog to get your mother’s undivided attention, something is amiss, even with ordinary people.

8)Gale Sayers (Billy Dee Williams) delivering emotional acceptance speech in Brian’s Song, a true story. In a self-less act, Sayers dedicates an NFL achievement award to his cancer stricken Chicago Bears teammate Brian Piccolo (James Caan). This tearjerker of a scene makes me reach for a snot rag every time.

9)The riveting dueling banjo scene in Deliverance between Drew (Ronny Cox) and a demented inbreed from the South. Genius is cinematically captured by the backwoods ignorance of handicap.

10)Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore(Robert Duvall) revelry among the brutality in the beach scene of the epic war movie, Apocalypse Now. With unflinching candor, bare-chested Kilgore delivers, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” after fighter planes dump fire bombs on the enemy. Duvall is as incredible as he is believable in this scene.

11) Carr (Clifton James) giving new inmates rules of the prison in Cool Hand Luke. Luke (Paul Newman) looks on dispassionately, the signature attitude for this rebel. It epitomizes the tagline of the film, "What we got here is a failure to communicate" as one man fights his tortured soul within the injustices of the penal system.

12) Elias (Willem Dafoe) staggering out of the Vietnamese jungle after being intentionally shot by nemises Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) and left for dead with the enemy in Platoon. Friendly fire never went so bad. Powerful scene encapsulates not only the ugliness of war but the duality of man. It is viewed aerially by the enduring conscience of Private Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) from the last helicopter to take to the sky in the movie’s pivotal final scene. Elias’ outstretched arms in the formation of a crucifixion underscores the battle of good verses evil in humankind.