Liars and Lunatics :: Film Blog

New York City seems to be revising their plans a bit regarding the whole film permits thing. After all, they are trying to bring people to the City to film, right? Isn’t that what their ”Made in NY” incentives are all about?

…Yep! To try to keep filmmakers here in New York, and away from the West Coast or the Frozen North!

When we lived in Toronto (we were doing theatre back then), there always seemed to be movies in production…just in our neighborhood alone! You could always tell when they tried to make the setting look like New York City. They’d put up a blue mailbox (in Canada, mailboxes are… red) and add graffiti all over the place. This was supposed to make you think the setting was New York. (But sometimes, if you look closely at these films, you might catch a glimpse of the CN Tower in the background!) 

Last summer, we shot our feature film Liars and Lunatics in New York City. Queens, actually. Interestingly enough, there seem to be very few films shot in Queens. Did an internet search and here’s the list of movies…

Coming to America (1988), starring Eddie Murphy and Arscenio Hall (Hey, “Queens” is part of the whole premise. They better have shot some footage in Queens).

Spider-Man (2002) & Spider-Man 2 (2004), starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst (They shot some footage in Forest Hills)

Raising Helen (2004), starring Kate Hudson (Shot in Forest Hills, Woodside, and Sunnyside)

And that’s it… The results of our search on the subject.

Hey… so why don’t more movies shoot in Queens? Well, our biggest problem with shooting Liars and Lunatics in Queens came from a place called LaGuardia Airport. The faint drone of the aircrafts coming in for a landing, or taking off, became a familiar sound on our set. We’d have to pause more than a dozen times an hour for sound purposes alone.

Maybe that’s the answer to the question above. Queens just has too many airports–LaGuardia at the north end and JFK at the south end. But Queens is a big borough. Forest Hills seems to be kind of popular. Maybe they have less air disturbance in Forest Hills…

Or, maybe if we all went back to the silent movie era, we’d all be fine!

Ahhh…. Yet another two-part blog… (Read Part One)

Okay, so when we were drafting the screenplay for our feature film Liars and Lunatics, we decided to turn to the people who do courtroom drama best. Alas, yes, we speak of Hollywood…

They’ve been doing it for years. Courtroom dramas, that is.

Sooooo, why not get a few ideas to help us along with our own film. Here’s a list of some the films that gave us inspiration for our courtroom scenes:

• To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
• A Few Good Men (1992)
• The Hurricane (1999)
• Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
• Twelve Angry Men (1957)

Luckily for us, one thing we had going was the fact that our courtroom was an imaginary one.

We didn’t have to follow all the conventions if we didn’t want to. Like in the scene where we have two witnesses (Avie and Davie Malvideo) on the stand at the same time. Same with props. If continuity was a little off, we had the luxury to say, “Hey, guys, the whole thing is all in James’ head. Remember, it’s an imaginary courtroom!”

In other words, we could have done whatever we wanted. Hmmm. Maybe we missed some golden opportunities here. We could have had everyone floating around like in Mary Poppins… Or why couldn’t we have had them all get sucked into a wormhole and end up on the Starship Enterprise… Or…

Oh, yeah. Budget. That one word says it all…

{{ photo :: Davie and Avie (played by Hudson Chambers and Amanda Short) manage to be on the witness stand together in our imaginary courtroom. Notice the mysterious boom operator in the background. }}

Have you ever watched a movie and wondered how long it took to get the scene right?

The big Hollywood films seem to have all the time and money in the world (compared to us lowly independent filmmakers). Which means, they can spend a whole day on one short scene…

Here are some examples of Hollywood flicks and some of their excessive use of takes:

• In the movie Jezebel (1938, starring Bette Davis and Henry Fonda) there is a scene early on when southern belle Julie (Davis) uses her riding crop to hitch up her skirt. The footage that was used came finally on the 45th take!
• Apparently the production manager of The Parallax View (1974, starring Warren Beatty) kept the slate used in the film for display in his office; it was marked “Take 98 – Warren stirs soup.”

Wow! How come we never had the luxury for doing 98 takes of someone stirring his soup?! Oh, yeah. We had only 12 days to shoot principal photography!

As we recall, on our film shoot for Liars and Lunatics, we managed an average of two to four takes. Sometimes less, sometimes a few more. Looking back at our continuity reports, it seems that we never went over nine takes for a single camera angle. (Turns out that the nine takes was for a two-shot of James and Paige in the empty courtroom in Scene 97… See above photo).

{{ photo :: Scene 96. James and Paige (Joseph Halsey and Maya Serhan) talk in the empty courtroom. }}