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How To Lose $1.2 Million And Shoot Your Feature Anyway
Seattle talent got a break when Tim Hines fired Crispin Glover and his entire Hollywood cast before production of House of the Rising.
In writer/director Tim Hines's latest film, House of the Rising, the running time of one hundred minutes means just that-one hundred minutes of life at a retro-seventies party over the course of one night. Shot in one continuous take with a SteadiCam, the "real-time" coverage of the partygoers took cast and crew over 4 floors of a Seattle house, creating unique obstacles, shooting challenges and odd rehearsal scheduling.
Not a story for Generation X, but rather more an American Graffiti for the late 70s and '80s, House of The Rising shares the consequences of encountering all your past relationships in one single night. "The point of the continuous take," explained Hines, "was to show everyone trapped at this party. In the 70s and the 80s, I was a watcher on the edge of the punk rock crowd ... then I turned around, it's 10 years later and all my old friends are dead of AIDS or drugs. I had this feeling of nostalgia; I began to understand what drove Lucas into American Graffiti. I started to wonder, 'what if I ran into so & so?' I created an ego thin main character, and examined three concepts: What people need in their lives to make a change; the extremes they go to to get accepted; and how far they allow bad relationships to go in their lives because of the small good things those relationships offer. Placing the film during one night of action helped cut down the [original 300 page] script to one hundred minutes of real time."
Frustrated with the politics involved with his previous five feature films, Hines was looking to present his own voice, to speak from his own center. "Writing isn't something I have a choice about," Hines tried to explained from his Seattle production office. "If I don't write, I start to evaporate off this earth. It's the only way I'm held here, I need to interpret what I see and what I feel. I always see a sense of injustice in how people lie to themselves ... what's of interest is how people lie to themselves to trick themselves through life."
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| Hines: Regrouped when Hollywood pulled the plug. |
Originally established as a $1.2 million dollar feature starring Crispin Glover and a cast of Hollywood talent, House of the Rising lost its five week shooting schedule and comfortable budget when Glover decided to rework the script into his own project. Since he seemed nervous about the SteadiCam choice in filming, both Harry Dean Stanton and Max Perlick (who had also been cast) worked hard to keep Glover calm, unfortunately to no avail. Glover's signed contract gave him $75,000 for 10 days worth of work (he was originally offered $40,000), but when he distributed his own script revisions to the other cast members and even sent them by fax to Hines, he effectively voided the agreement. The last straw came when Glover issued the ultimatum that he was not going to do this film unless he directed it, and Hines was forced to fire Glover as well as cut loose the original cast.
Faced with having spent $117,000.00 in pre-production costs, and the reality of no money coming into the project, Hines quickly re-grouped with a 14 day shooting script and a $140,000 budget. The money bought film stock, processing and food, while the cast and crew both agreed to work on deferred payment. Hines went back to his desire to cast Seattle actors and auditioned every stage actor he could find: a concept originally turned down by Glover, who refused every Seattle actor he saw during auditions for not being good enough. Still Hines was convinced that talented stage actors would be able to hit all the marks he was asking them to during the tight shooting schedule.
"In a continuous take there is no fourth wall. Every cable, every light has to be disguised. The camera is making 360 degree turns while the crew is ducking on their hands and knees, and falling flat on their bellies to get out of the way," recalls Hines. "Brad (Nelson, the SteadiCam operator) had 40-50 marks per reel that he had to hit, the focus puller had 10-20 and each actor had 16-20. The extras had one mark they had to stay on; they could dance or talk on it, but they couldn't move from it."
At first, everyone was nervous about the continuous take idea; yet as rehearsals began to take shape and the concept was ironed out, attitudes started to change. "Even with masked edits, the continuous take has to flow for 10 minutes because the film reel changes every ten minutes anyway," explained Hines. "So a typical shooting day started with eight or nine hours of pure rehearsal; actors developed their characters within the parameters of the camera location. At the dinner break, the principals would eat first and then go to make-up while the crew ate. We'd then run through the scene, shoot for 10 minutes and we'd be done. Ninety percent of the scenes were done in one take."
House of the Rising has had several test screenings, including some under different titles at the request of various distributors who wanted to play up different elements of the film, which Hines describes as, "wild but sophisticated in its center." The distributors must have seen something else as they were requesting titles like "Pepper & Candy's Last Wild Party" and "The Pleasure Junkie." The House of the Rising title refers to a t-shirt worn by the main character: the shirt originally said, "House of the Rising Sun," but after his girlfriend cut it off one hot day, "House of the Rising" was "what I was left with." The title House of the Rising represents "people's attempts to hold unrealistic visions together, trying to keep their life as much in fantasy as possible until reality comes crashing in," defined Hines.
House of the Rising is now in post production
and Tim Hines continues to negotiate with interested distributors.
Hines has expressed concern that the continuous take is slow or
boring at, several moments in the film: "In the final edit,
we may have to throw out the gimmick," he concludes, "to
save the pacing of the film."
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- Comment by watch hindi movies online free on 12/30/10 at 7:55 pm
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This story was published in the September 1994 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
How To Lose $1.2 Million And Shoot Your Feature Anyway / Seattle talent got a break when Tim Hines fired Crispin Glover and his entire Hollywood cast before production of House of the Rising.
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