Paradise Falls

Director discovers that doing well at festivals is no guarantee

by Nick Searcy | Published April 3, 1999

In January of 1993, I was surprised to be back in my hometown of Sylva, North Carolina, where I'd been flown by Warner Bros. to act in a small role in The Fugitive.The scene I was involved in was the famous train wreck scene, for which they used the Great Smoky Mountain Railway a tourist train that operates during the vacation seasons. While I was there, my friend and fellow actor Sean Bridges showed me a script that he had written called Paradise Falls. It was written to be shot in our hometown, and was about two boys in 1934 who rob the Great Smoky Mountain Railway

I told Sean I thought the script was great. The two boys were lively and distinct characters, and the plot was compelling and had masterful touches. At the time, however, Sean wanted to try and get it made through conventional avenues, and I was struggling to get my acting career going, having just moved to L.A.. It didn't even occur to us at this time to produce it ourselves.

Two years later, our respective situations had changed. Sean had been working steadily as an actor in the Southeast, and I had done fairly well in Los Angeles, having landed a regular role in the TV series American Gothic, which ironically had relocated me back to North Carolina. In March of that year, as the TV series was winding down, Sean had decided he wanted to make the movie independently, and he thought I could direct it. While I had never considered directing before the moment Sean suggested it, I was reasonably confident I could direct this script. It was set in the mountains that Sean and I loved, and it was about things and people that I knew pretty well. And, perhaps most importantly I felt like the script was so good that I wouldn't be able to screw it up too badly.

So we set out to make a movie. I knew some friends of mine who had done it, so I called them up. They sent me copies of their budgets, their prospectuses, their business plans. Reading through them, I thought I was going to puke. This kind of work was not what I thought making a movie was going to be like. We went through all the possibilities of size and scope16mm, Super 16, no-budget, low-budget-and began to realize that we needed some help. We were referred to an independent producer in South Carolina named Peter Wentworth, who had produced, among other things, Metropolitan and Other Voices, Other Rooms. He read Paradise Falls, loved it, and wanted to be involved. He took the bulk of the budgeting and planning responsibilities, leaving the most creative job of all-getting the money to Sean and me.

Sean's father is a lawyer and my father is an accountant, so they helped us form a Limited Liability Company, making us legally able to accept money. Sean and I targeted people in our hometown that we knew: a) had some disposable income, and b) were patrons of the arts. Our pitch consisted of telling them the story, assuring them that we wanted to make an accurate movie about mountain people, not the typical Hollywood viewpoint (stupid, inbred, racist, etc.), and telling them bluntly that this had to be money they could afford to lose. We also gave them an "executive summary" a five-page document which outlined our business plan and delineated the revenue flow (should there be any).

This approach was very effective. The people who invested in Paradise Falls did so because they believed in the story and supported the principles we were trying to achieve, not because they thought they were going to make a fortune. The first person we went to was a legendarily eccentric and very wealthy physician.We spent a couple of distribution success of hours with him, telling him the story, how we despised Hollywood's vision of the South, etc. He promised us a huge sum of money, approximately one-third of our budget. We were ecstatic-our pitch now included the fact that we had already raised one-third of our budget. It helped our momentum tremendously We almost reached our goal when we found out that our eccentric old benefactor had been "gotten to" by his wife and accountant, who had talked him out of investing in a risky thing like a movie. We were crushed, but at the same time, having his "promise" probably helped us get the money that we had.

We knew that we had a summer movie, that crops had to be up in the fields for our story to work, so we had to finish shooting the movie before the season changed. In other words, we had to shoot in August. Amazingly, our first day of principal photography was August 6.

There were many surprises along the way The director of photography that I'd initially approached dropped out 10 days before shooting. Luckily Wentworth recommended that we take a look at the reel of Mark Petersen, a friend of his from Atlanta. Sean and I loved his reel. We asked him to come up to Sylva and go scouting with us. We took him to some of our out-of-the-way locations, places that were fairly difficult to get to, some of them barely reachable even with only the skeleton crew I knew that Mark was our man almost immediately, but the waterfall location, where our heroes fall into the water, closed the deal. Mark waded out into the middle of the waist-deep, icecold water and said, "We can put the camera right here!" I said, "Petersen, you're the man!" I told Mark that I wanted a John Ford look to our film, with the landscape of the Smoky Mountains used like a character in the film, and our two heroes often shown small in the frame. Mark was very excited about shooting the film this way.

Wentworth assembled our crew from people that he knew in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Most of our department heads were fairly experienced in their departments, but had never been the boss before, and were willing to take less pay for the credit. We had four people in each department, and most of our grips were also actors in the film from time to time. The actors all came from the Southeast, and were people that Sean and I had worked with over the years. We worked out "summer camp" style housing for our crew, putting our 30 crew members in three houses and a trailer that we rented for two months, and housed our actors at a bed and breakfast run by the parents of a high school classmate of mine. We did our catering through a couple of local restaurants, and borrowed trucks and vans from friends and family members. All in all, this very cooperative familial atmosphere continued throughout the shoot. Everyone liked the script, felt like we were making something wonderful, and enjoyed coming to work every day.

On our first day of principal photography we shot on Tennant Mountain, near Waynesville, NC. We had a threemile trip up a washed-out logging road, and another two mile hike up a path to the top of the mountain. We also had some scenes planned to shoot on the way up the mountain, with the big scene on top ending the day. This day was crucial; this was the "Monument Valley" for our John Ford film.

We decided to do this first because it was our most difficult location (and I figured we could tell the crew that the shoot would never be any harder than this!). Even if it took three hours each way, we'd still have six hours to shoot. We only took the camera, film, a tripod, a high hat and some shiny boards. We hired a local boy of about 12 with a htde Honda four-wheeler to drive our equipment out the logging road. But even this vehicle would only go so far; the last little bit we had to walk, straight up, with the camera on the back of Eric Leftridge, our first A.C.. The day went very well, with only one casualty (a mild heart attack for our prop master, but he survived). It was a seven-page day on our first day, and while it was hard, we were blessed with good weather, and it was simple: set up the camera and shoot, reflect the sun as needed.

This taught us a lesson which I used throughout the shoot. Whenever possible I moved the indoor scenes outside, which saved a lot of lighting time, and also capitalized on our strengths (the beauty of the countryside) and minimized our weaknesses (lack of period indoor sets).

I had also envisioned a Steadicam for many sequences, including the climactic shootout. Wentworth soon convinced me that this was budgetarily impossible. But by creative use of our 100 feet of dolly track, we were able to create the effects I wanted. In retrospect, I am glad we did not have a Steadicam. I think, having just acted in a TV series where the Steadicam was used ad nauseum even for the simplest coverage, I had an inflated view of its importance.The classic John Ford style of Paradise Falls was actually enhanced by our lack of dependence on the Steadicam, and today I wear it like a badge of honor. I've been known to go into drunken tirades about how Steadicams have ruined movies.

In the barn dance sequence we used our circular dolly to shoot the clog dancing sequence, and also for a key transition, circling two young lovers kissing on the dance floor and ending the circle with them kissing on the front porch after he has taken her home, with a nice dissolve between the two shots.The barn dance sequence also contains what might be my favorite shot in the film.There was a hole in the floor of the barn, and the stables were underneath the dance floor. We were able to set up a shot where we could dolly back through the stables with a horse being led in and boom up through the floor to reveal the dance going on overhead. This gave us some great production values, and came about as a result of our walking into the barn and saying, "Hey, there's a hole in the floor, let's use it"

Many things in the film came about as a result of not being able to do what we had originally intended and having to improvise. During our one day with the Great Smoky Mountain Railway (which was all we could afford), we realized that Sean Bridges, our star, was not going to be able to leap off a bank onto the moving train, which we had envisioned in the script. So we improvised a sequence whereby he "chickens out", and chases the train down after he's unable to force himself to jump on top of it. This actually worked to our benefit; it humanized the character immeasurably.
We also had a huge fight sequence in the last reel that we wound up staging in a long shot with the fight happening offscreen in sound effects.We set up the camera in a locked-off symmetrical shot of the front porch, and had the characters move in and out of the house within the shot. We did this partially to save time, but again the decision turned into a strength for us: instead of a fight sequence that we did not have time to cover well, we have what sounds like a truly horrible beating taking place that the audience must imagine for themselves.

We shot the film in 23 days. Our longest day was 15 hours. We brought the film in under budget and on time. This past year we won awards in five festivals, including Best Feature Film under $1 Million Dollars at the Hollywood Film Festival in August.

I think we were successful because we sincerely loved and believed in our project, and we made the movie for all the right reasons. We wanted to pay homage to the place where we grew up; to show the people we grew up with as we knew them to be, not how Hollywood has depicted them. We hired our friends and colleagues, people that we respected, and trusted them to do their jobs well. I wish we had had more money, more time, and more coverage, but all in all, Paradise Falls was a difficult but wonderful experience. I am proud to be associated with it.

But our biggest mistake lay in our naivete m thinking that if we'd made a good movie, the marketing would just ...flow Hah. Be sure you spend time on marketing materials-like stills, for goodness sakes. It's been so frustrating to win festivals, get all this acclaim from audiences, and to be told repeatedly by independent film companies: "Really great movie. No Stars. Can't sell it."

What you have to realize is that if you do not have stars, you have to do the marketing campaign yourself.You have to show them how to sell your film, because they cannot or will not take the time to come up with an effective strategy themselves. If you have a "star" in your movie, it's easy for them: they can hang it on the star. One executive told us that it was easier to sell a bad movie with one star than a good one with no stars. Bear in mind that the quality of your film has practically no bearing on whether or not a distribution company will want it. Once you realize that 99 percent of the people in the film industry do not care how good a given film is, the world will make much more sense to you. They just want something they can sell, and you have to show them how to sell it. Still pictures are the key. Make sure you get them. Make the poster. Write the copy. Show them how to sell it. Or better yet, just sell out. Get a damn star. Doesn't matter who. Save yourself the heartache. MM

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