Marlon

There's a group of people in my life who all share a question between them. Each time we get together, somewhere into the third round of drinks, or the closing minutes of the phone call, they all ask me the same question, their expressions a shuffle of love, regret, and hope as they ask. None of them ever ask with malice. Not really. Here's the question:

"What's going on with Marlon?"

I love them for it. For six years they've asked me this, and for six years I've had nothing better to give them than "Nothing," and a sad little laugh. I've been stuck a long time, and too worn out to drag the project up out of the mire.

Still no soundtrack. Still no score. Stuck.

They nod, these people who feature in all the best memories of my life--Sitzy and Mariah and John and Tyler, Renowned FRT Actor Adam Lowe, and Stephen with his endless Natural American Spirits and his Russian literature--and we shake our heads, and we laugh and say goodnight, or have another drink.

And each time they ask me when or whether I'll ever finish the horror movie we shot in the winter of 2014, I think, "They had as much fun as me. They loved it like I did." Every time, it makes me want to finish the thing, because goddamn it, we had a good time making it, and because I want to do it again.

But another drink, another day: someday. After all, still no soundtrack. Still no score.

Stuck.

Until two days ago, when my brother handed me a 60 GB flash drive with nearly all of the raw studio audio from the Marlonsoundtrack and score recording sessions in the summer of 2015. The missing piece of track that derailed my little indie horror movie all those years ago.

I'll be completely honest with you: I honestly, sincerely believed that these sessions didn't even exist anymore.

Some of you have no idea what I'm talking about. After all, this is all years ago, in a different city farther north, in a golden age.

Let me go back.

When I was 23 years old, I wrote a screenplay for a film called Marlon.

Back then, I listened to Kevin Smith's podcast Smodcastreligiously. One day, at the Chophouse where I worked, Brandon (a buddy of mine and fellow fan of Smith) asked if I'd listened to the latest episode. I hadn't.

"It's Episode 259: The Walrus and the Carpenter. Listen to it, and let's talk tomorrow."

Those of you familiar with the film Tuskmight recognize the name of the episode. In the podcast, Smith and his best friend/cohost riff off a strange news story and come up with an absolutely buck-wild concept for a horror film. You can hear the moment Smith decided he was going to actually make the movie. It's awesome, in both senses of the word: the moment of inspiration that would eventually become one of the most twisted and unique horror films of the past twenty years captured on tape, so to speak. To me, it was like listening to magic.

The next night, between tables, drinking top-shelf scotch out of coffee cups, Brandon said, "I think you should write Tusk. You just finished that other script, right? So you're all warmed up. Write it really fast, before Kev gets around to writing it, and send it to him, and if he likes it, maybe he directs it, and you've got your 'in' to Hollywood."

Older now, looking back: never in a million years. Steal an artist's idea out from under him, the idea being to do it better than he can, and try to leverage a career in screenwriting out of it? I suppose it's a matter of perspective. Still...

23-year-old me absolutely loved the idea.

It's funny the way things happen, and sometimes it's better not to know what the rules are, and just start playing.

The next morning, in the shower, clear as day, my favorite scene from Marlonjust fell into my head from somewhere, whole and clear as day: a well-dressed man with long greasy hair, sitting on the edge of another man's bed, smoking a cigar in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere. The other man is asleep, until the smoke wakes him up. The man with the greasy hair sits quiet and unmoving until he's positive the sleeper is awake. Then the well-dressed man tells the groggy man in the bed that his mother died in the night, died horribly, screaming, and in pain.

Except she hadn't, really. The guy with the stogie just thought it was funny.

I'd been writing for a couple hours when Brandon texted me from work. Smith was already working on the script, had set aside other projects to focus on making his whimsy a reality. (And he did--Tusk started principal photography just a year later, if memory serves. At any rate, it got made, and it's fucking excellent.) He was writing it, and wouldn't need a spare.

But it didn't matter. The movie I was writing didn't require a walrus, or Kevin Smith. Just a remote place in a harsh wilderness, where a handful of damaged people could unravel together. I kept writing.

When I'd written somewhere around 70 pages, Bird said, "What if you just made it yourself?" I'd been griping about the apparently impenetrable wall between the newcomer and the Film Industry, worried I wasn't going to be able to sell it.

"So don't. Just make it yourself. What is it, a cabin in the woods and a couple murders? Some blood? What's the cast, like four people?"

"Six."

"If it was sixty, we know, like, everyone in the theater department." It was mid-afternoon. I remember her smile, and the way the little apartment looked exactly. It was the moment that led to the movie, and the movie...

...everyone should make a movie, especially with their friends, and especiallyif it's vulgar and obscenely violent.

My god, did we have fun.

With the help of an amazing, hilarious mishmash of good friends and new friends and strangers who became friends, I raised some money, I bought cameras and lenses and professional audio equipment, built DIY boom mics, fig rigs and shoulder rigs and a pretty awesome steadicam out of PVC pipe, electrical conduits, washers, and a handful of nuts and bolts. And then we made a movie. We shot the whole script, and I cut, corrected, and color graded the flick on Bird's then-new iMac. It came out around 90 minutes. It looked great (or good, maybe; I'm obviously biased, but I think we shot the shit out of it for a bunch of young twenty-somethings brimful of piss and vinegar), and we had a blast. When it was all over, and we were going our separate ways, most of the people who worked on the movie with me told me to call if I ever did it again. If I did, they were in.

I wish I'd made three more with that crew by now.

But it wasn't easy.

The long and extremely erratic hours of principal photography put a massive strain on my relationship with Bird, to whom I'd only been married about a year. I'd leave for day exteriors at 6 a.m., and get home from interior night shoots at...6 a.m. sometimes. Otherwise, I was working, or working on Marlonin my head. On the financial side, between touching personal accounts to cover when we busted the budget near the end of shooting and the months of dumping shifts to shoot, the movie pretty much cleaned me out.

(I'd do it again tomorrow. That's sort of the plan, actually.)

Once filming was finished, and the cast had dispersed back into the real world--Chicago, Colorado, New York City--all that was left was to cut, score, and soundtrack the thing. I had it cut in a month, and wrote the soundtrack and score the same month, in the little pockets of time I wasn't editing in. I got my brother onboard (Sam's an insanely talented drummer, and by far my favorite musician), found a miraculous connection to a professional recording studio, and over the course of a month, Sam and I recorded an album. Not a "couple of mics in a buddy's basement" kind of album, but an actual, no-shit, "drums-in-isolation-room, $6,000-ribbon-mic-on-the-tube-amp" kind of album.

The recording sessions felt like a possession. Sam had only ever played--or even heard--one of the songs before we recorded the album. I would play him the guitar part a couple times through, and then we would just GO. Essentially, depending how you want to look at it, Sam either improvised an entire album, or wrote an entire album's worth of drum parts on the fly, memorizing them as he made them up in order to replicate them almost flawlessly take after take.

I found out this past weekend that those sessions were one of the last times my brother played drums. It broke my heart. I don't know if I can explain to people who weren't there, not just at the sessions in Escanaba, but all through our childhood: there is perhaps no better place to be than in a loud room, making music with my brother. I think the reason I understand him so well, the reason our relationship is so different than other brothers--Sam's drumming is like listening to his soul, and I spent half my life playing along with it. In Escanaba, we caught a furious hour of it on magnetic tape, true ferocity, utter eloquence: some of the best drumming Sam ever did.

So when all that music vanished, it was pretty hard on us.

I won't get into it here. Somewhere, someday, I'll tell the whole story out. In short, post-production on the album started out promisingly, but quickly turned to crickets. I had a hard time getting answers, and though there was a lot of optimism, there seemed to be very little progress. After a month of sitting on my hands, I started working on some other writing projects--another screenplay, sparse and probably pretty cheap to shoot, which I half imagined as the movie I would shoot after Marlonwas done--and waited.

For various reasons--bad intel, let's say, and a growing feeling of exhaustion, the creative equivalent of "I'm just gonna rest my eyes for a minute"--I waited a year. Bird and I moved to Maine. The movie was faltering, losing momentum.  The tentacular rhythms of normal life were coiling around my legs, sucking me back down. If I could just get the...

Then two of the people I loved most in the world died, and up was down, black was white, and I didn't want to look at the movie anymore.

The vast majority of it was shot at my Uncle Walter's place out in the woods on 581 just outside of Ishpeming, where my brother and I carried his body out of my grandmother's house a few years ago. He never got to see the movie we shot around and inside his day-to-day life. He cooked for us, hung out with us as we shot, and hated the smell of the goddamn cigars. He taught us how to run the gennie that powered the place so we could shoot there when he wasn't around, asked us to stoke the stove before we left (which was usually around three in the morning) so he wouldn't freeze to death, and showed my crew where the guns were hidden, in case the wrong people came around. I loved him immensely, and cherish every second of the plus two months I spent out there, shooting the movie. Uncle Walt loved that we were out there, that his place was a horror movie set. He loved the cameras, and the seriousness with which the cast approached the project. I loved him.

He never got to see it.

That's been pretty hard, too.

Let's fast forward.

Bird and I moved again, back to Michigan. I met Karl, we started Measuring Flicks. I wrote some other stuff. Then COVID.

Then it was a month ago, and my brother called me. After working as a banker for several long and miserable years, Sam dumped the money-obsessed corporate job that was slowly whittling his soul down to an unfeeling stub, and joined the Electrician's Union. (He swore in a couple weeks ago. He's happier than I've seen him in...well, since the day he started working at that stunted, shitty, soulless bank. Seeing him happy lightens the weight of my world as well.)

"Bro," he said. "You're never going to fucking believe it."

I was at work when he called. I ducked into the kitchen, off the tasting room floor. I never ignore a phone call from my brother, because I love him, and because he's the one who calls me when really bad things happen. I've never known if that's his choice, or if it's a role the family's put on him, but when there's hard news, it's Sam that tells it to me. I've always been grateful that it's so.

"Believe what?" I asked.

He told me. I didn't believe him. I didn't believe him, really, until my phone dinged while I was talking with him, and I saw that Shadd, one of the sound engineers from the Marlonrecording sessions, had texted me a Google Drive link. Then I went and found a quiet corner in the cellar of the winery I work at these days and cried.

Sam was talking with his foreman on their lunch break. Sam's foreman is way into music, and, having found out that Sam was a drummer, asked if he'd ever recorded anything. Sam told him yeah, at a pro studio in Escanaba, but the sessions had been lost. The foreman asked if Sam meant the studio Shadd worked at. Sam, surprised, agreed that it had been, yeah.

"Well, Shadd's the plumber on this jobsite," said Sam's foreman. "He's standing about forty feet behind you."

Sam turned around, and there was Shadd.

Shadd had everything, and he handed it to Sam on a 60-gig flash drive. Last Sunday, Sam handed it to me.

Again, the story of how and why the album recording sessions stayed buried so long is totally fucked. There are many circumstances--some appear extenuating, some inexcusable--that need to be disentangled, parsed, and considered before I write at length about them. Honestly, having just heard the album for the first time since my brother and I wrote and recorded it, I don't even really care: I have my music back, and some of a younger era of my soul along with it. It feels like a coming again of hope and potential.

But, as goes the old saw: "What's going on with Marlon?"

It's been a long time since I was set up to work on a movie. The hand-me-down iMac I originally edited Marlonon (which I now use exclusively to cut Measuring Flicks) is too old to run the latest Final Cut Pro. I've got Reaper on there, for the podcast, but professional audio mixing (film audio edits and mixing and mastering a score, say) requires a bit of a bigger boat, and my ornery old overheating iMac won't cut it for this kind of shark hunt.

Here's where I'm at:

Between the two of us, Karl and I have a decent chunk of change to put toward a new computer with all the necessary Bells and Whistles. We're about a grand shy at this point, but have a couple ways forward--there's income coming from this Patreon (actually accounting for a sizeable chunk of what we already have), and we've been talking about doing a t-shirt for seasons, now. We've been eyeing a new studio computer for the past year or so anyway: there are a few film projects, an album, a few radio plays...but now that I have the Marlonstudio recording sessions, I seem to have both a damn good rock/metal/country/folk/alternative album and a mostly-finished feature-length horror film within a year of completion.

Only for real this time.

There's also a little more to do on the album--all of the guitar solos and some of the vocals were recorded at a second location, and so weren't in with the session backups I got from the studio in Escanaba.

I'm okay with it. I'm a better guitarist now than I was back then. (Not that I was some slouch when we recorded the album--I've really enjoyed rediscovering my playing style from all those years ago, these past few days.) However good I remember those solos being, I was never happy with how they were recorded, actually--the solos were tracked digitally, with me playing my guitar directly into the computer in the studio, into an amp simulator. I remember them sounding great the day we tracked them (I never heard them again), but it always bothered me that they never got to breathe. They went straight from my strings into the computer, cheated of their one good wail as sound waves in the real world. Call me analog or superstitious, but in a way, it's a relief that the solos that'll end up on the album (and in the movie) will have lived and died on the lips of a cranked tube amplifier in an isolation room, rather than as muted plinks in a bedroom studio.

So.

That's what's going on with Marlon.

I've been writing this for days, so I'm going to put it to rest and go to bed. There'll be lots more, trust me. In the meantime, the song at the top of the post is called "Killing Jar." I wrote it when I was 22 years old, a year before I wrote the script for Marlon. I think it might be the best song I've ever written. I forgot how to play it, after we tracked the album. I've been trying to pick it back out by ear for six years. Now I have a recording of my brother and I playing it together.

It's been a very, very good week for me. I hope yours has been as good as mine. I hope all of you feel the way I feel right now. I wish I could share some of it with you. I hope I have.

--Max

My Director of Photography, a Cup of Tea, and an Odd Movie

It's 67 degrees here in Marquette, the dogged tail of October leaving us with one warm last wag before the dark of November. I'm laying on my bed, covered in the hair of the terrifying American Pit Bull, on an ugly green blanket my wife hates, but which keeps us warm when we're too tired to fight the war of the icy feet in the night. The sun comes through the window with the illusion of fire, careening, childlike, through the un-coy shades of maple outside the window. Chamomile tea steams in an old black mug, and Wire's "Heartbeat" reminds me, the way the best songs do, I suppose, of a place and time I've never known.
    (The first time I heard "Heartbeat" was Big Black's cover on The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape, another album from before I was born. I suppose it's a case of first loves, but I like the Big Black version better.)
    I haven't written in too long: my fingers are itchy, and I keep turning off the T.V. A sure sign I need to write is when I don't want to watch a movie. I'm in the middle of a great documentary about the evolution of the American Horror Film, but there you go. It'll still be there when I get done with work tonight.
    Stephen (Wardell, the Director of Photography for Marlon) came over and watched the first hour and twenty minutes of assembled footage this afternoon. We drank coffee and laughed as I cued up the footage and played the clips. He seemed to laughed at all the right parts, and employed liberal profanity when the bloody bits came around...so, that was good. We walked Trinity (the aforementioned Pit Bull and incorrigible cuddle-bug) over to Michael's Arts and Crafts to get my car, I drove him where he needed to go, and came home.
    Today was exactly what I needed. What the movie needed, too, probably, and they aren't always the same thing: sometimes the movie needs to be edited, or scored, or color graded, and I "need" (ha) to eat, sleep, read a book, have a good cry, etc. etc. And that's the point. I've found myself at odds with Marlon often, lately. Today taught me a few things.
    First, I hate Marlon.
    Second, I love Marlon more than almost anything.
    Third, men with thighs like mine should not try to lounge on their beds in slim-fit khakis, or do anything in them but stand and try to look thin and suave. Slim-fit lounging leads to muffin tops. That's what I always say.
    Watching the scenes I'd assembled with Stephen was like an hour and twenty minutes in hell. Or...no, that's not quite it. It was like an hour and twenty minutes in a boy's locker room after high school gym. There I sat, mortified, and Stephen...Stephen could see everything. I mean, here I'm just playing scene 69 (Marlon tells Nate his mother is dead), just minding my own business, and Stephen is watching.
    Then the unholy Calcutta of scenes 62 through 66 comes along, and Stephen is still watching.
    Imagine my horror.
    Audio cues didn't sync properly. Clips were lost. The dreaded MODIFIED FILE screen flashed across the screen instead of the beautifully-edited slap I'd cut the day before.
    "He's going to tell everyone," I thought. "He's going to tell everybody what he saw, and then I'll never get asked to the prom."
    But after the last reel had spun its ones and zeroes around the digital spindle, after we'd put on our coats, once we were out in the Indian Summer, something changed. An almost imperceptible touch of clove and cinnamon that comes from the quiet places of autumn, from the undersides of leaves and the bones of trails through woods only children and dogs really know.
    While we walked, we talked. We talked about what Marlon is and what it wants to be. What it should be, and what it's going to be when it's done. We talked about horror, and the deconstruction of horror. About how Ryan Sitzberger is a genius. The vulnerability and honesty of John Scheibe's performance. It turns out, we winced at a lot of the same parts, and a lot of the same kind of parts.
    Trinity chased leaves around, and Stephen and I walked.
    He told me what he thought Marlon was, down in its heart, and what parts of the assembly he thought weren't honest about that true thing at the film's core.
    He was right.
    I've spent so much time so close to this movie, it got to a point where all I could see was the pages and the lines and the scripted transitions from scene to scene. All I saw were the parts; a kind of frustrating, fragmentary collage. Frustrating because I love a lot of the scenes...love most of the movie, in fact, but then there are these great whacks of...stuff.
    "Yeah," Stephen said. "But we'll get rid of that later." He doesn't smoke anymore, but I can see him take a drag in my head. I think I'll always see Stephen with a cigarette and a warm scarf, when I think of him.
    "Finish putting it all together, first," he said. Two men were pushing leaves out of the back of a big black rust-pocked pickup truck. "It's weird. It's funny...it's like a horror movie that's fighting against its horror. And it's good." He takes another phantom drag here, tapping ash away.
    Marlon isn't Winter's Bone, or Shame, or Evil Dead, or any of the movies I had in my head when I wrote it, cast it, shot it. It's not the movie I had in my head when I started cutting it. This is something else. Something good. Something weird, and other. Conversational and violent. And after I was done hating it, I realized it was actually pretty good.
    Besides, I hate everything I do before it's done. I suspect all creative types do. (My wife certainly does: she hated both paintings she did for the film, until I'd shot them.) Probably it's a necessary cycle of anti-ego triggered in the artists' brains to keep them from being insufferable, egotistical pricks at parties.
    Tomorrow, I get to play a violently unhinged gangster in a short film my friends are shooting. They're shooting on a Red, in 4k. The script is genius: a sharp, smart blend of Tarantino and the Coen brothers.
    But that's tomorrow.
    Right now, my dog is sleeping on my wife's pillow behind me. Right now, my fingers are stained with emerald ink from filling my fountain pen, and I have a blank notebook waiting for me in my office. The tea kettle is burbling toward a whistle downstairs.
    Today is a good day.