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"The Vest"

Set in the early 70’s, when a third grader wears a homemade vest to school and gets teased for it, her response surprises even herself, and leaves her with a lot of explaining to do back at home.

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Production History

This long, rambling production history was published in the
Fall 2003 Filmmakers Alliance newsletter.

We hope you find at least some part of it informative....

Thanks,

Paul

Production History for “The Vest”

A little over five years ago, my friend Stephanie Hubbard was editing a short that I had produced for Matt Nix entitled “Mike Feeny’s Secrets of Success.” She had been cutting infomercials, and since this short was a satire on such things, we needed her expertise in the area of glitzy titling, clever attention-grabbing effects, etc. At some point, Stephanie shared with me a collection of short stories and poems that she had written in a writing class. One of the stories in there was called “The Vest,” and it was about an experience she had in third grade when she wore a homemade vest to school. I told her this tale would make a great short, but her plate was pretty full at the time, so she didn’t pursue it.

Over the next two years, we would bump into each other occasionally, and I would say something like, “Hey—you should really take a look at that vest story…” and she would say things back like, “Ahhh, I don’t want to work with kids….” or something like that.

In January of 2001, I was reflecting on what the hell I was going to do with the rest of my life, and at one point I started to brainstorm projects that I could produce. I thought again of Stephanie and her vest story, and made a note to call her about it. Well, a day or two after that, she called me!

She was shooting a scene from a feature screenplay of hers called “Hugo” for a women’s directing workshop at AFI. She wanted me to act in it. After the shoot, she took me and the other actor out for lunch. So over French Dips at Phillippe’s, I told her that I wanted to produce her vest story if she was interested in directing it. Again she demurred, so then I took a breath and asked her if she would let me direct it. “OK,” she said, “You can make that story into a short, but in exchange you have to produce another short for me.” It was a deal. Only now I had to write the script.

Months went by.

Then, I saw the announcement. Filmmakers Alliance, in Association with the LA Film Collaborative, was holding a short script competition, with a prize of a $2500.00 production grant. Deadline was May 31, 2001. It was something like May 20^th. So using this deadline, I hammered out an adaptation of the story and turned it in along with a required budget and cover letter. Again, I forgot about it. I was traveling with my girlfriend, thinking about getting engaged, and still busy worrying about what the hell I was going to do with my life. At some point in July, I checked in with FA, and found out that they had extended the deadline because they felt that they had not received enough entries. Oh well.

Amy and I got engaged in August, and at some point in September, I heard that they would be announcing the top 10 finalists for the competition in October. Well, the October meeting finally came when they would make the announcement, and I got there late. I had missed it. So at the break, I went up to the front of the room, and got ahold of the agenda of the meeting, that included the names of the finalists. We weren’t on the list. Oh well, I thought as I drove home, I still think it’s a good idea. I’ll make it some day.

The next morning, I get a call. I can’t remember if it was from Jacques Thelemacques (founder of Filmmakers Alliance) or Liam Finn (second in command at FA) or maybe it was Diane Gaidry (also a founder of FA, and Jacques is her husband). Whoever it was, the conversation went like this:

“Paul?”

“Yes?”

“It’ Jacques/Liam/Diane—”

“Hey—what’s up?”

“We are so mortified—we only announced 9 finalists last night—you’re script is the tenth!”

As we continued talking, I realized that the list that I had looked at the night before was not numbered, and I hadn’t bothered to count them….

A month later, they announced the top five in alphabetical order by title, so it was a bit of a nail-biter after four titles were named….but then came “The Vest.” Whew. Finally, at the FA holiday party in December of 2001—five and a half months after the original deadline—Robert Faust, founder of the LA Film Collaborative and the LA Independent Film Festival, announced that we had received the grant.

After the big announcement, he and I spoke about the details. It was definitely a cash grant, but since it was for production, it would not be released until we were deep into pre-production, and just a few weeks out from actually shooting. I also spoke with Jacques, who told me that while I had won, I needed to continue to work on the script (I agreed) and I needed to complete the film by June for the DGA event.

Yikes! That was in six months! I was getting married in June! Fortunately Robert told me I had 24 months to complete the project before they rescinded the cash, and eventually, when I plead my case to Jacques about getting ready for the wedding, etc., he said I could take longer, but that he wanted to make sure the project actually got made.

More months went by. Wedding planning went into high gear, and a couple of drafts of the short came and went. I still had no real idea of when I was going to get around to making this short.

Amy and I honeymooned in Hawaii, and one evening, as we enjoyed a tropical sunset from a spot overlooking Kailua-Kona, I spoke to my new wife about how it was only going to get harder and harder to find time to make this short, and so would it be OK if I tried to make it sooner rather than later. She gave me her blessing. When we got back to Los Angeles, pre-production got off to a quiet, if not leisurely, start.

I say that because pre-production would have to take place around my survival job work schedule. It wasn’t like I could just take off, set up an office, etc. So I made up a list of tasks to complete, and I set about doing them—basically on my own.

SAG

My first step was contacting SAG and getting assigned a rep. As a SAG member myself, I knew that I would be working under some kind of SAG agreement, and I also knew that if you give yourself enough time, the paperwork demands of SAG were reasonable. If you have not produced a film before, you may feel that the timelines and paperwork requests are not reasonable, but they are. As you start to contact other businesses that will be a part of your production, you will discover that they too have paperwork requests and deadlines by which they need everything, so one’s perspective on the demands of SAG will be seen as on par with the demands of lighting, camera and truck rental companies as well. Plus, setting up a relationship with SAG contributed to the feeling that this production was becoming a reality.

I knew I would use the SAG Experimental Agreement, because I needed to defer the actors’ salaries for the sake of the budget. In retrospect, I might have tried to pay the actors under the Low-Budget Agreement, simply because there are additional paperwork steps to complete if you use the Experimental Agreement and then find yourself in a position where someone wants to distribute your film. Commercial distribution is not allowed under the Experimental Agreement, so if someone approaches you about distribution, you have to convert your contract to the Low-Budget Agreement anyway. It comes down to where you can (or need to) put your money during production. I knew I didn’t want to worry about paying the actors until the possibility of distribution became a reality. Now that we have a distributor, I am in the process of completing the paperwork required to change the agreement and pay the actors. This may all sound very intimidating, but don’t worry. SAG wants to help its members get exposure without ruining filmmakers’ credit. We will not have to pay the actors until we get paid by the distributor. The challenge is when the money you get up front is not enough to pay your actors, but again—SAG will help you with that.

Next, I needed to put my creative team together. I had made a short three years earlier called “What We Have,” and it was shot by Paul Szopa. It looked great, and after sending him the script and talking to him about his schedule, he came on board to shoot “The Vest.” Craig Siebels had worked as a Production Designer for a number of directors who were friends of mine (Dan Fields, Matt Nix and Alfredo Barrios). In fact, he production designed Nix’s and Barrios’s “Mementoke,” which found Craig covering and recovering me with sharpie ink for my portrayal of the Lenny character in this parody. Needless to say, we were already close. He read the script—which I was still re-writing—and came on board. I met him for lunch to discuss my plans, and I told him that it was my hope to locate a costume designer that I had met a year earlier named Janet Teller. She and Craig had attended the same theatre grad school—UC San Diego—that I attended, although they were there after me. Craig looked up from his burrito with a smile a the mention of Janet’s name. “I’m meeting her for dinner tonight, and I will ask her about her schedule!” Another moment of synchronicity.

It turns out that Janet and Craig had worked together previously, and they loved working together, so she came on board. Now, SAG had asked me for a preliminary budget, so I came up with something like $25,000. I wasn’t sure how I came up with that number, but that’s what I gave them as an initial estimate. But now that I had a production designer and a costume designer, I had to start getting real about money so that they could get to work. This was, say, mid July. Janet couldn’t do anything until we had our cast, but Craig was able to start putting some things together, so we had to scout locations and talk about what needed to be built. Since I didn’t really have any money for this project—I knew I would eventually be going into credit card debt—I didn’t have pre-set amounts for the set and costume budget. So we settled on $500 for each of these two departments—an amount that would turn out to be substantially underestimated for both areas. Set expenses got up to around $800 and Costume went up to about $1150. There were a number of reasons for these overages—which I’ll get back to—but the budgets were too low to begin with. The plan was to make this a period piece, set in the 70’s. Any time you want to establish period, you are going to spend additional money to do so.

August Cast

My wife, Amy Lippens, is a Casting Director (Once and Again (two Emmy nominations for Casting a Drama), Fathers and Sons—a feature currently in production), and in August, she put out a Breakdown for the two main girls in the short: the lead role, and the role of the little girl who teases her. We read about 35 girls, but we also got to meet with Skye McCole Bartusiak. She was 9 when we met her, and she had already been in The Patriot, Don’t Say a Word, Riding in Cars With Boys, and the list goes on. She and her family live in Houston, but she was in LA to be in an arc of 6 episodes of 24. Her agent wouldn’t let her audition for us—understandable given her resume—but he did send over her demo DVD. It had a multitude of performances on it, and included her interview with David Letterman at the ripe old age of 7 (it was during the summer that The Patriot was released). Skye and her mom Helen were interested in the short because they liked the humor of the script. Stupid Director Moment: I had only watched one or two clips and the Letterman interview before I met them. I was a nervous, inexperienced director, and I worried about casting her without reading her. So we had a great meeting, and they left and Amy said, “Why didn’t you offer her the part?”

Actually, Amy was very supportive at the time—even though later she told me she couldn’t BELIEVE that I hadn’t made the offer. Well, that night after the meeting, I did what I should have done BEFORE the meeting. I watched the entire DVD. By the time I was done, it was clear that she was going to be able to handle anything in our short. I got worried that they might be offended that I hadn’t made the offer and that their interest might go away. It was Friday night. I left a message with her agent, but of course heard nothing until Monday. Fortunately Skye and Helen were still very interested.

For the Mom, I went straight to Kellie Waymire. She also went to UC San Diego, and I was a year ahead of her there. I had acted opposite her in a play two years earlier, and had been a big fan of her work for a long time anyway. I told her about the project, and she was basically on board schedule permitting. I sent her a script, and over the course of the following weeks, we discussed the text and I think made one tiny adjustment—I can’t even remember what it was. For the teacher, I turned to my theatre company, Antaeus, and got the pitch-perfect Anna Mathias to give us an afternoon and evening. For the nurse, a friend of Amy’s was set to do it, but when her schedule changed, she introduced us to Sonya Maddox, who you can also see in Hanelle Culpepper’s short “A Single Rose.” Out of all the girls we met, we asked Gage Golightly (her real last name!) to join us in the role of the teasing classmate.

How we cast the role of the Dad: Amy and I went to see Soderbergh’s Full Frontal one Saturday afternoon, and when Enrico Colantoni came on the screen, I leaned over and said, “I saw him in a play, like six years ago. I had to deliver a hello to him from someone in New York afterwards, and he was a great guy about it.” Then Amy leaned over to me and said, “I cast him in a pilot four years ago that didn’t go.” After the film, Amy said, “You should ask Enrico to be in your short.” “Naaahh!!!!” I said, “He’s too busy with his TV show, he’s got a family….” “Write him a letter,” she said.

So I wrote him a letter, telling him about how I met him and about Amy and about the short, and how we’d only need him for four hours on a Saturday morning and we sent it to him with the script via his agent. We didn’t hear anything for two weeks (this was in August), so we re-sent everything to his manager. About a week after that, at the end of the month, I got a call from his manager. “Is this Paul Gutrecht? I’m Enrico’s manager. You had asked him about acting in a short film your making (at this point I thought I was just about to be let down gently) and we just wanted to give you the affirmative, that he’ll be able to participate.” I was in a coffee shop at the time and had to step outside because I had started to jump up and down.

Now let me back up a bit. As the month of July ended, I was zeroing on a number of important production elements. Since I had received this production grant, Jacques decided that FA’s contribution to the grant would be that the organization would waive the fees it normally charged for all of its available services. So FA provided our production production insurance and workers comp insurance at no charge. Jacques was busy preparing for the August DGA event, and spoke to Kodak about making a donation. Kodak decided to give $5,000 worth of film stock to FA to give to someone in FA who was about to go into production on something. Jacques determined that I was the only member at that moment who was imminently about to shoot, so he gave this donation to us.

Regarding a camera package, just a few days before the DGA event, I was turned down by Panavision for a donation of a weekend package rental. A number of factors were involved here. Panavision had discontinued its formal official program in which it gives out free camera packages. These donations were—at that moment—decided on a case by case basis, and I don’t even think our request made it past the assistant to the main guy who makes these decisions. In one chat with his assistant, she said, “now you’re a friend of his, right?” “No.” “Oh.” That might have been that. Also, we were making a request for late September—that’s well into TV season. The best time to make a request of Panavision is during June and July, when TV is almost totally on hiatus.

Fortunately for us, Amy saved another stupid director move. See, AFTER I got rejected by Panavision. I tried to think of anyone and everyone I might know that might have a connection to Panavision. DUH! Do this BEFORE you call anyone for anything! So I spoke to Amy about the situation, and she spoke to someone who knew the guy at Panavision, and this colleague of Amy’s called him on our behalf. He hadn’t heard of our short, and asked Amy to call him. When she told him about Skye, he exclaimed “That little girl was the best thing in that picture (The Patriot)! We’ll figure something out for you, just fax us your request.” We faxed it in that afternoon, but they weren’t able to approve our requests until we got much closer to shooting. They promised to give us a camera, but not necessarily the ones (or the lenses) we requested. Fortunately again, as we got closer to the shoot, exactly what we had requested became available, and the last parts of our requests were approved days before the shoot.

At the FA DGA Event in last year, after Wim Wenders spoke, Jacques presented me with the Kodak Grant just before the shorts were screened. I got to go up to the podium to say thanks for the grant, and maybe because of that, this composer of whom I was a bit in awe, came up afterwards and gave me his demo and said he wanted to speak with me about “The Vest.” Cool, I thought, one more part of the creative team handled! I had heard his work on a number of shorts, and was deeply impressed. And his resume is even more impressive. I later sent him the script and he came on board.

Fundraising.

Another way in which FA helped was that if people wanted to donate to our production, they could write the check to FA and get a bit of a tax break. FA normally charges a modest administrative fee for this service to its members, but again, they made this service available to us free of charge because of the grant. If you donate $100, and your tax bracket is 28%, then you got to deduct $28.00 from your taxes. It wasn’t a huge incentive, but we raised another $2,000 this way. The rest of our budget came from savings, family donations and credit cards. All in all, the short cost about $30,000, not including the deferred actors salaries which we will eventually have to pay (roughly another $4,000).

So: In the latter half of August, I put an ad in www.mandy.com, which was recommended to my by Craig Siebels. I had never heard of this below the line website, but it has proven to be extremely valuable. My ad was for a line producer. At this point, Amy and I were going to produce, but we knew we needed at least one more person on board. Through mandy, we met Ryan Mintz, and he was a god-send. He has since gone on to work a few more great shorts and a couple of features. I also met up with Arash Ayrom, who was an Assistant Editor on Mulholland Drive. Arash and I had known each other for a number of years, back when we would screen films for the programming department of the LA Independent Film Festival. Our boss back then was Thomas Ethan Harris, currently Director of Programming at Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, and Board Member of FA. He was a crucial advisor and mentor on our production of “The Vest.” We are indebted to him.

Also in late August, Albert Hasson emailed me to say that he might be available to help. Albert and I had known each other for a few years. He was the Producer of the LAIFF in 1999 and 2000, which is to say he physically produced the event—a huge job. In 1999, he sat down with me one afternoon to go over my planning for the shoot of my first short. I had emailed him earlier in the summer to see if he would like to come on board as a producer, but at the time, his schedule would not permit. Now, he said in his email, it looked like a project had been pushed back, so he had room in his schedule. He came on board as a full producer, and truly took a large burden off of mine and Amy’s shoulders. He worked very closely with Ryan, and then he hired Ryan on the feature he produced immediately after we shot our short.

Regarding the position of First AD, I approached the incredibly busy Liam Finn, but he had to wait to hear about a few things before he could commit. So I checked in with David Knell’s availability, and ended up getting the best of both worlds: Liam came on as the First, and David came on as the Second.

I met once or twice with the DP, Production Designer and Costume Designer all together, so we could discuss the look and tone of the short, and then I met numerous times with each of them separately. I arranged a rehearsal for Skye and Enrico, and Janet Teller came to get their measurements.

Three weeks before our shoot, me and Janet, went to Skye's trailer--on location for an episode of "24"--and while she's trying on stuff in the trailer, I'm outside with her mom. Helen says, "Now Paul, I want you to know that Skye may be getting an offer on an episode of "Boomtown," but don't worry, we won't let it conflict." I say OK, and forget about it.

Three days before our shoot, Skye's agent calls: "Paul you know your Friday shoot?" I think to myself, yeah you mean our first shoot day, the one at the public school with the 18 kids and the fire marshal whom we had to pay to be on site..... "Uh-huh" I say.

"Could you move it to Monday?"

Now, coincidentally, I've known this agent for 14 years, when he was an actor, then a manager, now an agent. He helped us meet Skye, so I want to be helpful: "Uh, let me see what I can figure out."

90 minutes later, during which I think I just stared at the wall, Skye's mother Helen calls: "We're very cross with our agent. He shouldn't have said that Skye was available. What would I be teaching my daughter if we blew you off for an episode of a TV show?" And that was that. We shot, and Skye didn't do the episode. Pretty classy, eh? (PS they actually really like their agent and are still with him.)

It was a three day shoot. Friday afternoon at an Elementary school. For nine year old children, State law says they can only work for 9 hours, and that includes three hours of schooling, if they are missing school to shoot. Now, if they don’t miss school, but arrive after school, you only get them for three hours. The thinking behind that is that the child has already spent a full day (about 6 hours) at school, the part of a child’s day deemed to be “work” must total 9 hours. For every 10 children, you have to have a studio teacher. We brought in 8 kids, plus our two main girls, and had a certified studio teacher (who donated her time) work with them for three hours. We timed it so that at the end of those three hours, 8 other kids showed up after their day at school for three hours of shooting. We shot out the large, establishing shot and the melee scenes first, broke for dinner, then let those 8 kids go. We then finished off the classroom stuff with the original ten, that we got for more time. The following two days were at the house of some friends, and Skye was the only child.

Since it was the weekend, we got to work with her for the nine hours each day, although that includes one total hour of “rest and recreation.” That hour, however, took care of itself during setups between shots. Still—if there is a child, you need a teacher on a schoolday, or a “welfare worker” on the weekend. Usually these studio teachers are also certified welfare workers. We had one on Saturday and one on Sunday—each donating their time. These folks make donations like this because they want to build relationships with parents of child actors. Then, the child actor and his or her parents can request teachers by name.

Then we were done. Paul Szopa, our DP, said that with any other child, our three day shoot would have taken five days. Skye was great. Often we would discuss the next shot with her, and when we asked if she wanted to rehearse, she’d say, “No, let’s shoot it.” I’d look at the AD, he’d look at the DP, he’d look at me and we’d shrug our shoulders and say, “OK!”

Then it was on to the lab and telecine, and then to the edit suite. We edited at the home of the editor on a Final Cut Pro 3 system. Arash didn’t much care for the Cinema Tools add-on, so we knew that at the end, we’d have to re-digitize on an Avid, and get the cut-list from there. By mid October, two weeks after shooting, we had a rough cut with a first pass at the score.

This is one of the hardest parts of the story to tell. On my first short, I just had a song play from end to end, so there wasn’t much in the way of scoring questions (the short was 4 minutes long!). This time, the score was going to play a much more important role, and I was failing in my attempts to communicate with this composer. I’d seen films that he’d scored, I’d heard his reel, I’d seen his credits. So I basically blamed myself for it not working out. One big problem I had was that I was letting myself get intimidated when speaking with him. He’s a great guy—it was all in my head. But I wasn’t giving him a clear idea of what I wanted because I didn’t want to interfere with his creative process. Well, that was a mistake. I think all composers would prefer a clear idea of where you want to go rather than to try to come up with something only for you to say, “not that.” We parted ways in early November, and I had no idea what was going to happen next.

But Amy thought of somebody. There was this young composer who had done some work for Once and Again, and she got his name and number from one of the show’s producers. It was Joey Newman. We gave him a fine cut of the short in late November, and he agreed to do the project. But then came Thanksgiving. Then his wife gave birth, and then came Christmas. So things slowed down a bit, but when Joey and I finally got to work, I was much more clear with him, and somehow, we just clicked. By February 7^th, we had our final cut with locked picture and score.

Then came the final sound mix. Allsound Audio Services, which consists of partners Matt Walsh and Klint Macro, not only did our production sound, but they also did our final sound mix. I did the titles at Title House, cut the negative at rednaveL fLmworx (that is the correct spelling), and did the color timing and answer print at Deluxe.

It has been an awesome experience so far, and we look forward to see where we go next. Thanks for reading.

Paul Gutrecht.