MODE: First
things first, a brief synopsis of the movie.
Greg Swartz, writer/director,
Hollywood, PA: It’s about a native Pennsylvanian who returns home
… determined to make his dreams come true in his hometown — to bring
the film industry to them rather than go there himself — so he sets
about making ultimate documentary, which is every single minute of his
life.
MODE: Tell
me about the filming itself. Where will you be shooting in the area and
how often will it be webcast live?
Sven Pape, web director, Hollywood,
PA: [It will be webcast] every second day and depending upon
locations. We’re going to be live in The Vault, and we’re going to
be live in the State Forum building — we’re going to shoot a town’s
hall meeting there … and we’re gong to be shooting Negley Park where
the Hollywood sign is going to be erected.
MODE: In
all, how much of the film will be webcast?
Pape: We’ll shoot seven days
live, for four hours, which is live web feed; we are going to be live at
all times with the web cam — the web cam is a still-frame, with no
sound, it refreshes itself every sixty seconds.
MODE: Is
this the first feature-length webcast?
Gerald Stetson, film producer/web
producer, Hollywood, PA:
The first independent.
Pape: There was a studio film
called Urban Legend 2 where two days they were live for two hours
each day. That’s why we can’t call ourselves “the first film
ever”. But we’re the first independent, and I think independent
is part of what we are. I think it is important to point out that we’re
doing this not because AOL is helping us or somebody else, but because
we had to do this to find an audience for a film that otherwise might
not have a chance to find an audience. I don’t know how many thousand
filmmakers make a movie each year, and you don’t read about them or
hear about them.
MODE: Why
don’t you think this has been done before, at least not to the extent
that you’re doing it?
Stetson: There isn’t the
technology. This really is very new.
Pape: Yes. I think the reason
being is that the technology that is out there right now is actually not
suitable for what we want to do. The compromises that the Internet user
would have to make in watching this — normally they would just watch
it on, say, television, with television quality — live, with stereo
sound — and you don’t have that. And half a year ago what we do now
wouldn’t have been possible.
Stetson: Right. And again in a
half a year from now, it will be done to death. It’s that close, of
someone [else] doing it. And as we said, someone else did it for a
two-day live stream just a month ago, so we’re just a month away from
being totally unique. Now we’re still unique in the independent
market, and for a longer period of time — seven days, four hours
streaming. They did two days, two hours streaming a month ago. In three
months time, it will be 14 days, and on and on.
Pape: What is still unique about
it is bringing an audience to a film. Inviting people to hang out on the
set … The great thing of it is that we are relatively capable of
changing the site within 24 hours, we can add elements to it, so if
there is a suggestion … the same applies to a certain audience.
MODE: Are
you prepared for technical problems? Do you have a back-up system?
Stetson: We have enormous
technical support coming from as far west as Seattle and Silicon Valley
and as far south as Florida with our own production team coming from Los
Angeles, as well. We’re trying to have back-ups to overcome
complications. There will be complications, it isn’t a completely
smooth process.
MODE: What
are some of the complications that you’re prepared to face?
Pape: I think it’s very likely
that the signal will break down here and there, and we’ll just have to
deal with it.
MODE: Do
you think that’s going to happen?
Pape: I think it’s possible,
yes.
MODE: Are
you prepared for people logging on at the same time? Will a large number
of simultaneous hits crash your site?
Stetson: We are very much
prepared for people logging on at the same time, up to 300,000 at a
time.
Pape: We have a deal with Eye
Beam which is a broadcaster, basically they have a space satellite and
the signal that we send from our set is not going through the Internet
to the user, which normally leads to a lot of congestion and a lot of
problems but it actually goes to Eye Beam directly, from there to a
space satellite and from there to all the major back bone points of the
Internet and then you as the Internet user, you don’t have to go
through the Internet to get to us, you just go to your local server and
get the information from there.
MODE: Is
there a crew for the web production, one that exists entirely separate
from the film crew?
Stetson: We have an enormous
crew, a complete film crew and a complete web crew.
Pape: There’s actually a
company in Germany, an Internet design company, doing this they have
about 15 people within that company, and I send them e-mails every day
— what needs to be changed, what needs to be improved, and then they
do that. And then there is a Pennsylvania company that we’re working
with called Startbutton.com …
MODE: What
was the perfect fit between your script and the concept of the webcast?
Why did you think it was a good idea?
Swartz: The whole, original, very
first draft of the script wasn’t a web thing at all, it was this guy
who had a cable access TV show and he was convinced that if he just
showed his regular life every week he’d be successful … the script
wasn’t even complete yet when I had switched to webcams, focusing more
and more on the Internet. There are certain elements of the script that
are obviously very autobiographical — I’m from here, I left here, I’m
coming back here to make a movie — it sort of seemed to fit on another
level if what he was doing we were doing. So other people have taken the
shots of their feature film live, but we’re not showing our shots, you’re
not going to be able to download our footage from the day — it’s a
behind the scenes thing.
Stetson: The real beauty of the
Internet is that it’s really an enormous marketing tool for a feature
film … we’re trying to get public awareness.
Swartz: We can offer a
distributor a pre-marketed film, it’s not a totally unknown entity.
Even if you take a movie — Saving Private Ryan — until
Dreamworks began promoting it, it was an unpromoted film. No film gets
promoted during its shooting … Entertainment Tonight may have a
behind the scenes thing about what Ben Affleck is doing on the set of
his new movie, but they don’t do a full marketing campaign, whereas
ours are coinciding.
Stetson: We’re promoting the
film now and we haven’t even shot a foot of film.
MODE: What
should we expect to see?
Pape: We will have to turn off
the camera if we run out of satellite time, that is why we have four
hours for seven days, but we won’t turn the camera off … if
something is being said that wasn’t supposed to be said … I think
that’s part of what … we can offer, to show the truth about film
making or to show behind the scenes, because filmmaking is very much a
struggle, it’s like crisis management, there’s problems left and
right and because you’re so on the edge and its working so many hours
each day, the relationships that you have among each other are very
intense. And I think that’s what’s interesting about movie making to
show those people on the set that just don’t have the energy any more
for being polite or for doing something that they would normally not do
because they’re just doing their jobs.
MODE: So
basically a lot of this is going to be uncensored?
Stetson: Yes, firstly, we’re
saying we’re making a film and we’re going behind the scenes and
that is pretty unusual. Now we’re saying that we’re actually going
to have the camera rolling and that’s even more unusual, whereby when
the shit hits the fan, we’re going to keep it rolling. Thirdly, one’s
going to be able to get the real, actual e-mails that we’re passing
around the crew …
Pape: What we do want to do is
show people what filmmaking is all about.
MODE: Will
this camera ever break the fourth wall, will it ever interview the
stars, or will it strictly be used for behind the scenes purposes?
Stetson: Yes, we can interview
stars. It’s the director’s job to film the actual film, to get the
real actors. When actors come off the set, and we’ve got another
camera, we don’t want to just stick it in front of their faces, they
might have been in front of the director for six, eight, nine hours
Pape: We want to experiment a
little bit with this, which means for a couple of days we’re going to
have Jenni.cam actually host the live web chat. She’s the web girl
that started webcasting from her apartment three years ago in Carlisle
and so we’re going to play with that a little bit and see what the
response is. She’s just going to pick and choose certain angles on the
set. What we’re also going to do is what we call the spy cam —which
is another additional camera — a little camera placed on the shoulder
an each day we’d like to ask another crew member to wear this for just
2-3 hours so we could have a different point of view of different crew
members and see the set from a different perspective.
MODE: Is
any of the live webcast being recorded?
Pape: Yes, we have an archive
where you can see the days prior, where you can see a summary, the “best
ofs,” that kind of stuff, and we are going to have the
web cam which will be live whenever we’re going to be live.
MODE: Are
you worried that the aspect of the Internet is going to overshadow the
film itself?
Stetson: No, it’s not going to
happen. No way … the film is what’s going to make it, there’s no
question of that.
MODE: What
are your highest expectations — what do you realistically expect to
happen?
Pape: What I expect to happen is
to find an audience for this film, and to find the interest of that
audience, to have them interested in the making of them film and to have
them interested in how that film turned out.
Stetson: I can see the Los
Angeles contingent picking this up and running with it, I can see the
same in New York, I can see it regionally here, if Blair Witch
can do it, so can we.
MODE: So,
you’re hoping that this is a vehicle to get the film into a larger
market?
Stetson: Hopefully. To find an
audience. Totally.
Pape: You call it ‘marketing
ploy’, I call it finding an audience.
Stetson: That’s basically the
same … other films haven’t got this vehicle to move forward and that
time period — you know, it costs so much money to make these things
— the momentum is going to roll and roll, by the time that we get out
of the studio and the film is ready to go in the theater that momentum,
that ball is rolling, gathering, and it’s getting bigger and bigger,
and who knows, in three or four months time when we’re about to
release this, there could be quite of a lot of awareness out there. And
I really hope so.
MODE: How
are you getting exposure? Any national media outlets?
Swartz: Movieline is a
magazine, but it’s also a website. It’s interactive, kind of like Premiere.
It’s a film magazine, but not for filmmakers, it’s more for
consumers. They’re doing a five part series on the interaction between
Hollywood and the Internet and we’re one of the five parts. It’s not
a magazine article, it’s on their site, and it’ll be on the site for
a month. And then also we’re supposed to have banner ads rotating on
all New Line Cinema sites, and New Line is huge … and these individual
sites are going to rotate our ads at the top ... the deal we have is not
with New Line, its with the designers of the New Line webpages.
Pape: … We’ll find our niche
wherever we can get it, and we’ll try to build from there.
MODE: Do
you think that this film would be able to get the attention that it may
receive without the Internet aspect — is the Internet that lucrative
of a marketing tool?
Pape: That’s one thing about
filmmaking, you never know. If somebody would have asked the Blair
Witch Project, “do you think that this film would get that kind
of attention, that kind of buzz — ” they would’ve said, “Yes, this is going to be the greatest film ever, we’re going to
this, this, and this, and it’s going to work out” and we would’ve
said they were crazy. And you cannot predict that, you never know what
is going to happen. You just have to try. And that’s what we’re
doing.
Stetson: You’d be amazed at how
many people are sitting at a table just like this “we’re going to
make a film this year” and at the end of that year, they’re
sitting the same around that table saying, “well, you know, we’ve
had a few problems, a few personal things, let’s start it next
year” well, that’s different than what we’re doing now. You can
talk ’til you’re blue in the face, you just need to get out there
and try it.
MODE: What
is your response to people who will make the comparison between
Hollywood, PA and films like The Truman Show and EdTV?
Swartz: The easiest answer, the
smuggest answer, would be: read the script. The script is nothing like
it — sure it’s like it in that it’s a study of the privacy, public
lives/private lives interaction, but other than that, the story is
nothing at all like it.
MODE: But
do you think people will walk out of the theaters after seeing this
movie and say, “oh, they stole that idea from The Truman Show or
EdTV”?
Swartz: No. They’ll say it
going in, and that’s just what we have to deal with. They will say it
going in, sure. If anything, the original concept would seem more like EdTV,
in that he’s aware of the fact that his life is being taped, but if it’s
similar to any of those scripts, it’d be more The Truman Show,
because of all that stuff about advertising in The Truman Show,
the whole place is up for grabs, the product placement, an that’s sort
of what happens in his town — his parents begin selling wall space in
their house …
MODE: Tell
us about the setbacks, wasn’t the film originally scheduled to start
filming in November?
Stetson: Well, basically, the
dates were so close to Thanksgiving and Christmas, we tried to fit in
between those two periods, and we realized that the time slot was too
tight.
Pape: I think many things played
a part in it. For one thing, we weren’t ready. One of our companies,
they weren’t ready technologically. Also, on the film side we felt we
weren’t ready yet, certain actors hadn’t been cast or something, so
we felt, we can’t deliver the goods and that’s why we had to push
it, and that’s what you need to do as a filmmaker, as well. If you
feel like it’s not worth it, you need to say, “ok we’ll do it
later”. But if you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, you end up
sitting in L.A. in a coffee shop just doing nothing.
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