So what went into this? Last month, I did one for Eurydice that didn’t really work: I thought it’d be fun to make it look like a trailer for an old film noir, so I shot it at 24 frames a second for that “film look” and converted it to black and white. (I didn’t add scratches-and-dust because I felt it screamed “plug-in.”) It was fun to do the animated titles, but the approach didn’t work. So I decided to use the film-noir approach to Accidental Death of an Anarchist, because the whole police-interrogation thing would lend itself to looking like an old Bogart movie.
Well, that idea went away very quickly. The play’s more slapsticky. When I watched the rehearsals (taping them for reference), the set was due to be painted like cinderblock, and I figured we wouldn’t be able to set up special lighting to get effects like window blinds on the walls for that really Maltese Falcon look.
Also, I was told that this was the director’s first project, and he was sweating bullets, and when I strode up and chatted with him about it, he’d had no idea who I was and wondered if this was some horrible new complication. Okay, I thought: let’s find a nice, non-intrusive approach. So I suggested that we do the old-trailer thing, but we’ll do Screwball Comedy instead of film noir. And I assured him that I could hang back and shoot the thing from the audience seats, with no need to stage anything special for the camera.
I shot some rehearsal stuff, just trying things out, and we planned on me coming by to shoot the run-throughs where they use costumes and lighting. I also figured that I could, probably so what I’d done on Twelfth Night: shoot the whole play from two or three different angles and edit it into a continuous whole. And since the final product would be in low-def video, I wouldn’t have to zoom in and out for closeups: I could do those in post, and thus, do them more carefully.
I hit YouTube to watch as many 1930s trailers as I could. I didn’t find many that worked as models– several used announcers’ voices that I couldn’t imitate. The best were the ones for the Thin Man films, which used sprightly music and had some nifty titles. But during this time it occurred to me that the real inspiration wasn’t Screwball Comedy, precisely. If you’re doing a play about anarchy upsetting order, who better to emulate than the Marx Brothers?
Most of _their_ trailers wouldn’t work, but the opening of Monkey Business (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTQififsFc8) offered a long stretch of wonderfully sprightly music, which also had an Italianate “Funiculi, Funicula” quality. PERFECT.
The music wasn’t long, and although I picked a few dialogue exchanges to use, I decided that I couldn’t make them work as interruptions in the music. Which meant that the visuals all had to be very _active_, and it was only a matter of time before I worked out that sequence of people hitting each other.
Okay, a word about those titles. I wrote out several that I didn’t use. One was “The FUNNIEST police interrogations since SACCO and VANZETTI.” But I’d design the final title, and then I’d separate each element into a separate card, and have them appear in sequence with a lot of complicated wipes, flips, fades, and blurs. Those took most of the work. The series of “FO times the ” was an early idea, and it was such a dumb joke that I had to fit it in.
There’s only one thing I’d change: the opening title card. I wish I could make it look more like the Paramount logo, and I should’ve had it fade out before fading in to the opening shot. But, it’s fine.