Diary of an aspiring filmmaker
When the credits roll: A first-time director deals with the aftermath of hismovie's premiere
The crowd right before the premiere of Art Car: The MoviePhoto by Ford Gunter
Ford Gunter, from left, Harrod Blank and Carlton Ahrens
And what better way to be visible in America than on the ultimate public canvas:The Car.Photo via Art Car/Facebook
Editor's note: Ford Gunter quit his full-time journalism job in Houston to make a movie with his childhood buddy/co-director/business partner Carlton Ahrens. In the latest installment of his CultureMap account of chasing the dream with Art Car: The Movie, he deals with the aftermath of the movie's premiere.
The art car artists have a term to describe the ennui they all experience every year after the parade: "Post-artum blues."
We felt it too. After weeks of 14-hour editing sessions and, before that, months of 10- to 12-hour days, we suddenly had nothing to do. Months of brutal hours, followed by a few days of awkward attention (at the Cinema Arts Festival), and then . . . nothing. For me, the silence wasn't deafening, it was unnerving.
The day after our premiere, on Monday, Nov. 14, as we filled out the first of what is now nine (and counting) film festival applications, it dawned on us how much our movie had changed.
The first thing we do when we fill out one of these things — film festival application, grant application, media synopsis, etc. — is go to our website or Facebook and copy and paste the synopsis from there. We did, and realized it didn't fit at all. Since we wrote that synopsis half a year ago or so, we'd gone from two lead characters to one, gone from five supporting charters to three completely different supporting characters, added substantially from the last interview we shot in Baltimore on a last-minute if-we-don't-do-this-now-we'll-never-do-it trip, and cut almost completely footage we made special trips to shoot in places as far as, oh, you know, France.
The nuts of it is, we set out to make a movie about why people decorated their cars and we ended up making a movie about why you should care.
We also expanded from the "Hands on a Hard Body" goal-oriented-in-an-oh-so-quirky-event/competition story to (we hope) a much more broad and socially applicable story that at points addresses public education, generational apathy (young and old), public art, consumerism, the car as a reflection of self, the car's value in American society, and — to be sappy for a moment — chasing your dream so relentlessly that the drive could only result from the pursuer knowing deep down inside that there is very little chance of any public or financial return on investment but also acknowledging, still deep down in side, that it doesn't matter because he or she is not doing it for that reason.
He or she is doing it because, whether they fully understand it or not, they have to challenge you. On a daily basis.
And what better way to be visible in America than on the ultimate public canvas: The Car.
What we think we have is an existential mediation on the society we've become. That's the heart of the thing. The characters are just the, ahem, vehicles that get us there, to help us, the viewer (because we were viewers too), get to the meaning of the Damn Thing, as it applies to them. To us.
But it couldn't have been just anyone. Art cars and the people who make them were almost too perfect. And what better way to investigate the values of American society than through the lens of a handful of people who dare to (fill in your adjective here: decorate, modify, beautify, funkify, defile, disgrace, ruin) the Great American Icon.
Heady, right? Don't worry — we're not taking ourselves to seriously. The nuts of it is, we set out to make a movie about why people decorated their cars and we ended up making a movie about why you should care. We made the movie we wanted to make.
I wrote this weeks after the premiere. I still don't have a firm grasp on the entire experience, but I'm a lot closer. It took a week of sleep and another week of solitude to start to piece things together. The next week I started my reemergence into society, but I'm still too tired to try very hard.
Now begins a weird sit-and-wait period where the only real tasks are submitting to film festivals we won't hear anything back from until February at the earliest and starting to put together DVD extras. Oh, and cut a trailer. There's that too.
Anyone who thought filmmakers were lazy will probably find positive reinforcement in the scenario I've painted of the last few weeks, and that's fair. For the rest of you, the close readers, I hope it's an adequate explanation of how I could have arrived at this period of quiet, isolated, self-indulgent sloth.
See you on the other side.
