An Introduction to You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory

Note: In April, I directed my senior thesis film, titled You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory, which received an Advanced Production allotment last fall from the Tisch School of the Arts. In order to receive the allotment, I had to pitch my film to Professor Yemane Demissie and the class in November. The first part of this blog entry is comprised of my pitch for the Advanced Production Workshop class, and the second part is comprised of text from my IndieGoGo campaign to fund the film (which was launched in February).

You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory Promo Video from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

The Pitch

To say that my Intermediate Narrative film The Wheels is auto-biographical would be somewhat accurate. The specific events in the movie never happened, but the film does kind of reflect how I feel about a lot of things, and maybe it represents some of the things I wish I'd said to my father, who passed away when I was eleven from alcoholism. But interestingly, making that film became a way of understanding him, and by the end of it, I actually feel more sympathy for his character than for the son. So, I don't know, maybe that says something about why we make these films.

My new film, You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory, is about Charlie, a socially inept twenty-six year-old who compulsively confesses every detail of his anti-social behavior to his mother, Hazel, with whom he still lives in Harlem. When his mother asks him to finally move out of her apartment, Charlie is forced to confront his greatest fears – losing his only life witness and living in a world without his only friend and confidante.

In the latest version of my script, there is no mention made of Charlie's father, but the implication is there - if his father so easily disappeared from this world (as an older draft stated, aside from an obituary and a few pictures around the house, you'd never know he existed), what's to stop Charlie from being forgotten completely, too? Particularly when the people around him – his girlfriend, members of his family, friends who abandon him – are, as he puts it, dropping like flies? At the end of the day, the only person who knows his life story, who has been a witness for his entire life, is his mother.

The film directly addresses so many of my fears and anxieties - of dying without being remembered, the need to be liked or to impress in social situations, fear of abandonment, the necessity of archiving and preserving memory, and wanting to have someone by your side who knows your entire journey, from start to finish. Psychologically, I'm not sure I can say where all of these obsessions come from. Maybe it is from losing my father, or watching the size of my family dwindle down to just a few people. At the beginning of this semester, about two months ago, my mom's sister, my aunt, passed away, and suddenly all of my worst fears embedded within this script were reconfirmed. If anything, that’s made me feel even closer to the project, and more certain that it expresses something that truly matters to me.

The way that the character in my film, Charlie, handles the loss around him isn't exactly mature. He's a self-obsessed character if there ever was one - crying out for love and attention from friends by acting like a buffoon, and then, knowing his behavior was unacceptable, confessing his behavior to his mother and expecting forgiveness, never once thinking of her struggles.

Along with the other three films I have made at NYU - With Love, Marty (2011), The Wheels (2012) and Jake the Cinephile (2013) - this new film represents part of a cinematic biography, with each of these movies dealing with a different aspect of my obsessions. These are all stories of alienated outsiders and social pariahs, of young men with strong, rigid moral codes, and the films concern their disenfranchisement with a world that doesn't share their values. You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory is the culmination of so many of these common concerns and themes.

In With Love, Marty, Marty obsesses over a new romantic conquest every few weeks. His desperate behavior drives his friends away, and his obsessive quest for love culminates in an ill-advised trip across the city to profess his love to a young woman he barely knows. She rejects him, and his night ends in disappointment. The obsessive behavior in The Wheels is the father’s unstoppable drinking – it destroys his relationship with his son, but he can’t seem to help it.

Disappointment plays a large role in these movies. In The Wheels, the son is continually let down by his father, and by the film’s end, he has distanced himself from his dad, not allowing himself to get hurt again. In Jake the Cinephile, Jake prefers watching films to having actual relationships with human beings, because the cinema has never disappointed Jake. When Jake tries to start a relationship with a young woman, his obsessive behavior eventually drives the young woman to throw him out on his feet. To Jake, though, this is simply a re-affirmation of what he already suspected – that people are disappointing and unreliable, and the cinema is his only true friend.

More than anything, though, these four pictures all seem to revolve around characters who are forced to come to terms with their unsustainable way of living. These men are pulled away from their comfort zones and pressured by outside forces to change their way of life. More often than not, however, they eventually retreat back to their original behavior.

When I think about why I've written these pieces, I think about the scene in my Advanced film where Charlie, in an act of desperation to form a connection with someone, goes overboard and starts overwhelming his realtor friend, Jim, with his deepest insecurities and fears. Jim becomes very uncomfortable, and withdraws from the conversation. And I think maybe that's what I'm doing with my work - reaching out and hoping that someone will understand me, or at the very least understand how I feel (without alienating them, hopefully, as Charlie alienates Jim in the film).

So what's different about this new film that I want to make in Advanced Production? If this is the same self-obsessed character making the same mistakes, why make another movie about him? This is what I want to address first.

Working with Yemane in this class has made me even more aware of how my movies deal explicitly with resistance to change. This theme has evolved over the four movies in a significant way. In With Love, Marty, I do believe Marty changes, even if only by a small degree. The Wheels, however, is pretty bleak. The father reverts completely back to his original state by the end of the movie – there is no indication that he will get sober. Jake the Cinephile is trickier. Jake loses both the girl and the cinema, and at the end of the movie, he comes face-to-face with himself for the first time. Is that progress? I don’t know.

Now that I’m aware of this reoccurring theme, however, I’m inclined to do something a little different with You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory. At face value, the ending – in which Charlie moves back in with his mother after being asked to move out – would seem to represent a total retreat back to Charlie’s comfort zone. However, I’ve always viewed the ending a little differently – I think that Charlie has learned how much his mother means to him, and how scary it will one day be for him to let go of her. Rather than moving out, however, I believe Charlie deals with this fear by treating his mother differently at the end of the film, with more care and compassion. Yemane and I have talked a lot about Charlie's journey here, and it's become clear that, although you can't expect Charlie to change radically by the end of the film, maybe we can see a character who is ready to listen to his mother.

Maybe it is unhealthy for mother and son to live together for the years to come. But the end of my Advanced film poses the question, what if they truly need each other? What if Charlie learns, over time, to be there for his mother, as his mother is there for him? There’s a strange sense of comfort, if not hope, in that ending, that I don’t believe exists in the other films. With this movie, I want to work toward a new kind of ending – something that’s still true and perhaps a little melancholy, but one that also acknowledges growth and, perhaps, hope.

Inspiration and Style

I'm going to cross over here to inspiration. With all of this talk of guilt, confession, social anxiety and obsessiveness, there's one filmmaker who I really respond to over any others, and that's Martin Scorsese, who is the king of the cinema of loneliness.

The visual style of Mean Streets (1973) is a big influence on the bar scenes in my movie, not only because they are stylistically similar to what I want to achieve, but also because the beginning chapter of Mean Streets was a major influence on me when thinking of how to introduce my character in my script. In one of the opening scenes in Mean Streets, we follow the protagonist, also named Charlie (Harvey Keitel), through the bar and observe his behavior with his friends. In this scene, Scorsese introduces the camera’s subjectivity toward Charlie, and the bar is also used to represent a world of sin. Look at the way Scorsese follows Charlie steadily as he dances through the bar and makes his way onstage to dance with the woman – this is not totally dissimilar to the kind of subjective camera movement I would like to do in my scene, perhaps when my Charlie walks up to the bar and starts ranting to the bartender, doing his Jack Nicholson impression. We also learn quite a bit about Scorsese’s Charlie based on his interaction with his friends – he’s immediately separated from the rest of his friends because he insists on punishing himself, or testing the fires of hell, by holding his finger above an open flame. We then understand that Charlie exists in a more emotionally conflicted universe than the people around him. We’re introduced to both his physical world and his internal, emotional world.

There are two very different worlds in my Advanced film. The first world, of course, is the world of the bar. It will be drenched in red light – open, spacey and a kind of platform where Charlie can go wild with his behavior. The lighting and production design in this scene will emphasize that we’re looking at this bar as a kind of hell for Charlie (very similar to Mean Streets). This is the world of sin, the world of Manhattan – the world away from his mother. The bar stands in contrast to the later scenes in Harlem.

The other world, of course, is that small, cramped Harlem apartment where he lives with his mother. These two environments will stand apart drastically with the film’s production design, as the apartment will be full of furniture, scattered boxes on the floor, and dirty clothes. My hope is for the apartment to convey a real sense of confession, as if Charlie is in a dark confessional booth, defeated by his own behavior. It is almost as if Charlie, squeezed into that Harlem apartment, is forced to come to terms with his inappropriate behavior, whereas the wide-open bar is a playground, where he is free to act like a buffoon and go wild.

The Campaign – The Crew and Logistics

I'm incredibly lucky to get to work with so many people who have been on my creative team for the past three films, as well. Our incredible crew includes producers Erica Rose and Harry Tarre, cinematographer Benjamin Dewey, sound mixer and sound designer Bobb Barito, and production designer David Jaffe – many of whom did outstanding work on my previous films. (Current Jack here – take a look at Ben’s latest cinematography reel below, which features footage from You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory and The Wheels).

Ben Dewey 2013 Cinematography Reel from Benjamin Dewey on Vimeo.

The Impact

We truly believe that if you help us, you will be part of a great and powerful movie. Without the proper financing, however, the film cannot be made. The costs for film equipment, location fees, transportation, and meals for the cast and crew, among many other things, are overwhelming, and outside financial support is critical to the successful production of this film.

As I’ve been making more movies and working with slightly larger budgets, with each new film I think I’m getting closer to achieving what I want in terms of style. For one, I’m trying to incorporate more and more expressive uses of camera movement. Jake the Cinephile is really where I started dipping my toes into a more subjective, expressionistic kind of filmmaking, experimenting with a moving camera – and that’s what I’m hoping to really embrace and expand on with this new film.

My Intermediate Narrative film The Wheels won the Best Student Film award at the 2012 Metropolitan Film Festival of New York, and was an Official Selection of the 2012 Coney Island Film Festival. The film also received high praise from professors at the Tisch School of the Arts. My previous film, With Love, Marty, was an Official Selection of The 2011 Big Apple Film Festival, the 2012 World Music and Independent Film Festival in Washington, D.C., and the Emerging Filmmaker’s Series in Rochester, NY.

We already have an incredible ensemble of actors line up to star in the film, including Mike Wesolowski, who will play Charlie. Mike is a senior in the Atlantic Acting School at the Tisch School of the Arts, currently studying acting under Alec Baldwin. Mary Goggin, an extremely talented actress who has acted in films such as Little Children (2006), will be playing Hazel.

What We Need & What You Get

We need your help. As you can imagine, as a senior thesis film, the scope of the picture is far-reaching. We truly want this to be a film where New York City itself plays a key character in the story, and so we are shooting in many different locations around the city – including a three-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, a bar in the East Village, a restaurant to double as the Times Square Olive Garden, another restaurant in the West Village, along with several night exteriors in midtown Manhattan and Harlem.

Our budget includes fees for these extraordinary locations, additional equipment rentals, transportation costs, anamorphic camera lenses, and meals for an entire week of shooting. The shoot begins in a little more than one month, and in that time, we need to raise as much money as possible.

As I head into rehearsals with the actors and continue pre-production with my longtime collaborators, I cannot tell you how much I would appreciate it if you would consider contributing to this campaign. We will not be able to make this film without your help. And if you are among those who were so generous to contribute to Jake the Cinephile last summer, I’m so excited to share that film with you in the very near future.

We are working as hard as we can to make this picture a reality by April. Any donation you can make – however small – would be absolutely incredible. Our deadline is quickly approaching, but with your help, we know that we can make this film. On the right, we have listed the perks for contributing to this production. (Current Jack here - thank you so much for reading about my new film, and lastly, please take a look at our wonderful Steadicam operator Patrick Morgan's reel, which includes footage from You Can't Put You Arms Around A Memory):

Patrick Morgan Steadicam Reel Spring 2013 from Patrick Huw Morgan on Vimeo.

Screening Jake the Cinephile

On Friday, June 14th, I premiered the final cut of my new film Jake the Cinephile to my friends and professors at the Tisch School of the Arts, alongside Jordan Fein's film White Carpet and Nicole Cobb's film Athanasia's Waltz, both of which I worked on as Assistant Director. It was such an honor to screen my movies alongside two great films by two of my friends, and we were very lucky to have a large crowd come out to see the pictures. By the way, check out the second trailer for Jake the Cinephile below.

Jake the Cinephile Trailer #2 from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

The feedback on Jake the Cinephile has been overwhelmingly positive, and I have been so moved to hear that many people are connecting with this character. My professor Laszlo Santha, who has always been a champion of my work, wrote that the film had "way above average confidence in every department," and he truly enjoyed the film, complementing my acting and directing. He found some faults with the second half of the film, but still felt "the first ten minutes [were] delightful," and the casting of my "love interest worked very well."

Professor John Belton, Professor of English and Film at Rutgers University, the respected author of five books including Widescreen Cinema and American Cinema/American Culture, and the recipient of a 2005-2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, wrote the following:

"The film got to me because it looks at the borderline between the pleasure of a purely private experience and the innate desire to share that experience with another. There is love of the movies that can be utopian and perfect (Mystic River) and we'd like our other relationships to be that perfect too. You are not afraid to take your character to painful places - to push utopian ideals of perfection to a messy space of lived experience. (I recall the elation I've often felt after watching a film and then walking out into the street and becoming overwhelmed by depression.) So, yes, you did take yourself to where the wild things are."

In addition, Professor Belton invited me to screen Jake the Cinephile for his Introduction to Film class at Rutgers University in the fall.

My friend Grant Rosenmeyer (The Royal Tenenbaums) wrote that he loved the film - that "it was even better than the script," and "Ben's cinematography was gorgeous, the story was clear, [the] direction spot on" and "the Scorsese references bled through with such affection and passion, and yet it was so unflinchingly you." Grant also wrote that he believes that there is a feature film to be made with this character, something even more along the lines of Taxi Driver.

"Cinema for Jake is not even a love anymore, it's an addiction," Grant wrote. "And like an addict, he's chasing the high he can't achieve. That high - the perfect moviegoing experience - is just a mirage, a placeholder for something more in his life: love, acceptance, a sense of belonging or intimacy that can finally defeat his fear of abandonment. We can see he needs love, but can he see it? By the end of the movie does he find love, or does he fuck it up the way he does in the short, but worse?" 

Additionally, my Advanced Production professor Yemane Demissie invited me to screen Jake the Cinephile for his Sight and Sound: Film class at NYU last week, and it was such a fulfilling and rewarding experience. His students really empathized strongly with the character and the material, connecting with Jake throughout the entire film - even when he is yelling angrily at Elizabeth, as they felt his pain and frustration so deeply. It was very exciting sharing the film with them. 

Many students remarked that they knew someone exactly like Jake - in fact, one student said she had seen people in the Cinema Studies department at NYU behave like Jake when trying to watch a movie in their theater. As film students, they remarked that they particularly enjoyed and understood the material. One student said that he knows a film is doing its job if it can make him feel every bit as uncomfortable as the character in the film, and this movie made him feel incredibly uncomfortable throughout. Another student told me he felt so strongly about everything Jake said, especially when he puts his heart out there to Elizabeth on her apartment stoop. 

The students had many different interpretations of the ending - one student said she thought the last shot, in which Jake stares at his reflection in the television screen, was hopeful, as he's finally watching a movie at home and not blowing up or starting the movie over again. She felt that the character did change over the course of the film - the climatic blow-up is probably the event that makes Jake finally examine his behavior and change. Another student interpreted the ending very differently - he felt that Jake was more imprisoned and alone than ever by the picture's end, and all of his horrible experiences and frustrations are represented by this small, crappy television in his bedroom, where he's forced to stare at him own reflection. This student realized, after Elizabeth points it out, that Jake has likely never had a "perfect experience" at a movie before, and that becomes clear at the end when he watches a movie alone on his crappy TV, which is the source of all of his frustration. 

Yemane asked me to address to use of popular music in the film, particularly the meaning of "I Am A Rock" by Simon & Garfunkel at the end of the movie. The song, Yemane believed, is meant to be taken literally, but also perhaps ironically, too. We discussed some of the other music in the film, as well, including "Sweet Dreams (Of You)" by Patsy Cline.

We discussed how you make a rather unlikeable or difficult character likable or relatable (the key, Yemane thinks, is to show their vulnerability). One student said it was difficult to dislike Jake because there's never anything malicious about his behavior - he is simply fighting for the things he loves, even when Jake berates Elizabeth and yells at her. We have these private moments in the film with Jake, such as when he's walking on the city streets, or alone in his bedroom at the end, and we get a profound sense of his deep loneliness and vulnerability. 

I was also happy to hear that my film incorporated elements of nearly every exercise the students are given in the Sight and Sound: Film course, including music, voiceover, three-point lighting, offscreen sound, parallel action and special effects lighting. 

More than anything, Yemane commended me for making such a bold movie that revealed so much about me, and it was a joy screening the film for his class.

I have received so many other kind comments from friends and professors who enjoyed the film (including one of my fellow Advanced Production students, the great filmmaker Eduardo Lecuona, who gave me the very kind shout-out on Twitter to the right). My friend and former Austin High School administrator Dan Fuchs also wrote that Jake the Cinephile is "both funny and troubling; Kyser is not afraid to laugh at himself, while simultaneously shining a light on the alienation many feel as we search for perfection in an imperfect world." The film "speaks to that part of all film lovers that longs for that mythical bygone time when going to movies could be a 'perfect experience.'"

Aside from my article on the passing of Roger Ebert and writing about some outstanding new films, I have not updated this blog in some time, and I am eager to share details about my final semester at NYU, shooting my senior thesis film You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory in April and many other events from the past few months. Before I close this article, however, I want to pay tribute to the wonderful Professor Geoff Erb, who passed away earlier this month. He was a champion of my work, inviting my crew and me to screen The Wheels for his freshman class last year, and asking me to be a part of his Advanced Television Production class my senior year. He was a great person and teacher, and I am so sad to hear of his passing. Professor Erb was the Cinematographer for Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, shooting over 130 episodes of the series. 

I was also very devastated to read of James Gandolfini's passing. What an extraordinary actor, who just last year delivered three of his best performances in Zero Dark Thirty, Not Fade Away and Killing Them Softly. He blew me away onstage in God of Carnage on Broadway in 2009, and I was lucky enough to meet him after the show. With his mesmerizing and natural performances in The Man Who Wasn't There, Where the Wild Things Are, Get Shorty, In the Loop and, of course, The Sopranos, he was one of the finest actors around. Just a few days after his death, Bruce Springsteen performed a beautiful tribute to Gandolfini by playing the entire Born to Run album live. 

The beginning to this summer involved a great deal of preparation for Jake the Cinephile, as Bobb finished his brilliant sound design for the movie, and we worked on mix sessions for the film at Tisch in the days leading up to the screening. Earlier in the semester, Bobb held an ADR session with Bethany McHugh, who plays Elizabeth in the film, and me, where we re-recorded some of our lines. 

In February, my film The Wheels opened Screening #2 of NYU's New Visions and Voices Intermediate Film Festival, screening at the Tisch School of the Arts along with several other films. I did not get to attend the screening, as I was heading out for the second weekend of my friend Morgan Ingari's senior thesis film shoot in Boston. I also took some time to finally mail out the beautiful poster Ben Dewey designed for The Wheels to IndieGoGo contributors. That film was completed more than one year ago, but better to send the posters out late than never! 

Finally, my film With Love, Marty - from my sophomore year of college - is now public on Vimeo, having screened at the 2011 Big Apple Film Festival, the Emerging Filmmakers Series in Rochester, New York and the 2012 World Music and Independent Film Festival in Washington D.C. You can watch it now!

With Love, Marty - A Film By Jack Kyser from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

Film Festivals - Screening With Love, Marty and The Wheels

Before the new semester starts, I want to write briefly about my experiences with a few film festivals over the past year. I have had the pleasure of screening my last two films - The Wheels and With Love, Marty - theatrically at festivals in New York. Earlier this summer, I received notice that my film The Wheels won the Best Student Film award at the 2012 Metropolitan Film Festival of New York City. The Wheels premiered at the festival on Saturday, July 14th at The Producer's Club Theater on West 44th Street, screening alongside two other films in the final block of the evening. I was very lucky to have some of my collaborators on The Wheels accompany me to the screening, including actor Tom Corbisiero (who played the father in the film), cinematographer Benjamin Dewey and sound designer and mixer Bobb Barito.

Together, we accepted the Best Student Film award, and I participated in a brief Q&A with the audience after the screening (along with the other filmmakers whose work screened with The Wheels). I was so honored to receive this award for the project, and it was fantastic being able to have a "premiere," of sorts, for the movie (although I showed The Wheels alongside a few other student films at a small screening in Tisch earlier this year). If you want to see the full list of winners from the 2012 Metropolitan Film Festival of New York, please click on this link to their official website. If you are interested in seeing the official pictures from the festival (including me accepting the award), please click on this link. I will include some of the pictures from the festival in this post (and other pictures in a later post).

At the same time, my film With Love, Marty was nominated for the Best Student Film Award at the World Music and Independent Film Festival in Washington, D.C. I will not be able to attend the festival, which takes place from August 19th to August 25th, but I am excited for a film I finished over one year ago to still be nominated somewhere! If you want to see the full list of nominees for the World Music and Independent Film Festival, please click on this link to their official website.

Last November, With Love, Marty first premiered as an Official Selection of The 2011 Big Apple Film Festival in New York City. The movie, which was nominated for Best Student Film, screened at Tribeca Cinemas on Thursday, November 3rd in Program 16, along with five other films. In fact, With, Love Marty screened back-to-back with my good friend and roommate Bobb Barito's film Lead Me To The Clouds, for which I served as Assistant Director (the movies were both shot around the same time in April of 2011). It was a bizarre coincidence that our films screened back-to-back, and we had a great time attending the festival together and participating in a brief Q&A after the screening with the audience.

With Love, Marty was a particularly fun festival premiere because not only did Benjamin Dewey and actress Karen McFarlane join me for the screening, but the lead actress, the wonderful Alexis Gay, brought a large group of her friends and family members to the screening, ensuring that With Love, Marty had a large support group in the audience. Before and after the screening, we took some pictures in the cinema alongside the posters for With Love, Marty (designed by the endlessly talented Mr. Dewey). After the festival, the Marty crowd went to Alexis' apartment for post-screening food and drinks. It was an incredibly fun evening, and a wonderful festival experience for both Bobb and me. To check out The Big Apple Film Festival's 2011 Program Guide (including information about With Love, Marty and Lead Me To The Clouds), please visit this link to their website.

With Love, Marty also screened as an Official Selection of the Emerging Filmmakers Series in Rochester, New York last December. Because I was in Austin at the time, I was unable to attend the screening, but I recently came across an online blogger who had some kind words for the film. Read what Jason Olshefsky had to say about the movie by following this link to his blog. Here's a brief quote from his review:

"Starting out was With Love, Marty by Jack Kyser in which Kyser plays the central character: a college-age man desperate for the affection of a specific woman. I found his presentation to be brutally honest from all angles - I know from experience how it is to desperately desire someone, and to resort to honest, direct means that work only to sabotage any possible relationship."

I want to thank all of the great people who made these two movies with me. I'm thrilled to work with so many talented people, many of whom also did outstanding work on Jake the Cinephile just recently. I'm hoping to hear back from some more festivals in the near future, but until then, I wanted to give you a brief rundown of my experience with New York film festivals thus far. Bobb and Ben are similarly sending out their Intermediate Narrative films, Max Ages and Quitting, to many film festivals currently, and I look forward to seeing their pictures premiere at festivals (I had the honor of working as Assistant Director on both of those films, as well as editing Quitting). It's really something else to screen your work for a live audience - unnerving, certainly, but also quite gratifying. Thank you so much to the festivals for screening my work. 

An Introduction to Jake the Cinephile

Note: This summer, I wrote, directed and starred in a new film titled Jake the Cinephile. In a series of new posts, I will describe in great detail the production process of this picture. On July 19th, my IndieGoGo campaign to finance Jake the Cinephile officially ended. Not only did my team and I reach our $3500.00 goal, but - thanks to the enormous generosity of our contributors - we exceeded our goal by more than $500.00! The following is an email I sent out to our extraordinary IndieGoGo contributors a few days after we wrapped shooting: 

Dear Contributors,

Last weekend, my crew and I successfully completed principal photography on Jake the Cinephile. Thanks to your incredible contributions, we were able to have the most wonderful film shoot possible.

Jake the Cinephile Promo Video from Jack Kyser on Vimeo.

After a long day of renting out film equipment from several equipment houses on Thursday, July 26th, we began shooting early Friday morning at Tavern on Jane, a terrific West Village restaurant owned by the wonderful Horton Foote, Jr., who very graciously let us shoot in his establishment. After shooting there for five hours, we moved to our cinematographer Benjamin Dewey’s apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn to shoot one of the longer passages of the film, taking place on his apartment stoop and the sidewalk. The actress, the incredibly talented Bethany McHugh, and I shared one of our most important and poignant scenes, and this nighttime exterior accounts for some of the most beautiful footage in the film.

We shot Jake the Cinephile, by the way, on a Red Scarlet camera – one of the finest cameras available – thanks to the generosity of our 1st Assistant Cameraman, Justin Levine, who owns the camera. Ben and I decided to shoot the film with anamorphic lenses, which means the final film will have very wide frames.

On Saturday, one of our gaffers, Jon Annunziata, drove the crew and me up to Beacon, New York in a passenger van, where we were granted permission to shoot in the Beacon Theatre all day, under the supervision of its extraordinarily kind owner, Mr. Jim Brady. Our Assistant Director, Mike Cheslik, drove our equipment up separately with Ben, and we commenced shooting in the afternoon all the way into the late of night in the cinema. The footage from the theater shoot is quite fantastic – not only did the Beacon Theatre provide us with some outstanding production value, we were able to pull off some impressive camera movement in the space (and these scenes also allowed many of our crew members, including Mike, Jon, producer Erica Rose, gaffer Alexander Fofonoff and boom operator Charlie Rivera to make cameos in the movie as unruly cinema patrons). Also, actor Tom Corbisiero, who starred in my Intermediate Narrative film The Wheels, and actress Karen Mcfarlane, who starred in my film With Love, Marty, both joined us in Beacon for the shoot, and they did extraordinary work as even more obnoxious cinema patrons.

Because a large skylight overlooks the Beacon Theatre stage (and it is nearly impossible to block out the light with a tarp, as we did not have roof access), Ben and our G&E department ingeniously constructed a forty-foot tall, forty-foot wide silk on the stage with outrageously tall pipes that successfully blocked out the light for our entire day of shooting (until night set in) – you’d have to see this thing to believe it. After wrapping shooting for the day, the owner presented me with a souvenir from the theater – an original, large marquee letter (K, for Kyser) from when the Beacon first opened as a cinema in the 1930s (before then, it was an opera house that first began operating in the late 1800s).

After getting home late Saturday night, we set up early the next morning in my Lower East Side apartment for the most intense day of shooting yet – the ten-page climatic scene that ends the movie. This was a difficult performance day for both Bethany and me, as the scene gets fairly intense, and we had to run the oftentimes brutal and uncomfortable scene an endless number of times. Luckily, our art director, Madeline Wall, had already completed the outstanding production design in my apartment (including putting up wallpaper, re-decorating our bookshelves and kitchen area, and changing the look of the apartment entirely) the week before shooting began. This scene really makes the movie, and although it was a physically exhausting scene (I admit to losing my voice completely by the end of the shoot), it was an exhilarating thing to film, and I couldn’t be more proud of the work we did.

Throughout the shoot, producers Harry Tarre and Erica Rose (as well as Line Producer Liz DeBold) provided us with nourishing food and water at all times, and Mike ran our set with more energy and efficiency than I’ve ever seen from an Assistant Director (which was essential, given that I was both directing and acting in the film). It’s also worth mentioning that Mike drove our Budget Van with all of our equipment the entire weekend – I cannot thank him enough for that. Both Bethany and I received feedback and acting advice constantly from script supervisor Nicole Cobb, who accompanied me to many rehearsals and served as a back-up director and reinforcer of performance notes. And my roommate and good friend Bobb Barito was our sound mixer, and I feel so lucky to continue my collaboration with him (he’s well-known as one of the best sound designers at our school).

If you are friends with me on Facebook, be sure to check out some of our set photographs that I have posted in an album (taken by our set photographer and media manager Jeremy Keller, who backed up our camera cards of footage every day on several hard drives). This will give you an inside look behind-the-scenes of our massive shoot. In the coming weeks, I will post stills from the actual film. Ben and I are in the process of un-squeezing all of our footage at the Tisch School of the Arts Post-Production Center (which essentially means converting the footage to the right anamorphic settings). I hope you’ll find that the movie looks as extremely professional as I do – because of your generosity, we were able to shoot with state-of-the-art film equipment, obtain incredible locations, and provide for a crew that nearly exceeded twenty people at one time. In short, I have you to thank for the professionalism of this film.

I also want to thank the entire crew of Jake the Cinephile – I can’t begin to express my gratitude to Bethany and the outstanding crew of geniuses, including Ben, Mike, Erica, Harry, Bobb, Nicole, Justin, Madeline, Jon, Nicholas Giuricich, Tomson Tee, Alex, Jeremy, Liz, Dennis Dembeck, Tom and Karen. I’m so honored to work with these brilliant and talented individuals.

IndieGoGo will only let me post one image per update, and it’s incredibly tough to just show three pictures from our extraordinary shooting weekend. They don’t represent even one-eighteenth of the things you made possible with your contributions! I do not know how to begin thanking all of you for your enormous kindness and support in making this movie possible. I look forward to keeping you updated with the progress of Jake the Cinephile, as we finish shooting pick-up material this upcoming week and head into post-production on the film. Thank you so much for believing in me and this project.

Sincerely,

Jack Kyser