AFF Diary: Clear Cut, Ghostbusters

On Saturday I finally decided to go to some of the conference sessions for Austin Film Festival. I could not resist the potential fun of writer-director Judd Apatow interviewing writer-director Harold Ramis, whose film The Ice Harvest had screened at the festival the previous evening. Also, I knew that if I didn't get downtown early, before all the University of Texas football traffic, I would never be able to find parking for the movies I planned to see later that afternoon. People in burnt-orange Longhorn shirts were everywhere on Saturday.

The first panel did not disappoint. Apatow apparently interviewed Ramis for a radio show in the early 1980s and had saved a photo from that momentous event. In fact, he blew up the photo to poster size so all of us could see. It was full of Eighties goodness, including a bulletin board in the background that appeared to be covered in headshots from the Vacation cast.

I liked this line from Ramis about his directorial style: "I thrive on disaster. I get really excited when things go wrong." He thinks the basis of his success as a director is due in part to the experience he gained in his first job out of college: working in a locked mental institution. "It expanded my tolerance for extremes of human behavior, which was wonderful training for working with actors."
The session was a pleasant combination of personal interview and hints for aspiring filmmakers/screenwriters. Oh, and I have to mention the guy in the audience who referred to Ramis's latest film as Ice Castles. Oh, honey. I don't even want to think about the potential film noir aspects or existential dilemmas posed in Ice Castles.

After lunch (and why are most of the good lunch places in that part of downtown closed on Saturday?), I decided to try another panel, one on how to create buzz for your films. I'm on the wrong side of this panel—I tend to affect buzz for other people's films—but the panel participants included Janet Pierson and Austin filmmaker Bryan Poyser, two people I thought I would enjoy hearing on this topic.

Poyser gave one piece of advice to filmmakers that I absolutely agree with: have some really good still photos taken, which you can post on the film's Web site and send with press releases. If I'm profiling a couple of films in a festival entry like this one, I check the Web sites for images from the film to use at the top of the entry. Pierson also stressed the importance of having a Web site for your film, something else I agree is important.

After that panel ended, I thought it would be fun to go to the session with Mike Judge. He was interviewed by one of the King of the Hill writers, Jim Dauterive, but most of the time was spent answering audience questions. A lot of the audience members looked high-school age and wanted to ask about Beavis and Butthead. And there was a lot of talk about propane and propane products. I realized that a lot of these sessions would be more enjoyable if the panelists were able to show clips on a handy screen. The Mike Judge session seemed a bit blah and I wasn't sorry to sneak out early so I could catch a screening at The Hideout.

The audience for the documentary Clear Cut: The Story of Philomath, Oregon, was the biggest audience I'd seen for a film at The Hideout. The theater was at least half-full. Unfortunately, I think we saw Clear Cut in the wrong aspect ratio. Everyone looked horizontally stretched, which was terribly unflattering and a little distracting at times. But the filmmaker was right behind me and didn't say anything, so maybe it was my imagination.

Clear Cut is a documentary about the town of Philomath, Oregon, which has historically been a big logging town. A successful timber businessman, Rex Clemens, founded an organization that awarded college scholarships to every Philomath high-school graduate, because he feared the logging industry was in decline and wanted the town's kids to have other options. However, he died in 1985 and the Clemens foundation is in the hands of people who disapprove of the way the Philomath public schools are run. The foundation demanded that the school superintendent be removed or else they would discontinue the scholarships.

It's a sad story. The Clemens Foundation people feel like they are honestly working to fix problems in the local schools, but as a result, fewer kids from the area are able to go to college. The movie would make a great double-feature with a documentary I saw at SXSW, The Education of Shelby Knox, which also deals with small-town public schools.

Director Peter Richardson told the audience that he was from Philomath and had received the Clemens foundation money to attend college, before the dispute with the public schools occurred. He didn't intrude himself into the film, preferring to try to present both sides of the situation as fairly as he could. He said when he showed the movie in Philomath, people on both sides felt he'd favored their side in the film.

The Hideout is only about a block away from the Paramount, so after the Clear Cut Q&A finished, I was able to walk over to the other theater for the next screening. I decided to watch a movie that I had seen before and that is widely available on DVD: Ghostbusters. I wanted to see the movie with a big audience, and I wanted to see a movie that I wouldn't review in my head the whole time. Besides, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson were doing a Q&A afterwards.

A large, lively audience did show up for Ghostbusters. I got a kick out of the little boy, maybe 6 years old, sitting behind me and asking questions the whole time. "What's a spore?" "Is that really marshmallow? I want to be covered in marshmallow!"

I also remembered what I didn't like about this movie when I first saw it in a theater in 1984: Bill Murray. I never liked watching Murray back then; I found his characters to be arrogant, obnoxious, and entirely without charm. I hated that this movie spent a disproportionate time with a character I didn't want to see, who seemed to hog every scene he was in. At the end of the movie, everyone is covered in marshmallow ... except Murray's character, who has a token bit of fluff on the side of his head and maybe one shoulder. Heaven forbid the star should have to hide his visage in marshmallow goo. I liked Murray in Tootsie only because he wasn't in it for very long; the first time I actually liked him in a leading role was in Groundhog Day (I generally enjoy watching his more recent films.)

Also—true confessions time—at the time the movie came out, I had a little crush on Harold Ramis. I hate admitting to these things. I think I found something attractive in the dead-serious geek character. It occurs to me that I dated a disproportionate number of tall, thin, dark-haired geeks in high school and college. I seem to have gotten over it, although my current boyfriend is a Linux programmer, so maybe not. (He looks nothing like Ramis, at least.) Anyway, it was amusing to me to see that I no longer find the character attractive at all. I liked Ghostbusters, but nowhere near as much as I did in 1984, and not as much as I still like Animal House. Does the movie date, or is it me? Maybe a little of both.

After the movie, Ramis and Hudson answered audience questions about the writing process, their roles, and working with Bill Murray. Brian at Cinema Strikes Back has all the details on this Q&A session.

Two things stood out for me. One was Hudson's hinting that his character had been much more prominent in the draft of the screenplay he read when he accepted the role. His character originally appeared at the beginning of the film, not an hour into it. He didn't want to say much about it, but Ramis confirmed that changes had been made at the behest of bigger-name people who felt that the stars of the movie deserved all the best scenes and lines. Very Hollywood. I suspect Bill Murray, but as you can tell, I am totally biased about it.

The other thing was that the little boy behind me asked Ramis a question: "How did you make all the monsters?" Some audience members laughed at the question, but Ramis handled it with grace and respect, and interested the whole audience by remarking that Slimer was based on the late John Belushi. I was impressed. Still don't have a crush on him anymore, though.