Behind the scenes at a Sequoyah Hills movie shoot
by Jack Neely
If you were in Sequoyah Hills walking down the Keowee Avenue sidewalk several days ago, you likely wondered about the clutter in the old apartments' usually neat courtyard. You might have seen people sitting in chairs, smoking cigarettes, working New York Times crossword puzzles. They're out here because it's getting too crowded, too intense inside apartment 3730 W, where they're making a movie about a bizarre murder.
Inside those doors are bulky, expensive equipment and about 15 people shouting orders you don't understand about "safeties" and "C-47s" and "meataxes," and if you sneeze or giggle or move a little bit this way or that way at the wrong time, they're all going to be mad at you. A well-dressed older lady sidles up to you and whispers, in a thick Georgia accent, "It's studied chaos."
This particular chaos is called The Sleep Seeker and stars Jayne Morgan, who also directs it, as well as Kara Kemp, David Alley, Linda Parris Bailey, and Fran Shea, actors well known in local productions.
Unlike October Sky or Box of Moonlight, this one isn't coming to a cineplex near you. It's a short independent film, not for the mass market. Still, the producer and director have hopes for it getting attention in national film festivals next spring.
It must have seemed simple enough. You've got some money, you've got a script, you've got some talented actors and a camera crew willing to work cheap, and you've got an ideal location. The only thing left to do is make a movie.
There's one more detail. You have four days. It's Friday, and everybody has to be somewhere else on Tuesday morning. All of these folks have other jobs, and some of them have other jobs in other states.
Jayne Morgan is Knoxville's Meryl Streep. Perennial winner of Best Local Actress in the Metro Pulse Readers' Poll, Morgan is a regular in numerous stage productions here and beyond. She has acted in plays, she has directed plays. She has helped cast movies, and recently played a role in the feature-length independent film, A Good Baby, which got a good review in the Hollywood Reporter earlier this year and is still making the festival rounds, awaiting wider distribution.
Until this month, she had never directed a movie. As she acts, she's entirely in the role, working on timing and inflection. Morgan has already plotted out the shots, but her colleague Michelle Orr, the assistant director, seems to be in charge when the camera's about to roll. Orr, back home after several years acting in commercials and TV shows in Los Angeles, seems like she's been directing all her life. When she makes a correction, Morgan takes them, sometimes a little tensely. "Thank you," says Morgan. "You're welcome," says Orr. "Dorcas."
It sounds like an insult, but they're both smiling. Dorcas is the name of Morgan's troubled character.
Morgan met Staci Swedeen about 17 years ago when they were both semi-employed actresses in New York and found work as Virginia Slims girls at Kennedy Airport. Tall, thin, and blonde, Swedeen is exactly what you would picture someone named Swedeen would look like. She grew up in Washington state, but has lived for years in North Tarrytown, New York, a town she and her husband spearheaded changing back to its more dramatic original name, Sleepy Hollow.
Years ago, she wrote a script based on a news story she'd read. "A woman in upstate New York called the police to report a murder," she recalls. "When they arrived, she said, 'Go dig underneath that tree. I've sat here for 35 years, and I can't get any sleep.'" What they found under the tree was her child's long-buried body.
Swedeen couldn't get the story out of her head. She made a play about a woman haunted by the cries of a nonexistent baby. Her script won some awards, wound up in a drama anthology, and encouraged her that the idea would carry a short film.
For a location, she wanted a place with a two-story apartment building, pre-war, not too urban, with trees in a yard. When Swedeen and Morgan had a good look at Sequoyah Village Apartments, they looked no further. The circa 1936 brick complex is interlaced with a variety of trees. The residents are mostly pretty quiet, unlikely to interfere. It seemed ideal. They opted for this one in part because the two people who lived there were college boys who had almost nothing to move out—just a futon, a TV, a Vols banner, an empty pony keg, a Ronald Reagan poster.
Although Swedeen is author and producer (and plays a minor role as an alcoholic neighbor), during the shoot she hangs back, stays out of the way, trusting her old friend Jayne to get the best out of her script. She's impressed with the whole crew, most of whom are working at cut rates. "There's a lot of talent down here," she says, plus a good variety of locations to shoot. All the city lacks, she says, is investors.
In hours, the "art" people—that's mainly Carol Goans and Vicki Sparks, both veteran actors—transform the sparse bachelor pad into the cozy apartment of a sentimental middle-aged woman who's slowly going mad. The furniture came from Goans' house. Today, they're fretting about continuity. Scenes are shot and reshot with other scenes in between. It's a job just to keep everything looking just as it did the last time: the teapot filled to the same level, the same pictures on the wall in the same place.
Saturday morning there's a minor crisis in a scene where Morgan's Dorcas is gesturing with a ball-point pen. They shot it yesterday. Now they can't find the pen. They have plenty other pens, but not the very one.
"What did it look like?"
"It was white plastic." Goans eyes this reporter's pen. "Like that one!" She seizes it and hands it to Morgan. In moments, the pen is on film. It's a small sacrifice.
Goans, who has an unsettling tendency to break into a cockney accent without warning, is also in charge of bagels. There's a poppyseed bagel in one scene with a chunk bitten out of it. If the art people have done their job right, it will look like one bagel in the final cut. The audience doesn't need to know it's actually three: one from Fresh Market, two from New York Bagel.
All the interior shooting is in this one apartment: a small living room, a smaller dining room, and a tiny kitchen. It serves not only as Dorcas' apartment, in various states of neglect, but also, with a paneling backdrop, as her office, where she deals with her boss, played by David Alley. For four days, this is a true studio apartment.
Inside, the voices of the rehearsing actors and the voices of the technicians weave together. You sometimes can't distinguish the anxiety of a woman going mad because she's becoming dimly aware that she killed her child—and the anxiety of a hungry camera crew trying to finish a scene before lunch.
"Pedestal lamp left!" shouts the guy with the short graying beard and the ball cap, who's squinting into the camera. "More! A little more! Give me a half blue. Is that double or is that full?"
On the set, he's the most intimidating presence, the one whose voice sends large men scurrying. But then, there he is, sweeping the floor.
"It's a real independent picture when your DP is sweeping the floor," says gaffer Josh Beach. DP is Director of Photography, and his name is Steve Anderson. Sweeping's an important job right now and he wants to be sure it's done exactly right. The camera rolls on a dolly with rubber wheels. A hunk of dust could ruin the shot with a bump, or add an unwelcome crunch to the soundtrack. Yesterday they were running it on a 12-foot-long curved metal track which they had to keep coated with baby powder and Endust, but by Monday it's out on loan. Fickle rental equipment is one of the challenges of independent film.
Commanding more esteem than any individual here is Anderson's companion: an Arriflex 16SR3, valued at a quarter of a million dollars. Swedeen won't say what they rented it for, and the others claim not to know, but it came with daily insurance, and someone came with it from Nashville to tend it and keep an eye on it.
Clipped to Josh Beach's denim shirt are several wooden clothespins. Except, on a set, they're not clothespins. They're C-47's. Why a wooden clothespin might be named for a World War II cargo plane is unclear. A meataxe is a big screen on a pole that blocks out light from windows. Duct tape, maybe the most useful item on the set, is known as duct tape.
There's something about how busy and demanding the crew is that makes you think they're New Yorkers, but most of this competent crew is local, including Bobby Tucillo, the sound man who has to be as tall as he is just to hold the boom over the actors. Most of them have never worked on a drama before, but they've done enough shoots for Cinetel and HGTV and local commercials that they know what they're doing. Among the worthy locals is an extra, a tiny black dog. When he arrives with his handlers, Jayne announces, "Mr. Sniffy is here! Our therapist is here!"
Semi-New Yorker Swedeen says, "Stephen's the only real New Yorker here."
Stephen Foster, the caterer, does look like a real New Yorker, dark haired, fast-moving, thinner than most middle-aged guys south of the Hudson River. Like most New Yorkers, he professes astonishment about Knoxville. He's just been on a shopping trip to Kroger. "Everyone's wearing orange," he says, in an urban accent. "And everyone's talking on cell phones!"
You try to explain UT football to this Manhattanite, that Neyland Stadium is the second-largest football stadium in the nation, and it's always full.
"I didn't know that," he says. "I mean, it was big when I was there, but..."
"Eh?" you say.
"I played clarinet in the Pride of the Southland Marching Band," says this New Yorker. He reminisces about Vols victories you've forgotten, the 1969 win over Doug Dickey's Gators, the 1971 Sugar Bowl.
It turns out the only real newcomers here are Staci's brother, Steve, an insurance man who's here mainly as a grip, and Ken Murphy, another friend from Washington, who's the set photographer. Steve sounds disappointed that, in four days in Tennessee, "I haven't heard anything that sounds like what I think of as a Southern accent." He does mention Fran Shea as an exception.
Sunday afternoon they're getting into some pretty heavy emotional scenes. Kara Kemp plays a representative from the Child Protection Service, investigating Morgan's complaints. She's just leaving after an interview, turns and makes one last comment to Morgan.
"You did the right thing," Kemp says earnestly, carrying the stunt bagel. "Really." But when she opens the door, she surprises a crew member who was waiting in the foyer on the other side.
"Okay," Morgan ad-libs, as Dorcas, "but next time don't bring the assistant camera person with you!"
There's a lot of sleight-of-hand, and it doesn't all involve bagels. When Morgan and Kemp run out the front door at the movie's finale, they run out the front door of another apartment across the courtyard; it was more convenient to a maple tree they chose for the horrifying ending. In an earlier scene, when Morgan takes out her garbage, she takes it out the back of still another apartment.
Sunday evening they're running out of time and film. They need four more rolls to finish the film tomorrow. No big deal, they say, we'll just call the Fuji 24-hour hotline. But it's cold; no answer. Fortunately, they get in touch with Scott Colthorpe, the local producer in charge of Atmosphere Pictures, who happens to have exactly the size and quantity they need.
They're trying to film a quiet scene in which Dorcas encounters her mother, or an apparition of her mother, as they celebrate the lady's birthday. Playing an upright piano, Morgan and Shea play a strange birthday tune by Mahler, a melancholy air better known as the "Merry Widow Waltz." Shea has just left to go upstairs to the bathroom as an earnest nurse, played by Linda Parris Bailey, arrives tries to tell her that her real mother is dead.
This emotionally delicate scene, one of the longest, most complicated single scenes in the movie, is going along well. Outside, a backhoe tears across the quiet courtyard at about 20 mph with a load of dirt.
They try it again. Then comes a sound: wham, wham, wham, wham! Across Keowee Avenue, construction workers at the church have encountered a limestone shelf. They're busting it up with a Komatsu Rammer.
Anderson decides to go ahead and shoot and hope for the best. "It underscores the emotional context of the scene," deadpans Beach.
During the critical final scene, when Dorcas breaks down at her child's grave, the Budweiser blimp looms into frame. Then it was a flock of geese.
There's a wrap party at Jayne Morgan's place in North Knoxville. You've never been to a wrap party, but you've heard rumors about them, so you go. But even show people aren't very wild when they've been at work since 6 a.m., and some of them have calls on commercial projects early in the morning. The party's over by midnight, and everybody's still clothed.
But in the morning paper, there's an epilogue that's too bizarre to have been in the script. The wire story unfolded as they were shooting the film: a real woman in New York had been haunted by the cries of a baby in the next apartment. Authorities investigated and found no baby, but a dead one the mother had concealed 20 years earlier. It's far more like Swedeen's The Sleep Seeker that was the original news story that inspired the script.
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