During his terrible twenties, Lonely Christopher wrote a screenplay with the wherewithal to gather funds to pay good actors, hire a director and produce a movie that I really admire called Mom. I think it’s kind of remarkable. Watch it. And tell your friends. It follows on the YouTube below.
Following the movie, the trailer, and a scene that was deleted with the delightful Mink Stole in it, Tony Torn writes an insightful review of Mom, and then an essay by Lonely Christopher follows going into vivid interesting harrowing detail about how Mom was and was almost not completed, a great adventure story about the elusive beast we call creativity.
Enjoy.
Who Is MOM?
by Tony Torn
Lonely Christopher’s first feature MOM is a fascinating entry into a genre I will call the spiritual detective story. Try (Joseph Huffman), the young protagonist of the picture, has engaged an organization called Responsible Research to find his birth mother, and the search sends him on a series of adventures that bring him closer and closer to a possible resolution. But the real journey of the film is one from innocence to experience, and Christopher uses the structure of a police procedural to dramatize the universal sensation of having one’s mind blown by encountering a larger, more complicated world.
Like Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Try encounters a series of vivid, archetypal characters who send him deeper and deeper into his investigation (spoilers ahead). Paul Lazar’s Clancy operates a rural branch of Responsible Research, close to the sheltered community where Try has spent most of his life with a foster family. Clancy launches Try’s quest by sending him to a “city” that remains nameless, as fits the dreamlike nature of the story.
When Try arrives at the urban branch of Responsible Research, run by a trio of antic “detectives,” he is instantly out of his depth. Carmen (Melinda Prisco), Petal (Alejandra Bufala) and Arden (Gore Abrams) are charming, cryptic, contentious and queer, arguing in Spanish and staggering around in dirty underwear. As young Try struggles to get his bearings in this new heightened environment, the filmmakers do a stellar job of keeping us locked into his perspective. It’s a beautiful use of subjective POV and through the camerawork, editing and writing we find ourselves piecing together the new reality in much the same way as Try does.
Arden becomes a Virgil figure for Try, introducing him to a pair of characters played by heavyweight guest stars Mink Stole (mysterious drug addled mentor Woodrow) and Michael Potts (sardonic and passionate bookseller Andy). The film settles into a more theatrical mode with these characters, allowing them to take over the narrative with riddles, rumination, flights of fancy, and verbal rabbit holes. What makes it all work is the continuing storytelling focus on Try’s expanding sense of self, as his world opens up to include such fascinating creatures as Woodrow, Andy, the three detectives, and the mysterious Judy Curtains (Janet Hubert), a woman who might hold the key to Try’s quest.
Try reaches what might be considered a resolution of sorts, but by the end Christopher has effectively reframed the very nature of his search. Try’s relation to Judy, Arden’s relation to Andy, the trio of detectives and their relation to the mysterious Woodrow: are all complex answers to the question, “Who is Mom?” This is an open ended film in the best kind of way.
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Indie Memoir
by Lonely Christopher, writer/director
The story of my film MOM begins over ten years ago with an international group of twenty-somethings who spent many debauched nights and early mornings haunting a basement bar on the Lower East Side called Home Sweet Home. I met them through actor Gore Abrams who became a collaborator after being about the only person who responded to a casting call for a play I was mounting at the Bowery Poetry Club. (The dialogue was so bizarre at times he suspected he was being pranked, but ever since he’s been the premiere interpreter of my dramatic writing, playing Andy Warhol and Hart Crane among other characters.) This eccentric pack of friends worked together on no-budget theater, indie film, and public access projects for years. They eventually formed a production company and I wrote the first screenplay.
There were two main things that informed the plot for me personally: I’m adopted and my mother was ill with cancer. I wrote about an unreliable protagonist named Try who hires a detective agency to locate his biological mother. The unorthodox gumshoes happen to be dealing with their own matriarchal crisis, as their boss had abandoned them to die alone at home. The premise was straightforward but the themes were strange and existential. I wrote it to be filmed quickly and cheaply in the area of Brooklyn where most of us lived.
We rented a huge office in an industrial building under the BQE near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This was also our main set. The production designer emptied his storage unit into the space to make it seem cluttered and lived in. Preproduction was the rosiest phase of the project but it was constant work. We scouted for locations all over Brooklyn and spent hours in thrift stores buying props and costumes. We rented audition space and considered a slew of actors for the lead. It was a huge relief when we got a tape from Joe Huffman that we liked. The other labor intensive main roles were meant to be played by our gang of friends, with cameos throughout for working actors (the adults, we called them) to come in and perform for a day or two. Gore and I drove to Baltimore to wine and dine Mink Stole and offer her a supporting role. I thought she would be good for a character with lots of monologues because of her verbose performance in Desperate Living. She was a living legend to us.
My mother died the summer before we went into production. Then right before the shoot one of the producers had to leave the country. Without his oversight the financial situation was poorly managed to say the least. I don’t think we ever had a finalized budget, which caused us all manner of problems. But we were enthusiastic. There was a pervading “let’s put on a show” atmosphere and many friends chipped in as set dressers, production assistants, drivers, et cetera. We rented a sixteen passenger van that was our only transportation and accrued a bunch of parking tickets.
I was excited to be directing but had no professional experience. None of us did at that point, except for the homemade media we’d been making together. It was a privilege to be asked to take the helm but I’ve learned much about leadership and teamwork in the intervening years that would have helped me on set back then. Most of what I knew about film came from watching them. A lot of directors insist on writing their own material when they’re not suited for it. I think that’s often a mistake born out of the auteur model. In this case it was the other way around, which doesn’t happen as much but can work (Tom Stoppard and Charlie Kaufman both pulled it off). Since we were newbies, the prospect of disaster rose exponentially and we were constantly at risk of devolving into sloppy B-movie cliches. Luckily we were all a little more talented and human than the likes of Tommy Wiseau.
We hired a professional crew and knocked out much of the work in our studio with ease, shooting interiors with expert lighting setups. Going on location was messier. We hardly ever went over schedule but ended up working without permits, which added a furtive sense of paranoia. We shot on an unobtrusive DSLR, ending up with great looking footage because of the talent of the man behind the camera and the fact that he insisted we invest in renting several really nice lenses. He favored long lenses, one of which was so huge you basically had to place the camera a football field’s length away from the actors. The shallow depth of field is a signature style that also made it easy to shoot outside. You don’t have to worry as much about what’s going on in the background if it’s out of focus.
The shooting script called for numerous one-take steadicam walk-and-talk scenes. Basically the characters would leave a scene and have a little chat while they walked to the next location for another scene. I think we ended up hiring a steadicam operator for one extremely stressful day. The focus puller was having a difficult time. The steadicam operator had the sense to suggest we do a few takes shooting the actors from the back so that we could cut around the worst issues.
That night one of my old college professors acted as our stunt driver and we unofficially shut down a four-way intersection in Brooklyn for a complex follow shot where two characters almost get hit by a car crossing an intersection. Our PAs were gorgeous young fashion models dressed in black, which made them hard to see on the road. Their job was to stop traffic during takes where we drove a car the wrong way down a one way street into our actors. The professor kept insisting that we grab a closeup of him behind the wheel. I told him we wouldn’t use it. “You might!” he argued. Somehow we all got out of that one unscathed. This stunt is not included in the final version of MOM. I know this kind of riskiness is common in indie filmmaking but it’s not something I’d repeat.
I didn’t anticipate having trouble communicating with the actors because I had directed a handful of stage plays. The dialogue was complicated and there was a lot of it. The cinematographer would occasionally shake his head and mutter, “Too many words.” The schedule was such that there was little room for error. Many nights after we wrapped for the day I would sit around with the lead talking about his character’s motivations and how to approach the performance. The protagonist is an odd duck without much revealing dialogue because his character is more about what he’s hiding from others and himself. Some actors became frustrated and started feeling lost in their roles, which fomented a grim mood. However, we only had to reshoot one scene: an exterior confrontation between two people where they weren’t feeling satisfied with their performances and we lost the light. We came back and did it again a few days later and it worked that time.
The script called for a lot of crying. My version of the protagonist was constantly on the verge of tears. Joe didn’t understand that and only cried once on camera when I was not present. (It’s in the film.) I don’t think I was adept at helping the cast reach a place of vulnerability. In one scene an actor was required to be hysterically weeping while reciting a long monologue. She wasn’t able to burst out into a fit on command so we tried working up to it and it was taking a long time. I’m ashamed to say I resorted to that untenable trick of emotional manipulation in this instance. I started acting exaggeratedly hostile toward her in front of the crew until she broke down and delivered her lines through racking sobs. We all gave her a standing ovation afterward. She returned the favor by throwing a crowbar in my direction.
This is the atmosphere that our more established performers had to deal with during their cameos. We managed to cast an amazing group of character actors, whom we all deeply admired, to play the “adults.” And we put them through grueling paces, unfortunately. I think the amazing Mink Stole was the most displeased by our working conditions. She showed up with her arm in a cast from falling off a porch in Provincetown (where she’d been doing a Tennessee Williams play). She was told we’d put her up in a hotel but it turned out to be a guest bedroom where she was offered cereal for breakfast. She had to deal with a tight schedule and a lot of bickering. We found a splendid location to shoot her rooftop scene but (even though we were invited to be there by a tenant whose apartment we used as a dressing room) the building’s super materialized halfway through and tried to kick us out. And then Ms. Stole was expected to rattle off pages and pages of monologues. Somehow we thought she wouldn’t mind any of this because she was used to doing weird things in John Waters’ movies. But Pink Flamingos was forty years prior.
As winter progressed, our huge unheated office became freezing. Circumstances grew more harried. We were spending money wildly on below the line crew, which I was in favor of because I wanted to run a “professional” operation. But slowly the producers started to let people go and every day I arrived on a less crowded set. With a couple weeks left we totally ran out of money. That’s when the exiled producer found his way back from Mexico and decided we had to end early. Even before then a huge rift had developed with me and the production designer on one side and the producers and cinematographer on the other. I was being obstinate about finishing the project in a way that was beyond our means. But rather than compromise I expected more funding to appear. The producers started talking about how we needed to complete the shoot in the spirit of guerrilla filmmaking, basically just driving around in our van and hopping out to shoot whatever scenes we had left. I was horrified by this prospect but in retrospect if I had adapted to it I’d have gotten a result closer to what I desired. I think my greatest mistake as a director was being inflexible.
Near the end we would be shooting with just an actor or two, the cinematographer, and myself. I didn’t feel good about it at all. I was so resistant that the producers started shooting footage without me. The opening of the film takes place in a rural environment and they went upstate to scout for locations. That’s what they told me but they actually brought the cinematographer and lead actor along to film everything they could (minus my dialogue). I was furious at the betrayal but even more so when they started cutting scenes from the schedule. The plan became to only do what is absolutely necessary for the film to make sense.
Michael Potts was terrific to work with and was a bright spot in this debacle. After he read the script we had one phone conversation where he asked a few questions then he showed up on the day with a complete character. He took a night off from doing The Book of Mormon on Broadway for his scene, which was set in a friend’s bookstore (the intended location had been a library, but we couldn’t get one). He ran through an enormous amount of dialogue over and over again until dawn when he was utterly exhausted. By then meals weren’t being catered anymore so he was offered a plain bagel and a bottle of water. We were just racing to finish what we could and everyone was fighting with each other. The producers stopped paying for the office so it got padlocked and its contents were thrown in the trash (we broke in to save the computer). That’s one way to strike a set.
I was still convinced we needed to keep working but at the earliest chance production was canceled. At this point things were so acrimonious that I was being ignored. Some of the producers and the cinematographer absconded to Mexico with the footage and spent a week dropping acid and trying to cut something together. The result was really bizarre. In addition to what was never filmed, so much had been cut that this version ran a scant hour, hardly feature length. It looked nice but didn’t make much sense. It felt like a lackadaisical arthouse flick. Because the ending was so ambiguous they turned it into a dream sequence. And I hate dream sequences.
I was devastated but I also believed there was no going back. Telling myself their edit was in good faith, I offered some notes that were immediately rebuked. As far as they were concerned, the thing was locked. However, the project returned to Brooklyn where I was able to supervise the post sound work. Most of us were still on speaking terms. We recorded a lot of voiceover to fill in some of the gaps and even then I understood that if you’re trying to fix a movie with voiceover, something has gone very wrong.
After the editing fiasco, things were much less contentious. We commissioned an original score and the color grading and visual effects were also achieved quite professionally. We ended up with something that looked and sounded great with an edit that was so confusing nobody wanted to take credit for it. By then I think everyone was discouraged. In 2013 MOM premiered at a film festival in Mexico City, to which I wasn’t invited. After that everybody pretty much gave up on its future. Nobody seemed interested in the expense of sending it out for festival consideration. The producers went on to work on other projects. My friendships with many involved fell apart. And then time did its thing to our community. Some people got sober, some professionalized, some died. My first date with my ex-husband was at Home Sweet Home and I pop in from time to time, although I don’t know any of the bartenders anymore. Gore is a career actor now. I rarely worked in film again.
For the longest time MOM felt like the greatest failure of my creative career. Something that I had hoped would find an audience and lead to new opportunities was languishing as if it had never been completed at all. If I ever screened it privately for friends the reaction was always awkward. I felt bitter resentment. Years passed and I started thinking of it as a lost film. Gore Abrams was the main person who pushed for MOM to be made. The outcome bothered him as much as it did myself. In 2016 he called me to discuss the idea of going back to the raw footage and recutting the film using my shooting script as a guide. I don’t think it was until I saw his first draft that I realized MOM was going to be salvageable.
What Gore did was make a completely different movie. He labored over the project mostly alone for several years. I provided much input but relied on his skills as an editor rather than looking over his shoulder constantly. He suggested turning it black and white to lend it a noir atmosphere, which had been the original concept. Gore reinserted entire scenes and recut others to change the pace and tone. The B-plot was restored. The whole film was given a new identity. This continued for a couple years through a half dozen drafts until we finally had a picture lock. MOM was more structured and intelligible while retaining its air of mystery. What had been a procession of pleasant imagery turned into an unsettling but cogent story. This version premiered the summer of 2018 at the famous Anthology Film Archives in New York City where I was in attendance with a couple of the actors. It was the first (and so far the last) time I saw MOM on a cinema screen. It was a personal milestone although it garnered little notice. The producers helped pay for the wine and cheese but most people who had been involved were now living out of town and couldn’t make it.
Even after the premiere we kept fiddling with it, as if MOM would never truly be complete. Gore’s wife suggested that he subconsciously didn’t want to finish it. Our chief motivation was that we had to throw out all of the quality post work that had been done on the first cut and didn’t have the money or resources to remix everything. I had foolishly created a temp musical soundtrack full of songs that were too expensive to license, which to fix I cobbled together a revised score, relying on my knowledge of public domain compositions from the Romantic era. We slowly paid for what we needed out of pocket and that brings us to the present. The movie is probably still too rough around the edges and “arthouse” to interest many viewers (or any distributors, I learned), but I feel vindicated that it’s finally done.
This is a version, of which I can be proud, that represents my creative intentions. In one scene Gore’s character talks about the protagonist’s mother having a “puzzle room.” The whole film is really that puzzle room, but the pieces within never fit together perfectly due to its abstract thematics. The protagonist is not actually looking for his mother, but her not being found. That’s the central crisis that he tries to manage until he can’t anymore, intruding the life of a stranger he calls mom. The last scene finds him inappropriately demanding emotional labor from a woman he doesn’t know. He’s not exactly a heroic character and this isn’t a proper resolution. But if life has taught me anything, it’s that things never end neatly or the way we want.
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Tony Torn, photo by Charles McCain
https://www.tonytorn.com/
Lonely Christopher