Indie Film About Louise Brooks In Pre-production Phase

Silent film actress's tormented life to be Subject of upcoming independent short film.

Louise Brooks is the subject of a new, independently-produced short film currently in pre-production and set for completion in late 2013.

Louise Brooks made her film debut in 1925, soon appearing in such Hollywood films as A Girl in Every Port and Beggars of Life. Her most memorable role was that of the amoral, self-destructive temptress Lulu in Pandora's Box. Her innocent eroticism, along with her pale, beautiful features and bobbed jet-black hair made her both a film icon and a symbol of the definitive 1920s flapper. Her stardom flamed out early, however, and by the age of 23 she was all but forgotten until the 1960s when film historians and younger fans rediscovered her and catapulted her to cult status.

Independent filmmaker, Scott Howe, hopes to shed light on the events that lead up to Brook's "disappearance" from Hollywood. Moreover, he intends to reveal what may have lead the iconic silent actress to play, so convincingly, the character of Lulu, a self-destructive sexual temptress, conceived by German playwright Franklin Wedekind.

Howe's screenplay is a work of fiction, based on historical facts. His story traces the story of Louise Brooks through the writings of a life-long friend and one-time lover, from her humble beginnings as a young girl in Kansas, to her meteoric rise as a dancer in the Ziegfeld follies, as the silent film temptress, Lulu, in the silent film, Pandora's Box, and finally her later years as a recluse.

Additional information about this film can be found at: www.ScottHoweFilms.com/LULU/

Set Extensions: What Are They, and Why Don't More Indie Filmmakers Take Advantage of Them?

Enter the search term "green screen" into YouTube and you'll be inundated with hundreds upon hundreds of goofy, 45-second "test" clips created by what seems like every twelve-year-old, ever. To look at the number of green screen examples on YouTube, one would think everyone was using green screen in their productions. They're not. And it's a shame. The use of green screen doesn't have to be the sole purview of twelve-year-olds and Sci Fi nerds. Used subtly, techniques such as green screen composting, motion tracking, or just a simple matte/plate used as a set extension can open up a new world of possibilities for creative visual storytellers. Below, is a quick example of a set extension technique, completed in After Effects.



Of course techniques such as these may be used to place characters in fantasy worlds with castles, warlocks, and other realms full of "beings" who have never dated actual girls before. For the purposes of this blog, however, I'm talking about using simple techniques, like static mattes, used by Hollywood filmmakers throughout film history, to place characters into cityscapes, desolate vistas, or even to reproduce other historical time periods. If used sparingly, good effects done right can pass completely unnoticed, yet plunge an audience completely into the story without even a trace of disbelief. Oddly enough, recent television shows such as Ugly Betty, or CHUCK have made stunning use of special effects to create east coast locations and other, more foreign and exotic, locals on sound stages in Los Angeles.





As one can see in the above effects demo reels, film effects don't always have to be used for bringing to life worlds like that of Harry Potter. They can be used instead to make your actors appear, for example, to be inside an airplane hanger when, in reality, they're simply standing in a two-car garage. And although these types of effects, done on a Hollywood scale, can be quite expensive, its inspiring to think of the vast array of other visual storytelling possibilities that can be achieved on a smaller scale for next to nothing.



The above clip is a great example of a simple set extension technique. With some creativity, a technique like this could be used very effectively in your next, non-Sci Fi, non-fantasy indie film.

Sacramento Area Hot Spots for Filming Movies

Why Sacramento-based filmmakers need look no farther than their own hometown to find one of Hollywood's best-kept secrets

PART FOUR: Sacramento has also supplied the Hollywood industry with some marvelous locations in more recent films. From the 1980s, The Stunt Man, starring Peter O'Toole, Steven railsback and Barbara Hershey, made use of the Sunset Bridge in Fair Oaks. The 1984 film The River's Edge, starring Crispin Glover and Dennis Hopper was shot along the river in Goeth Park. The 1996 film Wisdom, starring Emilio Estevez, used several downtown locations. In 1998, Clint Eastwood used downtown Sacramento's 24th and L streets to represent New York of the 1950s for his film, Bird. Two years later, he would return to use Sacramento locations again for the film, Pink Cadillac. Eastwood was even able to use the Crest theater to watch dailies, saving on time and logistics.

More recently, News10's Jonathan Mumm presented an interesting visual retrospective of many other films that have used Sacramento and surrounding areas to represent a variety of other geographic locals, as well as a number of different time periods.


Courtesy News10, Sacramento

Herein lies the beauty of our town. Filmmakers see Sacramento as a place of visual and financial possibilities. This is primarily because this town and surrounding locations provides so many different landscapes.

As Sacramento continues to grow, perhaps it will make history again, break new ground, and become a place unique among other industry cities. But it need not change for the worse. After all, filmmakers have sought out Sacramento for its pleasing blend of old and new. If the town maintains that bled, it will always have the appeal of the riverboat town captured on film over 80 years ago in Steamboat Bill, Jr. To live in Sacramento is to live in any number of different environments—New York, Los Angeles, or Everytown U.S.A.

Only in Sacramento can one work or live in one environment and then effortlessly pop, almost as magically as a film's edit, down the block to a deli inside and old Victorian or down to the river for a relaxing afternoon playing hooky on the banks of our own "Mississippi."

And to those who continue to deride Sacramento because they feel it should have a grand continuity, a sameness, a plainness; to those who fee that this town is too eclectic...

...what is the harm in that?

The Gold Rush: Part of Sacramento's History... and its Film History

Why Sacramento-based filmmakers need look no farther than their own hometown to find one of Hollywood's best-kept secrets

PART THREE: Charlie Chaplin's 1925 Masterpiece, The Gold Rush, was inspired, he later recalled, by the horrific events that took place within the Donner Party. The film was eventually completely re-shot at his studios in Los Angeles, but it began on location in Truckee. Though Chaplin and crew remained there for six months, literally until the winter snows had melt away, Chaplin's relationship with his co-star, the Tramps on-screen love interest, took a turn for the worse. Having fallen out of love with her, he fired her and started the entire film over again—from scratch.

Chaplin hired a new actress, reconstructed the entire mining town on his own backlot in Los Angeles and literally remade the whole movie. But one piece of his original Truckee footage remains in the final version of the film—the opening shots of the film. As far as the eye can see, men are hiking down an icy overpass, supposedly in the Klondike but actually on a mountain near Truckee.

To pull off the shot, Chaplin hired 200 extras from Sacramento equipped with tools and supplies purchased at Sacramento stores. And so in the end, after six months of on-location shooting—having eaten up countless canisters of film—the only Truckee footage used in his final version of The Gold Rush is of 200 Sacramento residents hiking in the snow.



[While promoting the New York premiere of The Gold Rush, Chaplin had yet another summer-long dalliance with an as yet unknown Ziegfeld follies girl, soon-to-be silent film icon, Louise Brooks. Their short-lived romance is to be featured in Scott Howe's upcoming independent feature film, LULU: The Untold Story of Louise Brooks.]

...to be continued.

Sacramento's Role In The Birth of Filmmaking

Why Sacramento-based filmmakers need look no farther than their own hometown to find one of Hollywood's best-kept secrets

PART TWO: In the 1870s, Leland Stanford was one of a small group of Sacramento Businessmen—including Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington and Charles Crocker—who built the Central Pacific Railroad. The Central Pacific, later to become the Southern Pacific, began at the Sacramento Embarcadero, snaked over the Sierra and linked up to the Union Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869.

Sacramento's Leland Stanford scored another coup besides participating in the development of California: He played a key part in the birth of film's history as the man behind what is now considered the first movie.

In 1872, Stanford decided to settle a bet once and for all about his contention that all four hooves of a trotting horse leave the ground at the same time.

He enlisted the help of San Francisco photographer, Eadweard Muybridge. They met at Stanford's ranch and rigged up a series of cameras attached to trip wires that, when struck by a horse, would each shoot one image. They hoped that this would produce a series of pictures depicting proof, for Stanford's bet, that the horse's hooves did leave the ground simultaneously for at least a fraction of a second.

When viewed in rapid succession, however, these images reproduced the event not as a series of pictures, but as a fluid motion. Initially intended to stop the motion of the horse, Stanford's experiment actually could be used to reproduce that same motion. Today, those Stanford/Muybridge images are collectively considered to be the first motion picture. However, the the first motion picture to be copyrighted as such would not come for another 22 years: the "short" was an Edison film documenting The Birth of a Sneeze, 7-January-1894; Its running time: a whopping five seconds.

...to be continued.

Why Sacramento-based filmmakers need look no farther than their own hometown to find one of Hollywood's best-kept secrets

PART ONE: For many, Sacramento represents little more than a cow town; for others, the river city is the political hub for California; but for a select few in Hollywood and beyond, Sacramento has been a treasure trove of locations to use as backdrops for practically any place... or any time.

Just a simple trip through my local video store, some twenty years ago, began what was to become a profound change in the way I now see my hometown. Upon returning a video, Steamboat Bill, Jr., the clerk gave me one of those ominous statements of film trivia: "Did you know that some of this film was shot here in Sacramento?" I did not. But it intrigued me enough to rent the film again, watching this time with closer scrutiny.

Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) is a silent Buster Keaton feature-length classic. Its many sight gags are some of the most widely known and talked about by film buffs and historians alike. The stunts are so complex that most filmmakers of the day wouldn't even attempt them, and certainly not without the use of stuntmen. Keaton was different. He insisted on doing his own stunts, feats that would keep even today's sophisticated audiences on the edge of their seats.



To tell his river boat story, Keaton built a Southern Mississippi town in Sacramento on the banks of the Sacramento River. In his biography, Keaton said, "We went up there and built that street front, three blocks of it, and built the piers and so on. We found the riverboats right there in Sacramento; one was brand new, and we were able to age the other one up to make it look as though it was falling apart." Could one of these boats been our own Delta King? Closer examination will reveal the answer to those interested enough to stream this video for themselves.

When I got home, I immediately popped the tape into my VCR and watched it with new fervor. Steamboat Bill Jr. begins simply enough, with a slow pan across a majestic river. This time, though, I watch with knowing amusement and saw Sacramento's river banks as they looked almost sixty years earlier, over 40 years before I was born. It was a panoramic view of a place perhaps three miles from where I live. These scenes gave me a new appreciation of my town's history as I transported myself back the the '20s, the era not only of Keaton, but of Charlie Chaplin, Mak Sennett, Fatty Arbuckle and Harold Lloyd.

But Sacramento's film history reaches back even farther than Buster Keaton to a Sacramento businessman who played a key part in film history as the man behind what is now considered the first movie ever made.

... to be continued.

Scott Howe Films Currently Seeking Talented Actors, Actresses for Romantic Comedy

Scott Howe Films is currently seeking bright and talented individuals for an upcoming proof-of-concept trailer for the feature film, Made In China, a romantic comedy.

The story follows an average Joe who falls in love with a woman he meets online. Before their relationship can progress, he must finally leave his comfort zone and convince family and friends he's not crazy in wanting to marry the girl of his dreams: a woman he's never met, who can't speak English, and who lives on the other side of the world with her eight-year old daughter.

Interested parties should contact Scott Howe Films through its website: www.ScottHoweFilms.com