Part One: A Lesson in the Film History of Dan Brown

Oklahoma City. Mid to late 1980s. Teenage best friends Dan Brown and Mike Mitchell shoot short films on video cameras. Craig Denham and James Marsden attend the same high school.

Later. Mitchell goes on to direct Hollywood fare including Sky High, Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo and is currently on board pre-production for Shrek Goes Fourth.. Denham moves to Austin, landing jobs as a graphic designer on The School of Rock and After the Sunset, among others. Meanwhile, Marsden makes his way into acting on the X-Men series, Superman Returns and Hairspray.

Spotlight. Protagonist. Brown after graduating film school from Oklahoma University; working in Los Angeles for several years, part of the time with Propaganda Films, music video production company base of directors including Spike Jonze, David Fincher and Mark Romanek; and, writing a script for his debut feature American Detective.

Shot in 1997 and released to the film festival circuit in ‘99, American Detective, Brown says, represents an entirely different time period of independent filmmaking. “You had to shoot film. You had to have a 35mm print to play at festivals. They didn’t have video projection in ’99. Everything changed with the new decade,” he explains.

After the small distributor that acquired American Detective went bankrupt, holding onto the its rights for five years, the film went cold, though Brown laughs at his naivete, saying, “This may be too long a deal.”

During that five-year stretch, Brown made advertising his day job, producing television commercials and the like. About three and a half years ago, he quit that job and has since worked as a freelance filmmaker who produces and directs documentary series like A&E’s Roller Girls and Austin’s PBS local series Downtown, which won an Emmy during his tenor.

Then there’s this, his recent short film The Pipe, an adaptation of a short story by Jack Pendarvis.

Part Two: Themes of The Pipe

“The radio station had buried one of its DJs in a field. He was going to stay there for forty-six days to break some kind of record. There was a clear plastic pipe sticking out of the ground and that was where his air came from. The pipe was as big around as a half-dollar and it came about two feet out of the ground. The station had placed an awning over the pipe so the DJ wouldn’t drown if there happened to come a squall. A little electric bell sat on a table with a wire running to it from under the dirt. The DJ was supposed to press a button if he got into trouble, for example, if an animal burrowed its way into his box, or if he started going out of his mind. Then the electric bell would ring and the two men on duty would dig him up right quick.

“There were two men on duty all the time. The midnight-to-six shift was taken by a big thick-necked security guard with a shaved head and bright red ears, and a short little paramedic with a pocky face and a black moustache.”

~excerpt from Jack Pendarvis’ ‘The Pipe’

Made in large part on a whim and with Pendarvis’ support, The Pipe watches as security guard (Nathan Zellner) and paramedic (Kent Osborne) inadvertently become friends while on, by all accounts an unimportant and perhaps fruitless, job. Despite the seemingly absurdist themes of the narrative, both the story and film carry an emotional weight that speaks quietly and without much lingering on the relationships between men.

SM: What is the nature of this dynamic we see play out between these two male characters?

DB: These two characters obviously, if they’re working the midnight shift at a radio promotion, in the middle of a field, are not really at the top of their professions. So, I think there’s an instant bonding with that. They both know they’re in a crappy place in life…And, it helps that they’re the type of men that they are. The paramedic is never at a loss for words. The security guard is more introspective.

At the beginning of the movie we have the scene where (the security guard) puts his hand on the gun, and he’s ready to shoot (the paramedic) for threatening to pee down the hole, and then soon after, they’re both sharing a joint. So, the male bonding is—it’s easy to just get along with a guy. You can talk about sports, whatever, even if you don’t have anything in common with him. But, it gets to the point where (the security guard) started trusting (the paramedic) too much, let his emotions get the best of him and then shut down…

SM: Then on top of that the security guard is connecting [and talking to the pipe itself]. In both the short story and the film, we as viewers don’t know if there’s actually anything or anyone down the hole. It’s more than likely there’s no one there, and so he’s connecting with nothingness. That’s a big question about humanity, I guess: Is it easier to connect with nothing rather than the person right in front of you?

DB: I think it is, absolutely. Especially for these characters, it is.

SM: Why is that?

DB: Humans are complicated, and so to connect to a person really depends on a lot of things lining up: interests, opinions, upbringing. I’m not saying it’s a good thing. Especially with these two characters, in my opinion, neither of them is at a good place. Nathan’s character, the security guard, really wants more than anything to feel like he’s doing something important even though he knows he’s not. He’s sort of justifying (the job) more than the paramedic is. For the paramedic, it’s just a job.

SM: Yeah, on the one hand people want to make everything important, but on the other side of that, when it gets to be too much, they want to make everything as trivial as possible.

DB: That can happen, and that’s the shut off—when you realize it’s over with, there’s no fanfare. The sun is rising, they’re going to dig the (DJ) up, but the location is trashier and trashier and seems neglected in a lot of ways.

I love that about Jack’s story, that you don’t know if there’s something underneath the ground. Ultimately the story is not about the DJ. The DJ is not really a character; the pipe is more the character.

It’s got that Waiting for Godot quality.

Part Three: A Question of Information

Although not at professional leisure to speak in-depth about it, Brown mentions that he’s developing a movie-based talk show, a quick note that leads us into a discussion about filmmakers’ increased access to information prompted by developments in technology.

SM: The film blogosphere has gotten much bigger through podcasts and videocasts. It’s easier and easier now to get information about how a film was done.

DB: Absolutely.

SM: And, it sounds strange, but a lot of times, that’s where people take inspiration from. They may or may not like the film, but they’ll take note of that random comment made on the podcast about self-motivation.

DB: Yeah, it helps. When I was writing American Detective, I remember I was hitting a wall,—and, this was pre-Internet when I was writing, or at least for me it was pre-Internet—but there was a [screenwriting] magazine called Scenerio that would publish screenplays, and I remember reading something from Buck Henry, who wrote The Graduate, a very funny writer. He talked about how when he was adapting it, he wrote a draft, stopped and then sat away from it for four months. Then he rewrote it again not looking at it. He’d subconsciously drop a lot of things that he didn’t need in the story on that second draft, but then he’d go back to the first draft to highlight passages he liked; highlight passages from the second draft; and, then made a third draft. I always thought that was a great piece of information.

Just yesterday I went on YouTube and a few other sources, and there were so many interviews with David Fincher talking about Zodiac--how he built it, shot it, the technology, how he chose The Viper and why, just information, tons of interviews from upstart podcasts, and I think that’s really cool. The amount of information out there now for filmmakers is incredible compared to where I started.

SM: Now the question is: Will this excess of information lead to distribution deals, to sales? Does the amount of available information also play a part in helping the product go where it needs to go? With that we’ve yet to see a direct correlation. We’re maybe just at the beginning of that.

DB: A good friend of mine Joe Swanberg is obviously benefiting from this access to information. A lot of people know who Joe is, and I met him when he was fresh out of film school and nobody knew who Joe was. Joe just wanted to do what he wanted to do and make the kind of movies he wants to make. So, in a weird sort of way, he’s made his features, but then by doing the Nerve series [Young American Bodies], he got a bigger audience from that than he ever would have gotten from film festival screenings. Then that just carries over, and now people look for him and look for his work. It also helps that he’s prolific, keeps making things one right after the other and is talented.

Because of this information, it can in a way help some people, maybe not everybody. I still don’t think there’s a great distribution example yet despite all of this. I wish there was. I wish there was something stronger. But, I think digital downloads will change everything once it gets really widespread.

SM: Distro groups like B-Side, IndiePix and others are trying to push the digital download, but even when they get that technology up and running, the market is still so incumbent on other things—the connection speed, for example. Regardless there are certain areas of the country, where even with digital downloads, people won’t have the proper Internet access. It’ll remain hard…So, it’s that balance of, “We’re pushing the technology, but people have to meet us.”

DB: Back when iTunes first came out, I was like, “I don’t need that. I don’t need something to organize my mp3s,” but now it’s become a completely different source for me. Downloading TV shows, I thought initially was a horrible idea, but then now I’ve done it and do a lot of watching of programs via iTunes or the computer…I think it takes a bigger idea that’s more in the mainstream—well, not mainstream but like Apple, if more people are on it and involved with it, and they’re leading the charge, then the idea of the digital download isn’t such a weird thing for people anymore.

SM: It’s a negotiation not only between people and the film world, particularly the independent film world, but also the balance of society with progress and comfort. Progress generally is not comfortable, and so the question is: How do you make that progress as simple and familiar as possible?

And, it’s a challenge filmmakers working on digital have been dealing with since, probably the same time American Detective came out, ’99 to 2000.

DB: [1998’s The Celebration] was the turning point for just about everybody. I had seen a movie shot on video in the 80s maybe, Sting starred in it [Peter Del Monte’s 1987 Giulia e Giulia], but from that point I was like, “No, you can’t shoot a movie on video. It’s just not believable.” Then I saw The Celebration], and I was like, “Okay, you can shoot a movie on video.” And, I had that tiny, little camera, not in PAL, but a Sony PC-1; that movie was like a P25…Nowadays you can shoot just about any movie on video. Everything changed. You can get affordable Hi-Def cameras pretty easily now.

The Pipe was shot on DV. It was nothing fancy, just something to do. The Pipe for me wasn’t a calling card, or I wasn’t thinking about making it just to get into festivals or sell. I just said, “The Pipe would make a great movie,” and Jack said, “You should make it.” Then I asked Kent, and he was going to be in town, and so we made it. That was basically the impetus of that movie. It was just something fun to do with some friends. That’s what’s exciting also about the technology, that you can do something like that.

[Cool Techie Factoid: Brown’s close in saying The Celebration worked with a Sony P25. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle actually shot with a Sony PC-7E.]

For more information on The Pipe visit, www.myspace.com/thepipefilm or learn more about the filmmaker at www.karatechimp.com.