In the late 1990s, I shopped my screenplay for
CHROME to virtually every studio and producer in Hollywood and New York. Everyone liked the script. Several producers wanted to make it or tried to get it made. For instance, I worked with
John Bertolli for some time at
Destination Films. Things were looking good for a while. Bertolli produced
RETURN TO ME with
Minnie Driver and
David Duchovny. He was in production with
GANG RELATED, starring rapper
Tupac Shakur and CHROME was looking promising. Then Tupac was shot and, as they say, things changed.
Anyone working in Hollywood knows how many times a deal almost happens and then doesn’t. In fact, if you were an alien looking at the activities of Hollywood, you wouldn’t think they were in the "movie making" business, but the "putting together of movies for no reason" business. People have no idea how much effort goes into turning an idea into a script and then actually getting it made into a move, even a bad one. The number of movies that producers or directors labor over that never see the light of day far outnumber the pictures that actually get made.
As was the case with CHROME for a number of years. As I said, many in Hollywood and New York wanted to make or get the picture CHROME made but I kept running into a major snag. The script was set approximately a 130 years in the future and was populated by a world of robots in settings that don’t exist today. Action in every scene with a near-decadent scale. The fast pacing of CHROME is the antithesis of my
WAR OF THE WORLDS. So the thing I heard again and again in various forms was something like, "It’s a great script but only about five people in the world could afford to make it and they probably won’t because they’ve got their own epic scale projects.
Jumping ahead for a moment, when my planned large scale modern day version of WAR OF THE WORLDS fell apart on September 11th, and I was left sitting with a studio that I had set up south of Seattle converted from a former school where the gymnasium became our soundstage and the classrooms became our art department, props department, woodshop, materials casting rooms, costume and wardrobe, actor’s dressing rooms, etc, I convinced the money interests that were left, to roll it over into CHROME. I’ll talk in detail on that production at a later time.
But this story, surprisingly, is not about CHROME, but about
BUG WARS (
Reviewed in CFQ, issue 165 - Vol 33). The way BUG WARS came to be was that I had exhausted my leads and myself temporarily in my quest to get CHROME made. Two years and countless meetings and trips to Los Angeles or New York, only to come back to Seattle, wiser but empty handed.
It was on one last trip to New York, that I stopped by
TROMA to see if
Lloyd Kaufman might want to get involved either as a producer or in some financial capacity. Lloyd was distributing my movies,
HOUSE OF THE RISING and
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM at the time, though I believe only MIDSUMMER is still available. That may change soon. Incidentally, Lloyd mentions my movie A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM in his book,
ALL I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT FILMMAKING I LEARNED FROM THE TOXIC AVENGER, where he laments that my movie didn’t have nudity in it.
Now before I go on, I want to clarify, I wasn’t coming to Lloyd for CHROME to be a TROMA movie, but to Lloyd as a producer. Now not many people know that before Lloyd Kaufman made the
TOXIC AVENGER and was rocketed forever into camp-sexy-fantasy movies, Lloyd was a straight arrow production manager and producer. In fact, Lloyd was the production manager for Sylvester Stallone’s
ROCKY and
SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, starring
John Travolta. He also produced
THE FINAL COUNTDOWN starring
Kirk Douglas,
Martin Sheen and Katherine Ross.
When I met up with him, Lloyd had read my script and thought it was great. Impossible to shoot, but great. I pitched my idea about him coming on board and he, without missing a beat, counter pitched that if I could make a much much, did I say much, smaller sci-fi film in the hundred to two hundred thousand dollar range, with TROMA putting up $17,000 dollars of it, he would distribute it. At that point, it struck my funny bone. The business is crazy and I was practically jumping out of my skin with exhaustion from the business end and wanted to do something creative. I think many of Lloyd’s films are funny and watchable…like a train wreck. His sense of the macabre blended with a joyous, don’t-care-tongue-in-cheek approach is often very entertaining. I will never forget when the TOXIC AVENGER yells, "Yo, villain, into the blender!"
Also
JAMES GUNN, writer director of
SLITHER, and writer of
SCOOBY DOO, cut his teeth at TROMA.
So I agreed and we made a deal. I went back to Seattle and wrote BUG WARS in about two weeks, smiling to myself the entire time. I sent it to Lloyd. He asked for some changes that were not surprising. "More gore! More nudity!" I gleefully obliged, understanding the comedic way in which he intended I use these devices. My story, BUG WARS, was quite simple. The last two women on Earth after a quantum war battle invading intelligent bug creatures. With a Twilight Zone ending, BUG WARS was wall to wall fun. Oh, did I mention, the world of BUG WARS is hot, very hot. Requiring little clothing. Oh and the women were scientists turned warriors. I am grinning still as I write this.
Having TROMA as a distributor, having a couple of films with them and having seen money from TROMA for those, plus a letter of intent from Lloyd, I was able to raise a hundred and fifty thousand dollars pretty easily.
So BUG WARS was shot in soundstages that were actually underneath the street level in Pioneer Square in old underground Seattle. More specifically we were beneath the old Buttnick Brassiere Manufacturing Plant. Yes, we had much fun with that. In the lead role is
Darlene Renee Sellers, whom some may remember as the trembling
Mrs. Elphinstone, in WAR OF THE WORLDS. The actor’s dressing rooms were actually under the sidewalk and at one time, the main stage had been part of the Underground Tour years before we got hold of it.
This space later was converted into a multi level nightclub called
THE FENIX UNDERGROUND. You should check out the link. It has great panaramas of what they did. I went down there to see for myself and it was weird to see the soundstages we had filmed our movie in converted to dance floors. The owner asked me if he could play BUG WARS at a sci-fi themed party he threw at the club's opening. It was very cool how they had my movie running on a loop on screens throughout the club on several floors.
Anyway, to make the movie, we built future sets, a couple of collapsed stores and the collapsed lobby of a hotel. It was a kick. Producer Shefskie Paba hand sculpted life-sized skeletons to be strewn throughout the movie. We really enjoyed the production. Much of it difficult to figure out and visualize, but everyone laughed a lot all the way through. When the time comes, the bloopers reel will bare this out.
The movie was shot in 16MM film with
Angenieux lenses and posted on MAC computers. The special effects were created with cgi on a toy program by today’s standards called
Specular Infini-d. This was before MetaCreations bought it. The comps were done on an early version of After Effects using things like
Puffin Composite Wizard to pull the mattes.
The movie turned out pretty darn good for what it was meant to be. It was fun and funny often and there is a spirit of irreverence to it that was infectious. So much so that it was at a BUG WARS screening in a community theater that some of the first employees of Microsoft showed up on an invite. They had been drinking and had a great time and it was that night that the first deals for my now abandoned large budget modern version of WAR OF THE WORLDS were struck. I was quickly introduced to many people with real money and a range of financial advisors. I will recount the collapse of that version of WAR OF THE WORLDS in another blog.
Now, it is to absolute naiveté on my part and not trusting my own inner feelings that I let some of these new money people talk me into going with another distributor with BUG WARS. The reasoning was all about prestige and it was stupid stupid stupid. I chose a new distributor offering cash up-front that was composed of a group people who had all worked in distribution on some level, but were woefully under-financed. Lloyd said, generously about them later, "Good people. They just shouldn’t have been in the distribution business." You see they had worked for Lloyd.
BUG WARS played at
CANNES and got on the front page of
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER for a promo stunt involving girls in wet t-shirts with tricked out super-soaker squirt guns. A few deals were made but they fell apart as the film had been shopped wrongly. So, on better advice, I shelved it for a few years to let that pass by. I recently talked with Lloyd and BUG WARS is indeed going to be a TROMA movie soon, after all said and done.
So today I’m posting
the trailer for BUG WARS. You can see by it that we all had fun making this movie. Also notable is that the music is by
THE CRYSTAL METHOD. We made the deal just before they broke and now I hear their music in a range of movie promos and global advertising campaigns. But we were of the first. And the way it came about was proximity. My producer on that picture, LORA OLIVER, had grown up with the band members in Las Vegas. So I hope you enjoy. Don’t expect SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. BUG WARS lives in the TOXIC AVENGER vein. And we are all quiet proud if it, in its kitchy way. When it is released, I hope you have as much fun with it as we did making it. BUG WARS contains some nudity. Thank you Lloyd! The trailer is censored for youtube.
-Later~