Part two of: What happened to Trevor and Meher while they were in L.A. together composing the score for Reasons To Live.

April 3, 1998.

Stopped working on the score at just after 4am last night. I tried to stay up with Meher but I sort of drifted off at about 3:30. At 12:38 today the phone rings and thus begins The Continuing Story of Tony and His Girls…

RING!

Meher’s eyes light up expectantly.

“It’s the stripper!” I say.

“Hello? Hey how ya doin’!” Meher nods in my direction. It’s the stripper.

Erika wants to know if they can keep their bags in our room. They’ve lost their room (apparently due to some loud fighting late last night) and they need somewhere to stash their stuff until their friend shows up around four o’clock or so.

“What do you think?” Meher asks.

“I don’t know.” I say with a touch of worry.

He hangs up the phone having agreed to protect the stripper’s worldly goods.

“I knew this would happen!” I say feeling pretty world wise, “I wrote it in my book last night.”

“What?” Meher asks.

“That we were supposed to offer our room to them.” I enter the bathroom to wash my face. “Next thing they’ll ask to use our room ‘just for a little while’ and Tony will beat us up and empty our wallets.”

“No we can’t have that.” Meher leaves the room and returns five minutes later. He’s convinced them to put their bags in his car, that way they won’t have an excuse to get into our room if we’re out. Also, Tony wants to go for coffee with us.

“Just Tony? Or the whole gang?.”

“The whole gang, I think. They say there’s a place within walking distance just around the corner. It’s weird, I walked up there and Erika was just in panties and a bra and I was like ‘oh! sorry’ and they were like ‘no, that’s cool’. ”

‘They’re up to something.’ I think. My mind keeps drifting to Jim Thompson novels and how the protagonist is continually presented with chances to escape, but instead keeps digging himself in deeper and deeper…. mixed up with the wrong people until he is double-crossed and he says “I’ve been played for a sucker!”

Later:

I’ve left the door open while I attempt to strategically hide stuff in our room, my ID, camera. walkman etc… Leah appears in the doorway with an armful of stuffed animals.

“They didn’t want to stay in the car.” She smiles coyly, “Is it alright if I leave them here?”

Um… “Sure”. She is really cute in a little girl Lolita kind of way.

“They won’t take up much space.” She puts them on our chair.

“And they add a little colour to the room.”

“Thanks.” She smiles – coyness incarnate – and then leaves. It dawns on me that I am a sucker. She’s just got to bat her eyes and suddenly they’ve got personal items in our room.

Meher with Leah the stripper's stuffed animals

To continue the Reasons to Live retrospective, over the next few days I’ll be excerpting some journal entries that I wrote during the film’s creation.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, when it came time to write the score for Reasons To Live my composer, Meher Steinberg, was in Los Angeles seeking job opportunities. I couldn’t imagine anyone else doing the job and seeing as I was unhappily single and feeling somewhat sorry for myself, going to California for a week or two seemed like a good idea. So, in the spring of 1998 I got on a plane with a VHS tape and a journal and went to meet Meher.

After spending a night in a horrifying motel room in Culver City we eventually settled into the Royal Santa Monica motel in Westwood. While Meher wrote the score hunched over his keyboard in front of the television I’d stay close by scribbling in my journal and doodling. After we’d been there a few nights we got a phone call and thus began our interaction with two strippers and their “bodyguard”. The rest of this entry is transcribed from my journal:

Meher writing the score in our Royal Santa Monica motel room - April, 1998

Meher picks up the phone and there’s a woman on the other end who asks if we have any cigarettes. He tells her we don’t smoke and then she reveals that she’s on the second floor in a room directly across the little courtyard of our motel. She’s an “exotic dancer” and her name is Erika. She’s travelling with Tony, her “bodyguard” and Leah, her sister. She asks Meher if we want to hire them but Meher explains that it’s not the sort of thing he usually does. She says knowingly, “You’ve never done it before and you’re not sure if you can afford it.” Meher agrees. I’m stuck between them waving to her through the window while sitting on my bed. The phone call ends and Erika walks around the upper balcony singing tunelessly.

Later:
“I’ve found a cigarette, Meher!”
Meher – “Yay!
Trevor – “Congratulations!”

She comes down to smoke on some plastic, umbrellaed patio furniture in the courtyard, that sits on a vast expanse of astroturf. She’s a rather large girl with the beginnings of a double chin and a big mess of a dyed blonde bob. She waves to me and I reply in kind. She goes back upstairs.

Even later:
Tony and Leah return with some take-out food. Erika and Leah then come down to the courtyard.

“Is that Trevor sitting in the window?”

“Yep!”, I wave my foot at them. They both sit down at a patio table. Leah is actually really cute although leaning towards her sister’s heaviness. She looks a bit shy and yells “Anthony!” throwing a pack of cigarettes at her motel room door. They bounce onto the balcony. She runs upstairs and disappears. Erika remains, smoking and Meher finds out she’s from Redding California originally. “If you’ve seen red necks, cows and horses… you’ve seen Redding.”

She tells us she’s got to get work tonight or they’ll have to check out at 11am tomorrow but it’s Thursday night and “… nobody wants a stripper on a Thursday night!”. Tomorrow it will be easy to find work she tells us, she’s just worried about the time between 11 and 3 (they’ve got a ton of stuff in their room). It occurs to me that we’re supposed to suggest using our room, I mean, if it’s only going to be a four hours… but I resist the temptation.

“God it’s freezing! I’m going to got get a sweatshirt, excuse me.” Now she runs up to her room. “Don’t come back on our account” Meher says quietly and we leave our door open for a few minutes until we can’t stand the cold anymore.

Later still:
The phone rings.
“It’s like Grand Central Station!” Meher says as he picks up the receiver.
“Do you have a car?” I hear over the phone.
“Oh yeah, I do… but I’ve got so much work to do… I can’t.” Meher asks me if I’ve got 50 cents.
“No, I’ve got about 10 pennies.”
“I’ve got a buck I can lend you… ok.” he hangs up the phone and explains that Erika wanted a drive down to Sunset.
“What’s the dollar for?”
“It’s worth it for entertainment.” he explains, “For the bus.”
“Well,” I say “looks like we’ve picked up a stray stripper.”
Meher laughs.
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16mm Colour film, 23:03 min.
Synopsis: Colin Payne gets more then he bargained for when The Grim Reaper shows up at his door demanding to know why he won’t die.

After I graduated from college I began to work in the film industry. First as an office production assistant, then as a “heat wrangler” (I was in charge of propane heaters to keep the cast, extras and crew warm during winter night shoots on the 1994 Rae Dawn Chong vehicle Boulevard) and eventually I settled in as an assistant director. I took these jobs with the understanding that I was only doing it until I’d saved enough money to make a film of my own. In 1996 that moment had come.

The Script:

The core premise of the film sprang from my personal experience with chronic health problems. I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis when I was 12 years old. At the age of 22 I had an operation to hopefully correct the disease but which has proven to have unpleasant complications of its own. The surgery had occurred a few years earlier and I was dwelling on it when I had the idea for Reasons To Live. I began the outline for the film on April 16, 1996 while living in a rental apartment on Lauder Avenue near Oakwood and St. Clair in Toronto with my roommate Christophe Quillévéré (if you’ve read earlier entries you might recognize him as the actor from The Impostor. Christophe also made it into this film as the the Elvis like figure, Hervig Prufrock of whom Colin is a fan). A couple with a young daughter lived above us and the plot started to form as I lay in bed staring at the ceiling hearing the family make a ruckus. There was a lot of clomping going on and I thought, “What the hell is she wearing… tap shoes!?”

The heading in my notebook says “Death and the Colitis Sufferer“, I think it’s safe to say that I eventually settle on a somewhat more accessible title. This early version included considerably more personal anecdotes about living with colitis and included a girlfriend for Colin named Sue. Eventually my writing partner, Rob MacKinnon, and I streamlined it down to the the version that we finally shot.
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Colour and B&W 16mm film, 8:33 min
Synopsis: A student film that deals with a young man’s struggle to understand the concept of God and religion.

The Cross was my third year film at OCAD. I think that of all my shorts from college this is the one that reeks the most of “student film”. I tried to tackle a big topic using ham-fisted visuals and overall I’m dissatisfied and somewhat embarrassed by the results.

The reaction of my classmates seemed to agree with this impression. When it was screened before the class, one woman said she felt is was an accurate depiction of a young person coming to grips with the concept of God and religion but she was in the minority. The consensus was that the film didn’t achieve it’s goal, was naive, that my character was too distinctly dressed and even my instructor Morris Wolfe, who generally enjoyed my work and was very encouraging said that the music was inappropriate and didn’t convey the proper mood.

Looking at it now I have to agree with the criticism. I present it here with the intention of creating an honest retrospective. The quality of the transfer from an old VHS tape is horrible and the narration is hard to make out at times ( I have a transcript of the dialogue here if you need it). I hope you’ll find it interesting in the context of the other films on this site.
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B&W 16mm film. 16:36min
Synopsis: A meek real estate agent thinks he’s found a machine that can solve all of life’s problems in this Twilight Zone-esque comedy.

Before I continue I should note that I’m not creating these posts in chronological order; there are quite a few shorts between The Ghost in the Machine and this one. I plan to give all of them their due on these pages before long – be they good, bad or ugly. And now without further ado…

The Impostor was my final film for OCAD. It was shot in B&W 16mm film and was my first with sync sound. It was finished as an actual film and as such I literally cut and taped it together on a Steenbeck editing table at the college.

Though it’s far from perfect I’ve always had a soft spot for this movie. I enjoy that it looks the way it does. I was aiming for a Twilight Zone sort of vibe and for the most part I’d say, with the help of my cinematographer, Brian Sharp, I succeeded. The plot was also an homage to Rod Serling’s classic show.
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Steve Markle and Jeff Kassel of the FX show Testees

Last Wednesday my sister-in-law alerted me to the fact that the FX show “Testees” was premiering on Showcase.  We were both interested in it as one of it’s stars, Steve Markle, went to high school with us.  I thanked her for the heads up and dutifully set my PVR to record the show on Showcase HD on Rogers cable.

The next day I sat down to check the show out and discovered that the it had been recorded but there was no dialogue track.  The background music swelled, the distant sound of traffic could be heard in the apartment scenes but the actor’s mouths moved silently.  Now I had seen this happen before on City TV HD but usually by the end of the first commercial somebody in the station had noticed the problem and corrected it.  Not so with Showcase.  I fast forwarded to the first commercial and promisingly the dialogue for the ads played just fine. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I’d mention that this site is set up to use gravatars .  A gravatar is a thumbnail icon that follows you around to different sites and is displayed when you make comments. With gravatars you upload an image to represent yourself and associate it with an email address. When you use that address to sign in anywhere that uses gravatars your icon will follow.  You can use anything you want, your facebook picture, your MSN messenger icon etc. At the moment, I’m using the creepy headshot on the right as my gravatar.

So if you feel like making a comment why not take the minute or two to go to the gravatar site and give yourself some representation!

B&W 16mm film on video. 3:58min
Synopsis: A cyberneticist finds out what really happened to his grandfather when he takes over the old man’s work

The Ghost in the Machine was my first short film. I’d shot a couple of projects on video in high school, including Macdeath a parodic modernization of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that garnered us the amazing grade of 25/15. The additional 66.66% being required to boost one of our member’s english mark high enough to pass. I still have a fuzzy copy of Macdeath that may make an appearance here eventually. However, these early high school efforts were all cut together using multiple VHS machines and as a result sported that odd rainbow striping at the beginning of each cut. Also the video quality quickly degraded due to multiple generations. The Ghost in the Machine, on the other hand, was shot on black and white 16mm film, transfered to Super VHS and edited on a proper editing suite at the Ontario College of Art (now called the Ontario College of Art and Design or OCAD). It may be worth noting that the tools used to create this film are all pretty much dead media now.

This was my second year in college and I was fascinated by machines and computers and how they might eventually overtake us. At the time, home computing was in it’s infancy (I wrote the script on a Commodore Amiga which was considered rather high powered at the time) and popular use of the internet was about eight years in the future. The college had a computer department and it was usual practice to go out to lunch while your photoshop file was rendered over a couple of hours, something that would take seconds now. So, compared to today, I had very little evidence that we had anything to fear from PCs.
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Well this is it… the beginning of my blogging career.

The fact that this blog exists at all is a bit unexpected. I’ve always felt that the internet is like a bunch of people talking to themselves. In fact, that’s exactly how I feel right now. That I’m most likely talking to myself. If that’s the case, I suppose I’m not really doing any harm so…

The reason I’ve created this blog to supplement my company site madfatter.com and provide a place to post my videos, showcase works in progress and opine on matters close to my heart.

Having recently revamped the company website and continued my commitment to remain retired from the film industry I’ve found that most of my short films and student films (with the exception of Love Connection )  are now internet orphans, scattered across the web on youtube and google video with no home of their own. As a new blogger my first chore will be to add these poor lost pieces of media to this site.

So without further ado I will set about doing just that… one last thing, I want to formally welcome you, whoever you are, to trevorfischer.com. I hope you will find something of interest here and encourage you to sign up, make comments and join in the discussion.

Please enjoy your stay.