This is VERY long, but gives you a good look into everything about when I WROTE the show. This will be MY last blog about "The Death of Joe Britz" for a while. The next one will be the announcment about the screening.
Everything is motivated by love. No matter it being the love of money, another person, an activity or any substance, if you love it you will do anything to have it. My life long love affair has been with celluloid. If you are thinking that means I’m a butt man, you are incorrect, well, half incorrect. It simply means that I love movies.
As far back as I can remember I have loved film. Some of my earliest memories are viewings of films I saw as a child. My parents have informed me that I was great to take to a movie because I never made noise, nor did I squirm. Why was it that I wasn’t like those little brats that kick and scream while you are trying to watch any movie? Well, that I have simply loved film since I was one and my parents took me to see Beauty and the Beast. Since then, I’ve never been off film. In fact, in my baby book it states that two of my first words were “Phone home.” I was a geek even before I knew what a geek was.
Now, with any small boy, I loved superheroes. At that point in my life, I didn’t know how to read, so I wasn’t into the comics but I was into the cartoons and movies. I didn’t realize but I wasn’t into the fact that they were comic book characters, but the fact that I was seeing these things that could never happen in real life being brought to the screen. In all my confusion, I thought that if I wanted to work with superheroes I had to make comics; I decided I was going to be an artist. Never mind the fact that out of my friends I was the worst at drawing cartoons. Who needs to be able to draw when you have great ideas that are based on the clothing in my closet?!
That is right, my first superhero was based on a t-shirt I had that had a basketball with the number “33” on it. The hero’s name you ask? Super 33 of course. I drew several comics, but I knew he couldn’t exist only there. So I broke out my father’s video camera, but in a yet-to-be-used VHS and began filming the epic Super 33. For the next three years I made everything from Super 33 V to a cooking show featuring Super 33.
Then one night in 1998 happened that I will remember for the rest of my life. It was the beginning of October and my mom and sister were out for the night. My dad and I got Chinese food and started surfing the channels. We got to AMC and it was the first week of their month long monster movie marathon. On the screen was just about to begin a movie that my dad had made references to when he was joking about how people looked: The Creature from the Black Lagoon. I didn’t just want to watch this: I NEEDED to watch it. It was one in the morning when the third in the trilogy, The Creature Walks Among Us, was finished and my life was changed. For the rest of the month, I watched the cheesy horror movies and discovered they were on every Friday for the rest of the year. It became a ritual that continued until AMC stopped it.
Later that year, my best friend and I auditioned for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the Woodland Opera House. One of us didn’t get in: me. The summer before, he had done Show Biz Kidz at the Opera House. For some reason, I got the idea in my head that if I did Show Biz Kidz I could get into more shows at the Opera House. My mother signed me up and I was in. On the first day, I walked in and sitting there was another boy that my friend knew from the last two shows he had done. This boy’s name was Ray. Instantly, Ray and I hit it off. We had a very similar sense of humor and even more strangely, we were both into cheesy horror films. We started to hang out and we began making films together and to this day that collaboration exists.
In 2001, Ray had his birthday. It was to be the beginning of us filming a feature length version of a short film series we made called Curley Beth where Ray played a killer little girl trying to get me. For the night, he had rented three horror films: Poltergeist, House on Haunted Hill and Night of the Living Dead. After making it through the wonderful Poltergeist, we put in Night of the Living Dead.
Never in my life had I watched a film like Night of the Living Dead. It was gorey, it was terrorfying, and it was a revalation in my life. These gorey horror films my dad said he hated could be good? Well, I decided to research this. I quickly discovered that in the world of horror that you needed to know your directors and actors and stories. From then on, I did all my research on a film and I realized how influential a director is. Before that, I didn’t realize that a director was pretty much the person who made the movie. He had the ultimate call on what goes in the movie and what doesn’t and is the one that creates all the visuals I loved. Why had I wanted to be an actor? After all that research, I decided that I wanted to be a director and have never looked back.
Flash forward to 2006. I had more short films that I had made than I could count. Three full length movies that I had written and tried to get made fell apart before my eyes as I was not interested enough in the project. Thanks to two performances the prior year, I had two Elly award nominations. Earlier that year I had become a big fan of the films of Kevin Smith. The type of comedy in them made me laugh hysterically, but at the same time they had a heart to them. These were films that were more than just pop culture banter, they were about real life and all the problems that arise out of everyday experiences. Even if the problems were not humanly possible, they were grounded in reality and every character still acted like a real person. This was what I wanted to write. This was what was calling to me.
As the school year began that year, Ms. Sakona told the Play Productions class about an acting festival called Laenea. It was for high school students and you can do anything from monologues to a one act show. My friend, Jorren Thornton, and I were doing a scene from The Odd Couple. One day, we had a subsitute teacher and Jorren and I started to go off on tangents and not working on our scene at all. We looked over and the substitute was watching intently. The next things out of his lips were:
“Are you guys acting? Cause this is entertaining as hell.”
Jorren and I then decided that we were not going to do someone else’s scene. We were going to do our own. Not only were we going to write a scene, but an entire one act play. Everybody expected only a comedy from us, but we were not about to do that. We were going to write a dramedy about two brothers who are re-united after several years at the funeral of their mother.
We sat down one day at my home and wrote the entire first act, 10 pages. Since we told the festival that the play would be 20 minutes we knew that the first and second acts needed to be 10 pages each. The first ten pages were 100% comical. We pulled our mutual love of film, obscure references to weird bands, 80’s cartoons and much more to form dialogue that flowed just as if somebody was talking.
Jorren wrote the second act, raw emotions spewed from his fingertips as he unveiled more and more about their pasts. Their relations with their parents. The naivety of the younger brother and the burden of secrets on the older brother’s.
We performed it and when we got into the judging room the first words we heard was, “Wow… We wish more people had seen this. This is what Leanea is about.”
It was the best day of my life.
And it was over several hours later.
At this point, not unveiled to anyone. I had been sort of having a self crisis. I really was giving less and less of a shit about acting. At the time of writing of “Forgive, Not Forget,” I was prepping for my audition for “The Music Man” which is one of my favorite shows of all time. Even though I loved the show, I was expecting to play Marcellus and not being the role that I always wanted to: Harold Hill. Basically, I was going to be re-doing my role as Moonface from a year earlier. This is something that didn’t appeal to me at all. As an actor I’ve never played similar characters, and I didn’t really want to begin. I was also having a large just self-doubt. Nobody seemed to want me to go into film but my friends at the time. I hadn’t made a short film for a very long time. Pretty much, I had nothing driving me. Leanea pulled me out of this and breathed new creative breath into me.
In fact, right after I decided I was going to make a solo play effort.
I wanted to do something different though.
Something that I had not seen on stage before.
I wanted TARANTINO on stage basically.
Hitmen with witty dialogue and time jumps. I came up with the plot of two guys who killed a man being interrogated. They each tell separate stories that makes the other one look much worse. The stories would be interlocked creating a very strange/funny story. I tried to figure it out. Much outlining was done to make it all make sense, but I couldn’t do it. I’m simply not that good yet.
The title for this script? “The Death of Joe Britz.” It was called this because the person who was murdered was named Joe Britz.
Then it came to me as I was walking to class with Luke. Out of nowhere the following line popped into my head:
“Hi, my name is Joe Britz and by the end of the day I’m going to be dead.”
I turned to Luke and said it. He looked at me like I was crazy. Then I began explaining it to him.
Throughout Spanish 3, I could not pay attention to Perea’s rambling. A new story started to unfold in my brain. A story about a guy, much like myself, who was visited by Death and told he has a day to live. Yea, sure, the idea had been done before, but it was an idea that I wanted to play with.
People who have asked me any advice on writing a script (I don’t know why they would), know that I always tell people to go into it with an outline. I did the single weakest outline of my life. There were no detailed scenes. No character outlines. Nothing. 5 words: the steps to accepting ones death. Those were all my notes and I began writing.
Even at that point, I knew I would not be doing theater much longer and decided that one of my last shows should be one I would love to play. At the same time, I knew I wanted to direct it. So I decided to write myself… well the same comical supporting role. This character was Death.
It began as a quirky little comedy. That was all it would be to me. Then I got to a certain point in the script. I’m pretty brushed up on my religious ideals and I’m fairly religious contrary to popular belief. Not religious as I enjoy going to Church and take the Bible word for word, but the type of religious where I believe in God and all that jazz. I don’t nessecarrily believe in all the views of one sect of a religion though, I pick and chose. At the same time, I love ancient culture mythology. This point of the script was the line “I am Death not Loki…” this left me with an opening to slyly add my own views on religion into the play.
From that moment on this play changed from the simple quirky comedy to a play with themes and ideals and so much more. It became a dramedy and I loved every moment of it.
Half way through writing it the band trip occurred and I was going to be away from my project for a full five days. I decided this was not going to happen. The first half was pretty much finished, I printed it out and bought myself a new notebook to right it on.
On the following 9 hour bus ride, I became totally anti-social. People would sit to me and I would put in my ear phones, listen to The Who or Elton John and write. Write. Write. Write. I would occasionally take a break to ask somebody for last names for certain characters (Kristina Garske came up with the last name for Russel).
About half-way through the trip we went to “Wicked” and after that, as life long friend Sarah Landsburgh fell asleep on me: I finished causing a big yell of joy which awoke her from her almost slumber.
The day after we returned, I talked to Parker about doing the show I wrote. Without even reading the script she went, “Okay, as long as you direct.” So there it was. I gave her the script though, just so she can double-check it all. The only comment I got from her back was, “There aren’t any girls.”
This was a lie because the scenes with Gwen were always in the show. It is true though that it was a show with five guy roles and one girl role. There was always an idea about a date scene that I had thought of. Truly, I liked the idea of Joe being so pathetic that he would not go on a date and I decided that the show was good enough without the scene.
It was early May at this point. I had no plans for the summer, my job search was not turning out too well. I was going to let Joe sit all summer and bring it to my attention again in September. Then, my plans to make the film version of “Forgive, Not Forget” fell through. Nothing. No film. I was not that worried about that though because I was still unsure about a visual style at this point.
Then Ray and I made impact. That was the visual style I wanted and frankly, I knew I was ready.
In my mind I started to form “The Death of Joe Britz” as a movie. The casting seemed simple at first: Kayla Sheehan as Gwen, as I wrote the role for her, Ray Tarara as Russel, since I sort of wrote the role loosely based on him. Then came my question: Do I want to act in it? For a while I decided not because I knew I was playing Death later that year, so it was no big deal to me. I decided to cast somebody who I had enjoyed his work my entire life, Kyle Hadley. Recently, Kyle and I had become very good friends after being casual acquaintances. We had both been heavily involved with theater in Woodland and it was strange we had never worked together. Still, I knew he would be 100% perfect for the role.
My problem was that I was left without a Joe. It was not that I didn’t know people who could take it. At this point, I had fallen in love with the character of Joe and I was too paranoid to trust the role to anybody.
We did the read through in early June. Every time I tried to do some filming for about a month nobody could do it. Then, one day everything clicked and we filmed. About two months later, we were 100% done filming (chronicled in earlier blogs). There was much laughing and some tears shed. We got it done.
I finished editing about a week after the movie was done and now we are working on the play.
That is it. Joe is slowly dying, one project after another and will be finally dead for me for a long time after January.
