Photo Gallery

The making of

NOTHING (displacement)

and

COUNTER MEASURES

The following are excerpts from Mark’s book TRULY INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING;

Johnny Johntz and Jamie Battmer shooting on location at the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City

Johnny doesn't understand what the boy wants from him

            Right before I left for Savannah, Georgia to begin Graduate School at the Savannah College of Art and Design, I shot footage for a production I thought I could use for an editing class project. In the end, from the same footage, I made four very different incarnations, ranging from music video to experimental to narrative film. Shot on VHS video and Super 8 film, the original title was COUNTER MEASURES and was a non-conventional narrative story about a man (Johnny Johntz) who is unaware of the world around him. He is the typical yuppie, in that he is so self-absorbed in his work and his immediate surroundings, that he doesn’t see the beauty and dangers around him. Although it’s not made clear in any of the versions, I envisioned that he was involved in real estate, and was visiting various sites to inspect them. Johnny encounters four people outside of the office while trying to read through a stack of paper work, starting with me as someone who watches him trip in front of an office building. Johnny realizes he is being watched, obviously concerned with his appearance and public perception. Then he meets a child played by Jamie Battmer, younger brother of our friend Andy Battmer and another veteran Adamstar actor. Jamie meets Johnny sitting by a fountain on the Country Club Plaza. He offers the busy executive the ball that he has been tossing, as if to say enjoy the moment of youth. Johnny just stares at the boy, not understanding what Jamie wants. Then Johnny becomes lost in downtown Kansas City , and encounters another man, played by Adam Leatherwood, who has never had the wealth and opportunities that he sees this lost person possessing. Adam finds a ball on the ground and picks it up, turning to Johnny, who is becoming very nervous. Adam tosses the ball at him, but it bounces on the ground and up over Johnny’s head, causing him to lose his stack of paper work to the amusement of Adam’s character. The final encounter happens on a hill as the sun is setting. Johnny stops and looks up, suddenly noticing the sunset for possibly the first time in his life. He lets his hand holding the paper work fall down to his side as he looks at the beauty in front of him. A man played by Ali Rezaee walks up beside him and looks at Johnny, then looks at the sunset. He then holds up a club and hits Johnny over the head and proceeds to steal his wallet. As William Shatner said in AIRPLANE II, “Irony can be pretty ironic.”

            The twist to this film was to be that the Super 8 footage would show Johnny’s experiences, while the video footage would be show the same thing but seen via surveillance cameras by someone who is a cross between Big Brother and a Guardian Angel. Signifying that there are people watching our every move, their purpose is to keep us out of trouble using technology that somehow controls our emotions. But in this case the “Guardian Angel” is talking with an associate about the equipment that he is using, and not really paying close attention to his subject: Johnny. Whenever the film would cut from the film footage to the video footage, we would never see the “Guardian Angels” but hear their conversation, while watching the surveillance footage complete with computer data and messages printed on the screen. The “Angels” become more interested in the technology itself than the reason for the technology. 

                Jamie Battmer remembered working with the Super 8 film, “I remember that day we were using a special kind of film…so I couldn’t mess up. I remember that and I was so worried that I was going to bounce the ball off of my foot or something because you said it was really expensive film. But it went relatively flawlessly.” Johnny also wanted the chance to use the look of film, “It was exciting because we were going to film from video, and I just knew that the quality of it would add to the richness. It just seems weightier; it seems like a more legitimate product when you can shoot on actual film.”

            For Adam Leatherwood the shoot was another hot day in an unusual location, “We were shooting one of the sequences that was on the (railroad) tracks, and I was walking down a certain section of the tracks. I think you wanted another shot of me walking. And I came across a cat that looked like it had just been caught and bent over, and had half of it’s flesh and fur just pulled down on the other side. And it was not a…(Shakes his head and shudders) nice stretch of track you picked out, Mark! (Laughs) I think that interrupted filming for a while, because we all had to come over and take a look at it, and then get back to business. I don’t know why that stands out? I remember the heat. I remember walking and feeling very self-conscious and unnatural. And then I remember that cat. That was another day where we waited until it was at least 130 degrees before we – seriously! It was over 100 that day! I just remember it being just absolutely hot. And I did not like my role in this at all. Even though all I had to do was walk down the street, how could you fuck that up? Well, I did! I was just a little too self-conscious. You can just tell in my movements, the way I was walking down the street. And I felt odd doing it, when I did it, and I don’t know why that is. (NOTHING (displacement)) is by far (of the films I was in) the most technologically advanced that you’ve ever done. And your angles and the camera movements; they’re steady. They look – there’s just no amateurism to it, is what I’m saying. (With NOTHING (displacement)), it seemed you had a really clear idea of what you were looking for. The buildings (and locations) that you picked out, and the way that you filmed them, the rough edges have been smoothed out. It’s clear from watching this film. Which is not to say that WAR, DEATH AND PIZZA or – I think probably the last amateurish one was PETER’S TREASURE. It was fun, kind of rough around the edges. Probably not something you want to put up in a theater - more of a home movie type of thing. But from that to this - this is clearly polished. I can really see…the progress that you’ve made as a filmmaker, in terms of honing your vision.”

 At SCAD I was just starting to learn how to use the professional post-production equipment, and knew I couldn’t make the video footage as elaborate as I wanted. I didn’t record the “Guardian Angels” conversation in Kansas City and decided to do a different version of the film for my editing class project. I would record three fictitious interviews with people who know Johnny’s character - A ‘childhood friend’, a ‘co-worker’ and his ‘fiancee’. I wrote the script for them and taped the interviews on ¾” video. Then I inter-cut the original footage with these interviews to try to have an ongoing commentary about Johnny’s character. I still tried to make the video footage look like surveillance footage, but in the end it didn’t make sense because none of the interviews explain why this even existed. I renamed this version NOTHING (1990) as a reference to a quote from one of the interviews. His childhood friend, played by Gavin Chappell, says; “Johnny wanted to be somebody when he grew up, he didn’t want to live his life for nothing.” But my instructor wasn’t very happy with the result; he saw it as a rough-cut still in need of work than a finished piece.

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              For fun I edited NOTHING the cast & crew video (1990) as a music video showing scenes from the production and behind-the-scenes footage. It actually won 2^nd place at the 1990 Kansas Film and Video Festival, to my surprise. For me it was a way to learn A/B roll editing, because, for the first time I could do wipes and dissolves, rather than just straight cuts. But the ultimate exercise in editing came with the third version of this film, called NOTHING (displacement) (1991), an experimental video that won an Award of Excellence at the 1991 National Fine Arts Video Competition. After seeing several students’ more bizarre and experimental videos, I decided to try to make something that was more of an artistic expression and experience than a more straightforward linear story. Using part of the interview with the childhood friend that I shot for NOTHING as an introduction and ending, the rest was a disjointed montage of images not in any particular order. I would go back and forth from scene to scene, moment to moment of Johnny’s encounters. I did, however end the film with the complete scene of Johnny’s mugging while watching the sunset. I used a special effects generator to manipulate the images themselves, creating overlapped, altered and polarized pictures. It was an assault of the senses, a bombardment of sight and sound in order to create the chaos surrounding Johnny and what may be going on in his mind. It only becomes clear when he finally notices the beauty and tranquility of the sunset, and at that moment he is attacked and robbed. It was interesting to hear how after watching the film, people assumed Johnny was killed after being hit over the head with a club, where in my mind he was just knocked unconscious. Is this a perception created by society and the media, a commentary about violence on TV and in the movies?

“In both of these Super 8 films (DECEPTION and NOTHING (displacement)), because it was going to be grittier and you had to get one take, you had a guy bludgeoned and shot – you decided somebody had to get knocked off in this dark filmmaking style and film medium.” – Johnny Johntz

             The final version, using this same footage, is actually the original narrative concept that I had in mind. Coming full circle, I finally completed COUNTER MEASURES (1991) using the original “Guardian Angels” dialogue. Of all the versions NOTHING (displacement) seems to be the favorite, which had a greater emotional impact. COUNTER MEASURES may have been too confusing a mix of narrative and linear with the odd sub-plot of Big Brother that went nowhere. But it was an interesting exercise in using the same footage to create very different interpretations.