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The making of ROAD TO NOWHERE

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

             During the 1991 summer break from Graduate School in Savannah , Georgia I returned to Kansas City and shot another short narrative film to be edited on SCAD’s equipment. The original title was ONE OF THOSE DAYS, but I after a rewrite it became the comedy ROAD TO NOWHERE (1991).

           ROAD TO NOWHERE begins with Richard standing by his broken down car. He’s on crutches and unable to walk anywhere because of a leg in a cast. This was a last minute change because Johnny did hurt his leg, and it made his motivation to hitchhike even stronger. Along comes a Volkswagon Golf that stops and offers him a ride, but as soon as Richard gets in, he realizes there’s something peculiar about everyone. The driver, named Ernie (Jeany Donohue), talks quite excessively explaining how her parents named she and her older brother Bert and Ernie. The front passenger, Bill (Mark Adams), says only quotes from Shakespeare’s HENRY V; “Leashed in like hounds should famine, sword and fire crouch for employment!” Richard is sandwiched in between Brian, (Adam Leatherwood), in a red cap and his buddy, Buddy (David Leonard). Buddy is eating a big bag of chips, while Brian starts calling Richard “DICK” in a really obnoxious and condescending way. Slowly, Richard starts to discover the secret that Brian and Buddy are hiding – they are bank robbers and everyone else in the car are their hostages as they make their way to Mexico . Richard becomes even more nervous when he hears Brian shot a guard, an “asshole bank president or something like that”, and two nuns in the street because he thought they were some sort of “Ninja SWAT Commando Team”, as he explains, “We ran outside and there they were and well…so it was a bad call!”

            These trapped carpoolers continue to argue and get on each other nerves, until Richard is able to wrestle the gun from Brian, getting shot in the leg in the process, and forcing the car to stop. He orders everyone out of the car, where he tries to reason with everyone at gunpoint but to no avail. Then he tells them to get back in the car and leave, with Brian asking for his gun back and Richard yelling “No!” Brian replies “OK, OK…don’t have a cow or anything!” After they drive off, Richard throws the gun away and starts limping down the highway, crutches and all. The last image is Richard waving off another car pulling over to help.

            In terms of production this was a lot of fun to make. Johnny, Adam, David and I all went to high school together and those three guys in the back seat were some of the funniest people I know. The blooper reel was twice as long as the film itself because putting those three together was like putting Mel Brooks, Rob Reiner and Jonathan Winters together and seeing them improvise some of the funniest jokes and skits you’ve ever seen. Adam would usually start the joke and David would run with it, leaving Johnny with the punch line. I wish I had made another film with Adam Leatherwood and David Leonard paired together, their comic timing and playing off each other was priceless.

            Jeany Donohue remembered the hilarity in the back seat, “I didn’t have very much to say in that film. I was just the driver, and just to be entertained by the boys in the back seat was quite…entertaining. Those two (David Leonard and Adam Leatherwood) were like Laurel and Hardy or whatever - they were just goofy. That was fun.” Johnny agreed, “A fun group to shoot with because they’re awfully funny (Adam Leatherwood and David Leonard). They were such characters! God! They could feed off each other too! Leonard could just keep feeding on the joke, and we had to reign him in.”

Adam Leatherwood, Johnny Johntz and David Leonard in the back seat

David Leonard having fun while filming ROAD TO NOWHERE

           Adam Leatherwood also enjoyed working with David Leonard, “I had never worked with Leonard before, but that was an awful lot of fun. Do you remember when he wrapped his head in ace bandages and he sat in the back seat and he was like (in a pathetic sounding voice), ‘This is the working conditions on the Adamstar film! They’re terrible!’ (Laughs) I’m not surprised (the blooper reel is longer than the film). I am not surprised. I remember driving up and down the stretch of road in the middle of nowhere, and it seems to me that part of the road was closed. But every time the camera was rolling, I recall Leonard and I pulling something. That was a fun one. That was the magic of everything that we have done, really! The blooper films – Gosh, that’s just fun because we have such a good time. And to get a chance to get together and share a few laughs and get it on camera, that’s always a good time. But this was one of the most fun I remember making. I sure enjoyed working with Leonard. I recall (working with David Leonard) being one big laugh. Some of the improvisational stuff was probably funnier than some of the stuff that made it into the final cut.”

            When we started shooting I discovered that Jeany Donohue did not know how to drive a manual transmission, but in the film her character had to drive my Volkswagon Golf complete with clutch and stick shift. One afternoon, we drove out to an empty stretch of road and I tried to teach her how to drive my car. There were the usual mishaps; stalling the car, sudden lurches and the sound of grinding metal as the gears seem to scream out in pain. But by the end of that afternoon, Jeany was able to drive the car and had almost no trouble driving during the shoot, as she recalled, “That was fun, that I do remember! I remember someone taking me in their car over to The Landing to practice on driving a stick shift and how much fun that was! (Laughs while rolling her eyes) I don’t think I remember how to drive a stick shift anymore but that was fun. I kept making your car die and I’m sure I ruined your transmission, but that was fun.” She was a real trooper for hanging in there during the long shoots with all five of us scrunched into the car, and the kidding around that was going on between old high school friends. The only time she seemed embarrassed was when a truck drove past us while the camera was filming us from the hood of the car. The people watching us asked why we were filming ourselves and someone from the back seat blurted out, “We shooting a porno film!” and Johnny added “It’s auto-eroticism!”

“With each of your films you did bloopers and music videos, I really liked seeing your bloopers and your music videos! I think there’s a real humanity and you see the joy in filmmaking when you look at the bloopers, you see the fun that goes on and how people can get one another laughing and the struggles that go on. The music videos are also nice; just a quick, overall, “This was what our experience was” because this process takes 3 to 9 months. You spend a lot of time with these people and it’s nice to have this sort of a summing up, almost a good-bye party for a co-worker. This is a nice way to remember this whole experience together, so I’ve always liked the fact that you’ve done that.” – Johnny Johntz

              I wanted to challenge myself again by forcing the characters into one confining space rather than using different locations. This way I would concentrate on the characters and their interactions. It intrigued me that these very different people can’t deal with each other to such an extent that violence was the only solution. Their personal space was so invaded that it came to a boiling point, fueled by the fact they were being kidnapped. People who watched this film didn’t seem to like it as well, especially after seeing an earlier film as astonishing as NOTHING (displacement). This was only 13 minutes long shot on SVHS and edited on MII video, and perhaps I needed more character development and history to make them more interesting. We never found out why Brian and Buddy robbed a bank or why Bill said nothing but Shakespeare quotes, or why Richard was on crutches. There just wasn’t time in the short 13 minutes to address these issues, and I learned that is very important information for the viewer. People were impressed that I shot the dialogue scenes entirely in a moving car at different angles, even mounting the camera on the hood to shoot through the windshield.

“I think it all meshed quite well together…The personalities of the people really kind of came out through the film.” – Jeany Donohue

“I thought ROAD TO NOWHERE was a good film. I thought it had some bad parts in it, but the whole concept to it was a good one. And I even like the actors in it. It took place mostly in a car. It’s one of those concepts of a stage production where the setting is one thing. Plus it had that element of taking place in a certain period of time, and getting from here to there. I don’t know, it just worked as an idea.” – Don Adams

But in the end it won no awards and seemed to be my second disappointment after JAKE POWERS. I was beginning to become a little hesitant to make comedies; my last two weren’t the successful films like WAR, DEATH AND PIZZA.