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ADAMSTAR PICTURES
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The Making of THE HONEY THIEF
The following are excerpts from Mark’s book TRULY INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING;
The summer of 1987 was a time to get together with some of my friends in Kansas City and make a couple of short comedies just for fun. In the end we made only one film; my first feature length film that also won my first award. My friend and co-producer Johnny Johntz remembered, “(THE HONEY THIEF) was sort of our summer project, and we filmed a lot around the Plaza and around the Nelson Art Gallery. And I can remember a lot of people watching us as we did it, and actually that was kind of exciting to me; here we’re making this film and getting attention. It was the first sort of major project that I worked on and maybe you worked on that was going to be a full-length feature. With all of (the films), and it’s certainly was the case with THE HONEY THIEF, there was always a creative process going on where even when we had the scripts, you were very open to what others had to share and if they had an idea. You wouldn’t always run with it, but you would listen to it. And if it made sense and if you thought, “Ok, now that might be funny there!” then we would try doing it. It might not make the final cut, but it certainly might so there was a lot of that going on.”
We started shooting THE HONEY THIEF (1987) thinking it would be a 20 minute comedy about a thief named Farzad (Ali Rezaee), who steals a fictitious Picasso painting called “The Honey”, from a house of a friend of mine, Johnny (Johnny Johntz). We must retrieve the painting before his parents return home from a weekend trip, resulting in some slapstick-filled adventures. It kept growing and growing until it was 75 minutes long, which was cut down to about 25 minutes for the 1987 Kansas Film and Video Festival, and finally re-cut to the much better 52-minute version that I show, if I show it at all. Even though it won 2nd place, I rarely show it to anyone because it really isn't that good compared to my later films. The characters are fairly flat and one dimensional, which wasn't that apparent in the 25-minute version, and the story itself isn't very involved or complicated.
The one thing it has going for it is that it’s so silly at times it’s fun to watch. There is a chase scene on the Country Club Plaza ending with me standing in a fountain and Johnny speaking ‘Japanese’ (to give the film an international flavor). There’s another elaborate chase sequence in a park involving a shoot-out with water pistols in a children’s western town, a Benny Hill-like pursuit where we run in circles on picnic tables, an impromptu photo session with Johnny and Ali holding The Honey, and my attempt at an escape on a bicycle ending with me flying head-first into a pond. My father’s art room at the Pembroke Hill School became an art dealer’s secret hideout, where Johnny and I sneak in to steal the painting wearing Groucho Marx style glasses for disguises. I created the painting, The Honey, with the help of my father, and it was originally suppose to be destroyed by being thrown off a large wall and smashing below. But we changed the scene and ended up handing the undamaged painting back to Johnny’s father (played by Johnny’s real father, Topper Johntz). As a unique cameo appearance, The Honey kept showing up in subsequent films.
Two scenes stand out for their originality and production value. The first is what I call “The Dog Scene”. While searching for the art thief, Johnny and I split up, and Johnny drives his car down a road. He doesn’t see a girl crossing the street with her little dog, and runs right into the pooch, sending it splattering into the windshield, while the girl yells out “Mickey!”. This may not sound very funny but it was done with enough exaggeration of the gore and shots that you can’t help but laugh while being repulsed at the same time. The dog-splattering effect was done by using an old Raccoon skin cap that I had, changing the tail to hide the stripes, and filling it with a combination of watered-down ketchup, cut-up pieces of pizza and hot dogs, and gummy bears. While the cameras rolled, I threw this onto the windshield, with someone beside me throwing about a gallon of additional watered-down ketchup onto the car. It hit perfectly in the middle of the windshield, splattering the contents everywhere, and the carcass slid down to the hood leaving a bloody trail. At the same time, the extra blood left the perfect trail of blood over the hood to the windshield. Johnny gets out of the car, grabbing the lump of hair and entrails by the leash and dragging it over to the girl, whom is softly sobbing on the curb. He then says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you. I’m sorry. But there’s still a lot of Mickey on the windshield and I was hoping you would help me get him off.” He then walks back to the car, waves very sadly to the girl and sits back into the driver’s seat. He starts the engine, turns on the windshield wipers and drives away. This demonstrates some of the more demented humor that Johnny Johntz and I would come up with, laughing at the strangest things. After shooting this scene, we went to eat at a restaurant, but we didn’t clean up Johnny’s car. I wonder what were people’s reaction to seeing an automobile parked nearby apparently covered with blood and small bits of flesh on the hood and windshield? Not something you want to see on the way in to eat a burger. We nearly had a disaster when Johnny told us the next day that he went home after dinner to wash the bloody aftermath off of his car, and it was starting to harden and very difficult to scrub off. If he had waited for much longer then it could have taken the paint off the car. So I took note of an important lesson: wash fake blood off of cars IMMEDIATELY upon wrapping the shoot. For Johnny Johntz, the scene marked a new level in my filmmaking, “(The Dog Scene) That’s just a great scene and I think as a concept we thought it could be pretty darn good. But you did a GREAT job of using music. It was so effective in that scene because you’re seeing two different worlds. These two worlds with this sweet girl (and the approaching car) and it adds to the comedy of this scene. The music - the way you used the music where you have the girl walking along and there’s such pretty, soft music. And then you cut to me and I’m driving my Honda, and if I was just driving in my Honda without that music this scene still could have been good but it really juxtapose the two by having this Van Halen song. (Back then I had no plans to sell the film or show it on television, so I didn’t worry about using copyrighted music. That’s another reason why I don’t show it to anyone today.) And it was loud and there may have been sounds of the car speeding up and the brakes, and then to see this dog hit (the windshield) and the two of us screaming. And then I bring the dog (carcass) back over to her after seeing what a mess it is, and then drop it off after saying I’m sorry. And then the music resumes and I take off in my car and it’s like I haven’t missed a beat (to the hard-driving music again), although I have the windshield wipers going with blood splattering everywhere. And then it cuts back to her and she’s dragging this dead dog down the street (to the pretty soft music again). And that’s actually a great, great scene. And today you couldn’t shoot it much better, quite frankly. You could do it better with a better quality film, but the music and the whole concept you wouldn’t want to change at all. That was one of our better scenes.” Kevin Walker agreed, “The Dog Scene is just a riot! That’s probably the funniest thing you’ve ever done! My sense of humor is really sort of morbid and twisted, and when Johnny comes peeling around the corner blaring Van Halen, I think it was, and here’s this little girl with this jewelry box music playing and she’s walking her dog, Mickey. And the next thing you know Mickey is just getting plastered across the hood and the windshield. It was just a riot! Just an absolute riot! And the funniest moment in the whole (scene) - I think Johnny, out of all of us, was the best actor. When he walks over to the little girl and he hands her the chain with the flattened dog, and he tells her that Mickey is dead. And then he’s got this dry, matter-of-fact comment, ‘Well, there’s still a lot of Mickey left on the windshield…’ That is the funniest thing you’ve ever put on film! I absolutely love that (scene).”
“I think (Mark Adams is) very, very creative. He’s a little out there sometimes…(laughs) but he’s creative enough to get what he wants on his films. Like the dog scene, I would have never of thought of doing that but it turned out fine. I mean with what he had at the time, which was very little…I think it turned out fine. I mean he’s very creative with what he does.” – Jeany Donohue
The other scene that was a standout is actually about 3 or 4 scenes that take place at the end of the film. Just as a car is about to crash, the filmmakers (Myself, Johnny and Ali) stop the tape to reveal ourselves sitting on a couch out in the middle of a back yard, at night as if we, too, are watching the film with the viewer. Johnny has paused the tape to explain that we didn’t have the budget to actually crash a car, so we had to use a model instead. The crash was supposed to be Ali’s black RX-7, and I was actually able to find a model kit of his car. So we show the rather pathetic crash of an 8-inch plastic model falling off a cliff. Then I stop the movie again to say I bet a Lamborghini would look even better, so we show a model Lamborghini Contach crashing pathetically as well. Then I interrupt again to say a Ferrari would look even better, at which point Johnny starts to beat the crap out of me, and Ali returns us to the movie. And finally, after the last scene where Johnny’s father comes home and is more upset about his missing beer than the missing Picasso, we stop the tape and Johnny is completely disappointed in the ending. As he continues to argue with me (while I’m bandaged up from our previous argument), I start pointing out the problems with the rest of the film in a final self-mocking examination of low-budget cinema as the credits roll.
In the end Johnny Johntz seemed pleased with our effort, “I think (THE HONEY THIEF) was a significant improvement (over previous films) just first of all because we went with an entire (script). This wasn’t a really complicated plot but there was more plot to this than anything prior, and it was just a much longer piece that we did. You still did almost all of the behind the scenes work so the process of learning and developing and understanding of the nature of filmmaking was primarily yours through all of this. But behind the scenes you would talk to me about camera angles and why you couldn’t go from that angle to another (breaking the 180 degree rule) and why it would be too difficult for the audience to grasp the change. So I was learning those sort of things from you as we were shooting that.” “I was thinking I wanted to get into acting, but fortunately it was your films that showed me very clearly that I did not belong in acting. I did not belong in the field of acting and I thank you for that. (Laughs) Because the camera doesn’t lie, I’ll say that. You put that in your book! In fact make that the title; “THE CAMERA DOESN’T LIE!” And man, the one thing you learn is whether you’ve got a sense for it or not. If you should be condemned for anything, Mark, it is the lack of quality of talent of too many of your actors – and I was one of them! I mean the fact that you really are the best actor you’ve ever had in any of your films to date! YOU ARE! Says two things; first of all you’re a good actor. And secondly your actors that you brought on board sucked! So if there’s a piece of advice that you should pass on to future filmmakers it is they really should (get good actors). You know it really is nice to bring your friends in because they’re going to do it with you, we were just going around and screwing around and doing stuff to see what it would be like. It was fun, and it seemed like it would be fun to us. But you were pulling in the guys who would do that instead of having casting calls or somehow putting ads out there saying that you would be looking for certain roles. I can understand why at a certain level you can’t do that, but it’s going to cost you in the quality of the outcome of your film.” – Johnny Johntz (In all honesty, Johnny was also one of the better actors I worked with on these early films. He had taken acting classes, had a natural ability and presence, as well as very good comic timing. I knew that most of my actors were, in fact, not actors at all. But I learned to cast the ‘actor’ with a character he/she could play well, or change the character to fit the actor’s personality. I knew that people would accept this level of thespian prowess and video ‘filmmaking’ in a comedy, but not a drama. But I was very happy with most of the acting in these early films. I think that it showed on screen when the actors were having fun with the scene.)
In 2007, Mark decided to go back and take another look at the first film
he entered into a film festival; “In honor of the 20th Anniversary
of THE HONEY THIEF, I decided to go back and re-cut the film using the original
footage shot back in the summer of 1987. The original versions of the comedy
were edited using two home VHS VCRs and so the final products were crude in both
the technical quality of the equipment and the creative skills on my part, as
well as the fact that the original Master Tapes have begun to wear out due to
the passage of time and multiple viewings." "I felt like THE HONEY THIEF
deserved a second look, and since I did keep all of the raw/unedited footage, I
could easily record them into my digital, non-linear editing system and produce
the ultimate digitally re-mastered version of the film. I discovered while
editing that there was a lot of footage I never used even in the longer 1987
‘Director’s Cut’ version, including a lost sequence from the car chase
scene at a gas station. I also had the ability to do some special effects and
transitions that I couldn’t do 20 years ago. After I restored all of the
footage back into the film I decided to name this version of the movie THE HONEY
THIEF REDUX." "I wanted to keep all of the music
that was used in the original versions for a couple of reasons. First of all,
the film is like a time capsule from that era and the songs became as much of a
character in the film as the people. Secondly, a lot of the re-recorded dialogue
and voice-overs were mixed with some of the music using the original mono VHS
VCRs, and could not be separated. I decided to keep all of these sound clips
from the original Master Tape, but I was able to fully mix it with other audio
clips and sound effects. THE HONEY THIEF REDUX now has all of the music and many
of the sound effects in stereo, as well as far superior picture quality from
earlier edit masters.”
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