#andy biscontini

So it’s pushing 11 years since I made a movie called EVERY DOG’S DAY.  Thanks to indiepixfilms.com, it’s still available.  People still ask me about it, so what the hell, it’ll be this month’s post.

Jeezis, what do I say about EDD?  It’s a story I somehow talked a bunch of my friends into helping me tell with a camera.  I honestly thought I could make a digital movie for thirty grand and turn it around for sixty.  I could only get my paws on ten, but I still thought maybe an idiosyncratic movie with a unique look, voice, and talented if unfamiliar cast might be marketable.  What can I say?  I was young.

It’s an exercise in pragmatic imperfection.  Somehow, it exists.

 I wrote the script in maybe 1998, based on the pre-9/11 hustle by which people would marry aspiring immigrants for cash.  I’d heard about people who’d been divorced three and four times before they turned 28.  The story was smack in the gray area between love, loyalty and finance that marriage often exists in.  That was the Rubin era on Wall Street and the Deitch era in SoHo, and American culture was well on the path to corporate quantification.  The idea that humans should mate based on FICA scores was just beginning to become dominant (it wasn’t always like that, kids), so I figured those themes might be relevant for a while.

I tried to write it as a mainstream romantic comedy.  (Those who know me know that’s not a comfortable fit.)  I developed it under the tutelage of Hal Hartley, who I’d met while doing art department work on his movie HENRY FOOL.  He was interested in executive producing it, packaged with a couple other projects.

 That didn’t come together, so I took a stab at shopping it around on my own.  The response was positive but the most common line I got was, “You won’t have a problem selling this, but it’s not for us.”  Riddle me that, Batman.

So I shelved it and continued to scrape by on prop gigs and hack carpentry.  Next thing you know a bunch of stuff happens and it’s 2003. 

I’m working and hanging around a scenery shop in DUMBO (VHS4EVR!) and am surrounded by an unfair number of astoundingly talented, funny and active artists and performers.  I was itchy to make something and I had this story sitting on a shelf.  The Panasonic AGDVX-100 had recently hit the market and would fit on a credit card.  Attainable computers could run editing software.  All the makings of a movie were right there, except, y’know, a budget.

I tried to raise sixty, then fifty, then thirty grand, but only came up with ten.

The only person who got paid beyond meals and transportation was Dan Johnson, the sound mixer.  I shot it myself and drove the van.  Susan Leber and Jeff Caldwell kept the paperwork in order and wrangled a sprawling cast of 26.  The rest of the production staff consisted of Edna Leshowitz (then girlfriend, now wife).

 People ask why I didn’t just make a good-looking short, or a more realistic portrait of fewer characters.  I dunno.  If that’s what you want, watch THE VISITOR.  It’s a really good movie.  But it baffles me how people can look at a thing and critique it based on the fact that it’s not another thing. 

 People also tell me I shouldn’t have shot it myself.  Maybe.  But I respect the trades and don’t want anyone working on my shit for free.  Jeff and Susan own a piece of it for their help and I insisted on giving the cast SAG-sanctioned deferments even if they didn’t care. 

 I threw the script over my shoulder once production started.  Steve Cuiffo and the girl who played Stella knew all their lines, but everybody else winged it.  I taped up pages off-screen for Peter Lorenzo sometimes.  Since most of my favorite lines came from the cast I didn’t take credit for the script.

 The result is pretty much the cinematic equivalent of a Xeroxed comic book drawn by someone who really can't draw but tries really hard.

 Some people don’t like it, others love it.  The people I know who love it tend to be awesome, and the people who don’t like it (often also awesome) still seem to find things about it they enjoy watching. 

 I’m not one for nostalgia, but I really enjoyed the ten days we shot it over and I think the movie retains a sense of shared fun.

 Yeah, I tweaked the story after 9/11.  I watched the towers fall from the waterfront in DUMBO.  I understand why seeing that could make someone want to join the army.  But for me, it had the opposite effect.  The way I see it, the only real way to stop a game of whack-a-mole is to unplug the machine.  A strong military matters, but only a strong society can do that.

 For the record, the best movie about post-9/11 NY is Ilya Chaiken’s LIBERTY KID.

I consider myself extremely fortunate to be counted among the extraordinary writers associated with New Texture, publisher of my novel nu luna.  I also consider myself extremely fortunate to know Wyatt Doyle, founder thereof, as is everyone who knows him. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I knew Wyatt long before New Texture took shape.  We both grew up in Lansdowne, PA and our paths had crossed as kids in the 80’s:  I was in the audience at the Halloween screening of “The Wolfman” he MC’d at the Lansdowne Theater, and I had likely competed against him or one of his brothers in a pine-car derby (my own association with scouting was short-lived; my Cub Scout pack was the Dirty Dozen of the den and I never made it through Webelo.  I believe Wyatt made Eagle.  I did win a derby once, though).  

The first time I remember hanging out we were 15 or 16 on the set of Operation: Blue Moon, which I recall as being a strange amalgamation of young-adult murder fantasy and war movie, directed by Philadelphia underground legend Norman Macera and shot by my neighbor Bob “Bobby October” Joyce on equipment borrowed from the local public-access channel.   I don’t remember if Wyatt was there for the stunt involving live explosives and a trampoline that resulted in the fracture of Tim McCloskey’s collarbone.  I do remember going with Wyatt and his dad to see Ken Kesey read (not long after my own dad had put Sometimes a Great Notion in front of me.)

Later, Wyatt and I worked together at the great Movies Unlimited’s former outpost at Lawrence Park.    We kept in touch into the mid-1990s when I was living in Koeln and he was at Bennington.  I keep a bound manuscript of the collected “Speedlace Letters” he wrote at the time on my shelf. 

I’ve always respected his writing and his omnivorous taste in media.  He’s also always been a fair, honest and brilliant dude who surrounded himself with good people.  Since I’ve known him he’s put some terrific books, movies, performers, music and people in front of me, many of which and whom have proven significant, and I was bummed that we lost track of one another in the respective life-vortices that took him to L.A. and dropped me in NY. 

So I was psyched in 05-06 to come across New Texture, the writers’ collective he’d established.  Unsurprisingly, he’d assembled a badass cadre of contributors.  The posts from Wyatt, Plato Jesus, Stanley Jason Zappa, Moby Pomerance et al are a big part of what convinced me that the Internet didn’t have to be all garbage.   I was likewise psyched when he invited me to contribute, because aside from an unsuccessful stab at screenwriting my writing had been more or less buried for nearly a decade.

It’s been great to participate as New Texture has evolved into independent publishing, partly because I enjoy working with Wyatt and like what he puts out (like me, he loves genre and non-genre in equal measure), but also because I think the model he’s building for writing and publishing is valid and important, especially now that the publishing industry apparently no longer has the resources to find and cultivate new writers, nor the flexibility to identify and adapt to rapidly changing trends in reading and book buying.  There are no advances, there is no marketing budget.  Just writers trying to make great books for, and sell great books to, readers and appreciators of great books.

l-r Larry Niven, Andrew Biscontini

In October of 2013 I had the good fortune to be a panelist at the second annual San Diego Comic Fest, thanks to the efforts of my friend and publisher Wyatt Doyle of New Texture.  Major thanks also to Mike Towry, Clayton Moore and everyone else involved with the fest for hosting such a fun event and giving a first-time SF novelist both a chance to interact with a lot of great people and a seat on the dais with some of the most brilliant and talented professionals in the field of comics and science fiction.

For a small con, I found myself torn between concurrent awesome stuff I wanted to see and hear surprisingly often.  But missing out on great shit because of other great shit is what they call one of them happy problems, and every panel I checked out was engaged, engaging, informative and relevant to the state of the arts and the business they exist in, and I was proud to be part of an indie delegation that included Wyatt, Sandee Curry, the great Kate Danley and Henry Baum. 

It also gave me the opportunity to sit on a panel discussing the current state of the private development of the moon with writer and aerospace engineer Blaine C. Readler, John Trimble (who along with his wife Bjo is credited with getting Star Trek on the air in 1966 and naming the first space shuttle the Enterprise), and legendary SF writers Larry Niven (whose Ringworld books and Integral Trees I consider essential to the genre) and Jerry Pournelle, who, in addition to collaborating on numerous seminal hard SF works with a roster of some of the best heads in the game, is generally regarded, by me at least, as the visionary thinker behind the idea that brought about a peaceful end to the Cold War.

Absent any false humility, I have to say that, intellectually, sitting me next to Jerry Pournelle strikes me as a little bit like sitting Bugs Bunny, fresh out of a hole in the ground and noshing on a carrot, next to an F-16: each highly effective but in very different ways and contexts. 

Anyway, Niven showed up and was seated between us just as Pournelle was about to shred a couple of my book's (acknowledgedly theoretical) precepts, and I think the resultant exchange of perspectives and ideas was worthwhile, if disappointing to anyone looking for news of an imminent permanent habitat: the takeaway I got was that space elevators are probably the way to go for regular access to low-Earth orbit, robots are great in vacuum but have cost limitations, there’s no American political will to set up shop first, and the investment is still so enormous that there’s no return on it in sight. 

Niven and Pournelle both seemed to feel that a sufficiently wealthy and unrestrained individual is the missing essential element to spearhead the necessary technological progress, and while I don’t think they’re necessarily wrong, the notion struck me as being somehow very 20th Century.  But I can’t think of any other notion having supplanted it, unless it's the subjugation of human culture to profit algorithms, which would suck.  I recommend Walter Tevis’s The Steps of the Sun on the subject, which Wyatt tossed me a copy of outside the excellent 5Ave books in San Diego.

Anyhow, the whole reason I wound up there in the first place is that I wrote a science fiction novel called nu luna (I’d put it toward the middle of the the SF Moh’s scale) which is set on the moon 400 years after colonization and concerns the problem of the unquantifiable in a highly quantified society.  nu luna is now available as both a trade paperback and an ebook.

I didn't snap enough pics while I was there, but here's a red carpet roll that Wyatt grabbed: