At the Movies with Governor Tom: George Washington

Last night at the Egyptian I caught a screening for this little gem from 2000 that I'd heard about but never got around to seeing (isn't that always the case?). Entitled George Washington, it was the feature directing debut for a chap called Green, David Gordon Green. Dave's got a new movie coming out soon entitled Snow Angels, his fourth film. So in his honor, as well as part of their No Budget film series, the Egyptian decided to do a little retrospective of his career. Tonight they'll be showing his second and third films (All the Real Girls and Undertow), and then tomorrow the Egyptian's hosting the big premiere for Snow Angels. Ah, it must be nice, ya know? To be only 32 and not only have four films already on your resume but also to have a theater as old and prestigious as Sid Grauman's Egyptian doing a series in your honor. Poor guy. To boot, he's already wrapped his fifth film. Coming out this August, it's called Pineapple Express and will feature those cats from Knocked Up and Superbad and whatnot. You know, the Judd Apatow crew. They showed the trailer last night just before they started the Q&A. Two words: Fucking. Hilarious.

Let's talk about the film first before getting to all the interesting stuff I learned during the Q&A. Actually I shouldn't say too much about it. About 85 minutes or so long, the whole story sort of hinges on this one thing that happens about a half-hour into it. It's something you probably won't see coming because it totally comes out of nowhere. So naturally, if I spill it here, you won't have much reason to see it.

It's set in this small unnamed North Carolina town with all these interesting people, both black and white. Actually, most of the kids we get to know are black, and most of the adult characters are white. The main character is this black tween named George. He's a bit on the laconic side, and it's unclear if that's because he's just slow in the head or if he just doesn't have much to say. Sometimes he does seem slow, but then other times you'll see wisdom there that belies his years. The most interesting thing about George is that he's got the head of a sponge. Literally. I mean, it looks like your normal average head, but it's got the sensitivity of a sponge. What does that mean? For starters, he's not allowed to swim. And secondly, he needs to make sure he doesn't bump his head, even lightly, against anything. If he does either of those things, it irritates his brain. So in other words, whenever he's out playing with his pals, he needs to take caution. If the little dude isn't careful, it could be the end of him. To help minimize the risk, he never leaves home without one of those old-fashioned leather football helmets strapped to his noggin.

George mainly hangs out with these three other kids. You've got this little bespectacled boy named Buddy. Then there's Vernon, the big guy, who's the most sensible and practical of the bunch. And finally there's this little blonde named Sonya. She's tough to figure out, partly because she almost never says anything. She's even more mute than George. Also, she never betrays much emotion. By the end of the flick it's like, okay, I think the gist of Sonya's deal is that she brings bad luck wherever she goes. I know that sounds cryptic, but you'll understand when you see it.

In addition to kicking off Dave's career, George Washington was also the springboard for a couple of actors. First you've got Paul Schneider, who played Rico. A native of Asheville, North Carolina who went to college with Dave, Paul has gone on to star in stuff like Lars and the Real Girl and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Then there's Eddie Rouse, who plays George's Uncle Damascus. In addition to doing more of Dave's stuff like All the Real Girls and Undertow and this summer's Pineapple Express, he scored roles in The Number 23 and American Gangster.

That's really all I should say about the film itself. It's a bit artsy in that there's less emphasis on plot and more emphasis on characters and beautiful imagery. It's not even an hour and a half, so if you don't like it, at least you won't have wasted too much of your time. I think it's worth seeing at least once. Whatever your opinion, it'll leave you pondering its meaning afterward. I'm still pondering the ending myself.

In addition to David Gordon Green, the Q&A featured his producer Lisa Muskat, Damian Jewan Lee (Vernon), and Eddie Rouse (Uncle Damascus). The moderator was Peter Broderick, President of Paradigm Consulting, a film advertising company.

Dave's an interesting cat. Born in Little Rock, he'd barely learned to walk when the family relocated to the Dallas suburb of Richardson. After high school, he moved back east and attended the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. In fact, he was there for the same four years I was in college, 1994-98. And I majored in film too! But now look. He's a successful director and I'm a grunt at Yahoo!. Let me move on before I get too depressed.

So North Carolina, right? Dave made a lot of friends there, both on the film crew side as well as the acting side, such as Paul Schneider. One of the shorts he made as a student was called Pleasant Grove. That served as the basis for George Washington.

Literally the day after graduating in May of '98, Dave paid a visit to L.A. to sort of scope things out. He didn't like what he found, felt a little intimidated and all that, but eventually moved out that September. From then until the spring of '99, Dave worked just about every manner of oddjob that's possible, all in an effort to save up enough cash to make a feature film version of Pleasant Grove. No, you don't understand. Dude really did take just about every gig he could. One of them was working as a concierge at the Hollywood Park Casino. Another included graveyard shift security guard at the Getty Center. The big advantage of both of those jobs was the flexible hours. The gravy with the Getty gig was that the place would be completely deserted at night, which afforded him ample time to work on the screenplay for what would eventually become George Washington. Oh, and to earn some more coinage, he showed up at a diaper company every week to let them tape diapers to his back to see if they'd leave a rash. He said he averaged about one or two rashes a week. Never one to let himself get bored, Dave also donated sperm.

By the spring of '99 the man had pocketed something like $40,000. So he went back to Winston-Salem, hooked up with all his old pals, and convinced them to help him make his first feature film for next to nothing. Most of his money went to film stock. Yeah, he shot it on film. If you've ever been involved with making a picture, even a short one, in black and white, film stock can suck your wallet dry before you can say Rosebud. This was feature length and in color. The production cost something like $42,000, but then he needed a few more thousand for post production. For that he relied on the generosity of family and friends.

It took 19 days to shoot, during which time all the cast and crew lived together in some big old house in one of those small towns near Winston-Salem. According to Dave, the parents of the child actors just dropped their kids off and said, "See ya in three weeks!" Gotta love the laid back South. Just to make sure everything stayed kosher, though, Dave's sister, an elemantary school teacher, lived with them.

When talking about the loose structure of the film, Dave said the main reason for that was he didn't have a script. I mean yeah, there was a script, which expanded on his student film, but for the most part he didn't follow it. For one thing, he didn't follow the dialogue at all. A lot of the characters are black, so rather than pretend that he knows how to write for black characters, he had his black actors make up their dialogue on the spot. While he was at it, he told the white actors to go with their own dialogue as well. The film doesn't have the traditional three-act structure. As I said above, you've got about a half-hour of getting to know the people, then that pivotal event happens, and then the remaining 50 minutes or so see the characters trying to implement a cover-up. If you don't watch this with an open mind and are not ready for a film that challenges you a bit, then you might get impatient before the pivotal event happens. But hang in there, this flick will grow on you.

Take that little montage right after the pivotal event. It's basically a sequence of tractors in a landfill somewhere. We don't even know where, just exactly, or how it's supposed to relate to the rest of the film. Dave said his idea was to let his audience take a break after that pivotal event. He told his cinematographers (yes, he had more than one) to go out and just shoot whatever interesting stuff they could. Then during editing, he chose whatever he liked and stuck it in there. As he said, that tractor sequence lets the audience digest everything they've just seen so they can be ready for the rest of the picture. I dunno, I know it's unconventional and all that. But you've gotta understand that Dave's attitude is that laid back Southern attitude. I don't have a problem with it. It's charming even. Maybe I think that because I lived in North Carolina for a spell and still go there every Christmas. I dunno.

For his part, Damian Jewan Lee said that he never needed the script at all. Ever. His character Vernon was one of the bigger parts in the film. If he wasn't in as many scenes as George, it wasn't by much. So the fact that he never, not once, needed to use the script tells you how loosey goose Dave was with his own writing. As Damian said, Dave would show up ready to shoot the scene, take Damian's copy of the script, and toss it off the roof, out the window, away from wherever they happened to be at that time.

It wasn't always like that, though. Eddie Rouse talked about this one scene he did where he talks to George about his dog. It's a pretty potent scene. Dave said they shot it in the basement of his head cinematographer, Tim Orr. During the making of the film, Eddie'd been going through some personal issues. Neither Dave nor Eddie expanded on what those issues were, but suffice it to say that Eddie wanted to shoot all of his scenes as soon as possible so he could get back to solving whatever his crises were at that time. To prepare for the scene, he'd had to ask Dave and the crew to leave him alone for a bit. Dave said he and everyone else went to listen to music while Eddie prepared for the scene by himself. Eddie made it a point during the Q&A to tell us that he didn't make up any of that speech, that it was verbatim from the script, and that in reality he has no problems with dogs.

Later on, when someone asked Dave which scene had been the most emotionally difficult to shoot, he cited this one. He said that the dog monologue scene was the first time he felt like a director because it required him to help Eddie's character reach this emotional place.

It was kind of funny actually. After the film but before the Q&A, they did this prize raffle where they asked trivia questions about the film. Whoever answered correctly would get some random prize. One of the prizes was a date with Eddie Rouse. So when they asked the question, the person who answered was a guy. Since Eddie's not gay, they asked another question and insisted only the women in the audience answer. And one of them did, this cute blonde down toward the front row. Then during the Q&A, while insisting he had no dog issues, Eddie also insisted that he doesn't "date dudes."

When producer Lisa Muskat was on the spot, she talked about how she used to teach film history at NC Arts. She's gone on to produce all of David's stuff except for Pineapple Express, which was produced by Judd Apatow. While watching the film last night, she said it was thrilling to look back and have all those memories. She's come so far since then, having produced a bunch of other stuff in addition to Dave's work. The same can be said for the film's head cinematographer, Tim Orr. He's photographed other films Dave has made in addition to a bunch of other stuff. When someone asked Lisa if there were any obstacles to getting this film off the ground, the only thing she complained about was the heat. That, of course, is a given in the Carolinas. The summers there are notoriously humid.

Look at all those rich people. In addition to a couple of his actors, Dave helped launch the careers of his producer and his cinematographer. Not to speak of himself. That was the point, he said. The key to getting George Washington made was to attract talented people who would be willing to "get sweaty" and work for pennies on a film that could be a credential on their resume and lead to gigs that actually yield an income.

Someone asked Dave if he was trying to say something by having his main characters be black kids while he himself was a white adult. Dave swears he wasn't. As a youngster in the Dallas 'burbs, Dave said that he went to elementary school in inner city Dallas where whites and blacks got along just fine. At that time, it never occurred to him that getting along with peeps of another color should have been an issue. He had friends who were white, friends who were black, and he didn't think about it. When it was time for junior high, he had to stay in Richardson. That's when he first became aware of racial politics, which drove him batty as a child and which he still talks about with frustration to this day. So in other words, no, it didn't strike him as a big deal that he, a white man, would write and direct a movie with black main characters.

He shot only two hours' worth of film, and he considered all of it disposable, meaning he wasn't attached to it. See the relaxed Southern ethic again? To spend all that money on film and consider all of it disposable says a lot about the man. That's why he had no problem with Eddie Rouse wanting to shoot all of his stuff first so he could bail. The whole thing's disposable, he told Eddie, so don't feel any pressure. Even after cutting the thing down to 85 minutes, he nearly lost most of it while waiting for developed film to be FedExed to him. At that point, he was resigned to it being another short film. But FedEx eventually found the package. Dave edited it at home on his computer with Final Cut Pro.

At that time, he considered Sundance to be the one and only gateway for independent films, so that was the first place he submitted it. When Sundance said no, he didn't know what to do, but Lisa Muskat did. She helped him submit to a bunch of places. The savior turned out to be the Berlin Film Festival. Soon after getting Dave's application, they called him up. Not only would they show it at their festival, but they wanted to add German subtitles. And so it was accepted at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival, found a distributor, and was released theatrically later that year. As a bonus, those who saw it in Germany got to see the subtitles. That was probably vital. As a student of German, it's tough at first understanding what the Bavarians and Austrians (i.e. southern Germans) are saying at first. I can only imagine how tough our American Southern twang is if you're from another country. At any rate, Dave couldn't say enough about how tickled to death he was that his little-movie-that-could was being shown in Berlin in front of audiences that numbered nearly a thousand.

And so Dave started off the 21st century with quite a bang. After finding a distributor, George Washington was shown in no less than 13 countries, in theaters and at other festivals. Dave said he got to travel to all of those countries that year and hardly had to spend a dime out of his own pocket. To be exact, he said that during the entire year of 2000, he only had to spend $3,500 of his own money. "I'm very proud of that figure," he said.