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The Cinematic Badlands of Berkeley by Waylon Bacon
Jai Jai Noire and Mike Edwards, depicted here, are old friends of author Waylon Bacon. illo: W. Bacon
Growing up a fledgling filmmaker in Berkeley, all I wanted was to make horror movies. Unfortunately, that put me at odds with the powers that be in the Berkeley film community, which is known more for its social commentary documentaries. Indeed, Berkeley has always been a grey zone in the Bay Area filmmaking: not as famous as San Francisco, nor as hip as Oakland, and overshadowed by its academic reputation and politics.
"Maybe Berkeley should add it to the city motto: 'We do doc's,'" my friend and fellow filmmaker Jai Jai Noire once said. I couldn't agree more and we often debated moving to San Francisco, for its less politically charged film atmosphere. Nevertheless, I stuck around for a number of reasons and between 2003- 2010 shot seven short films in Berkeley.
For one thing, Berkeley is cheaper to live in than San Francisco. And although the arts are experiencing a renaissance in Oakland, with its monthly art walks and multiplying downtown galleries, Berkeley doesn't contain as many bad neighborhoods and can be less stressful to live in. Moreover, the film scene here is small, making it easy to make friends, although there is some tribal division between the documentary and narrative film crowds.
One of the key players is the East Bay Media Center. Located on the edge the downtown theatre district, at 1939 Addison Street, the Media Center have been offering cheap equipment rentals and top of the line editing facilities for the last thirty years. Mel Vapour, one of its directors, also founded and still runs Berkeley's first and oldest film festival, the aptly titled Berkeley Video and Film Festival, which screens every fall at the Shattuck Cinemas.
When I asked Vapour what the film scene was like when he first started out,
"The scene was fragmented," he said in a voice still exhibiting traces of the New York borough from which he hails. "A handful of documentarians, a few serious filmmakers, and many that had aspirations to BE filmmakers. This a doc city, primarily, which occasionally spawns unique features and shorts."
Down the street from the Media Center, at 2239 MLK, right behind Berkeley High, is the Berkeley Public Access Channel. Since 1994, they have been broadcasting videos of and by the people, including appearances by notorious performance artist Frank Moore (a quadriplegic who made innovate videos covering sex to politics).
"There's a whole lotta politcal rebel rousing—lefty propaganda if you will—which I'm all for, but you know there's just so much of it." noted Jeffery Kimmich, the Access Facilitator, when I I asked what Berkeley cineastes were producing lately. By the way, anyone can get screened there—just drop off a tape.
"Some of the political stuff borders on the bizarre—you know, paranoid. There's also a lot more naked stuff, beyond Frank Moore... it's public access..."
In fact, Jeffery thinks that the very term 'Public Access' might be an inhibitor. "I wish we could change the name from public access to community media center because public access equals crappy for some people, which reflects the content, or their perceptions of what the content can be."
In an effort to shake things up there, and in the Berkeley film scene at large, BCM (as it's affectionately called) have been running a series of film festivals about three times a year since 2007. The festivals are broken into three categories: Horror Fest, which runs in the fall and is the most popular; Hero Fest which runs in the spring and spotlights underground action films; and Summer Fest, which due to its ambiguity, is transforming this year into a 48 Hour Film Festival.
Jeff Lunzaga not only critiques the Berkeley scene but does something about it, notably running well produced but totally local festivals. illo: W. Bacon
"Event producers in the Bay Area have the dreams but not the drive and stamina to follow through," says Jeff Lunzaga, programmer and mastermind behind the festivals. "It's hard to get filmmakers motivated because there is not enough festival activity."
A soft-spoken man with a gentle smile and an ankle length leather jacket, Jeff is no novice. He's been putting on film festivals for almost ten years now, as a reaction to frustrations he experienced as a filmmaker in his own right. "Northern California has a history of broken promises within the community. There's not enough people stepping up and saying, 'Let's show the world what we can do.'"
Jeff's approach to film festivals is unique. He doesn't simply put on a festival—he rolls out a virtual one man promotion machine, which includes pre-taped interviews with the filmmakers, internet commercials, and for those who prove themselves to be resilient, an option to speak on a 'kick-starter' panel and discuss the finer points of filmmaking to a live audience.
"It's all about presentation. It's always good to try to land sponsors or even add entertainment to the event, such as, bands, knife swallowing porn stars, demonstrations, etc. Doing that will make the show snappier, " advises Jeff, who can be contacted through his Torrid Productions.
At their best, Jeff and the Media Center represent what the Bay Area's film reputation rests upon, which is to take traditions, shake them up and expand upon them. Occurring numerous times throughout film history, this approach has seeped into the mainstream and become a standard.
If you continue working your way west from Berkeley Access, you will find your way to Tenth and Parker and an unassuming if massive building with a brown rock facade, and the words 'Fantasy' in plain white text on the south wall. Fantasy Studios initially specialized in recording and releasing jazz but blew up in the late sixties when they released a record by a local shipping clerk named John Fogerty and his band, The Golliwogs (later renamed Creedence Clearwater Revival).
In the seventies, under the stewardship of Saul Zaentz, after whom the building is now named, they began to provide postproduction facilities for feature films building the third leg of the Hollywood North stool after Coppola's Zoetrope and Lucas. Among the movies edited there are "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," "Amadeus," and 'The English Patient."
"In the 60's, the late sixties in particular, there where young guys who didn't want to be restrained, or forced into a mold, and wanted to do things in their own way," recalled John Nutt, who worked as a sound and film editor at Fantasy from 1981 until 2005. In the early years, the Bay Area was actually thought of as Hollywood North.
"People like George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola knew there was a lack of facilities in the Bay Area, so these guys threw themselves into it." Nutt told me. What they were throwing themselves into was sound design, an aspect of film previously thought of as peripheral.
"In LA you would just go to a [sound] library and do it, but what happened in San Francisco at that time was that sound suddenly had a serious budget and a lot of people working on it. There was a lot of experimentation, since they didn't have to ask permission as much. Suddenly they found themselves doing stuff in a very high quality way, recording all original sound effects, very UNUSUAL sound effects."
The end results were the revolutionary soundscapes on such films as "Star Wars," and "Apocalypse Now." And whereas Fantasy, Zoetrope and Lucasfilm continue to operate today, John is quick to point out that the party didn't last very long.
"The studios in LA took note of all this really quickly, and responded. So in short order, they [created] the equivalent, and then vastly surpassed us. So in that respect, this area has fallen back into a less vibrant, less exciting place in the overall industry."
But with Lucasfilm, Fantasy, and Pixar all in the immediate area, filmmakers still flock here, interested in the idea that the Hollywood North concept and innovators could again be players.
"The Bay Area's film history is full of thoughtful and innovative films and filmmakers." says local filmmaker Mike Edwards, who wants to direct narrative film.
"People like Francis Ford Coppola and Philip Kaufman are major influences on me, not only for my own work, but on my motivation to continue working in this area."
Kamala Appel, on the other hand, moved here from LA because she sees great things for the Bay Area as well as Berkeley scene, not only her feature 'Animal Crackers,' a festival favorite. illo: W. Blair
Kamala Appel, who has worked as a filmmaker both in LA and Berkeley, where she currently resides, thinks the tide may change in the very near future.
"I've already noticed at Producers Guild meetings and conferences that LA looks to us (Bay Area) for leadership in the New Media arena," she says. "Although I still think the mind set in Hollywood is that if you're out of town, you're out of the game, that could change in the next 3-5 years."
With the monumental advances in digital technology, more and more Bay Area artists are starting to think it's possible to make films here successfully and not have to live in Los Angeles.
"The technology and the gear enables people to be almost any where on the planet and work together," notes Nutt. "And I frankly think that's a good thing, because if everything is done in the same place, it's homogenized ... you lose that regional flavor." In the end, that's as good a reason to make films in Berkeley, or anywhere.
Waylon Bacon is a Bay Area based filmmaker currently working in Los Angeles as a storyboard artist. His films and art can be viewed at his site.Posted on Jun 28, 2011 - 09:45 PM