cineSOURCE magazine

DeWolf Smokes Monster Oakland Joint Film
by Doniphan Blair

Despite the suit and cool cat demeanor, Oakland filmmaker, writer and performer Jamie DeWolf inevitably reached a point in his interview where he had to express himself fully. photo: D. Blair

WITH ONE BLOCKBUSTER AND TWO
indie darlings this year, Oakland film has become the biggest thing since crack cocaine in the ‘80s, or the city’s crazed football fans, Raider Nation, a decade later, or the Golden State Warriors' four-year-old basketball dynasty, although they’re moving to a brand-new, half-a-billion dollar stadium in San Francisco at the end of the season.

Unfortunately, it may be too soon to crack the champs for Hollywood on the Estuary. Yes, “Panther”, “Sorry to Bother” and “Blindspotting” were created by Oaklanders, but they were mostly crewed by Hollywooders, a situation not likely to change soon.

In addition to getting gentrified out, many filmmakers are self-evicting. With commercial film relatively small in Oakland and big productions from out of town, many are making the six-hour drive south to the actual Hollywood, some permanently.

Six years ago, Oakland had high hopes as a film center. It had the actual Oakland Film Center (two buildings/25 businesses on the old army base), the Oakland Film Office (featuring the talented Ami Zins wooing producers with tax rebates and incredible location variety) and a startup film magazine (yours truly).

Within a few years, the Center was gone (see cineSOURCE article), the city had cut its commission by half and, although cineSOURCE is still with us (as you may have noticed), the city and most film businesses cancelled their ads.

“I just hope it is not the last chimes of the bell,” noted Jamie DeWolf, another great Oakland filmmaker, albeit in the scrappy DIY, or “grimy, guerilla Oakland,” as he calls it, genre. Indeed, DeWolf wrote, co-directed with Joshua Staley, and starred in “Smoked”, a drug-addled, one-liner laced, caper-comedy precisely six years ago.

Although Oakland had a through-the-roof murder rate in 2012 (127 killed), as well as plenty of theft, addiction, sex slavery and unemployment (it still does—please don’t tell anyone), it was also a cheap, fun place to live, work and play for tens of thousands of activists, artists, musicians, filmmakers and writers.

For those who hadn’t gotten with the Oakland program, well, “You’re just a blind man jerking off to braille,” as a character quips in “Smoked”, which is available on iTunes and Amazon.

“I really wanted the film to be good on the page,” DeWolf told me in our late-October interview (below). “I wasn’t interested in trying to make it naturalistic in any way. It was all about clever turns of phrase, much like we used to see back in the day, with old noir films, where everyone talked ‘smart.’"

Starting as a writer, director and actor, DeWolf had to learn to shoot and more to make his feature, 'Smoked' (2012). photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

How 'bout this smart talk: “Your asshole was a question mark that someone else had the answer for.”

A lanky, red-haired 41 year old (his birthday was October 28th), DeWolf is from the all-white suburbs of Benicia and resembles an insurance salesmen in the cheap suits he favors. Alas, if you made any other confirmation biases, you’d probably be wrong, given DeWolf is from the wrong side of the tracks, literally and figuratively,

A graduate of the university of hard knocks, DeWolf majored in drugs and suicide, with a minor in film, until he attended actual film school—after making "Smoked"! His early years are examined, with all of DeWolf's excess intensity as well as artistry, in a cinema love letter to an early girlfriend, "Strchynine Valentine" (2018), now on the festival circuit.

Plus his white privilege is extra giving, given his family is not only serious Bible bangers but Hubbards, as in L. Ron Hubbard, as in Hollywood's only homegrown religion, which is more patriarchal than Christianity.

After moving to Oakland in his 20s and falling in with a sometimes shady pack of artists, musicians and performers, DeWolf was soon surfing the spoken word scene and performing all over the world with The Suicide Kings, which included his "Smoked" co-stars, Geoff Trenchart and Rupert Estanislau.

They even taught classes at high schools, often performing a play about Columbine, the 1999 Colorado school shooting that launched a thousand mad men. More recently, he made a striking short on the subject, "Ricochet in Reverse", with Eric Harris played by Rafael Casal, the co-star/co-writer of “Blindspottings”’.

“That was the play. We toured that around a lot. We were very, very proud of it [but] we were also doing ‘Smoked’. ‘Smoked’ was my crazy antidote to this hard-hitting piece about teen violence and suicide.”

Given today’s culture cops, “Smoked” could probably not get made now, even by the sheer force of will DeWolf exerted. Indeed, Oakland film may survive but only as a theme park, as a set for movies about an edgy, integrated and heart-felt city, the way San Francisco was once Hollywood’s urban face of film noir. If so, perhaps it is time to take a closer at “Smoked”, which cineSOURCE missed somehow in 2012.

'Smoked' stars (lf-rt) Geoff Trenchart, Rupert Estanislau and Jamie DeWolf; here eyeballing a young, delicious female... marijuana plant. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

Yes, “Smoked” is harsh; yes, “Smoked” is raw; and yes, “Smoked” rattles on its rails a little in the fourth reel. BUT it remains a rollicking good and funny ride with a lot of sophisticated touches, take-downs and tales.

“Smoked” follows three hapless dopers, played by The Suicide Kings, as they concoct their plan, hold up a marijuana dispensary and try to sell the take to the Chinese mafia. They spend most of the film running from the dispensary’s owner, Shank, a coke-dealing revolutionary who went legit with legalized weed, yet another revolution California started in 1999.

Shank is perfectly played by local storyteller L. Abdul Kenyatta, who limped out of his hospital room soon after a stroke to finish the film. Shank's life summary opens “Smoked” with one of the most concise, cool and graphically filmed summaries of Oakland history I’ve ever seen.

There's also two thugs interrupted in a punch-fest by a woman with pit bull, which they protect themselves from by claiming they're gay; and crazy music, a modernist mix of Jewish Klezmer, horror theremin and dime-store Asian, and the absurdist elegance of a thirteen-year-old girl responding to a pistol with a riddle about a cigarette, while smoking one.

From there it’s down into a morass of robberies, pistol whippings, running, punching and shooting, with time outs for rapid repartee or for Estanislao, who in real life is a gangbanger turned punk singer turned performance artist, to coo lovingly over the phone to his girlfriend.

Indeed, “Smoked” has everything except sex, which is both still taboo and over filmed, with so many of our confreres porn junkies. Dewolf plays it for laughs with women walking around with their tits and their acerbic tongues out, a hard joke to pull off. But DeWolf is undaunted by cinema challenges, as we can easily see in this provocative sexy short, "A Girl and a Gun", or this mini-horror flick, "OK Monster!"

After getting DeWolf's number from a woman I met walking her dog , and chasing him down through the three different coffee shops he texted me the addresses of, I found him sitting serenely just outside the property line—to avoid legal issues, I assume—of Oakland’s esteemed Grand Lake Theatre.

DeWolf was wearing a bright red suit and tie and what looked like a red wig, although it turned out to be his real hair. From about a twenty feet away, I just launched into it.

DeWolf wanted to be interviewed right on the street, right next to the Grand Lake Theatre, for some reason. photo: D. Blair

cineSOURCE: That’s quite the film you got going there!

Jamie DeWolf: Thank you.

Was that an enormous headache?

Yeah, I pulled a lot of teeth to get it into being.

I was thinking it was going to be some sort of sane undertaking. It was totally crazy. I wrote the most impossible script for someone to start with: three main characters, nine villains, every scene in a new location, all the same day—incredibly complex to pull off.

I wanted to make a chase film that has a constant sense of moving through the city, a calamitous day for all the characters. I probably wasn’t thinking, when I was writing, that this was going to end up being 70 random shoot days with no budget.

70, wow!

Whatever it was, we were never able to do [full weeks].

A lot of the people in the film didn’t have official acting experience, but they were all performers: either rappers, comedians, poets or storytellers. A lot of the roles I wrote for them, specifically.

We shot whenever we could. Some actors would vanish. One guy ODed, so we had to rewrite scenes.

He died?

No, but he couldn’t be in the movie anymore.

I had to be fanatically stubborn to get it made. There were probably 20 times we could have stopped. I just kept foraging ahead.

I knew the film would never be perfect. There were some shots [where] the exposure was out of whack, the sound was all over the place [but] I had to hit the finish line to get to my next one.

It was a pretty insane undertaking. I’m glad I did it. It was probably the most arduous film school possible. I actually went to film school after that.

Which one?

SF State. [But] I felt that nothing they were teaching me was anywhere near getting your ass kicked by a guerillas film.

You must have had some film chops before that?

Jaylee Alde, who plays the heavy in 'Smoked', tries to extract information from a thirteen-year old girl—unsuccessfully! photo: courtesy of J. DeWolf

I had been a film maniac ever since I was in middle school.

Where?

Benicia, next to Vallejo [30 miles outside Oakland].

I had a partner and we used to run around in the summer and make all these insane, kind of violent, action movies and weird, dark comedies with whatever cameras we could find. Driving around in a van, we’d pull up, grab some friends and go out to the wilderness and, you know, stage these insane scenes.

I was used to forcing things into being—if you want to make something happen, just do it!—DO NOT wait for permission!

We were churning through a lot of films, which led me to performance art. I ended up in the world of poetry slams, these lyrical battles that were erupting all over the United States [starting at a Chicago jazz club in ‘80s, blowing up in the ‘90s].

I ended up touring a lot with the two other [main] guys in the movie, Geoff [Trenchard] and Rupert [Estanislau].

The white guy looks like a famous actor.

Geoff—he’s a lawyer now.

Our trio was called The Suicide Kings: Geoff, me and Rupert. We were all sort of crazy teens, coming from very different backgrounds—we didn’t meet until our 20s. All of us had a violent adolescence, in whatever ways, and we started performing together.

We would do writing workshops inside high schools and middle schools—we ended up doing a lot of those. At first it was shocking anyone would invite us into a high school. Then we realized how important it was for us to be an example, the example that you can be a messed up malcontent but art is an escape route, a method of survival, whether performance, hip hop, theater.

We toured all over, all the way to Russia, doing plays. We toured with the full-length play called ‘In Spite of Everything’ about school shootings and survival through art. A very hard-edged play [which became the film ‘Ricochet in Reverse’].

‘Smoked’ evolved for me as something I would write when we were on tour: this wild, dark comedy that was NOT as hard hitting as the play.

We would meet a lot of kids who were suicidal, who made poems with references to violence. We would wrestle with: How do we deal with this appropriately, considering I was one of those kids in high school?

You were a suicidal kid in high school?

DeWolf likes to cover a lot ground, both talking fast and surfing through stories of being a suicidal teen, a father at 21 and a film writer, director, actor, editor, shooter, etc, etc. photo: D. Blair

Absolutely, on a downward spiral, a tailspin, who had that desperate mentality of, ‘If I am going to sink, I am going to take the whole ship with me,’ that sort of diseased, adolescent mentality.

‘In Spite of Everything’ was—

The fictional premise is that we were doing a writing workshop the day before a student comes to that class and kills everyone, his teacher and himself—and leaves a note implicating us.

The plays goes through a series of interrogations. We asked ourselves, if this happened in reality, what would happen?

What would happen is: the police would come after us and go through all of our backgrounds, which pushes the question: If you had a violent, disturbed adolescence and come out the other side, should people [not] allow you to work with students? [Or] should you be the first to work with students, because only you understand what a lot of them are going through?

The play evolved through a lot of scenes, characters, vignettes, all basically about surviving through art and how do you internalize trauma. Every one of us [Suicide Kings] had been molested, had gone through all types of violent upbringings, and so on.

It was about looking at that with a fearless, ferocious eye, acknowledging the ugliness you have been a part of and [figuring out] what are you going to do about it, as an adult. How do you internalize it? What are you going to offer those who are facing some of those same challenges?

That was the play. We toured that around a lot. We were very, very proud of it [but] we were also doing ‘Smoked’. ‘Smoked’ was my crazy antidote to this hard-hitting piece about teen violence and suicide.

You obviously think showing violence is not unhealthy, that it is kind of cathartic.

Anyone who argues the art and violence thing… it is such a hypocritical conversation. Often it is by the same people shoving 'The Bible' in some kid’s brain.

I grew up super Christian. I saw Jesus get crucified in grisly detail many times by the time I was twelve. ‘This is horrifying!’ [I would say.] ‘You need to see this!’ ‘This is what Jesus went through for you!’ ‘Watch the lashes on his back, the blood spraying!’

Violence is a part of our history, part of our psychology. I am certainly drawn in my art to explore difficult subjects. I would argue a lot of my artistic sensibility is dark: whether it is dark comedy [laughs], or a dark, hard hitting piece—that is how my psychology variates.

I love to do things that are hilarious and insane. [But] once I scratch that itch, I go, like, ‘What is challenging and confessional and rough but honest?’ That level of rawness, I have been very comfortable living in that realm.

DeWolf has hosted a monthly vaudeville-like show at the Oakland Metro since 1999; seen here promoing a faux fight. photo: D. Blair

For instance, I just finished a short film called ‘Strychnine Valentine’, which we just submitted to a bunch of festivals.

It is all about one of my very first girlfriends. I watched crystal meth and heroin completely devour her life. She became this harsh lesson that poison doesn’t play favorites. It doesn’t matter who you are, how beautiful you are, [it] is just an empty mouth that will consume anything in its path.

This was a very significant lesson that completely set me on a different road. It is a pretty dark film, but it is absolutely 100% honest, as brutal and raw as I could make it—beautiful in its own way.

I will also do a dark comedy about a family trying to figure out how to hide a body—an all-female crime caper.

To me, violence is going to happen anyway, no matter what kind of art comes out or not. A lot of violence, if you aren’t able to show its true brutality, whether for laughs or impact, I think that is more dangerous. It is more dangerous to sidestep the consequences of violence.

In ‘Smoked’, which is a dark comedy, there is a whole cycle, a coming around. Once you open the door to hell, you are going to get burnt, the classical criminal arc: There is always a consequence.

We would film some scenes [to ‘Smoked’], then go on tour with the play, teaching at different schools. I was also putting on my monthly series, which I still do, ‘Tourettes without Regrets' since 1999, first Thursday of the month at the Oakland Metro Opera House.

‘Tourettes Without Regrets’ features live performers, rappers, circus acts, comedians, poets. So a lot of that world was woven through ‘Smoked’. So much of ‘Smoked’ is based on our lives, a ‘mild’ exaggeration: having the rapper get shot on stage, Oakland’s grimy, punk kids, friends who are pretty hard-core criminals, kind of ‘whackitty’ drug folk, artists and performers.

It synthesized all those crazy anarchic elements into one ‘Bananas’ ride.

The film, in strange way, is a real microcosm of that time. I pretty much threw my whole world into that movie, as ridiculous as that is. I couldn’t believe how hard it was to make a sort of wacky, dark comedy about a cannabis club robbery.

But a film is a film, it doesn’t matter what the subject is or how seriously you want to take it. The complexity is still the same.

You haven’t done another feature since?

I’ve done 75 shorts, it feels like.

It was such a brutal and humbling experience, I resolved I would never put myself in the position where I wasn’t able to do everything.

Jamie DeWolf in his trickster, happy place. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

When I started [‘Smoked’] I couldn’t expose a shot if you handed me a camera. Coming out the end of that film, I was shooting it, editing, working with the sound mix—everything that had to happen. [Now] I shoot, I direct, I edit—I don’t like doing sound—but I can do everything.

You prefer that?

Not necessarily, if there is budget, I would rather not. [But] I realized, you are better off as a guerilla filmmaker if you can shoot. You don’t have to wait for a DP [director of photography].

Some of the people working on the film just moved really slow. That is not the way I shoot.

Since then, I have been a one-man documentarian; I have directed whole projects with film crews. I have been so busy, actually, with all of these other shorts and films and grants and documentaries and music videos.

I have five features ready to go. And I’m also starting to think again about my family history, which is the L. Ron Hubbard family.

You are from the Hubbards?

L. Ron Hubbard is my great-grandfather; L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. is my grandfather. I am not a Scientologist—at all. I was NOT born a Scientologist. The last Scientologist in my family was L. Ron Hubbard, Jr.

L. Ron created Scientology, raised his son in it, who became sort of his right hand man—also his enforcer. Yeah, he used to beat people up, shake them down, destroy their enemies. Then they had a massive falling out and went to war, all the way to their end days.

That is a whole subset of my life and I do performances of that. ‘The God and The Man’ is a piece that I performed for Snap Judgment [radio show].

Were you able to sell ‘Smoked’?

We got distribution through Indican Studios in LA. They also put out ‘Boondock Saints’ and different genres. We had a friend [Eric Jacobus, see cineSOURCE article] who got a feature film released by them, an action, comedy, martial arts flick.

I learned an important lesson: you have to be really careful monitoring your energy.

When you start a film, you may be signing on to three years of your life. You have to be ready for the stamina it takes. By the time I reached the end of it, I had gone from being a writer-actor-director to having to sit in a studio and grind through small, minute increments of volume changes or color corrections.

Near the end, I was really burnt. It was such an exhausting, grueling process, I just wanted to make a whole gang of shorts, of all different kinds, to showcase I could be the director that I knew I could be, which is kind of an endless goal.

It is coming time [for another feature]. I’ve been developing a few scripts. I have been waiting to see which one I want to pull the trigger on. I have one larger one, that would require a much larger budget, and two in the scrappy style of ‘Smoked’.

The 'Smoked' scene where 'No Nose' is pulled off his day job (body disposal) to hunt weed thieves, highlights DeWolf's interests in horror, gore and the instructive nature of exploring violence ON SCREEN. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

When I watch the film now, it is a crazy time capsule. So many of those locations and people don’t exist any more. There is a scene at Van Kleef’s [a seminal Telegraph Avenue bar], where Peter Van Kleef was dancing around, pouring drinks. He has passed away—they even named a street after him [Peter Van Kleef Way, 16th/17th on Telegraph].

It’s a time capsule to see Oakland when it was still grimy, guerilla Oakland. Oakland now is not something I wouldn’t recognize.

Time to bail back to Benicia?

No way, no way, no way.

It’s still pretty hip actually. We are sitting in front of one of the best theaters in the world.

I still love Oakland but, the fact is, it is evolving. When your rent is skyrocketing, the first to go are the families, followed by the artists, followed by the soul… [laughs] of the city.

When you referred to the difficulties of making the film, you didn’t mention the difficulty of writing it and that is pretty much the best thing in the film.

Thank you.

There were a lot of great one line liners—all your stuff?

All my stuff. Basically, it was from that school of ‘running all over with lyricists’—a lot of my friends are performance artists, poets, MCs, rappers, writers, comedians.

It always came down to just the line; it came down to lyricism; whether that is a punch line or an off hand comment. I really wanted the film to be good on the page. I wasn’t interested in trying to make it naturalistic in any way.

I really liked films like ‘Brick’ (2006, Rian Johnson), where the language is elevated. What I loved about ‘Brick’, it didn’t have any interest in doing naturalist language. It was all about clever turns of phrase, much like we used to see back in the day, with old noir films, where everyone talked ‘smart.’

With ‘Smoked’ that was something I focused on. I wanted moments that just had lyrical banter. I was obsessed with every turn of phrase.

Some of the shorts I am doing now, I am much more open to crazy improv. I will give the actors maybe five punch lines for them to land wherever. It is almost like handing them a tool set; it is a fun experiment.

DeWolf displaying his moody-artist side. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

I haven’t done another feature, since I have been so slammed with these other shorts and I wanted to be a better filmmaker. Now I have a camera that is full-cinema ready.

The Arri Amira [from the German Arriflex company, in the Alexa family, the same sensor, so I am really excited to work with that. The image quality is really gorgeous: it has a flat image that you can grade in all sorts of complex ways.

Some of that is just learning how to be a leaner meaner machine. I think I could honestly make a feature with probably a crew of four or five, you know, because I can shoot. I have shot so many projects, I know what will work.

That doesn’t mean I am the best DP but that is what I recommend to most directors: you need to be in every position at least once so you can understand it.

I think the ‘El Mariachi’ Robert Rodriguez mythos of just grab a camera and hit the streets and make a film in 14 days [is good]. I have learned the hard reality of that and how to do it the right way.

Rodriguez shoots his own films.

Right, so does Steven Soderbergh.

How about that older black guy, did he keep acting?

Abdul Kenyatta? Yeah, he is still around; he does a lot of singing; he is story teller; he has been working on a book.

Actually, he had a stroke midway through making the film—there is a lot of real life like that that we had to adjust around—which is why, at the end of the film, he isn’t moving. He is standing in the shadows, on a cane, since he just suffered a stroke. But he was kind enough to continue to finish out the film when he was going through rehab.

So he went to the hospital in the middle of the film?

Yeah. We had to switch actors once or twice. A lot of it is that scrappy indie quality of people just doing it when they can, which is also another reason I haven’t taken on doing another feature in that way. I have also learned you add so many problems that you can’t perceive.

Time is a constantly expanding factor. You get with actors, ‘Well, we are trying to film this on weekends.’ Well, everyone’s schedule is so insane. Imagine trying to get thirty adults to coordinate their schedule in any way. That actually causes a whole new raft of issues.

If I was going to do my next feature, I would bum rush it. Be as prepared as possible [and do it] in 20 consecutive days.

What budget you think you could do it?

I think I could do a grimy, indie feature—pull it off by the skin of my teeth—for 150 thousand.

I own the camera I would shoot it on. I have worked with a lot of filmmakers who I have done a ton of projects with, filmmakers that I would want to work with. They are fast; they have hustle. We don’t stand around and debate. We make things happen fast because that is what we are paid to do by other clients.

You can’t sit around in some director chair and make a whole lot of squares with your fingers. You have to hustle and knock out shots.

Also, I am far more used to coordinating with the crew and cast. I have directed and shot simultaneously a lot of my projects, so it is very easy for me. Something like a 150 thousand, if we are able to lock it down and do 20 hardcore days in a row.

A character from one of DeWolf's movies appeared to interrupt the interview until it became obvious he was inspired by the streets of Oakland, much like DeWolf himself. photo: D. Blair

My ideal would be to shoot five days and then give the actors a day off, while we are also reviewing. [That way] we know the pickups we need, while we are doing the shooting, versus the editing room.

I think next year, it is time for me to come back with a full feature or at least get one moving. That is the deal I made with myself. I sort of did the opposite route. I made a bunch of scrappy movies when I was a teenager, then went into the world of performance, then decided I wanted to return to film.

I view it as the ultimate art form. I love the fact it is forever. I’m a big ol’ film fanatic in that way, that film is forever.

I’ve done so many performances: in prisons, in Russia, all different kinds comedy, storytelling, all stuff I wrote. Early on, what got me into slam and the performance world is that it was all ‘written from you.’ I am not a vessel, an actor taking on someone’s work and inhabiting that—it is all coming from you.

First person?

Yeah. Based on a kind of gritty sensibility. That is what The Suicide Kings did. A lot of our writing was coming from these tales of survival and violence and trauma and sarcastic storytelling.

Where does that come from Benicia or Oakland?

Oakland. Benicia was a suburban wasteland.

You sound pretty much like an Oakland filmmaker.

I definitely identify with Oakland. Benicia was my teenage years. When I moved to Oakland, that was when I became a true-blue performer. I had always been performer-filmmaker guy, but Oakland was to me where I met my true family of artists.

You include a lot of sexual stuff, particularly for comic effect, but not the act, any particular reason?

If you're going to show sex, you better do something more original than soft-core pornography. Sex is about psychology and the characters; it should drive the story versus be a showcase of flesh. If your sex scene doesn't have any character beats other than the act itself, you're not offering the audience anything new.

What do you think of William Burroughs?

‘Naked Lunch’ is a stand-out seminal work, but I'm still a fan of his early hard-edged writing on heroin [perhaps ‘Junky’, 1953]. He writes with a brutal clarity on the subject, though there's contemporary authors that stare addiction in the face with a fearless ferocity that's almost hard to stomach.

Are there any sort of nameable art, music or film movement you see emerging out of Oakland?

I'm always wary of 'movements' as, too often, they're a label cooked up by writers to lump some rather disparate aesthetics into one box for the ease of discussion.

I think Oakland is unique in its scrappy sensibility, the roots of outrage and protest, of Black Panthers to Hells Angels, to AK-47's on the steps of the court house, to the Occupy surrounding city hall. The opening shot of 'Smoked' is of Oakland, and the entire film is circling around ideas of revolution, race and mayhem teetering under the surface.

DeWolf exhausted on set of 'Smoked', although it could be an art shoot expressing his subconscious. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

You don’t seem to mention or focus on race much, any particular philosophy behind that?

Smoked has repeated references to race and a huge multi-cultural cast.

I wrote many of the characters for my friends to inhabit and I created a topsy-turvy world that pushed those cartoonish versions of them to extremes. Many of my short films tackle where race and economic disparity meet, of individuals trying to survive against systemic dysfunction and societal structures that have a sociopathic bent towards crushing those below the line.

The shorts are routinely excellent, very poetic in their words, if not so much cineaste style. Draw any inspiration from the art/poetry films of the 60s and 70s?

I draw inspiration from everywhere I can, and take more from the worlds of poetry and art, besides just films. I think too many filmmakers run a danger of being limited to the track of cinema when there's so many arenas of aesthetics to fuel us.

Would you say Oakland has a pretty strong filmmaking community?

Yeah.

There is a real hustle in Oakland because it has kind of this gritty sensibility. I think that really informed a lot of the energy, not only of [‘Smoked’] but of the people from Oakland. There was not this sense that we are going to hang around and you are going to hand it to us.

What a lot of the movie reflects is about Oakland —the opening shot of the movie is of Oakland.

Is that a drone or what?

That was a helicopter shot, actually.

So you put in a few thousand here and there for what you thought you needed?

Basically how ‘Smoked’ started, we took a grant that we got for a theater performance and literally threw it to get the movie going. So when we started the movie we didn’t have enough to finish. We had ten thousand dollars and I was like, ‘I don’t want to wait, let’s go!’

That might have been ill-advised because how are we going to [finish]? That started a constant cycle of chasing your own tail. Kind of a classic first feature film scenario except I didn’t shrink from any kind of challenge, like having so many characters is insane. We didn’t have any budget for any actors, even myself. I am not getting paid; I am just throwing money into this hole.

And because I didn’t own any equipment, that was its own trump card. You are working with folks because of what they own not because of aesthetic choices.

Today I would go the opposite. When you come with your own gear and technic expertise to the table then you are choosing people because of their aesthetics and eye not, ‘Do you own this camera or whatever?’

Any cinematic inspirations?

A lot films that I love, that ‘Smoked’ was informed by, are movies like ‘La Haine’ or ‘Hate’ [1995 French film by Mathieu Kassovitz], a great film. ‘Kids’ [1995, Larry Clark]: I love the raw quality of it—fearlessly living, take it or not.

I remember when I saw ‘Kids in the theater, there were people next to me who were horrified, ‘Oh my god.’ But to me I was literally,I' know these kids; this is a party we went to last month.' It wasn't horrifying to me at all; [it] made me realize that is why you need films like that.

'Smoked''s two top thugs, Jaylee Alde (lft) and Abdul Kenyatta, at the famed Oakland club, Van Kleef's, shortly before bitching out the wide-eyed gentrifier behind them. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

They may be ugly, at least to someone else, but as long as they are based somewhat in reality [they're good].

How about ‘Irreversible’, ‘Reservoir Dogs’, ‘El Topo’. You know ‘El Topo’?

Yeah, yeah. I think ‘Smoked’ was also informed by classic crime caper films like ‘The Killing’, obviously, or ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’

I thought that film sucked. I thought your piece was so much better then that.

[laughs] Since I was a kid the movie that was most significant to me was ‘Goodfellas’.

By Scorsese, who is a master.

I saw it in middle school. It changed my life because the movie had no problem that every character was an anti-hero, corrupt and flawed. It wasn’t going by the typical Hollywood tropes, where your good guy was some cardboard easily identifiable character.

Your good guy was Henry Hill, the least morally repugnant [in the movie] only because he would not outright kill you and was not a stone-cold sociopath. But he would do whatever he could.

There is something about that rogues gallery that I really loved. I like Martin McDonagh, who wrote ‘The Pillow Man’ [2003] and ‘In Bruges’ [2008], dark comedy sensibilities, I have always had attractions to.

I think that is what I am wrestling with in my next feature: whether I want to do another dark comedy, which I love and I honestly don’t think there are enough of in the world, or if I want to go the hard-hitting, gritty route.

So I have two films: one is that exaggerated, rogue's gallery world, sort of like ‘Smoked’, reality on acid, sprinkled with some meth, anarchic, breaks all the rules, lots of characters all over the city.

Or I have another film based on old school crime rings, some folks I used to know. There were these large scale, kind of crazy, shoplifting rings all over California in the early ‘90s. They have very complicated scams with chain stores that led down this progression of violence. So I have a whole 'nother script on that, that is ready to go as well.

Quick question, coming out of your meth-ed out, fucked-up high school years, was there one thing that specifically turned you around?

My daughter. I had my daughter when I was 21. She absolutely made me accountable, I couldn’t just dive off the deep end. She was always my road back: I am responsible [for her] and couldn’t go down the same spirals.

Actually my daughter, I have been teaching her filmmaking and we had our first lesson over the weekend. ‘I am going to start you on a different way than I came to things. I want to teach you the tools first; then what you do with them and what you write, that is your path.

Definitely my daughter but also performance, art, meeting like-minded individuals.

I was like the classic lone wolf character who shows up at open mics and is really drowning. You find like-minded people who are drawn to the same life raft and, before you know it. you have crafted it into a sweet boat.

Basically it was meeting Geoff and Rupert. Actually, that is one of the reasons we called ourselves The Suicide King— we felt like we had survived. And that we had each other, as a way of working ahead and keeping each other accountable.

'Smoked' includes some graphic and nicely tracking camera work. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

Rupert used to be a gang member in the Philippines and in Vallejo. When I met him, he had just robbed three houses that week.

But you met him at a performance?

I met him at one of his very first performances. It was one of those things: by us staying busy with performance that got him out of the gang.

He was too busy doing shows. There were many times that they called and went, ‘We got to go run out to Oakland,’ and he goes, ‘I got band practice.’ He was a really gret punk singer. Some of his music is in [‘Smoked’]. Eskapo is one of his bands.

Do you own fake guns or rent?

I own a few prop guns, some of those were Air Soft guns we borrowed for the day. I've never rented any prop guns.

What do you think of Oakland film and the three world-wide hits it produced this year?

I love it.

I have seen all the films. 'Blindspotting’—I have known Rafael Casal [star cowriter see cineSOURCE article] I knew him as a performer and he was in one of my first short films ‘Ricochet in Reverse’. I think it's incredible. I thought that film was incredible.

I also love the fact they were all different. ‘Sorry to Bother You’ is that kind of anarchic, dark comedy, just totally, gleeful.

It’s vicious satire, like ‘Dr Strangelove’—

Yeah, exactly. Gleefully nuts, that resounds with me.

‘Blindspotting' was absolutely hard hitting but really real and really showed that. It wrestled with what a lot of us in Oakland have. Oakland is evolving but they did it in a really smart way, fantastic filmmaking, great writing. I though they just knocked it out of the park.

It's obviously totally unbelievable. I have been pushing Oakland as a film center for ten years. But now it is off the charts.

What I would like to see—let’s be totally honest: some of that can look good on paper. But what I would like to see is: Stop hiring people from LA to come to Oakland. Hire Oakland filmmakers!

I hit a point were ‘I guess I got to move to LA, even though I love Oakland,’ because the industry isn’t the same up here. And that is what happens. People are like, ‘Oh I am going to make a movie about Oakland.’ So they hire an entire crew from LA; they come up here; they shoot Oakland; and then they are going to go back to LA.

That part is really frustrating. There are a lot of indie filmmakers here that are bad ass. Also I think we have a really scrappy mentality, a hustle and a grit that you aren’t going it find in many other cities. It is infused through me and a lot of the shows I have been putting on for years.

Rupert Estanislau, an actor with actual gang experience, in the medical marijuana robbery that starts 'Smoked''s chase scene rolling. photo: courtesy J. DeWolf

It is past DIY. It is a 'fuck-it' attitude. We even riot better then most cities. [laughs] The fact is San Francisco is forcing us to march to the beat of tech companies.

So that is the killer right there?

It’s gonna make things hard.

Art has to be income-drawing enough to compete with tech?

How are you going to have art competing against bits and ones and zeros? It is a different mind set. We will see what happens. Oakland will always be a corner stone of my art and my eye.

I love it. I love those films are happening. There is that movie ‘Bodied’ that is coming out about, [from] Oakland’s new battle rapper. ‘Black Panther’ opening [scene is] in Oakland and stuff—where the hell is all this Oakland love coming from?

I just hope it is not the last chimes of the bell at the end.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Nov 03, 2018 - 11:52 PM