January 3 we load in at Windmill Studios in Williamsburg, Studio D, a big black box with a very high ceiling … Saturday January 4 project dramaturg and actor T. D. White (Samuel Beckett) , director Joseph Quartararo, cinematographer Donavon DeCesare, Production Designer Anna Kathleen, Producer James Richard, Brian McElroy First A.D., actors Steven Lloyd Smith (Buster Keaton) and Lou Matthews and the rest of cast and crew begin the shoot with our Red Digital Cinema Scarlet and 788 Sound Recorder and Lectrosonics lavs.
We were fueled throughout by the truly fantastic tasting tacos supplied by our Bistro buddies at Los Tacos # 1 in Chelsea Market, Kyle Cameron and Tyler Sanders. (Hello to Christian!)
The desire to film “Banana Man” arose after we mounted the Don Nigro play in 2011 at the now condominium once 35-seat Red Room black box theatre on East 4th Street along with another”Manhattan” play, “The Mouse-trap” by William Dean Howells. We also screened three Manhattan short films, one by Joe Quartararo (“Abigail in Place”), “Private Eyes” by Sam Hayes, and the ironically entitled “Dinner on the Riviera ” by T. D. White. We called the evening “Aisle Take Manhattan.” Although “Banana Man” is primarily dialog, we thought it lent itself to imaginative filmmaking and here we are! And “The Mouse-trap” isn’t safe from us either!
AFTER we shot all the interiors over the four icey days, we came to realize that the half-our short will be released in the same year that marks the 50th Anniversary of the shooting of Samuel Beckett’s one and only film — “FILM” directed by Alan Schneider – in 1964!! … which really asks the question “Is coincidence coincidence or is coincidence our cosmic reality?”
“Banana Man” features an imagined dialog between silent film star Buster Keaton and the Irish literary lion. But it’s the Waitress in the Italian restaurant where they met in the evenings during the production of “FILM” who steals the show. She has acting ambitions as many waitstaff in the big city do, and fond memories that will make us all the more aware of the power, and importance, of performance.
Adding “color” to this piece, shot in an early television/noir style, are the musical atmospherics surrounding the profound artistic shifts in 1964, and the discussions between Buster and Beckett that celebrate and memorialize Hollywood, silent films, Fatty Arbuckle, Beckett’s theatrical work, life itself, and the philosophy of one Irish Lord, George Berkeley (esse est percipi !), and let’s also now and forever memorialize and celebrate the lives of the dog, the cat, the parrot, the fish while we’re here. We are all stars in the night and in the day, seen or unseen.
We will soon spend a day shooting exteriors, but the majority of the film is being prepped now for edit and should release in Spring. We will update you periodically here and at Lakhota Film Facebook and the Loose Moon Productions, Inc. website.
(50 years now since Beckett shot “FILM,” fifty years since “She Loves Me” and “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Oh, Pretty Woman,” Herbie Hancock’s “Empyrean Isles” and”Other Planes of There” by Sun Ra, “Under the Boardwalk” by the Drifters and “Dancing in the Street” by Martha and the Vandellas! {just a few of Billboard Hot Singles of 1964 … take a look at the list: you’ll be amazed!}) This was the year of Andy Warhol’s “Blue Monroe!”
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