Today the first official trailer launched for Bread and Butter, the independent film I worked on last year. I think it very solidly captures the quirky voice of the film.
Bread and Butter, starring Christine Weatherup, Bobby Moynihan, Micah Hauptman, Eric Lange, Lauren Lapkus, Sean Wright, Dawn Didawick and Harry Groener. Written/Directed by Liz Manashil
I became involved with Bread and Butter because of Christine Weatherup, the actress who plays the lead role in the film. She’s been a close friend and colleague for many years now, dating back to when she acted in a staged reading of a play of mine. She is how I became involved with Squaresville, for which she is producer and co-star and her husband Matt Enlow is creator/writer/director.
I remember having coffee with her when she confided in me how much she wanted this role, and the kindly relentless campaign she was mounting to convince writer/director Liz Manashil that she was the woman for it.
Liz has years of experience in the film festival world, and is one of the hosts of PBS’s film review show Just Seen It. Since this film is going to be touring film festivals, where the first question she will be inevitably asked at every single screening will be what her budget was, I will not rob from her the ritual experience of answering that question. Instead, I will just say that it was absolutely insanely low, and that some filmmakers would have been challenged to get this movie made for ten times the money she had.
Once I learned that Christine had won the role, I reached out to Liz on my own just to offer any help that I could to help see this movie brought to life. There’s a lot of cross-training in my resume, so I can be thrown into a lot of differnt jobs – and even if it’s a job I’ve never done before, I have learned on-the-fly many times.
We met and she told me that they were having trouble getting a boom operator for the length of the shooting schedule. I volunteered for six out of the sixteen production days, which was quite a workout for my shoulder muscles – the sound recordist told me “do this often enough, and you’ll get muscles that only swimmers have”. I had boomed previously – never with training and never particularly well, I thought – but here for the first time I picked up some good information that I’ll be able to use if called upon again. Given the course of my life and career so far, smart money says I’ll be holding a boom mic again.
It was – and I’ll be glad for the day when this is less of a surprise – the most female-heavy set I have ever worked on. Female producers, female director, female A.D., cinematographer, production designer, and so on and so on. It was a conscious decision by Liz to enhance what was to her a very personal perspective, and her collaborators did tremendous work in every department while creating the positive atmosphere necessary to survive when there’s this much work and this little money.
I made many friends on the set, and had a great time chatting with Micah Hauptman and Saturday Night Live‘s Bobby Moynihan, who play the two dating prospects in the movie. Bobby had a voice role in Pixar’s Monsters University, which was due to be released soon – it was his first big animated feature and he was geeked to the ceiling about the whole process.
A couple of months after production wrapped, Liz put out word on Facebook that she was looking for a voice actor to record a couple of lines. By coincidence, I was on-line and I responded immediately, since I have begun pursuing this sort of thing when possible. Less than a half-hour later, I was at her apartment talking into her Mac Laptop.
I still don’t know if my voice-over will be included in the final cut, it was an idea she wanted to present in test screenings, but just the fact that it happened is one of my favorite things about L.A., that what started as a cold e-mail I sent to a stranger led to her trusting me to add something creatively to the tone of her film with my voice.
I gripe sometimes here about the free labor economy in L.A., and I probably should do a comprehensive post at some point about the etiquette involved; because I think there are situations where it is excusable. For the record, I am thoroughly okay with having volunteered my services for Bread & Butter. For one – I was the one that reached out, it wasn’t an ad posted to a listing service. For another, I was reaching out to support an amazing opportunity for a friend. It’s different when strangers are expecting I should be grateful they give me the chance to work for free.
And in the end, I had the opportunity to develop skills that could make me money, and I may end up with a voice acting credit in a feature, which is directly useful to me and my career goals. That’s how you get someone to be happy to work for free – make it a real win-win.