Screamplay (1984) was the only feature length film I ever made, but it was not at all the first film. I had been making short films for almost 20 years (since I was 12 years old), many of them international award winners (Cannes, Krakow, Ann Arbor).
As a college student, I bounced back and forth between the East and West Coast. First, I was a film student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, where I met and collaborated with other film students. Then, I was a Directing Fellow at the American Film Institute in Lost Angeles, where I met actor Ed Greenberg and with whom I co-wrote Screamplay (then titled Death City) in his West Hollywood apartment. “Slasher Pics” were big then, and we wrote it with an eye toward Ed starring as Edgar Allen and with me directing. While we had some nibbles on the script, we had no takers.
At the AFI, I also had the rare pleasure of catching elderly film theoretician Slavko Vorkapić’s last lectures on the Gestalt theory of filmmaking. Inspired, I returned to Boston and with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, formed the Boston Black and White Movie Company with fellow students from the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts. We shot, acted in and processed and printed our own black and white reversal 16mm short films ourselves and showed them around town with live musical accompaniment. Many of these films were shot in my 3,200 square foot South End loft, which I converted into a film studio.
After another frustrating visit to Los Angeles, I decided to return to my Boston studio and to raise the money to make Screamplay myself. To raise interest and assemble a cast and crew from my original Boston filmmaking cohorts, I made a 4′ square matte painting of the Welcome Apartments with removable sections, then took a hammer and saw and built the steps and walls to be used in the movie. With these, I was able to demonstrate to my friends how the sets could be swapped around and combined with the matte painting to convincingly convey the impression of a three-story courtyard in Hollywood. With $25,000 raised from friends and family, we prepared to make the movie. Ed Greenberg could not leave LA to participate, so I decided to take the role of Edgar as well as director.
Artist Cheryl Hirshman stepped in to complete more matte paintings (and the poster for the movie), and animator Flip Johnson, in addition to playing one of the cops, developed additional special effects such as the undulating water in the apartment complex swimming pool (filmed real time through the matte painting – no actual water used), and Nicky’s motorcycle accident (a filmed scale model motorcycle and truck transformed into dozens of 8″ x 10″ black and white photos onto which Flip ink-stippled splatting blood and then re-animated).
To create the other visual effects, we built a front projection system (a la Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 ape sequence) using a large beam splitter and a lot of 3M retro-reflective material. My father, Gus Seder (who also played Al Weiner in the movie), designed an electro-mechanical “phase lock loop” which synchronized a 16mm movie projector to my 16mm Bolex camera, permitting us to project pre-filmed footage behind the actors. We designed and constructed a special tripod for the Bolex which would keep the nodal point of the lens in one exact spot at all times – essential to keeping the live action set from spatially displacing from the cutout portion of the matte painting when we tilted and panned.
Underground filmmaker George Kuchar and I had become friends by then, and we flew him in for a month to play the part of Martin, the manager of the Welcome Apartments and the villain of the piece. I’ll never forget the first take we did of him: He was to step out of second floor apartment, glower down (presumably at Edgar) and frown. George did all that, and to top it off, he spat over the railing (right onto our brand-new set). That’s when I knew I had chosen right guy for the role!
Shooting went well until filming of the final fight scene in Edgar’s storage room, when disaster struck. George, approaching me from behind to strangle me, slipped on a garden hose (part of the set), fell and broke his ankle in three places. As he did not have insurance, we raised more funds to cover his $20,000 hospital cost, effectively doubling our budget from $25,000 to $45,000. During his hospitalization, we filmed the fight scene using one of our crew members, filmmaker Ted Braun, as a “stunt double” for George. As soon as he was well enough to leave the hospital, George returned to the set and we propped him upright to film reaction shots to intercut. The final edited fight scene flows smoothly and you can’t tell it’s not George if you don’t know.
We first showed Screamplay at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival (sharing the screen with the Coen Brothers’ first feature film Blood Simple. We immediately got interest from New Line Cinema whose Nightmare on Elm Street had just hit big and who wanted to release our film as a midnight movie but only in its original 16mm. When we insisted they blow it up to 35mm for a proper theatrical release, they dropped it.
We also had interest from Troma (who promised to blow it up to 35mm), but chose instead to “world premiere” Screamplay at a local theater in our hometown of Boston, hoping to get good reviews which might entice “classier” distributors. Our strategy backfired when lead Boston Globe film critic at the time, Michael Blowen, panned it roundly. “It is customary for film reviewers to bend over backwards to support independent filmmakers,” he wrote, “But in this case, that contortion is impossible.”
We had no choice but to accept Troma’s offer. The deal – for US distribution only – was that we would start receiving royalties after Troma recouped its cost of blowing up the film to 35mm. Troma never made that money back.
Internationally, the film enjoyed more success, especially in Germany. It was a hit at the Berlin Film festival, playing to packed midnight crowds. We sold it Bayerischer Rundfunk (German TV) where it was aired as a Halloween special for many years. And I was invited to show the film and serve on a panel with independent filmmakers Frederick Wiseman and Shirley Clarke at the Melkweg Cinema in Amsterdam.
The brutal Boston reviews and the lackluster performance of the film in the US had taken its toll, however. I took it hard, feeling disgraced in my hometown and deserted by some of the friends who had helped me make the film. I ran away back to Los Angeles, where I convinced producer Bill Benenson to pay me to write a script about Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. After fourteen drafts and ten years, I had fashioned it to be a 35mm, hand-cranked black and white silent movie to be shown with live orchestral accompaniment. Bill Benenson thought I was crazy and insisted it be in color with sound. We almost got the money to make it from American Playhouse (educational TV), but when they saw me and Bill arguing about this issue, they dropped it like a hot potato.
Back in Boston, I regrouped, teaching film at the Museum School and working as a movie projectionist for a number of years. At one point I picked up my old 16mm Bolex, loaded it with film and went out to film something – anything – but could not think of anything interesting to film. I was finished as a film-maker.
After some soul-searching and introspection, I decided to focus on stuff that gave me personal satisfaction, which led to my lifetime career as a world-class public artist/inventor specializing in optically animated murals, books and toys. Anyone interested in knowing more about my “life after Screamplay”, they can watch my half hour video on YouTube, entitled “Magic, Art and Scanimation”.
Rufus B Seder
Our brand-new, 4K preservation of Screamplay, made from Rufus’ own 16mm print, premieres at Weird Weekend on Sunday 27/10/24. Tickets available here.