Directors Journal

(Continued)

SUNDAY JANUARY 2ND
MASS SUICIDE. That's the banner headline on the leaflet some guy gives me as I stand in line at the sunny Sunday morning food market waiting for an order of pot stickers.

It's one of those hell-in-a-handbasket leaflets. People will believe the craziest shit, I think, stuffing it in my back pocket. A few days later the heavens would open.

MONDAY JANUARY 3RD
The film is finished but the credits aren't. Without doubt the most important piece of real estate in all LA is not a compound in Beverly Hills but a single square of 35mm film. It's the contractual obligations and their correct interpretation to the letter that is perhaps more complicated than trying to learn Tamarind. To credit one person something can trigger all sorts of other contractual credits guaranteed by a network of alliances and deals that have the inmpenetrable complexity of medieval treaties.

To say nothing of the egos involved. And that's exactly what we're going to do - say nothing!

TUESDAY JANUARY 4TH
Show film to Harry Reems who has flown in with Jeanne, his wife, especially. He's extremely magnanimous, and essentially happy with the film.

FRIDAY JANUARY 7TH
Dennis Hopper comes back into the studio to read a few more lines. He's very gracious about it, considering he had to come straight from the dentist where he went straight after getting off the plane from England.

FRIDAY JANAURY 14TH
We are with Tammy Faye at the TCA for WE's (Women's Entertainment) announcement of our film Tammy Faye: Death Defying.

This sequel to The Eyes of Tammy Faye was going to be called The Demise of Tammy Faye, since Tammy had called us to ask us to follow her battle with inoperable cancer. But Tammmy has made a miraculous recovery and here she is answering questions from the press like

"Tammy Faye are you going to Hell?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Well you've lived in a house with Ron Jeremy, and got into bed with the people sitting beside you who have just made a film called Inside Deep Throat."

"I don't get into bed with anyone"

"But as a Christian, how do you avoid judging these people?"

(We are reminded of that classic line of hers "We're all made out of the same dirt and God doesn't make any junk." Except television critics!)

"I don't judge people because God doesn't judge people. God is God"

SUNDAY JANUARY 9TH
Biblical rains have been falling now for almost five days, dumping something like 17 inches. Randy has a waterfall in his backyard, and an underground spring has "overflowed" and flooded his basement knocking out his water heater. And phone. Too late to build an ark.

MONDAY JANUARY 10TH
Mixing the film all week with Lance Brown at Widget. We worked with Lance before when he mixed Party Monster, but it was seeing Riding Giants and its sonic vastness of thundering waves, a film he both mixed and sound designed, that made us realize we had to convince him to do the same thing for us. The especially great thing about Lance is that he is incredibly gentle, quiet, and capable of dealing with a bunch of frazzled filmmakers who've been working on this film for just too darn long!

THURSDAY JANUARY 13TH
The billboard is up on Sunset Boulevard. Inordinately thrilled.

Billboards in LA are the business cards of the rich and famous. They're also giant vanity license plates. They let everyone else in this town know what you are doing.

MONDAY JANUARY 17TH
As we are shooting, many people comment on the soundtrack – the catchy instrumental theme tune and the raunchy Deep Throat song with its nonsense lyrics ("deep throat, go row a boat, don't get your goat, that's all she wrote" - that sort of thing). So it seemed that we could do worse than make sure that Inside Deep Throat also had a killer soundtrack.

And Bill Coleman our music supervisor has done just that, artfully mixing dialogue, David Steinberg's emotional score, and classic hits of the period that deliver an overdose of memory pain.

A personal favorite is "Elected." I remember that song haunting me when I was 12. It was so screamingly cynical about the ghastly corrupt ballyhoo of politics, a fabulously prescient song about the forthcoming collapse of the process with Watergate. And then covering it when we were the Pop Tarts 15 years later, and here it is again another 15 years later. Scary, frankly.

Making an encore appearance after it's use in Party Monster is "Obscene Dirty." Perhaps to some that track's just another disco stomper, but to us it's the quintessence of sex and perfectly captures the mechanical madness that is modern porn.

Bill Coleman has been working away compiling ingenious running orders of the soundtrack. He's secured a deal with Koch Records - famous as the home of American Idol reject William Hung - and we're scrambling to get it all sorted in time for Sundance.

SUNDAY JANUARY 16TH
More credit drama... it only happens on public holidays or weekends.

"My life will not be worth living if we can't change it."

But this time. changing the fifth and final reel of the film means that we are cutting it to the wire in terms of delivering a print in time for the premiere at Sundance.

Just like Dale Carnegie said, "There's nothing sweeter to man (or a woman) than the sound of his (or her) own name."

(To be continued)