By Sherman Hirsh
Where do movies come from? For some filmmakers, it’s a desire to make a pot full of money, achieve fame and meet girls. For others, it’s an act of homage to the classic movies of the past. For the rest, like me, it’s just the love of making movies. Writing a script is putting a daydream on paper. Shooting is the process of drawing that daydream into the realm of reality. Seeing that dream play out for a flesh and blood audience is, well, when it happens to you, you’ll understand.
So, where did SCREAM, ZOMBIE, SCREAM come from? I had just put out LOVE SLAVES OF THE SHE-MUMMY, was itching to make another movie. While I didn’t really want to make another
living dead movie, I had to face the fact that I was going to make a movie
without recognizable Stars. However, in
the world of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction, the plot is the star. If I wanted to make a movie a lot of people
wanted to see, I had to go with the flow.
Sci-Fi and Fantasy require special props and costumes, and price
themselves out of the micro-budget class.
That leaves Horror, but I had no interest in the current trend of
torture and psychotic puppets. That left the monster genre. I couldn’t bring myself to get involved with
sexy teenage vampires and angst ridden werewolf kids.
We live in the Age of Recycling. We recycle, repurpose and
reuse anything we can, including ideas.
We claim to love originality and creativity, but actually, we ultimately
always return to the tried and true. As
a Mass Communications major, I was taught that nothing can ever be more than
15% new. So, if one is careful and
analytical, one can detect several element of SCREAM, ZOMBIE, SCREAM as having
established origins, but what’s the fun in that? So what if I took a pinch of Jekyll and Hyde,
a touch of Frankenstein, a little Orwell and some Romero? It’s a Zombie movie, not a serious statement
on the Human condition. Or is it?
Anyway, bowing to convention and hoping to ride the current
wave of interest in zombies, I would concoct a tale of ravaging undead. But I
had a problem. Most zombie movies
involve an army of zombies terrorizing and devouring an entire community. That wasn’t going to happen on my
budget. So, how do I tell a worthwhile
story using only one zombie a time?
Well, I would have to build a new kind of Zombie.
However, I was also conscious of just how many zombie movies
there are, and I was reluctant to commit to what I feared was an exhausted
genre. As it turns out, it was and is
not, but I still had to put my own spin on it.
There are two kinds of zombies. In
my classification system, the real Voodoo zombies, who are victims of ritual
drugging and brainwashing, constitute Type 1.
They are living people who think they are dead. There hasn’t been a voodoo zombie movie in
ages. Type 2 zombies are the typical walking
corpses, who escape from their graves to attack the Living. I needed a new species of zombie, one created
by science for the selfish purposes of the scientist. Which purposes? Why, to rule the world. What other reason is there?
A successful movie needs a memorable title. I went through several until I settled on
SCREAM, ZOMBIE SCREAM. I wanted “zombie”
in the title, but I also knew that I needed to imply action, so I needed a good
action verb in the title, too. However,
I refused to do another “ATTACK OF THE …” anything. Screaming is associated with madness, and I
had the line about how you had to have a soul to scream, so SCREAM, ZOMBIE, SCREAM
seemed like a good original choice. Then
I remembered SCREAM, BLACULA, SCREAM, and SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN. Too late.
A brilliant bi-polar renegade has the power to turn living
people into vicious zombies. OK, nothing
new there, but what if he could turn you back afterward? Consider the possibilities. We pick up the story with our loony, who has
the temerity to call himself “Orpheus”, reveling in the sight of the President
of the United States gutting a scientist on live TV. The response to this by the Nation is to have
a ruthless federal agent break his former partner, who had gone crazy fighting
zombies, out of a high security
psychiatric facility and set him and a very cute but dangerous female
assistant, on a variety of zombies. We
got our zombie Holocaust, just one zombie at a time.
To accomplish this film, I decided to shoot the whole movie
using Green Screen chroma key, a system most people have come to know as
enabling the filmmaker to put his subject into any image as a background. All I needed was the actors and a few pieces
of furniture and I could turn any room into anyplace imaginable. Except that it paralyzes the camera. If you move the camera, the subject moves but
the background remains stationary, giving the whole scene a sloppy, amateurish
appearance. So, all my shots had to be
made, locked down, from the same place. Never
again!
I rented a vacant one-room apartment in the North Hollywood
building where I lived and set up my studio there. The large living room became my sound
stage. The kitchen became the makeup
room, and the bath room became very hard to get into at times. We shot
over ten weekends, April through June of 2010, and got very good shots, some of
which were unusable due to street noise and the fact that we were shooting
under the final approach to Burbank airport.
You need two elements
to make a film, Time and Money. The
Micro-budget realm seeks to transcend this by shooting for pocket change
whenever the cast and crew can get it together.
So, how much did SCREAM, ZOMBIE, SCREAM cost? To tell you the truth, I didn’t keep
track. I worked without a budget, just
spending whatever I needed to. The actors got $50 a day, the studio cost $700 a
month, the makeup artist got $200 a day, I spent several hundred dollars on
props and costumes and thousands on equipment I intended to use again. The
finances on this project are a convoluted mess, but I didn’t do it for
money. I can’t tell you how much the
film cost. I never expected it to make any money, so I never expected to have
to account for any. If I had to give an
estimate, I’d probably guess something in the $10 – $15,000 range. I had been
saving up for it for a couple years and I knew I had enough to finish. I even have some cash left over for the next
one.
Having little in the way of production values, the actors
had to work hard to sell what I always recognized as a truly preposterous
concept. I deliberately wrote the script
to be short, since I knew it would get stupid if I let it run too long. I was constantly coaching the actors to put a
lot of energy and personality into the portrayals. Sometimes they listened and
sometimes they just puttered along. Usually,
the inconsistencies in the acting were due to the lack of rehearsal time we
could use. Also, I cheated and had
several of the actors play more than one role.
This dilutes their concentration.
A few of the actors were exceptional. Devai Pearce, who originally auditioned for
the part of “Jo Ann”, Orpheus’ pregnant zombie girlfriend, ended up playing 4
parts, as well as functioning as assistant director, talent coordinator, mic
boom operator, cue card writer, and anything else I had to throw at her.
There could not have been a better choice than William
Reinbold, who played Orpheus. He had to undergo violent mood swings and did so
skillfully.
Andy Mullins as the
Shock Jock did a fabulous job. This was
a particularly important part to me, since I had at one time been a radio talk
show host and had modeled the character,” Gary Z”, after a real talk show host,
the late Gary Dee, with whom I had worked in Cleveland. He was incredible. He makes Howard Stern look like an amateur. Andy’s
zombie ate Wayne Hellstrom as the TV interviewer. Andy also hosts a celebrity
show as” Red Karpett”.
The venal televangelist, “Rev. JE$$ Ble$$”, was ably played
by Gregg Stickeler, a full-time business professional who finds time to be
semi-professional actor. He is a
filmmaker in his own right and was the star of my previous feature LOVE SLAVES
OF THE SHE-MUMMY. His character is a TV
preacher who is so phony, he wrote his own bible. He is a parody of all those
“God-wants-your-money” hucksters who pollute the airwaves. This was a touchy part to write, since I had
to avoid all reference to any real religious values and symbols. Gregg had to read the absurd gibberish I
wrote as if it really were the Gospel
Supporting players
Marco Tazioli and Galen Sato played two roles each as did Andy Mullins. The exquisitely beautiful and talented Branca
Ferrazo was cast sight unseen over the phone when the actress who had
originally committed to the role de-committed. She played a starlet named “Brittany
Normandie” opposite Bouvier’s ”Dawn Rivers” and a news anchor who gets
zombie-beat while reading the news with Michael Swinehart. Sometimes you just get lucky.
I also got lucky
with Maria Olsen, a tremendously talented and enthusiastic performer. She is well known in the independent film
community as someone who will act for anyone if she likes the project. She is a professional character actress who
also generously helps promote the work of others. If you saw PERCY JACKSON AND THE LIGHTING
THEIF, you will recognize her as the teacher/fury.
The real stars of the movie were Tony Gracia and Raeshia Oli
as the two dedicated zombie stompers. Our villain was not Orpheus, who is
really the Problem. The real heavy is “Agent Schmeterling”, the nasty G man who
makes more trouble for the heroes than the nut job. Albert Marrero Jr. bullied his way magnificently
through the part. Even Bouvier, the star
of Andy Milligan’s SURGIKILL, for which I wrote the original script, makes a
guest star appearance as the secret ruler of the world. She appears as “Dawn Rivers”, her stage name
in Andy’s last personal film, MONSTROSITY.
A pregnant Zombie needs a lullaby. I wrote one.
You can hear The Zombie Lullaby in a video I made on YouTube. I was able to get it recorded at a
professional recording studio owned by a friend of Devai, Theo Mordey. He recorded
Devai singing her own tune, and processed it so she would harmonize with herself.
It was not a part of the original script but it came out so creepy that I used
it as background music for a couple of Devai’s scenes.
I wanted to see if I
could find rhymes for ZOMBIE. I remember
a cartoon series in the ‘60’s called Milton the Monster. It had a character named Abecrombie the
Zombie. That was the only known rhyme for zombie, for a long time. I was
only able to find two more. Taking the part “–ombie”, I went down the alphabet
shopping for rhymes. A-ombie, no. B-ombie, OK,
BOMB BE. Hence the lyric, “Though
every gun and bomb be aimed to shatter your sweet head…” c,d,e,f,g, all the way
to M. M-ombie “ ..will I your loving Mom be..” etc. After M, nothing.
We plowed through the shooting and I embarked on the task of
editing the final film. So, why is it
just coming out now? How many excuses
can you stand? 3 times my computer
crashed and took my edits with it. I got
sick, I moved, I finished the film 4 times and discovered I didn’t like the way
it came out. I finally got it to look
halfway decent and kicked it out of the nest to fly or die on its own. You can sample SCREAM ZOMBIE SCREAM on
YouTube. Besides the ZOMBIE LULLABY,
there is a scene between Orpheus and JoAnn, and a trailer I made. We’re still working on how it will be
sold. Stay tuned. Anyway, that’s where this movie came from.
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