The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (38 page)

REMEMBER
The Blair Witch Project
’s marketing campaign? It was an update of sorts on 1971’s
The Last House on the Left
, except where Wes Craven would have us keep reminding ourselves that it’s just a movie, it’s just a movie,
Blair Witch
kept whispering that this was actual found footage. It’s the same dynamic, though; it was tapping the same sensationalistic vein.

Writer/director Sean Mickles (
Abasement
,
Thirty-Nine
) knows this vein very well. And, for
Tenderizer
, he let it bleed.

As you probably recall, the first trailer was released as a “rough cut,” with the media outlets quoting Mickles’s grumbled objection that
Tenderizer
wasn’t ready, that production difficulties were built into a project like this, weren’t they?

Speculation was that he just wasn’t ready to let it go, of course.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

Whether actually released with his approval or not, that first trailer definitely had nerve. Just the title at lowest possible right in a “roughcut” font, then ninety seconds of black screen, punctuated by shallow breathing, the kind that makes you hold your eyes a certain way, in sympathetic response. At the end of it there wasn’t even any large-sized title branded on or swooping in—there were no closing frames. It was all closing frames. It was as if a minute and a half of our pre-movie attractions had been hijacked. Watching it, you had the feeling you could look up at the theater’s tall back wall, see a prankster’s face smiling down at you from the projection booth.

Except that breathing, it was supposed to be actual recorded breathing. From one of the twenty-four victims of the Woodrow High School Massacre.

Neither Mickles nor Aklai Studio ever suggested it, but in the press surrounding the trailer’s release, Aklai did deny it, and not just in an oblique way, but in a way that felt coached. By a lawyer.

Mickles had no comment.

It was obvious he was part of this junket very much against his will.

Soon enough, another rumor found its way into circulation, from no source anybody could ever cite. But it was so terrible it had to be true. It was that that black screen, that nervous breathing, it was the last voicemail Mickles had received from his six-year-old daughter nearly ten years ago, when she was playing hide and seek with her nanny— when Mickles, according to the reports, assumed she was just carrying the cordless phone with her and had accidentally speed-dialed him.

Whether an intentional call or not, she still suffered the same fate: carbon monoxide in the garage, her new best hiding place.

The rumor about
Tenderizer
, then, was that Mickles was dealing with his own grief (or guilt) by exploring visuals that breathing could have been associated with, for a girl playing hide and seek on another ordinary day.

If either theory were true—the breathing was from a victim of the massacre, the breathing was from his own daughter’s accidental death—then the studio should have stopped the project right there. Aklai would have lost a few dollars, sure, but it would have gained some public opinion points, which are finally worth more.

Film is intensely personal, yes, and it can be violently pornographic, but playing either the labored breathing of someone now dead or the last missive from a dying daughter to a father, that’s combining the two in a way that shouldn’t be flirted with, right? Shouldn’t there be a line?

Apparently not.

Six months after that initial trailer, there was the soon-to-be-famous thirty-second spot—perhaps originally intended for network, for prime-time—that featured footage culled from on-the-scene news reports, complete with station identifications, license plates, and sports logos blurred over. No, not blurred: smeared over. Instead of scrubbing the pixels or smudging the print, Mickles was showcasing his art-house pedigree. The news footage was playing on a small television, and the legally necessary “blurring” was actually Vaseline dabbed onto the screen. Which is to say those thirty seconds were shot, cut, and piped into a television monitor, then paused and rewound continually to wipe and reapply the Vaseline, a process that would have taxed even a Claymation artist’s patience. And for what effect, finally?

As with the rest of Sean Mickles’s body of work since his daughter’s accident, that’s always the question, yes.

Of course, save for one telltale glare of the screen right at the end of those thirty seconds, it takes a trained eye to even clock that it’s a television screen being filmed in the first place. Simply because of what that television is playing: thirty seconds of respondents and interviewees and witnesses to the Woodrow Massacre. Which of course we’ve all seen nearly to the point of memorization. Those easy, iconic moments weren’t the one Mickles chose for this trailer, though.

Do people know about heads and tails anymore, as it applies to film? It’s how you give a scene punch, how you cut run-time: snip as much off the front and back as you can, until only the absolutely vital remains. Because the modern audience doesn’t have time for the rest. In the early days of film, heads and tails were often bought off editing-room floors and spliced into what they called ‘shadow movies,’ where you could tell the story was actually happening in the space just beside the screen. There was an audience for it in the early 1930s, and not just because the theaters those shadow movies played in were cheaper.

That audience never died, either. It just went to sleep for a couple of generations.

Sean Mickles shook it awake.

The moments he clipped for
Tenderizer
’s second trailer, they’re the moments right before those witnesses’ and parents’ and emergency personnel’s voices creak on, when they’re looking past the camera, into some unclaimed middle distance. It evokes not so much a fly caught in a web, sensing some many-legged, inevitable shape taking form at the limits of its perception, but a human dreamer waking in that same web, about to offer an excuse to the spider. How this is all a big misunderstanding.

There were eight of these clips, of varying length, none longer than six seconds.

It left us all leaning forward, turning our heads sideways so as not to miss a breath. As if, from the shape those lips were about to take, we could get the word, too.

We wanted one of those people to have got it right, was the thing.

There was truth in them, you could see it in their eyes. They were there, after all. It was still raw, was still happening. Surely one of them was about to stumble into one of those magic utterances that define a generation, that epitomize a decade—a “What we have here is a failure to communicate” sort of thing.

Ich bin ein Berliner.

Go ahead, make my day.

I see dead people.

Except Mickles didn’t let any of that happen.

Instead of closure, he raked the wound open all over again, refusing to let it heal over.

At which point the studio still didn’t pull the plug, and the public didn’t rally, or boycott, or even protest at all.

It was just a movie, right?

Art’s how we process tragedy, isn’t it? And art can’t be right or wrong, it can just be good or bad. To allow it any kind of truth-valance would be admitting its importance, which in turn would make it hard to justify relegating it to the fringes of society.

Watch
Tenderizer
, though, and see if that argument still stands.

On the heels of that second trailer, then, Aklai (or somebody with Aklai) leaked the “behind the scenes” footage: those very respondents and interviewees and witnesses being interviewed on set, and talking about how many takes the ever-patient Sean Mickles had forced them through in order to elicit a performance he could actually print.

Remember?

We all nodded, almost glad to have been fooled, if it meant we could disregard the feelings the combination of those first two trailers had provoked.

Except then, of course, and as if by design, grainy cell-phone footage began to surface, confirming that those “actors” in the behind-the-scenes trailer, they’d actually been on scene for the Woodrow Massacre. Just background lurkers, none of them quite ever interviewed. But they’d been there.

I don’t know about you, but that left a distinct hollow feeling in my chest, one it’s hard to tease into words: indecency? transgression? grief? complicity?

And all because maybe these weren’t actors.

Had Mickles found some way to leverage these grieving parents and shy officials and shell-shocked witnesses into playing along with his little film? If so, it was unconscionable. But, where did that leave us, right? Had he had some intimation of what was going to happen at Woodrow that day, and stationed extras in the background? Had he found his daughter at last, hiding in the best place ever, and had she whispered to him, about where to point his camera?

Impossible.

Even Sean Mickles would have called the authorities, had he known.

All that left then was that the real reason for
Tenderizer
’s delays wasn’t Mickles playing Kubrick, trying to control every last detail, perfect every nuance, dot every visual
i
, it was simply the cost and the effort necessary for him to find look-alikes. Actors close enough in build and facial features to those “extras” in the background, actors with the craft to adopt this official’s bureaucratic mannerisms, that witness’s faltering delivery, this father’s way of licking his lips like he’s about to say something. Mickles’s makeup team and Aklai’s in-house digital effects could cover the rest.

And, if this was the case (as we hoped), was it then high art or poor taste? And what of us, compulsively rewinding, rewatching frame by frame, trying to wring the celluloid dry? Was it that we thought if we looked hard enough, our media savvy would let us see through to the artifice we so needed in order to distance ourselves from that day at Woodrow High?

But what if these weren’t actors at all? That was the most effective conversation killer.

No more trailers were necessary after this.
Tenderizer
’s marketing campaign had taken on a life of its own.

Look-alikes surfaced, digital manipulation was proven and disproven, legal action was vaguely threatened, petitions were signed, footage the news crews hadn’t had use for was auctioned off then shown to be fake. More than that,
Tenderizer
’s box office receipts were guaranteed beforehand, simply by the outrage levied against it. People were going to pay to be insulted by a studio capitalizing on their tragedy, and they were probably going to go back for seconds, just to be sure they’d been as offended as they thought they’d been.

To Mickles’s credit, though,
Tenderizer
doesn’t pander to the sensationalistic.

The easy route for the film to have taken would have been to “document” or re-dramatize the fateful events of that day—to create a visual bullet-point list of loosely verifiable scenes and already-legendary acts, and lock them together into a sequence that would, hopefully, serve as a sort of pressure-release valve for the nation’s feelings regarding the massacre, and perhaps finally give the shooter or shooters the face and name we so needed, as then we could burrow into the backstory, explain the Woodrow Massacre away as bad parenting, as an example of how the system is built to fail, as a reminder that we should more closely monitor our children’s activities.

Even if Mickles had them wear ski masks the whole time, and even if, after they’d herded their classmates into the front office, he’d stranded us out in the hall to await the explosion that would hide all the evidence, still, at least we’d be in the hall, right? Not forever out at the flapping yellow tape.

But what we really wanted, of course, was all the requisite heroes and last stands, the insistent prayers and secret-but-doomed love stories, all capped by the tearful, lingering, practically trademarked shots on the grand aftermath of violence.

None of which Mickles would ever even consider delivering.

Now, though, at the point where
Tenderizer
has only screened one time, to a roomful of survivors and parents and dignitaries, and one row of reviewers, there’s evidently a series of images circulating that claim to be the original storyboards for
Tenderizer
. Not as it is now, but as Mickles had to package it to get funding: a Norman Rockwell’d sanitization of the Woodrow Massacre, complete with a slow list of names at the end.