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WISH I HAD A CAMERA
NYU First Run screening 2003
Blatantly Subtle began as a kind of club, because we wanted to make movies with our friends. Part of how it started was just a reaction to graduating from NYU film school and facing the reality of the film world, realizing that the last thing we would be able to do is make the movies we wanted to make, or work on fresh, original material, or have access to the resources we needed... and most likely we were going to be getting someone coffee. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Blatantly Subtle was set up so that at the end of the day (after we got someone
coffee) we'd have something to work on that we cared about, that was ours.
So we set out to make the movies we wanted to make, the way we wanted to make them. Because we had some money we spent it on digital equipment and computers.
In 2001, Joe Leonard, Robert Rossetti, Jill Frutkin and Sam Mestman founded Blatantly Subtle. They shot their first collaborative project in early spring 2002.
An early morning BS production meeting.
Wish I Had A Camera was the first Blatantly Subtle group project. What was great about it was the degree to which everyone played a creative part in it. Joe directed it, Bob and Jill acted and helped him write it, and Sam did the sound and edited. People like Bryan Friedman, who shot it, and Janine Lodyko, who produced it, played key roles, and made the movie possible.
It was the first movie that we could make this way. Working with a pretty lean script, entire scenes were improvised, and shots were found that could not have been planned. For this project we rented radio microphones, which gave us a lot of freedom. In fact, that was the main item of a budget that was below $500...
It took a long time to edit, as Golf on Film would, but when it was finally finished, like Golf on Film, it was a definite success, because it got made. We managed to use our resources to do what we imagined we could.
Jill Frutkin and Bob Rossetti listen to Joe Leonard before a scene.
At around the same time we were shooting these scenes, we were working on several other projects, and one of these was Robert Rossetti's Speak to you Later, which featured three short stories, one in the style of Goodfellas, another like Annie Hall, and the last an homage to The Big Sleep. All of these stories ended with a guy getting rejected. This project remains close to all of our hearts. ny movie was also shot and edited during these months, made in one day walking around new york. These projects were shot and fast with little preparation and a lot of improvisation.
MOVIES SO SUBTLE IT'S BLATANT
Golf on Film (shot Summer 2002) took our "community film shoot" ideal a step further, practically breaking every conventional rule of filmmaking.
Shot without a script by three cameras and practically a dozen actors, the movie took only 18 holes to make, and produced more than a dozen tapes of footage. The original cut, screened soonafter it was completed, ran almost two hours long. The final cut trimmed this to thirty-five minutes.
But the director's cut is still available, with commentary.
on the set of Golf on Film
Once we had finished all of these films, we decided to hold a big screening. We invited everyone we knew and showed everything we had, including the full version of Golf on Film. We held the screening at the NYU Cantor Film Festival and almost unbelievably the whole thing came off.
After two and half hours a full theatre (150-200 people) left asking themselves what they had just seen. Since that first screening, we have shot more than a dozen new films and held other successful screenings, such as:
"unemployable: a night of short films," "blatantly Sexual" and "love lost & sold."
We are currently at work on new short films, and developing feature length scripts. And if we can't sell them, we'll probably just make them ourselves.
unemployable: a night of short films (May 1, 2003)
Bob Rossetti, Dominic Bartolini, Jill Frutkin,
Joe Leonard, Gabriella Dentamaro, & Sam Mestman
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