Award: Grand Prize - Worldfest Charleston

A comedy about a Beverly Hills socialite's party where simply everything goes wrong. A cross-cultural comedy about love, sex, food and morality in the increasingly nonfat nineties.

The story centers on a Beverly Hills socialite, Evelyn, who throws a stylish Sunday afternoon party to impress the members of her women's club. She entices the women's committee along, and some of their reluctant husbands, with the promise of presenting a special guest speaker, Kato Kaelin (of O.J. Simpson fame), to speak about "Sex in the Nineties". She hopes to be elected President of the club, and the new post seems to be in the bag. Then everything starts to go embarrassingly wrong. Her son, Jake, creeps naked around the house looking for a secluded place to masturbate, just as Evelyn escorts the committee on a grand tour of the house. Her husband, Herbert, is desperately in lust with the maid, Rosa, and looks for his chance for a romantic rendezvous. And all the while, Evelyn's special guest speaker becomes increasingly overdue.

Meanwhile, Sung Ho and Joon, Korean valets, are parking the cars for the distinguished guests. Sung Ho is trying to find acceptance in a new country and impress his boss. However, Joon is secretly renting the expensive cars by the hour, to a group of eager young Korean's around the corner. He tries to instruct Sung Ho in the fine art of being "cool" in America, and how to drive American women crazy with desire for his irresistible manhood. In pursuit of his fate, he follows an elderly doctor's, sexy, young wife into the bushes.

Bad leads to worse, and the now desperate and angry Sung Ho confronts Joon with a gun. They erupt into a vicious and elaborate (comic) fight, that disrupts the whole party. Evelyn intervenes, and Sung Ho unintentionally provokes her to attack him. The dwindling party quickly turns into a mass evacuation, leaving Evelyn crying on the front steps, and only Sung Ho to comfort her.

TREADING ON DANGEROUS GROUND

Comments by the Director of Photography, Peter Gray

I decided on a somewhat radical approach to shooting this rather funny comedy. I made the suggestion to the director to shoot the whole movie with Steadicam, and to my surprise, he agreed. Sounds like a very cool idea - right? Well, we found out there is a lot more to this approach than first meets the eye.

Firstly, it is hard to find an excuse to choreography every single shot ...... even to justify moving the camera at all. Secondly, and more importantly, comedy is all about timing. And the timing is easier to control when using more conventional montage-style editing techniques.

We couldn't use our Panaflex Lightweight camera in a conventual way shooting from a tripod, as it didn't have the normal optical viewfinder system. So our valiant steadicam operator, Bill Gierhart, S.O.C., found himself being used as a ‘human tripod' on numerous occasions. The lesson to be learnt ..... if considering making extensive use of Steadicam, the very concept needs to be incorporated into the fundamental structure of the piece, at the script level.

I went for a very clean, fine-grained, colorful look, and shot with Eastman EXR 5245 exclusively, including all the interiors (E.I. 50 Daylight). This is perhaps the most beautiful stock Kodak makes, but it is difficult to use it across a wide range of shooting situations. I had just shot an entire feature film in Asia using this approach with very slow, fine-grained emulsions. There, I used the companion tungsten product 5248, and was very happy with the result (see THREE FRIENDS, 1996).

I don't regret the Steadicam approach. It worked out pretty well in a way. Although the movie looks much more conventional in style than we originally envisaged. But I'd love to attempt another all-Steadicam movie one of these days.

Peter Gray
(near Los Angeles)
P.O. Box 5132
Pine Mountain Club, CA 93222
United States of America
telephone: +1(661) 242-1234

dp@petergray.org