Welcome to a behind-the-scenes look at the making of another independent feature--a sequel of sorts to Chance Shirley's lively and informative, "This Movie Ain't Gonna Shoot Itself", featured previously on Movie Poop Shoot.

We're coming to you live from Austin, arguably the independent film capital of the United States--home to a small army of filmmakers, writers, actors and crew, along with some dudes you might've heard of like Robert Rodriguez, Richard Linklater, Mike Judge and Harry Knowles. Plus something like 3.5 musicians and bands per square foot within Austin City Limits!

I'll be chronicling the production cycle of a low-budget feature called Z. Like HIDE AND CREEP before it, my picture is also a comedy and also deals with Zombies, but Z takes the road less traveled than your average Zombie flick...

In my view of the Zombie v. Human dynamic, Zombies are more interesting characters than Humans. 'Cause Zombies are kinda like Vampires--practically immortal--only dirtier! In Z, my Zombies are articulate, erudite, sexually liberated and even philosophical. Whereas Humans barely figure into this tale, and even then only in the most peripheral fashion.

Z is the story of a young woman who gets comically transformed into a Zombie. Our heroine is taken in by a group of the Living Undead who inhabit a modern-day suburban neighborhood north of Austin called "Zomburbia", where she's taught the Zombie Ways. She soon sets off on a road trip and meets various other interesting Undead characters, while along the way learning to Release Her Inner Zombie, if you will.

Oh, and it's a MUSICAL!

To Sing, Or Not To Sing, That Is The Question

As a long-time fan of Zombie flicks, I wanted to try my hand in that genre. From the start I wanted my picture to be from the Zombies' POV, not the customary way around. And, also from the start, I thought it'd be even cooler--and funnier--if my Zombies could sing and dance!

Z, a Zombie Musical, was born.

Except there was just one problem...

Pretty much nobody makes original movie musicals anymore! How do you even go about making one? More to the point--WHY would you even want to make a movie musical?!

With the exception of Messrs. Stone and Parker's fantabulous CANNIBAL! THE MUSICAL!, original, live-action movie musicals have virtually dropped out of world cinema for the past 20-30 years or longer. Animated musical features are a different animal, but even they aren't done as much anymore. Disney often doesn't even bother to make its animated features into musicals these days--and how are they gonna top SOUTHPARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT in any case?!

So there are pretty much no books or websites or even humans that I'm aware of to ask about the process of creating a movie musical. (I mean, it's not like Trey Parker or Matt Stone are gonna take the calls of some independent filmmaker from Austin, TX and spend hours on the phone regaling me with tips and pointers for the production of Z!)

Therefore the HOW would have to be figured out as I went along. I'm the writer, director, producer and editor of a previous low-budget feature--the comic mockumentary, THE PERFECT MAN CONTEST, which had its World Premiere at the celebrated Alamo Drafthouse here in downtown Austin, and for which I'm currently seeking DVD distribution. So I have some small idea of how to make an independent movie.

But that still leaves us with the larger question...

WHY Create A Movie Musical?

As an independent filmmaker, the deck's already stacked way against you. Sundance gets like 400 million billion submissions, or thereabouts, each year. SXSW, right here in Austin, probably gets even more. (Many low-budget filmmakers imagine that SXSW is easier to get into, since Sundance's idea of "independent" is a $7 million picture from an Academy Award-winning creative team and a world-wide distribution deal already in place from Monolithic Studios.)

Jumping into this circus with a movie musical--about Zombies, no less!--could only make the Sisyphean task of climbing to the top of the creative mountain that much more difficult. But, for whatever reason, it seemed like a Good Idea at the time...and isn't that the foundation of all Art?!

Fleshing It Out!

When I began writing the screenplay for Z, I hoped that I could come up with maybe 4 songs. One song right at the start, a couple more later in Act I and then a final song near the end. I figured 4 songs was like the bare minimum I could get away with and still call this a Musical.

The opening song was pretty simple--which I did on purpose, both to ease myself into the writing of the show and to ease the audience into experiencing a movie musical. I took the tune from a popular Gilbert & Sullivan song (more on this in my next column about Music/Composers) and simply re-purposed the existing lyrics to my own nefarious ends. Voila, I had a song done!

The next song was a little more challenging. My heroine starts out as a Human and is quickly transformed into a full-fledged Zombie. Once she realizes the transformation has taken place, naturally she starts to sing about it! (Hell, if that happened to me, I'd wanna sing about it, too!)

Since I'd never written an original movie musical before--and who HAS in the 12 years since CANNIBAL! was made?!--I wanted to keep things simple. I started out employing traditional rhyme schemes, AABB or ABAB, like that, so the songs would at least sound like, well, songs. Simple songs, maybe, but songs nonetheless. Another challenge was to maintain the same number of syllables in each line--usually 6-10--within the primary verses of a song, so that everything would hopefully come out right once the music was added later.

Not long after finishing my heroine's transformation song, an idea for a silly little song popped into my head and I wrote that sucker down. And then another song emerged out of nowhere...and another...and you get the picture. Pretty soon I was thinking "song" at every turn.

My general rule for creating a song was no different than what you'd keep in mind for writing any scene--it should develop the characters or advance the story or both. And rhyme. And have (mostly) equal numbers of syllables. And be silly, since this was supposed to be a comedy.

It was a lot to think about...now that I think about it!

Less Is More

Writing songs forces you into an incredible ECONOMY of writing, which is always a good thing, especially in comedy.

I launched into each song by writing out a rough draft of a "normal" scene between two (or more) characters, putting down everything I wanted them to communicate. Then I'd find a significant turn of phrase within what I'd scribbled, and, based on the words in that phrase, I'd decide on the # of syllables per line in that particular song. Then I'd just play with the remaining dialogue and phrases I'd already written, twisting and turning them into song lyrics to the best of my abilities.

In the end, I was frequently only able to include perhaps 1/3 of everything I wanted the characters to communicate -- but that 1/3 would usually be the "good stuff". (More than once I wrote 4 or 5 pages of conversation for a song...and ended up with a single, tight page of song lyrics.)

The Naked Truth

Another choice I'd made right at the start was to make my Zombies sexy! And that meant showing skin!

My previous picture, THE PERFECT MAN CONTEST, featured a fair amount of utterly gratuitous nudity. Z would go even further. My Zombies would sing and dance and get naked quite a bit.

I knew this choice would upset some people. I was even warned that including anything more than a single, fleeting bedroom scene between two characters who were destined to stay together for the rest of their lives would be a further--perhaps insurmountable--barrier to getting into any major film festivals, who often make the same safe, conservative choices of Network Television executives.

But, c'mon...if you're making your Art honestly and you're not offending somebody somewhere, then you're probably doing something wrong!

More on this in a future column, but suffice it to say I realized that any silly, pointless nakedness in Z would probably upset all those good folks who demonize the human body...and, not coincidentally, save money on costumes!

Finishing The Script

To recap: I began by hoping for perhaps 4 songs in the show. But as the screenplay emerged, I kept coming up with new song ideas and banging them out...and ultimately I had exactly one dozen songs, fully 3 times the amount I anticipated!

I wrote "The End" at the bottom of the last page and formatted it into Final Draft Pro and, well, you know the drill.

I now had in hand a screenplay for that rarest of sub-sub-genres...a comic, Zombie, musical feature!

The Cart Before The Horse

Composing the score of a motion picture is invariably part of the post-production process. This is true whether your budget is $150 or $150 million.

In practice, of course, on larger pictures the score is actually more like an AFTERTHOUGHT to the post-production phase, thrown together in the few weeks between the completion of editing and a major theatrical release--which is why the music in many big budget movies sounds so formulaic and derivative. The composers involved are usually tremendously talented, but get far less time to do their jobs than any other significant contributor to the picture.

Whereas in a movie musical, the process is reversed. The music--for the songs, at least--comes first.

The songs must be composed, performed and recorded, and then the vocals recorded and mixed with the music, BEFORE a single frame of film or video is exposed. Then, on set, the talent lip-synchs to the finished song while it plays back on loudspeakers...sorta like an Ashlee Simpson concert, only better!

NEXT: we'll delve into the process of finding composer(s) for the songs in a live-action musical.

Thanks!

Thank you for taking the time to read this far! If you have any feedback or questions, or if you're the Head of Acquisitions for, say, Miramax, feel free to contact me anytime!

Until then...

Release Your Inner Zombie!

Further Reading

If you haven't had the pleasure of reading Chance Shirley's 20-part column on the making of HIDE AND CREEP, you can access the archives on Movie Poop Shoot, or visit crewless.com

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