Jalopy Hour was shot in New Orleans during June of 1998. It was intended as a short comic film/TV pilot (30 min +/-). The filming turned out to be more difficult than expected and communication skills between the principle participants broke down. Frank Schneider, the one real actor among us, admits to being partly possessed by spirits either from the City of New Orleans or the African mask he slept with. I had met Frank in an "action theater" class and invited him into the project to act and coach the rest of us into some sort of acting.
Jeff Plansker and I drove from LA to NO in November of 1997 with the goal of finding some old loft-like building we could rent for the first 6 months of the year wherein to develop ideas into the film. We drove through an amazing blizzard in a mountain pass in New Mexico while listening to Art Bell talk about recent UFO sightings near Seattle. We did succeed at finding a great old building near Magazine Street in NO. I moved from Berkeley to NO the first week of 1998. The owner of our rental was kind enough to put me up on a couch until I found an apartment. I got to know New Orleans while waiting for my creative partner to show up. Jeff had gotten dragged into doing a car commercial, the first in a long line of those. I followed the Mardi Gras parades and fortunately had some visitors, Jazz Fest etc. Jeff came to town a few times during the first 4 months and we argued over red wine about how to make the film. We did agree to operate a pirate radio station and invited an expert friend in who set up a fully functional 100-watt station in our building. There were some memorable radio nights, like when Andrew Blustain visited and we broadcast the audio from the entire 2001 film. The radio station was to be the workshop for our film ideas: that we might spin some records and then rant, and in recording those rants find the seed material from which to write the short film. Unfortunately we were never all there long enough to make that pattern happen. We did bolt some rough ideas into place which became the working film treatment. Then Jeff called in the troops and a slew of people arrived from LA to help make Jalopy Hour Jalopy Hour.
To be continued...
Please see a portion of Jalopy Hour at www.jalopyhour.com
