by Curtis Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org
I was talking with one of my reformed slacker friends about the movie scene in Austin, when the subject of Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn) came up. "He's a great guy," I was told. "We were pretty good friends when we were both living in Austin."
I asked, "Is it true that he got the money to film El Mariachi at Pharmaco?" Pharmaco, by the way, is (or was, they've renamed it) a pharmaceutical research company that pays impoverished University of Texas students to serve as guinea pigs in drug research.
"Oh, yeah. That's how I met him."
If you know that story, you probably know the one about how Harvey Keitel got hold of the script for Reservoir Dogs and gave Quentin Tarantino a hand in finding the money to shoot the film with real actors instead of his video-store pals. Stories like these are to Generation X what the story of Lana Turner getting discovered at the soda fountain were to an earlier generation. Being an independent film director/producer/writer is today what being a movie star was to kids in the Forties, or what being a rock star was to kids in the Sixties. It is the coolest thing you could ever hope to be. (This side of playing quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, of course.)
The real legend of The Blair Witch Project has nothing to do with what may or may not be lurking in the Maryland woods. It has to do with novice filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, and how they turned a few thousand dollars and a few thousand feet of 16mm footage into the multimillion dollar blockbuster that's got everyone talking this summer. The story's familiar to anyone who's caught any part of the tremendous buzz about this movie; directors Myrick and Sanchez recruited three actors, equipped them with cameras and sent them into the woods for eight days with little more than a promise that it might get a little scary for them alone out there. Combine this utterly unconventional approach to moviemaking with the unprecedented positive word-of-mouth that the movie received on the festival circuit and on the Internet, and it's the sort of story that would make any aspiring wannabe director sick with envy.
The Blair Witch Project itself isn't as compelling as the story of how the movie was made, but it's not far behind. It's a taut, scary horror thriller, one of the best of an increasingly bad lot of 1999 movies. (It's a bit too early to tap as an Oscar contender, but one wishes Oscar would have a Rookie of the Year category.)
It begins in the most matter-of-fact way possible, with the now-famous caption: "In October of 1994, three student film makers disappeared in the woods near Burkittesville, Maryland. One year later, their footage was found." And that's it. No fancy opening sequence, no list of casting directors or assistant executive producers, nothing to break the verisimilitude that all this footage was shot by three kids wandering around in the forest. (Which most of it was.)
The three kids are Heather, Josh, and Mike, played by Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard, and Mike Williams. They've checked out a couple of cameras and an audio recorder from school, and they're on their way to the town of Burkittesville (formerly Blair, we're told) to shoot some location scenes for a documentary on the local legend, whatever it is. One of the movie's little conceits is that the trio carries two cameras for two different purposes. The actual scenes that they're going to use in the documentary are shot in black-and-white on a 16mm movie camera. They're also carrying along some sort of color camcorder that they mostly use to goof off with. So, the footage of Heather speaking to the camera in the town graveyard is in black-and-white, and the footage of the cast relaxing in the authentically cheesy motel room afterward is in color.
This conceit defines the look of the movie in three important ways. First, film from the two cameras is interwoven together, so the movie switches back and forth from B&W to color more often than the shuttle bus that runs between Kansas and Oz. Since both cameras are hand-held most of the time, the whole movie is herky- jerky enough to cause motion sickness in some viewers. And since cameras need light to operate, there are a lot of scenes that take place either in total blackness or in the eerie glow of a flashlight.
But the look of the movie isn't what you'll remember, isn't what will keep you up until the wee hours of the morning. The hyperbole about The Blair Witch Project being the scariest movie ever aside, this is a movie that will scare you. It may not scare you sitting in the theater. (Myself, I didn't think I was all that scared, although it was comforting to have an aisle seat just in case things got a little too scary.) But there are scenes that will stick in your memory, that will haunt you at odd moments when you're alone in your car or trying to get to sleep or when you hear a strange noise in the middle of the night.
The Blair Witch Project does not rely on surprise or gore, the two mainstays of the Hollywood slasher movie. Instead, it uses the rules of the campfire ghost story. Myrick and Sanchez know that fear is contagious, and they scare their actors silly, knowing that they will transmit the fear to each other and to the audience. They also know that they don't need to show a lot of really scary stuff in the movie, just set up a scary situation and let the mind fill in the blanks. (Next time you get the chance to tell a ghost story at a campfire out in the woods to a group of kids that hasn't seen the movie, tell the story of the Blair Witch and see what happens.)
But The Blair Witch Project is more than just a spooky ghost story, thanks to the work of actors Heather, Mike, and Josh. There are some drawbacks to their performance. They're a bunch of Generation X twits, for one thing. They wear plaid flannel shirts and whine and moan a lot. Like Tarantino characters, they seem to have only two modes of conversation, obscenity and pop culture references. ("Did you ever see Deliverance?" one of them asks as they make their way into the woods.)
They're highly dependent on emotion. As they wander through the woods with only a compass, trying to figure out which direction civilization lies, one of them asks, "How does east feel?" The ordeal of being lost in the woods drains them emotionally to the point that they have to stop walking and have a good cry every once in a while. (I kept imagining what would happen if you placed the squad from Saving Private Ryan in a similar situation, after Normandy, seeing piles of rocks and twigs might not be so bad.)
But these are minor quibbles. The cast does a great, intense, powerful job. There's an unfakable genuineness and sincerity to their performances. We're not just being told that they're cold and hungry and scared, we feel it along with them (the hungry part, especially, given how much popcorn costs these days). Their slow, linear descent into the nether world of psychological disintegration is much scarier than the things that go bump in the night.
Donahue is outstanding, taking a part that could have been nothing more than a Jamie Lee Curtis scream queen role and taking it to the next level. The movie's signature scene is hers, and her brittle, tense, unblinking delivery will stay with you. So will the last scenes of the movie, filmed in this, um... well... place.... with this stuff everywhere... and... well, I could describe it, but you'll want to see it for yourself without me spoiling it.
One of the best things about The Blair Witch Project is that even though we know (or think we know) that Josh, Heather and Mike are doomed, we're still rooting for them all the way, hoping that they'll find their car and get back home so Josh can call his girlfriend and so Heather can to turn in the camera equipment on time. And as we root for them, we're also rooting for Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, the young geniuses who started with nothing but managed to spin straw (and twigs, and rocks, and slime) into gold. Box office aside, the real success of The Blair Witch Project will be the hope and inspiration it will give to the next generation of filmmakers, actors, and screenwriters seeking to become the coolest thing you can ever hope to be.
-- Curtis D. Edmonds blueduck@hsbr.org
Movie Reviews: http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Curtis+Edmonds
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