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Stock in the Mosh Pit

Oct 1, 2006 12:01 PM, By Darroch Greer

There is not another film like it anywhere in creation, and if you missed the proto-punk days of the mid-'70s, when glam rock turned incendiary, you can get a voyeuristic eyeful with Brothers of the Head, Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton's debut feature after their successful documentary Lost in LaMancha.

Inspired by the Direct Cinema films of the Maysles and Pennebakers and Robert Frank's Cocksucker Blues, Pepe and Fulton set out to make a faux documentary about a pair of Siamese twins joined at the gut who front a band and inadvertently found the punk movement.

“We said to [screenwriter] Tony Grisoni, ‘Your first rule is you cannot write anything that doesn't exist. …It has to have been shot by the documentary crew.’ The first draft of the script had a sex scene. I said, ‘Tony, there is no documentary crew during a sex scene!’ So, it was all about coming up with really creative storytelling devices for each part of the story.” For the sex scene, they gave Barry, one of the conjoined brothers, a Super 8 camera. You can imagine.

What is hard to imagine, though quite palpable in the film, are the lengths DP Anthony Dod Mantle went to take us back in time. “It was one of the most inviting scripts I've ever read, with all these worlds you had to create,” Mantle says. “They let me develop the idea of shooting on 16 or 35 or DV, and I developed a palette: 35mm or 16mm pushed, sometimes one stop, sometimes two stops. You have to really bitch modern stocks these days if you want to get them to look like old stocks because film stocks have gotten so much better, so much more fine grain.”

Pepe and Fulton are quite academic and formulaic in their approach. Different segments of the film — the '70s documentary footage, the contemporary interviews, the film within a film being made by Ken Russell — were each partitioned into different documentary styles on a chart that Mantle carried around in his pocket. Besides the technical distinctions, Mantle had to actually be a documentary filmmaker. No faux shaky cam for this bunch. “We would never put the actors on the set, put Anthony on the set, and say, ‘OK, we're going to do a dry run-through just for camera,’” Fulton says. “It was important for us to have complete spontaneity.” The situation clearly called for zoom lenses, but incredibly Mantle was thinking primes. “I remember saying, ‘Anthony, you can't make a documentary with a prime lens. It's just not possible,’” Fulton says.

Mantle generally eschews the cinéma verité style, tending toward the poetic, but within these strictures he was able to go quite wild. “It's almost an anthropological study of formats in film,” Mantle says, “with a story kind of controlling the idea. …In the case of 16, I shot through the back of the film, which means you turn the film backwards, put it back in the camera, and shoot, which normally means you'd be fired from the studio. I overexposed it five stops to give it a kind of weird, blurry golden effect.”

Mantle shot almost everything through stockings or filters, the better to marry those fine stocks with the DV during the DI. “I shot 500 ASA Kodak because it's quite high grain. I pushed that to get some more grain out of it. Shooting the back of the stock — that would have been 35 and 16 500 ASA. As I said, I had to overexpose that five stops; it's like you're shooting at the equivalent of about 10 or 20 ASA. So, I was slamming lights like frying an egg on my actors' foreheads, really.”

This is the stuff in which Mantle revels; and he's not doing it just to be poetic, but to solve problems as well. Regarding the Super 8 style for the sex scene: “Super 8 is actually very difficult and very expensive to work with in post. So, I shot that in DV, deliberately out of focus, also stockinged, and then put it in post and manipulated it, shot it at weird speeds. And I think that ended up with quite a Super 8 feeling. Quite lyrical.”

Mantle recalls, “If you remember the old reversal stocks from the '70s, they always had a slight cyan blue look to them, and a very interesting yellow. So, I tried to simulate that. I was very tough on the art design, putting yellow objects in the picture and pulling reds, greens out. [Then, shoot] on tungsten stock without 85 corrections, screen the blues, and push forward. It's all technical bollocks.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.