The Village Barbershop - Escaping the Drawer

But it's not. It's a film.

So how did that happen? What defining feature of my personality allowed it to get out? To escape the drawer?

Umm...

I was naïve.  

Yep. Naïve. Completely clueless. Kinda stupid.

Seriously. It's funny. You read all these "how to" books about making your first film, books that want to fill you up and tell you everything, but nowhere in any of them does anyone mention the substantial benefits of not knowing anything. And for me, it was the "not knowing" of filmmaking that made the "not possible" of The Village Barbershop possible.

So where did this unenlightened journey of blissful ignorance start? Specifically, in the summer of 2004. At the time, I was a copywriter for a San Francisco advertising agency and we were shooting some commercials with a guy by the name of Ed Burns. Ed, or Eddy as everyone seems to refer to him, makes independent films, knows everyone at Peter Lugar's Steak House in Brooklyn, and is married to a supermodel. In other words, for an ad guy, or anyone else for that matter, shooting commercials with Ed Burns is pretty cool.

Now, commercial shoots aren't like independent film shoots. Instead of looking to shoot five, six and seven pages a day, commercial guys are looking to shoot one. And usually it's a short one. And on top of that, the money spent on a single 30-second commercial could oftentimes fund a single 90-minute feature film. Long story short, there was plenty of money; and plenty of money means lots of time; and lots of time means lots of sitting around. Sitting around in casting. Sitting around on the set. Sitting around at restaurants and park benches and hotel lobbies. And when you sit, you talk; and when you talk, you talk about your wife and your kids and, maybe, after a few drinks you even talk about a script you have in your desk drawer shoved underneath a bunch of guy junk and a Zip-lock^TM bag full of dark chocolate you keep hidden from your wife.

"What's it about?" someone asks.

"This fading old barber," I answer back.

"What happens?" someone else says.

"His partner dies and he has to hire this go-getter of a young woman to help him save his ‘man's man' barbershop."

Lots of polite chit chat. More drinks. Maybe some burping.

Doesn't feel very Hollywood. Not a script anyone would ever buy. Lots of me feeling stupid for bringing up movies to real movie guys.

And then somebody - specifically, Ed's producer, Aaron - tosses off something like, "Why don't you just shoot it yourself?"

Now, personally, I don't know what the fuck Lubin was thinking. The guy doesn't really drink and he's super grounded and seems to have everything under control, so as much as I wanted to, I couldn't toss off the comment as completely crazy. I had to actually think about it and consider it and mull it just long enough for it to get under my skin.

And it stuck. It stuck hard.

It had occurred to me to write the script. It had occurred to me to put it down to try and write something that might be considered, I guess, more sellable, but it certainly never occurred to me to, "Just go out and shoot it myself."

But once Lubin said it, I knew that's what I had to do.

And luckily, I had no idea how to do it, where I would start, how long it would take, or how hard it would be. Because, luckily, I possessed the single most important personality trait a first time filmmaker can have.

I was naïve. -MPM

Photo, top: John Ratzenberger and Shelly Cole, courtesy of Hot Shave, LLC

You can find out more about The Village Barbershop and the man with 67 pairs of sneakers (and keep track of screening times near you) at www.thevillagebarbershop.com.