By Wayne Price, director of The Doorman
(July 2008)
"Backwards" best describes how I made my first feature film, The Doorman. It did begin with a script, but only seven pages, without dialogue, written in a couple of hours one afternoon in the autumn of 2004. My roommate, Lucas Akoskin, and I were frustrated by the two-plus years we had already devoted toward developing the script of another movie, a drama, and so we wrote the script for Doorman basically just to make ourselves laugh and to give us a "little" project we could shoot quickly, with our own money and our own connections.
Our producer/lawyer, Jonathan Gray, invited us to hang out with him and his eclectic crew of film folks at his house in Park City during the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. It was there that we met two people who would quickly assume producer roles in our film, Mevlut Akkaya and Brian Devine. Mevlut at the time was the director of the digital film academy in New York City (where we began our editing process) and Brian was the president of Gigantic Pictures, a NYC-based film production company (which is now releasing the film). Neither Mevlut nor Brian had any idea what they were getting into at the time, but they seemed to like Lucas and me, and offered to "help out" however they could.
Upon returning to NYC, I hired a cameraman, Patryk Rebisz, for an obscenely low rate and told him to show up ready to shoot at the famous tents of Bryant Park Fashion Week. Lucas was actually working there at the time, in a sort of "doorman" capacity, for a PR agency responsible for coordinating celebrity seating during the fashion shows. Somewhat miraculously, Lucas was able to talk our little crew - Patryk on camera, me on the boom mic - into the backstage area, abuzz with naked models, make-up artists, frantic designers and various nondescript media. Lucas immediately became Trevor W., the world's most famous doorman, and started to talk to the camera crew as if we were doing a reality show about him. I would approach models and ask them to pretend like they knew "Trevor" when he passed by. They did, actually in a believable way (smart models!). We ended up getting some pretty amazing footage, including unscripted moments with celebrity photographer Patryk McMullan, "90210" star Tori Spelling, Heatherette designer Richie Rich and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy's" Carson Kressley. Not to mention the ubiquitous Paris Hilton, who sat front row, stroking her dog while we shot her.
This first day of shooting set the tone. While we had the semblance of a script to follow and knew what was going to happen to our beloved doorman, Trevor, the scenes we decided to shoot with him often were spurred more by our access to colorful environs and people than what was written on paper. Lucas knew Amy Sacco, owner of Bungalow 8, and after she agreed to appear in the film talking about the legend of Trevor, we immediately had interest from the top club owners/restaurateurs/hoteliers in the city. We interviewed them all because we couldn't say no! Then, after Brian Devine saw a first rough cut, he thought it would be great if Trevor had a scene with Peter Bogdanovich, where he tries to sell the legendary director on getting him a role in "The Sopranos." Brian knew Peter, and so it was easy for him to set up a meeting. A few weeks later, we were shooting with Peter, and a few days after that, with "Queer Eye's" Thom Filicia, whose interior design firm was actually working on Brian's house!
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