Sunday, September 14, 1997: The end of labor for The Yoofo Club's Writer-Director James Serpento and Creative Producer Kim Busbee. The team's first full-length Indie has just wrapped after a grueling rehearsal and shooting schedule at The Old Rock Island Depot in downtown Des Moines. Now the pair push for delivery. Ooof.
As with nearly all independent production budgets, dollars have been tight. Busbee and Serpento now face final fundraising, not to mention editing and post-production. While they have already accomplished much more than most on a bare six-figure budget, they see challenges ahead."People make the joke, ‘Well, it ain't brain surgery,'" says Busbee, "but with brain surgery you're working with a precision instrument. Here you have politics, people's egos, and all the intangibles you can't put your finger on."
“To say it wasn't a struggle, would be a lie,” notes Serpento. “To say much more that is negative would be ungracious and tempting the gods,” he adds.
The struggles included a tenacious and unpredictable train schedule outside the depot-set, loudspeakers from a nearby lumberyard, unexpected close construction (requiring a cease-work pay-off), quarter-hour Courthouse chimes, plumbing shut-downs, and possibly worse pipe-flow sizzles. “For no apparent reason, right in the middle of that beautiful take, and you're inches away, out comes SSSSSSS!” says Serpento, adding, “But that's it. That's what it's about. That's what independent film making is.”
As writer as well as director, Serpento appears grateful for the strong, talented cast of one- and two-take wonders. “Fine actors can make anything work,” he says. Once the actors came on the scene, Serpento-the-writer went to work cutting the excess. “I was listening solely for those times when it was too sentimental, or gave too much information . . . it's mostly a process of trying not to tell people what to think which is absolutely the worst thing a writer can do.”
This particular story, a tale of disparate characters anticipating a UFO, had started as a stage play, and it was not one of Serpento's favorites. “The Yoofo Club started as an experiment: Could I keep a lot of diffuse stories going? . . . And I always thought it was a fairly mediocre piece of writing.”
But writing for the screen made the piece work, says Serpento. “By virtue of the medium, I had to restructure and I think this structure is better. . . . In putting together a movie script, usually you want to find the central character's mythic struggle. And that's how it changed. I made a decision about whose story it is, and his struggle and his past are most important. And all of the other stories, at least in my mind, were subordinate to his.”
This story has three central characters: Serpento, Busbee, and their movie. Will their tale have a happy ending? Unlike members of The Yoofo Club, you can do more than wait to find out. With fundraising, editing, post-production and marketing/ distribution still required, ISA can put you in touch with the pair if you'd like to support this exciting production. Perhaps you'll come to that Iowa-Indie sensibility that Busbee feels, even at this mid-point in delivery. "We didn't have the luxuries of the studio production, but we have a stronger sense of ownership. I guess that's the upside of an Indie. Everyone has to work like a dog, but they feel like they're really affecting the project."