Moose Dreams
Q: What do you get if you mix the urge to make movies, a 48-hour deadline and a big, furry costume? A: You may want to avert your eyes

By Tyler Currie
Sunday, July 2, 2006

Kirk Mangels's lips crease into a thin line. He squeezes one forearm behind his back and waits for his turn to pluck a piece of paper from a hat that will make or break his weekend.

At the head of the line, a man representing Anjou Films reaches into the hat and, with dismay, announces the result: silent film. Kirk grins -- he was dreading that genre. Others in the crowd at Washington's Warehouse Theater clap wildly, taking delight in the tough draw of a competitor.

The next filmmaker, from Team Soul Story, pulls horror. "Damn," Kirk mutters. That's one he wanted for his team, Worthy Foes. Mockumentary is next out of the hat, going to Resilient Young Asian Network. Kirk looks crestfallen to see that genre slip away. "We're getting dangerously close to musical and western," he says. Choosing either of those genres would be a dagger. "The things that define westerns, big expansive spaces and horses, you just can't replicate here in Washington." His distaste for musicals is more succinct: "That's just the booby prize."

This is Kirk's fifth year trying to win the 48 Hour Film Project, a breakneck moviemaking contest that started in Washington but has now gone international. About 1,100 filmmaking teams in 35 cities from Portland to Paris are participating in this year's round of competitions. That's roughly 18,000 actors, makeup artists, camera operators, scriptwriters, directors, producers and editors. Participants are a mix of amateurs and film professionals, looking for fun or a chance to network.

Finally, Kirk, a 42-year-old freelance video producer, stands before the floppy orange top hat. He reaches inside, snags the first paper to tickle his fingers and shows it to the emcee, who leans into the microphone and calls out, "Fantasy!"

Kirk smiles. Fantasy is just fine with him. "Cool," he says. "We'll totally deal with that."

Now Kirk and his 24-member team -- mostly friends and friends-of-friends willing to work for free -- have two days to write, shoot, edit and score a seven-minute fantasy film that will wow a three-judge panel and beat out the movies made by 99 other teams. Shooting the film will cost about $3,000, with the bill being footed by a friend and the father of producer Brad Mendelsohn.

The 48-hour time limit will be doggedly enforced, so Kirk got a head start this afternoon, renting sound and lighting equipment. He also stopped by a costume shop and impulsively hauled away a six-foot moose outfit. He had no clue what purpose a moose could serve in his film. In fact, the raggedy brown costume, with a missing clump of head fur, seemed at odds with his plan to create serious cinema. "I don't want this to be just some silly little film," he'd said.

But now his costume selection seems prescient. "The moose," Kirk says, "it fits perfectly with fantasy!"

Everyone has finished selecting genres. Team Diamond, 11 students from Oakton High School in Vienna, has gotten stuck with musical, which Mark Romano, the team's 17-year-old first-time director, later acknowledges is the worst possible pick. Only one chore remains before the clock starts, and the filmmakers scatter. Mark Ruppert, one-time executive director of the Silver Spring Chamber of Commerce who created the 48 Hour Film Project as a high-speed artistic lark, announces the three elements that must be included in every film. The mandatory character, prop and snippet of dialogue are designed to give extra zing to the contest and block prewritten scripts.

"Your character is Tim or Tina Tate, gay glass sculptor extraordinaire," Ruppert tells the crowd. "The prop is a fire extinguisher . . . And your line of dialogue is, 'This is absolutely the last time.' "

"Now that's funny," Kirk says, reacting to the line. He deems the prop "heavy and stupid." But Tim or Tina Tate really bothers him. "To make the character gay, that's just inviting stereotypes," he grouses.

It is shortly before 8 p.m. on a Friday in May. Kirk heads toward his cramped Dupont Circle apartment, riding shotgun in Brad Mendelsohn's car. Eric Wargo, his 39-year-old screenwriter, sits in the back and tries to channel Kirk's emotion. "This is good. Let's use that anger . . . to propel this thing."

"Can you even sculpt glass?" Kirk frets. "I don't think it's possible. Don't you have to blow glass?"

Eric has a eureka moment. "What if gay doesn't mean gay?" he asks. "What if gay glass means the type of glass, like gay glass is this new space age material that doesn't chip?"

Kirk's eyes light up. "I love it," he says.

Three city blocks later, the car halts in front of a store. Kirk and Eric emerge carrying four gallons of iced tea, fully caffeinated. Kirk knows it's going to be a long night.

Kirk didn't set out to be a filmmaker. He grew up in a suburb of Akron, Ohio. His mother was a part-time dental hygienist; his father worked for the phone company and later became the town's mayor. As a kid, Kirk gravitated to jazz and the art of improvisation, collecting stacks of LPs that he culled from discount bins at local record shops. He organized big jazz bands -- 10 pieces or more -- that rehearsed in his parents' basement.

But when he went off to Miami University of Ohio, he settled on a more pragmatic course, deciding to become a doctor. "Organic chemistry put an end to that," he says. "I got a D in the class." So he majored in physics, with the aim of heading to graduate school to become a weather researcher. But he decided the work would be too tedious.

Instead, he became a driving instructor. "It was the worst job of all time," he says. "I trained for five weeks without any pay. And I had to read a book called Happiness Is a Driver's License. "

After a short, equally unsatisfying stint making in-home sales pitches for $829 Bose clock radios, Kirk moved to Washington in 1988. He eventually got a job as an apprentice film editor for a small production company. He was broke and earning only $60 a day, but the real compensation, he says, was the thrill of being creative.

Since coming to Washington, Kirk has worked in supporting roles on some significant film projects, including a couple of Academy Award-nominated short documentaries, one of which won an Oscar, and as the production manager for a pair of PBS-funded "Frontline" documentaries. But none was his own. "I really like being on the set of someone I admire," he says. "But there has to be a point or a moment when you're going to step out of the shadow and say, I'm going to take the lead." The 48 Hour Film Project was his chance to be a director for the first time.

The annual filmmaking frenzy is the brainchild of Mark Ruppert, a filmmaker who'd read about a 24-hour play competition where contestants zipped from page to stage in one day. "I thought it would be fantastic to try it with video, although I knew we would need more time," says Ruppert. When he and his friend Liz Langston, a local film producer, organized the first contest, "we weren't even sure if it was possible to make a film in 48 hours, or if those films would be in any way watchable."

Some of those initial 12 films were actually pretty good. After the first screening in 2001, word of the 48 Hour Film Project rippled through Washington's film community, which is home to giants such as National Geographic and Discovery Communications, but also speckled with freelancers and boutique production houses that pump out everything from political ads to sewage industry training videos.

Now the film project has mushroomed to 35 cities, where Ruppert and Langston contract with local producers to handle the organizing. Winners from each city compete for a grand prize, which can be a career booster. In 2002, Atlanta filmmaker Richard Sampson and his team, the Boondogglers, won that city's 48 Hour competition with a mystery called "White Bitch Down," which went on to win the grand prize and was aired on the Independent Film Channel.

" 'White Bitch Down' became a calling card for us, saying, hey, look what we can do in two days," says Sampson. The film helped Sampson win the Atlanta Film Festival's Southeastern Media Award, which included a production package worth about $100,000 toward making a feature-length movie. He's at work on the feature now.

Kirk is drooling for the same kind of opportunity. "We've seen the exposure of other teams that have done well" in the 48 Hour Film Project, he says. "And we want that."

Kirk has installed himself in front of his computer, and screenwriter Eric Wargo is gnawing the cap of his pen on the couch in Kirk's apartment. An esoteric German film is flickering on Kirk's pull-down movie screen. For inspiration, Kirk explains.

Kirk has an idea involving a "woman whose husband got killed in the [Iraq] war. Her 40-year-old sergeant husband got re-upped for the fifth time and got shipped off by these wack jobs" called politicians.

If the movie's going to deliver a message, Eric says, there's got to be a plot.

"Okay, you want a message and story. I can do that," says Kirk. But soon his antiwar flick morphs into a tale about a woman whose dog dies. The death of a pet can pack real emotional punch, Kirk explains, petting Daphne, his 2-year-old English setter.

After two hours of discussion, no real story line appears to be emerging. Kirk's latest brainstorm revolves around three characters: a sculptor of gay glass, an avant-garde photographer and a sad woman who sits outside the Hirshhorn Museum. "I'm seeing this clearly now," he says.

Eric throws up his arms. He wants Kirk to embrace a more concrete plot. He points out that there's no linkage among the characters. Eric has some authority in this debate; he studied film at the University of Colorado. Later he got a PhD in anthropology from Emory University.

"I thought I was going to make ethnographic documentaries," says Eric, an editor for a psychology journal in Washington. It's his third year working on a 48 Hour film with Kirk. They met four years ago while collaborating on a documentary called "An Archaeological Search for Jesus." It was the start of both a friendship and a combative working relationship. Kirk continually scolds Eric for not jotting down the torrent of ideas being bandied. Pick up the pen, Kirk sputters. "You're a writer. You're supposed to write."

Eric has learned to shrug off Kirk's outbursts: "Kirk is a brilliant director, but he's got the attention span of a gnat."

Now he turns to Kirk and says: "I'm having a problem with this scene you want to do at the Hirshhorn. What's going on with this woman?"

"She's sad," says Kirk.

"But what's going on with her?"

"She's seeking solace by going to the museum, by looking at art."

"But why is she sad in the first place?"

Kirk is quiet for a moment. A devilish grin spreads across his face. "She's sad because she hasn't seen a moose yet."

While Kirk wants to win this competition, he knows that film-judging is more art than science. A rock-solid film won't guarantee victory. Three of his previous four 48 Hour films have won an award -- but never the top prize. The closest he's come was in 2004 with "Deeper Than Under," a film noir about a washed-up gumshoe who seduces young women through hypnosis. The picture teemed with slick black-and-white images and kitschy lines: "I was on a big slide," says the gumshoe, "like a drunk donkey on ice skates."

Kirk thought he'd made a winner, but "Deeper Than Under" finished second. "There's no worse place to come in than second place," he says. "That's like, almost, almost, almost."

Later the film was accepted into the L.A. Short Film Festival, traditionally a staging point for short works with Oscar ambitions. Kirk and Brad Mendelsohn flew to L.A. for the screening, but when they arrived at the theater, they were greeted with blank stares: Deeper than what? Organizers told the pair of Washingtonians that their tape had never been received. Perplexed, Kirk says that he pointed to the listing of "Deeper Than Under" in the festival's official program. It was no use. Kirk numbly watched the other films; his own was never screened.

Last year his 48 Hour film "Chasing Greed" was less successful, although it won an award for best graphics. Kirk knows that even if he wins this year, the prize wouldn't automatically catapult him to the status of a professional director. Still, these annual events have shaped his hopes for the future. "I have noticed that for the past four years, the times I have felt the most alive were during the making of these projects," he writes in an e-mail. "That makes me look at the other 363 days of the year and say, 'I want my life to be more like those two days.' "

It's 9:30 on Saturday morning, and 34 hours are left on the clock. The cast and crew are sipping coffee on the back porch of a big, two-story house in the Palisades section of Northwest Washington. It belongs to friends of Kirk, who are letting him film here. Kirk and Eric worked on the script until 3 a.m., and Kirk managed to sleep for a couple of hours. He is ruddy and alert as he explains his "enigmatic" story to the team.

This is a movie about an artistic photographer, Bruno, who has found a fantastic new technique, Kirk says. Bruno deliberately "loses" his camera. Strangers find it and take pictures. Bruno then somehow recovers the camera and develops the film, which is supposed to reveal a mysterious inner truth about those who've been photo-graphed. One place where Bruno will set down his camera is outside the Hirshhorn Museum. The other is a party honoring Tim Tate, a sculptor of gay glass.

"And, strangely enough, there's a moose at the party," Kirk says. And the moose snags Bruno's camera to take pictures of his own lustful romp with another partygoer. ("Okay, but this is absolutely the last time," the woman will say to the moose, knocking out the required line of dialogue.)

Actress Kristan King Lewman scrunches her nose and says, "That's creepy." But she's not reconsidering her role in the movie. This is the second time she's worked with Kirk on a 48 Hour film. "You lose a weekend," she says, "but you get a nice chunk of footage. As actors, that's always nice to have."

Her husband, actor Lance Lewman, doesn't object to the strange story line. "It's always like this," says Lewman, who gets a "huge creative rush" working with Kirk on 48 Hour films. "He tells you his idea, and you're saying to yourself, 'Oh this is really weird.' I think the same thing this year. A moose . . . that's nuts. But, knock on wood, this could be really cool."

Doubts about the movie pervade the set. "Are you happy with the script?" Kirk asks Eric, who worries that there's no tension building between the characters. But Kirk rules out major revisions. "This piece feels very melancholy to me, meditative," Kirk says. "I don't know why Bruno is putting his camera down. Maybe he's looking for some kind of truth, for what's real in the world." Besides, this is a fantasy film, with a moose in the lead. "This does not have to make sense," Kirk insists. "That's the rule of the day."

"Action!" Kirk commands. The camera rolls. His lips move in synchronicity with the words of the actors, who are toasting Tim Tate's lovely gay glass sculptures in the back yard of the Palisades home, while Bruno holds his camera and lurks in the background. The mandatory fire extinguisher sits to his right.

"Many have tried to imitate Tim Tate's take on glass sculpting," says the hostess of the party, played by Kristan King Lewman. "But what Tim Tate has . . . is gay glass . . . Gay glass was designed by NASA for the windshield of the space shuttle, but in Tim Tate's hands it becomes art."

Kirk stands just behind the camera operator in the shade of a tree, protecting his fair skin from the warm spring sun. In the distance, there's a powerful rumble. It's getting closer.

The sound man holds a microphone boom above the actors' heads, listening through headphones to what's being captured. "Airplane," says the sound engineer, shaking his head.

"Forget it," Kirk says. He tells the camera operator to stop rolling and the actors to stop performing. Kirk failed to realize that his beautiful shooting location lies just off a flight pattern of Reagan National Airport. Jets roar overhead every few minutes, wrecking take after take.

If glorious weather is good for outdoor filming, it's also good for mowing the lawn, as the next-door neighbor demonstrates. Meanwhile, the neighbors on the other side have kids who decide it's a nice day for screaming. Soon the dad comes out to scream at the kids for screaming, and the sound man again shakes his head. Kirk grows frustrated.

"Damn it," he says. "It's not that we're messing anything up. It's just that under these conditions filming is tough." With 29 hours left, Kirk still hasn't finished the first scene, and progress has ground to a halt.

About 5 a.m. Sunday, Kirk stumbles home from the downtown editing suite where the initial footage has been loaded into the computers. He is thrilled with the quality of the shots, and the acting, he feels, has been superb. He loves the performance of Yvonne Erickson, who plays a know-it-all Hungarian art critic named Herta. "So, dahhhling, vaht doo you know about thees gay glahs?" Herta asks Bruno during the party.

Still, the opening scene of the film outside the Hirshhorn, featuring the sad woman, remains unfilmed. And Eric, with his pen cap gnawed to a nub, has continued to complain that the Hirshhorn scene makes absolutely no sense.

Kirk gets back to his apartment and steps into the shower. Eric's voice is burning in his brain, he later says. He now realizes that Eric has been right all along: The Hirshhorn scene would only convolute an already scrambled plot. Kirk decides right then to create plan B. The most interesting character in the film, he believes, is the moose. Better to focus on him instead of the inexplicably sad woman.

Now Kirk swallows a forkful of scrambled eggs. It's about 9 Sunday morning at a Dupont Circle restaurant, and three actors have arrived. Two of them were expecting to work this morning, but Chris Cline, who plays the moose, got a surprise cast call sometime before sunrise.

"Everything's changed," Kirk tells them. He explains that the scene at the Hirshhorn Museum has been eliminated. "Now the moose is going to deliver Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial."

This is his plan to rescue the film? Chris Cline laughs.

"He's not kidding," says Lance Lewman.

Danielle Campbell looks across the stone steps, her mouth agape. The 16-year-old from Portville, N.Y., is in town for a high school a cappella competition, and she and her family have decided to take in some sights, including the Lincoln Memorial.

"Why the hell is there a moose standing here?" Danielle asks. Carla Campbell, her mother, comes over to investigate.

"I'm wondering," Carla asks, "what's the connection between a moose and the Lincoln Memorial? Is there one?"

At this point, not even Kirk is attempting to answer that kind of question. The moose stands on the spot where King gave his speech. He raises his hands -- hooves -- into to the air, as if orating. A crew member wonders if this isn't "profoundly disrespectful."

The movie "is going to be weird but oddly satisfying," Kirk says. "And I'm okay with that." But he's not okay with the pimply-faced tourists who keep accosting his actor. "Don't touch the moose," Kirk says sharply to a gaggle of middle school students. A girl punches the actor in the back. An unprovoked boy hollers at him, "You suck!"

The scene is both hilarious and appalling, and later Kirk muses that "it only took a thin piece of fabric to completely void [the actor's] humanity." Kirk is prone to this kind of rumination and magnetically drawn toward abstraction. These impulses are perilously complicating his film. Despite all his moose jokes, Kirk doesn't want to make a farce. He's trying to make a film that portrays artists, however wacky, in the process of creating. But the concept is falling flat. And for the first time all weekend, a note of defeat slips into Kirk's voice. "I don't think this is going [to win]. I don't. It's just, it's awfully strange."

It's 6:35 p.m. Sunday. Fifty-five minutes remain, and Kirk nervously watches the editor, Adam Lingo, seam together the digital footage using a bank of computers. Kirk has settled on a title, "Moose Dream." "I'm starting to get a little noodley," he says to Adam. In short, hurry up.

Twenty minutes later, the film is dumped onto a tape. Kirk snatches it and runs, literally. Submitting the film even one second late means disqualification. Brad, the producer, is waiting curbside, the engine of his car running. Kirk hops in, and Brad quickly looks over his left shoulder before swinging an illegal U-turn across 17th Street NW. He doesn't see the oncoming taxi. Kirk does, and braces himself, cursing loudly. The cabbie slams his brakes. Brad flies past the cab, inches from a collision. They race to the theater on Seventh Street NW, where, with 20 minutes to spare, Kirk calmly delivers "Moose Dream" to Mark Ruppert.

"How'd it go?" Ruppert asks.

"Pretty good," answers Kirk.

Soon dozens of filmmakers are dashing down Seventh Street to submit their films on time, including a pair who ride a motorcycle recklessly down the sidewalk and another guy who pedals his bike through the open front door of the theater two minutes before the deadline. Afterward, some linger to celebrate the end of their frantic filmmaking. Joining them is a tall man in a beige suit, whose hands, gripping a bottle of beer, are the size of lion paws.

"I'm Tim Tate," he says.

"Get out of here," says an incredu-lous reporter.

"No, really, I am." He paid $500 at a charity auction for the honor of being this weekend's recurring character.

"And you're a gay glass sculptor?"

"Actually, yes, I am." He sells his work at a gallery in Bethesda. "This is a lot of fun," he says, looking at the filmmakers. "I'm just wondering what's going to happen to me in all these movies."

Kirk takes a seat at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring. The lights go down, and the short movies begin flickering across the screen. Team Diamond, the kids from Oakton High, offers up a Broadway-style musical about three young people who witness the murder of a friend and have to tell the boy's mother that he's dead. A slapstick western solves Washington's wide-open spaces problem by presenting a trio of rowdy cowboys settling in suburbia. A mockumentary chronicles the struggles of a childless B-list movie actress, who tells her agent that she needs money and sperm.

Of the 100 teams that began the film competition, 78 submitted movies on time, 20 turned them in late, and two disappeared, says Ruppert. Three judges have whittled the on-time submissions down to 24 top films being screened tonight. Kirk is delighted -- and surprised -- that "Moose Dream" made the cut. "WE ARE WORTHY!" he writes in an e-mail to his team.

"Moose Dream" begins with a deliberately out-of-focus shot of the moose at the Lincoln Memorial. There's no sound, except an eerie series of high clarinet-like notes. The audience chuckles at the improbability of the scene. Kirk crosses his arms, and his tense face relaxes when an acquaintance in the next row spins around to give him a thumbs-up. When the credits roll, the audience responds with polite, if confused, applause.

The lights come up. Mark Ruppert and Liz Langston announce 24 awards, from Best Original Song to Best Special Effects. Filmmakers waltz to the front of the theater to collect their certificates, but Kirk's name hasn't been called. His pale blue eyes get wider as the award for Best Film is about to be announced. And it goes to . . . "Owensville," a family film about a Mormon missionary who can't ride a bike.

"Oh, my God," Kirk gasps. "We've been blanked."

The theater empties, and the filmmakers congregate in the lobby. Kirk congratulates a few winners, but he looks dejected.

A few days later Kirk announces that he's done with the 48 Hour Film Project. "I've given it everything I can," he says, but he doesn't think he's cut out for making fictional movies. "I have a strong storytelling bent . . . but I just don't sit around conjuring up dramatic circumstance. I feel I'm much better suited for making documentaries."

In fact, he's already found a subject. It's a weirder-than-fiction tale involving looted native Hawaiian artifacts, the mafia and a mysterious death. Kirk says that perhaps he'll pitch the story, with himself as the director, to National Geographic, the Discovery Channel or PBS. With any luck, he'll be spending some time in Hawaii, where not a single moose resides.

Tyler Currie is a contributing writer for the Magazine. To see a clip from "Moose Dream," go to www.washington.com/moosedream.