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This Summer The DoormanWill Let Some Light Into Celebreality By Sara Schieron Due out in late summer, comic-reality film The Doorman pits celebrity doorman Trevor W. against a New York nightlife full of opportunistic and worshipful social climbers. As much a personality exposé as a critique on the cult of personality, Doorman is cleverly self-aware. Debut director Wayne Price is an actor in the "cast," persuading people like the film's producer, Brian Devine, to give him access to shoot, or chasing a flighty Trevor around for more incisive angles. Co-written by Price and star Lucas Akoskin, The Doorman takes from trends in reality shows like The Simple Life and The Osbournes, and if you're thinking, "Haven't I seen that SARA SCHIERON Tell me about the origins of the story. WAYNE PRICE Lucas and I were living together in Brooklyn. I was trying to be a director and he was trying to be an actor - the best we could - and we were writing a very serious drama based in Argentina, which is where Lucas is from. It was frustrating because it was taking us a long time to get to a level of script that we liked and we wanted to make a fun and short film we could get into festivals and at least get our work out there. LUCAS AKOSKIN Wayne and I wrote the script together, but 90 percent of it was improv. So we wrote the scenes and what was going to happen but we didn't have any dialogue. We wanted as much natural reaction as possible. The people in the film are all real people who know me and know I'm an actor. SARA SCHIERON That's important because it distinguishes you from other Candid Camera- or Borat-like reality models. Additionally, you had incredible access. WAYNE PRICE In real life Lucas is a party promoter. LUCAS AKOSKIN And the doorman is a common character in big cities. SARA SCHIERON Like an archetype? LUCAS AKOSKIN Yeah. He's the god at the door that decides your luck for the night. SARA SCHIERON I heard something about a viral marketing campaign. Wayne, you said, "Trevor is a real character and Lucas occasionally plays him." LUCAS AKOSKIN I don't know what you can write about that ... but about Borat, we shot this film before Borat and that film was huge but there are so many kinds of mockumentaries. Our film has similarities, which helped us, and we'll admit that. SARA SCHIERON It made the genre feel a little more familiar to a wider audience so Doorman, like many others, will be compared to it. Sounds like a blessing and a curse. Trevor is an invented character improving with the real world. WAYNE PRICE In some possibly subconscious ways Ali G was an inspiration for this film but the more overt inspiration was a Belgian film called Man Bites Dog. In '93 or '94, a bunch of Belgian film students shot a fake documentary about a film crew following around a charismatic serial killer. It blew me away. These filmmakers created a reality that didn't exist that still had a connection to some reality. Our doorman is like the serial killer in that he has this exotic existence most people can fantasize being. Though it wasn't my inspiration, Borat has become a place for people to comprehend the style of film. BRIAN DEVINE Borat, Jackass, Reno 911, maybe five or six movies have been made now that are proof Hollywood is just catching up to the culture, as opposed to being at the tip of the spear, leading the culture. YouTube, MySpace, reality TV, VH1, they've all created this new vernacular. As a result, people became accepting of lower resolution stuff with rougher quality, such that they were willing to seek out this stuff that seemed more genuine or authentic. Yet, there are so few films that have been able to incorporate that language, so there's little frame of reference. LUCAS AKOSKIN Still, our buzz has been really incredible. BRIAN DEVINE This film started as a seven-page treatment. The seven-minute film became a 35-minute film and finally grew to roughly 55 minutes. But a 55-minute film is neither fish nor fowl. We submitted it to Sundance the year I had another film (Flannel Pajamas) in the festival and they rejected it. So we said, "Fuck 'em. We're gonna go to Sundance, and we're gonna make posters and play it totally straight like we're in the festival." Lucas and Wayne pushed their way into the Getty Images tent and Moviefone news, and everybody started treating Trevor not only like he was a real movie star, but like he had a film at Sundance and it turned into all this meta-weirdness. The film starts with him, he has a fall from grace and he becomes a human being. There's this beautiful little note at PETCO where he's playing with the animals and he seems grounded, and at the end, he's come away from being this stuck up, celebrity tard. And then what would make this much more germane to today's celebrity culture - where people are famous for being famous and what used to be a social embarrassment was now the dead center of the culture - is that in fact, this movie itself brings Trevor more celebrity, making him more insufferable than ever. The only thing more insufferable than a doorman is the stars he's protecting. As a movie star Trevor's, if anything, worse than he was when he began. SARA SCHIERON But you guys are in the movie too so you're implicated in the critique. BRIAN DEVINE There were a lot of arguments about whether we should be in it but we decided there was nothing wrong with us helping out our own careers. It was against our wills - WAYNE PRICE It was against your will yet you were really good actors... BRIAN DEVINE When it came down to playing ourselves we were awesome. |
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