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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, May 15th, 2006 - Comments Off on Smith Returns to NYC with Buzz-Packing 'Bugcrush'
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Smith Returns to NYC with Buzz-Packing 'Bugcrush'

The first time I spoke with Carter Smith, he was stuck in a Dallas airport terminal waiting for a connecting flight to Salt Lake City. His film Bugcrush had been selected for the Sundance Film Festival’s shorts programs, and Smith would be spending the week before the festival at the Institute’s screenwriting lab. As you might remember, he had little idea what to expect.

Mystery man Carter Smith joins Through the Ice director Jennie Livingston for a discussion following Sunday’s Sundance shorts program at BAM (Photo: STV)
One Grand Jury Prize and a Cannes Directors Fortnight berth later, the picture is a bit clearer.
“What’s so great about where I am now is that I don’t feel any pressure at all to come out of Cannes,” Smith told me late last week as he prepared for Bugcrush‘s weekend screenings at BAM. “It’s too long to be in competition, so there’s no ‘will-it-or-won’t-it-win-anything.’ It’s just purely for the international audience to see it. But I kind of feel like I’m just going to enjoy myself and have a great time at the festival and meet people. Winning a prize at Sundance is such an amazing thing that if nothing else happened with this film ever, I’d be completely satisfied. You know? It’s kind of nice to be at this place now where whatever happens, happens. If people like the film, great. I’m super-excited to get it out there and to get people seeing it.”
Getting into Cannes was a relatively straightforward matter of the festival’s programmers catching Bugcrush at Sundance and inviting Smith to join the Directors Fortnight series. Meanwhile, back in Brooklyn, anchoring the Sundance Institute at BAM shorts program as it does, Bugcrush enjoys the twin distinctions of great company (Smith shared the jury prize with Adam Parrish King’s animated drama The Wraith of Cobble Hill) and haunting longevity; Smith’s quasi-courtship thriller about two high school loners in Maine sent the Brooklyn crowd home Sunday with a series of long, loud shudders. The filmmaker joined colleagues Jennie Livingston (Through the Ice), Bálint Kenyeres (Before Dawn) and Rob VanAlkamade (Preacher with an Unknown God) for a Q&A afterward, portions of which include spoilers I would be a fool to report here.
At any rate, Smith expressed his gratitiude to be back with a hometown crowd as Bugcrush enjoyed its New York premiere. “Can I just say how nice it was to have an audience that wasn’t, like, sending text messages and hundreds of people getting up and coming back?,” he said during the discussion. “It was actually really great to be with an audience that sat down and watched the films.”
Still, Smith obviously cherished the Park City experience, starting with the labs. “It was sort of like this perfect situation,” he said. “I went to the screenwriters lab first, which is like this super-supportive, warm-and-fuzzy artistic and creative environment where you’re surrounded by other filmmakers. It’s like this kind of great little family of 12 filmmakers and writers that you start out with, and a lot of them actually stayed on during the festival. So rathert than just landing and being completely lost when the festival started, I sort of had this immediate family of people who I just spent the entire week with. It was great in that sense. That was really going to be pretty overwhelming otherwise–it was overwhelming even with that, but I was really happy that I had a bunch of friends there. They were new frineds, and they were all filmmakers and they were all excited.”
Warm and fuzzy, indeed, but Bugcrush is a pleasing enough antidote if you think you are up to it. BAM’s Sundance shorts series unspools one final time Tuesday night at 9:30, and I will say it again: There is really not a stinker in the bunch. But if, for whatever lame reason, you miss it in Brooklyn, Bugcrush will be back in town June 1-11 as part of NewFest’s own gay-and-lesbian shorts programs. In the meantime, best of luck to Smith as he hits Cannes; if he keeps up this kind of work, it probably will not be the last time on the Croisette.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

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~ David Simon