Series of tight shots of hands fingering fretboards, stick tapping the rim of a snare drum, faces of musicians bowed in concentration as they adjust volume knobs, plug into amplifier jacks, adjust straps, check tuning. A dog wanders across the wire-strewn floor and sniffs at a mirror ball sitting in the corner. One of the guitarists finally nods to the drummer, and the Oklahoma City band known as Fellowship Students kicks into an upbeat, country-rocking ditty that takes an abrupt turn into bright, strutting, '60s-flavored pop-rock as we cut to singer Matthew Alvin Brown, now sitting in a theatrical dressing room, wearing a string tie and donning a ridiculously oversized handlebar moustache.
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BROWN: (Singing) Well, it's a beautiful day for a mouth garden / A beautiful day, grow one and see ...
And so begins "Rainbow Around the Sun,” the solo album by Brown that became a musical feature film shot entirely in Oklahoma — with a little help from a lot of friends.
The film, directed by Kevin Ely and Beau J. Leland, has been officially selected to premiere Saturday at the 2008 South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. It's one of only 113 feature films chosen out of more than 3,000 contenders and will be shown in the festival's "24 Beats per Second” category, which showcases music-related works.
"Yeah, it started off as just my record,” said singer/actor Brown, who is perhaps best known as one-fifth of the Fellowship Students, one of the most admired and respected alternative rock bands on the local music scene since its formation in 2001. But Brown has also made a name for himself in local musical theater.
"I think halfway into recording (the album), I sort of was like, ‘Man, I kind of want to do something visually with it,' and I started talking to these guys, and we were first going to do like a video ... and then somewhere along the way, it was sort of an idea to, ‘Well, let's turn it into a narrative,' and so the story was born, and I think the shooting scheduling started before I had a copy of the album in my hand.”
"These guys” Brown referred to were Ely and Leland, two formally trained Oklahoma filmmakers who were hungry to find a feature-length project of their own, after working so long for others. Ely had met Brown five years earlier while working with him on a music video that was never completed, for another band.
"We just stayed friends, and I was always a fan of the Fellowship Students,” Ely said. "It had actually been a longtime fantasy of mine of doing a rock 'n' roll movie with them as a band, because there were so many great personalities.”
The dream started to come true when Brown, Ely and Leland ended up working together on a handful of short films for Oklahoma City's deadCenter Film Festival in 2006, about the same time Brown was working on his solo album.
"He was like, ‘Let's do something with the album,' and it just kind of grew from there,” Ely said. "I remember the first time we got to hear the recordings, like unmastered, sort of rough-mix recordings ... and one of them was ‘New York City Girls,' which just blew me away. It was unlike anything I'd heard from them before, but I remember Beau looking at me and saying, ‘This is gonna have to be big.'”
Brown said, "I gave Kevin and Beau the album before it was mastered to sort of get them thinking about how we're going to take these 15 songs and turn them into one story, because I had thought of the album as a complete listening experience. I'd sort of pictured it as 15 three-minute plays, sort of revolving around the same subject, which is finding yourself through loss. I guess about two days later, Kevin called and said, ‘I've got a treatment.'”
On two or three sheets of paper, the album that Brown was making with his old Fellowship Students partners was transformed into a rock musical, and Brown would star as Zachary Blasto, a hard-drinking but gifted musician who loses himself in surreal musical fantasies and drinking binges to avoid dealing with his rapidly disintegrating personal life. When he's faced with the loss of someone he loves, Zach is forced to choose between facing his demons or succumbing to the madness of his imaginary world.
To tackle this ambitious project, the three men knew they would need a producer to keep things organized while they created, so they brought on one of Leland's former classmates from the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma City Community College film programs, Kim Haywood, who is chief operations officer of the deadCenter Film Festival.
Together, they formed Team Awesome Productions.
"We created an LLC, we had a business plan, and we went out and found investors, which actually got us through shooting,” Haywood said.
And most of the shooting was completed over a three-week period in late 2006.
"Kevin and I had just come off a production that took over a year and a half,” Leland said. "And it's really easy for a production to lose momentum when it's like, can you shoot a weekend here, a weekend there. ... So we decided we wanted to do it the right way, so we blocked out a chunk of time.”
The filmmakers credited Jill Simpson and Dino Lali of the Oklahoma Film and Music Office for offering valuable advice and guidance during production, recommending excellent locations such as the Masonic Temple of Guthrie, where the film's elaborate dream-sequence music-hall production numbers were staged.
Most of the cast and crew were friends of the foursome from the local arts scene, who would have willingly donated their time to this labor of love. But most everyone got paid, Haywood said.
"Although we had them budgeted in, they worked really hard for not a ton of money,” she said.
Fundraising is ongoing to pay off everyone and all the remaining bills, but Haywood isn't willing to disclose the actual budget.
"It's under 5 million, we'll say that,” she said. "We have been coached very well. You never give away what your budget is. It's always under 5 million.”
"It's way under 5 million,” Leland said.
But to Brown, making a rock musical is priceless.
"I really would like to be able to make a career doing things like this, making rock 'n' roll movies,” he said. "I've always got all these ideas about these non-cheesy rock musicals, because people hear ‘rock musical' these days and they just turn off. And I do, too, because I don't think there are many good ones. But I do like the good ones, the ‘Tommies' and ‘The Wall,' ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch' ... ‘Once.'
"I think I write pretty good songs, and I think I act ... OK,” he said. "So I think if you put those two together, I'm good. But I don't want to be in the national tour of ‘42nd Street,' for God's sakes.”
Next up for Awesome Productions — if "Rainbow” is successful and the company can raise more money — a country musical tentatively titled "The Cowboy and the Bastard.”
"It's more like outlaw country — Willie, Waylon and the boys,” Brown said.
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"Rainbow Around the Sun”
"Rainbow Around the Sun” is set to screen at 10 p.m. Saturday, 8 p.m. Tuesday and 5 p.m. March 15 at the Alamo Drafthouse Lamar 2 in Austin, Texas, during the South by Southwest Film Festival.
The film also will compete at the Florida Film Festival later this month.
For more information, go online to www.rainbowaround thesun.com.
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