Production Diary

August & September 2005:

In August, I made a road trip to Chicago for the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and while in town, I was able to shoot an interview with Fletcher Paul Hayes. Filmmaker and Movieside Film Festival director, Rusty Nails, worked the camera, while Cashiers Du Cinemart editor, Mike White, assisted. In September, while attending Birmingham, Alabama's Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival, I made another attempt to interview Davey Williams (the fourth attempt in five years), and was delighted to finally meet Davey in person. The interview was well worth the wait, and to make it even more special, Lucia Small (MY FATHER THE GENIUS) lent her very nice camera, and Peter Gilbert (HOOP DREAMS) shot the interview for me. Later that night, Jen and I got to spend more time with Davey at one of Birmingham's more interesting drinking establishments, The Garage. The previous night, we ran into Jim Willett, who we had not seen since interviewing him back in 2001. The three of us ended up at a film festival party on a gutted floor of a highrise. Meanwhile, Ted Bowen recently started an online message board for the doc, which you can find here:
http://com3.runboard.com/braudelunaspataphysicalreviewboard.

October & November 2006:

In October, Jen and I flew back down to Alabama to attend the Kentuck Festival of the Arts, just outside of Tuscaloosa. T.R. Reed and Jeanie Holland were both selling their art there, and to our surprise, so was Fred McGann (who I've been meaning to interview in Richmond for several years now). The festival was wonderful. It takes place outdoors, in a wooded park. We bought some art and saw musical acts like Dan Hicks & Hot Licks, The Pine Hill Haints, The Avett Brothers, and Peter Case. We met T.R.'s sister, Barbara, who I should've asked to interview while I had the chance, but I wasn't thinking. We also caught up with Bill & Leah Alford, Roger & Bonnie Hagerty, and met Johnny Williams. We went to Johnny's house to see the "Raudelunas Museum" and then he took us to a bar in the middle of nowhere, where the specialty is catfish, and we were all the guests of honor. It was a great trip, and gave me a chance to try out my new camera (it's so new, it arrived a couple days before the trip and I spent the flight to Alabama reading the owner's manual). Now I wish I could go back and reshoot everything with the new camera.

Fred McGann clued me in to a November arts festival in Richmond, Virginia that T.R. and Jeanie would be at, and told me about a radio DJ who is a big Fred Lane fan who might interview T.R./Lane. Naturally, I'd want to be there for that, plus I've been meaning to go to Richmond anyway to interview Fred McGann and his wife Cathy, and Charlie Ogden and his wife Helen (Cathy's sister). It turns out the radio DJ is Chris Bopst (of WCLM's The Bopst Show), who I hung out with for about a month during the summer of 1982 in Ocean City, Maryland, as it seemed like we were the only punk rockers either of us could find in that town at the time. Small world. So the weekend before Thanksgiving, with barely any planning (because MicroCineFest had me tied up for the previous several weeks) I drove to Richmond, interviewed Charlie Ogden (Helen wasn't home), interviewed Fred & Cathy McGann, shot some footage of T.R. and Jeanie at the arts show, and had a wonderful dinner at Mom's Siam with T.R., Jeanie, Fred, Cathy, and their friend Cathy. At one point during the dinner, someone asked a question about the Pataphysical Revue, and everyone turned and looked at me as if I were the expert (remember, three of the people at the table were AT the Pataphysical Revue, while I was 9 at the time). I feel so honored to be so welcomed into such a great group of people, and I'm thankful for them giving up their time to speak with me on and off camera, and for sharing their pasts with me.

February 2007:

I have a career working for film festivals, which frequently takes up more than 40 hours a week, especially during the times when I have hundreds of entries that need to be watched and critiqued. That's what has taken up most of what would have been my "free time" for the past couple of months, and will continue to do so for awhile. As I watch entry after entry, I realize that a lot of filmmakers tend to have a new film every year, yet I've been working on the same film since 1999. That's kind of embarrassing, so I'm determined to hunker down and get this thing finished. I made a deal with myself, which I've been living by for the last couple of weeks and will continue to do so. At first, the deal was if I watched two hours of film festival entries, then I would spend one hour working on my doc. I then changed the deal - if I'm home for the evening, regardless of what I've been doing all night, at 10 PM I will work on the film for at least an hour, maybe two, before going to bed. This has worked out nicely. I've been working on transcribing all the interviews in order to make editing easier and more organized. I still have more interviews to shoot, but in the meantime, at least I'm getting SOMETHING done. Transcribing is a time-consuming task. Each interview might take me one or two nights to complete, and those nights are spread out over the nights I'm actually home (the Davey Williams interview took four nights over the course of one week - but it's so worth it!). Revisiting each interview, word-for-word, has triggered all sorts of new questions I'd love to go back and ask each interview subject, but it's also gotten me very excited about editing. I keep hearing lines that make me think, "Oh, that HAS to go in there somewhere!"

July 2007

I have most of the interviews transcribed and I'm trying to schedule some time to shoot the remaining interviews needed. In the meantime, here's some interesting links I've found recently:

• Peter Bilderback has posted an amazing Fred Lane story on the Flowering Toilet blog.
  http://floweringtoilet.blogspot.com/2007/06/rev-fred-lane.html
• There's now a Fred Lane MySpace page. I don't know who's behind it, but as far as I can tell, it's nobody associated with Raudelunas, and it's not me, despite some of my images from this page having been lifted and used. Abdul benCamel is a friend.
  http://www.myspace.com/thereverendfredlane

September & October 2007:

In September, I finally finished transcribing all the interviews I had shot so far. Minutes after backing them all up on a Flash drive, my computer died. Yep, I lost a bunch of important files, but luckily I don’t have to re-transcribe anything. I was able to start reading through all the interviews, making notes that should help during editing. The new, replacement laptop arrived just hours before heading to the airport to start my Fall traveling season. First stop, Birmingham, Alabama for the Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival. I had hoped to meet up with some pertinent people to the film while in town, but I stayed pretty busy at the festival. I knew I’d be back in a couple weeks. Next stop, the BendFilm Festival in Bend, Oregon. The Oregon trip didn’t have much to do with the documentary except that I stressed to get ready for a big project at work before rushing off to the airport, instead of preparing for an upcoming 9-day trip to work on the doc. A day after getting home from Bend, I took off again, this time on wheels and armed with equipment.

DAY ONE: Six hours to Durham, North Carolina, where I interviewed filmmaker Jim Haverkamp, a Fred Lane fan who made a Lane-centric public access TV show back in the late-90s. Another six hours to Atlanta, where I crashed with my friend Blake.

DAYS TWO and THREE: I had earmarked the next two days to go to Miami to interview Kramer, who ran ShimmyDisc Records, the label responsible for most Fred Lane fans hearing Fred Lane in the first place. Some communication mix-ups meant that I didn’t get the interview, and didn’t really accomplish anything on the film for those two days, but I got a lot of driving done and got to see some of Florida. Those two days were essentially a long, out-of-the-way route to Birmingham, Alabama, where I crashed with my friend Kelly.

DAY FOUR: The next day I met up with Lee Shook, who is working on a documentary about Davey Williams. He is a Fred Lane fan who has an interesting perspective on the whole Raudelunas scene, so I interviewed him. Later, he took me to meet & interview Mark Lanter, who played drums in the Raudelunas group. From there, I picked up Jen at the airport, and we went to re-interview Jim Willett. Jim was one of the early interviews in this whole production, but that first shoot was cursed with some very harsh sunlight, so we re-shot.

DAYS FIVE and SIX: Jen and I spent the weekend at the Kentuck Arts Festival outside of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where we ran into T.R. Reed & Jeanie Holland, Tim’s sister Barbara, Craig & Linda Nutt, Bill Alford, Bill’s friend Larry, Lee Shook, and Gary Taylor. I shot lots of footage and interviewed Gary. Craig gave me a disc full of Doug Newby’s photos from the Pataphysical Review and From The One That Cut You live shows, plus a lot of miscellaneous images. Saturday and Sunday nights were spent at Dogwood Lodge Gazebo, where Bill let us scan tons of photos from his collection.

DAY SEVEN: Monday morning I dropped Jen off at the Birmingham airport, and then headed to Eutaw, Alabama, to revisit Johnny Williams. I interviewed Johnny, and spent hours scanning a large chunk of his collection of Raudelunas artifacts, including copies of Fred Lane’s newsletters (Liquid Basketball, Naked Women Overthrow The Government Quarterly, and The Good Deeds of a Five Dollar Bill). From there, I drove through the rains & winds that were destroying Alabama homes (this, after having survived a weekend centered around some football game that kept us from getting a hotel room closer than 35 minutes from Tuscaloosa). I rolled into Atlanta and crashed with my friends, Genevieve & Scott.

DAY EIGHT: All this driving has taken a toll on my van, so I spent the next day in a Honda service center waiting room watching CNN coverage of the fires in California. 7 hours and $1900 later, I was off to shoot the final interview for this trip. The legendary Col. Bruce Hampton is both a Fred Lane fan and a big inspiration to the Raudelunas gang, plus he’s a really nice guy. I interviewed him at a Whole Foods (!) during a really horrific downpour. That night I got to hang out with a bunch of my favorite people at one of my favorite places (Trader Vics!).

DAY NINE: A 12-hour drive home to Baltimore from Atlanta, through some of the worst rain storms I’ve ever driven through.

Nearly 3100 miles; 5 more hours of footage including 7 more interviews shot; approx. 500 images collected. This trip was a success, and especially significant! Up until now, regardless of all the footage and interviews I have shot, I did not yet feel like I had enough to make a film. Now, I can visualize the structure of the film, and with all the images collected on this trip, I’m ready, anxious, and confident enough to start putting this whole thing together (even though I still have some more interviews to shoot). I have some concerns though. Jim Haverkamp had told me that a big part of the fun of being a Fred Lane fan is all the mystery and mis-information surrounding the records, and that he’ll be sort of sad when this documentary answers all the questions. I have to agree with him, but at this point, I have to finish this thing – but I’m going to take that feeling into consideration. I’m also a little concerned about the perhaps unwanted attention this doc might bring T.R. Reed. He’s a busy artist who already graciously gives up enough of his time at arts festivals to talk to Fred Lane fans when he really needs to be selling his art. I worry that kind of attention will get worse, and that fans might buy up his art, not because they like it, but because it was made by the guy who was/is Fred Lane. And I worry about killing that unique camaraderie among Lane fans. Whenever I meet anyone who knows who Fred Lane is, there is a certain connection, like we know we’re in the company of like-minded cultural outcasts who have devoted our lives to seeking the coolest of the obscure, and we appreciate it for similar reasons. Fred Lane feels like our own fun little secret, and I’m about to let that cat out of the box. I have talked to people who consider themselves experts on Daniel Johnston and Jandek just because they’ve watched documentaries about both, though have never bought or listened to records by either. I will hate having had a hand in creating those kind of “fans” for Fred Lane, but I guess that comes with the territory.

December 2007, January & July 2008:

It's been awhile since I've updated this production diary, and a lot of that is, as usual, because my film festival career keeps me too busy for the first half of the year that I can barely think about this project. So let's start with December. I wasn't able to get back down to Birmingham, Alabama to interview Jan Hathaway during her brief annual visit home for the holidays. Lee Shook graciously stepped in and shot a wonderful interview with Jan for me. Jan currently lives in Hawaii, which if I'd known that two years ago when I was in Hawaii, I would've loved to have interviewed her there - what a change in scenery that would have added to the film!

A few weeks later in January, I was out in Park City, Utah serving on the jury at the Slamdance Film Festival, and also working as a projectionist. While there, I got to project the World Premiere of Kim Shively & Chris Bagley's documentary, WESLEY WILLIS'S JOYRIDES. After the screening, I got into a cool-obscure-music conversation with Kim and Chris and some of their friends that were hanging around. One of the group, Skinny Jim Compton from Denver, Colorado, mentioned that he is a huge Fred Lane fanatic, so I arranged to interview him while he was in town. Thanks to Kim and Chris for hooking me up with a camera, a blank tape, and a camera operator (Jon Firestone).

Fast forward several months to July. I took a week off from work, cooped myself up at home, and transcribed all the interviews from last October, December, and January. I'm, once again, caught up until I shoot more interviews.

September & October 2008:

In early September, I attended the Toronto International Film Festival, and while in town, I finally got to meet, in person, Stewart Russell. You'll recall from earlier in this whole story, it was Stewart's website that got the ball rolling on this production in the first place, so it was great to finally meet him and be able to include him in this project.

A couple weeks later, I took another roadtrip north, this time accompanied by Joe Tropea and J.R. Fritsch. Earlier this year, I signed on to help Joe make a documentary about the Catonsville Nine, so we were Boston-bound to interview Noam Chomsky and Howard Zine for that doc. I took the opportunity to multi-task for both docs. First we headed to Albany, NY to interview David Greenberger, of The Duplex Planet and Men & Volts fame, and also the man responsible for the series of Lyrics By Ernest Noyes Brookings compilation albums, the first of which features Fred Lane's "Shoelaces." David graciously allowed us to show up late at his house the night of his anniversary, gave us a great interview, and sent us on our way armed with plenty of reading & listening material for in the van. That night, we drove across Massachusetts, headed towards the Boston area. Here's some advice: if you ever drive from Albany, NY to Boston, MA at night, and you don't want to be hungy during the drive, be sure to eat before you leave or pack plenty of snacks. It's a long drive, and if you can find a restaurant anywhere along the way, chances are it closed before sundown.

The next morning, we interviewed Charles Roberts and Jeffu Warmouth at Jeffu's house in Fitchburg, right outside of Boston. They are both big Fred Lane fans, and by coincidence, I have programmed Jeffu's films at MicroCineFest, and Charles used to give me Final Cut Pro advice on the 2Pop boards many years ago. It was a lively interview. I wish we would've had more time to hang out with these guys, but we had to rush off to interview Noam Chomsky, which was both an honor and a delight. Howard Zinn had to re-schedule for a few weeks later, so we headed home. It was a LONG drive back to Baltimore. It should have only taken about 8 hours, but it took more like 11 hours because of construction on I-95. I got home around 3 AM, and I had to be out of bed at 8 AM because the bed was about to be literally removed from under me by the delivery guys bringing our new bed. Then I had only 2 hours to get ready for my flight to Birmingham, Alabama for my annual trip to the Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival, where I caught up briefly with Jim Reed and Lee Shook ( and I badly sprained my ankle the first night I was there).

In October, I had hoped to return to the Kentuck Arts Festival, but scheduling and finances killed that hope. Instead, I did whatever work I could do on the film from home. I finished transcribing all of the recent interviews. I logged all the recent footage and captured it all to harddrive. Once again, I'm caught up until I shoot more interviews. In the meantime, I'm doing some editing, but I don't want to fully dive into the editing until I'm able to give it my full attention.

Last year I bought a new external harddrive to keep this whole project on. It turns out, I should have ordered a bigger harddrive. 500 gigs isn't enough. Now I have a terabyte to work with, which should be plenty of memory, though it's not as portable as I would prefer.

July 2009:

You know how I'm always complaining about my job keeping me too busy to work on this film? Well guess what? I quit my job! I've given up being a full-time, year-round film festival employee and am now a freelancer, which means I can make my own schedule (and worry about money more than I've had to in years). Since July 1, I've been devoting most of my time to editing this film, and have been able to really devote my attention to it in ways I've wanted to for years. I can't tell you how cool it is to finally, after all these years, be able to watch parts of this film come together. I'm currently trying to have a concise 10-minute trailer/work-in-progress ready by the end of the month so that I can include it with a grant application. I'm going to really need that grant money because this film is going to require a ton of color correction and sound mixing, and I think it'd be better to call in some pros to handle those tasks rather than try to handle it myself.

In sad news, this past December 16, Doug Newby passed away from kidney failure after a sudden illness. J.R. Fritsch and I had the pleasure of interviewing Doug and his wife Candy at their home in Alabama back in June of 2005. I can honestly say that had Doug not taken so many great photos of Fred Lane live on stage back in the 70s, this documentary would not look the same. I wish he could've seen the finished work.

January 2011:

Happy New Year! It's been a year and a half since my last post, and I have a few things to tell you about. At the time of that last post, I was working on a 10-minute trailer to submit with a grant application. I got the grant! Thank you, Maryland State Arts Council! It wasn't a super HUGE grant, but it covered my health insurance bill for two months, so I'm not complaining. Meanwhile, I have shown the trailer publicly several times: last May at a works-in-progress screening during the Maryland Film Festival; to film students at University of Minnesota Moorhead last February during my stint as a visiting artist; and during my featured participation in WYPR's Maryland Morning Screen Test this past September. I have been getting some great responses from it. Before anyone asks me if they can see the trailer online, the answer is no. I only made it for fundraising, and do NOT want to put it online because it contains too many spoilers. It really is the whole film condensed to just ten minutes. When I get a chance, I will cut together a version with the spoilers removed, running a lot shorter, and THAT will get posted online.

In other news, what I've been referring to as "the as-yet-untitled Fred Lane documentary" finally has a title. I had been considering a particular title for awhile, and then I ran my idea by the good Reverend himself, and he approved of it. The name of the documentary is (drum roll, dramatic pause), ICEPICK TO THE MOON. All you hardcore Lane fans out there should get the reference. Everyone else, I hope, will just think it sounds interesting enough to make you want to watch the movie.

I'm very sad to report that Dick Foote has left the building. We lost Roger Hagerty to a heart attack on November 8, 2010, the day after his 59th birthday. Even though the extent of my relationship with Roger consisted of a few phone calls, countless emails, a day at his home, a couple weekends at Kentuck, and some online social network friendships, the warmth I felt from him made him seem like a close friend for life. Based on the many comments posted online by his many friends since his passing, I must be correct in thinking of Roger as one of the nicest, friendliest, funniest, helpful people you could meet. My condolences to Roger's wife, Bonnie, son Galen, and to the whole Raudelunas family who, I'm sure, are missing a great man.

December 2010 marked the release of Oxford American Magazine's Southern Music Issue. In it, Lee Shook contributes an informative article about Rev. Fred Lane. The article includes some rare photos, and HEY, I got a "from the collection of Skizz Cyzyk" photo credit for supplying them (even though most of my "collection" came from Craig Nutt, Doug Newby, and Bill Alford). The magazine comes with a 27 song compilation CD, which includes Fred Lane's Rubber Room.

There's now a "Fred Lane Fans" page on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9073025545).

Last but not least, I suppose I should update my answer to that nagging question of why it is taking me so long to make this documentary? The answer is usually the same: work gets in the way. Yes, I left my film festival programming job a year and a half ago, with hopes of being able to devote more time to my own filmmaking, and that is exactly what happened. Filmmaking has become my work. In 2009, I was hired to make a documentary about the band, Alice Donut, and how they have managed to navigate the world of underground rock for a quarter century. The film is called FREAKS IN LOVE, and it should start making the festival rounds sometime this year. For more info, go to www.freaksinlove.com. Meanwhile, as I reported perviously, in 2007 I started helping my buddy and frequent bandmate, Joe Tropea, make a documentary about antiwar activists who raided draft boards in the late 60s. At some point during the production, I signed on as a co-director, as well as DP and editor. That project secured some funding, and as such, is now paying me a small salary to get the whole film edited by this coming fall. The film is called HIT & STAY, and you can read more about it here: www.hitandstay.com. I also completed a mostly-animated music video for The Jennifers, which you can watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwLtnJhLMCQ

Hopefully by this time next year, I will be as engrossed in editing ICEPICK TO THE MOON, as I am with HIT & STAY right now, and was with FREAKS IN LOVE this time last year.

-Skizz Cyzyk

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