IN LATE 2000 we pulled together $65,000 from our corporate documentary salary (almost all of our savings) and launched into the script for Vince Del Rio, our first feature film. We decided on a story about a former standout high school cross-country runner (played by Mark) from the Texas border town of Del Rio. This runner, Vince, cheats in an Olympic Trials qualifying race and lands a spot in the actual Olympic Trials. It was inspired by our deep love of the original Rocky film. About a man who gets a fluke shot at redemption and greatness.
Mark, who was working primarily as a touring musician at the time, came off the road to get into fantastic running shape for the film and, along with me and our other close collaborator and editor, Jay Deuby, wrote the script that I would direct. In a few months, we had a draft that we felt was in good shape and set a date to shoot the film in early summer 2001.
During the Christmas holidays of 2000, we went back to our parents’ home in New Orleans and made a practice short film for fun. It was about a guy (again, Mark) who breaks up with his girlfriend and travels across the country to get her back. It was made for no money with a cast and crew of three people, most of whom had never worked on a movie before. It was improvised, goofy, a little funny, and definitely felt more like “us” than a film about a runner from the Texas border. But we weren’t thinking about that at the time. We put that little short film away without editing it and turned back to prep for Vince Del Rio. Our magnum opus.
The next day we went into a densely wooded levee area near our childhood home and shot some test footage of Mark running around as the character of Vince Del Rio. It was a pure white cloudy winter day, and my camera lost Mark quite a bit in the fog, zooming in and out to find him. I shot it on our parents’ lo-fi one-chip DV camera, which is technical jargon for “a piece of shit.” The shoot felt like a bust.
When we got home and watched the footage, however, there was a certain magic to it. The grain, the fog, the zooms. It felt raw, inspired, and unique. We got so excited we could barely contain ourselves.
“If it looks this good with just the two of us shooting it on a crappy camera, just think how awesome it will be when we shoot this movie with pro cameras and a full professional crew, with that great Texas summer light and heat!”
When summer rolled around, we lucked out by getting a more experienced crew than the meager salaries we could afford actually deserved. These were veteran players who had been on pro film sets, and we were blessed to have them. We hired all the right positions and headed to South Texas for our four-week shoot.
Before we left, we read as many books on filmmaking as we could get our hands on. We wanted to get all the terminology and lingo right. We wanted to make sure we knew all the union rules so we’d appear experienced and in charge. We were obsessed with leading a tightly run, professional shoot despite our relatively small budget and extreme inexperience.
And, as it turned out, we were very good at that aspect of filmmaking. Being good Catholic boys, we listened to our producers and assistant directors and we perfectly followed the schedule and protocol. We never went over our allotted shoot hours. Not once. We came in on time and on budget every day. People were loving how efficient and confident we were. Whenever they asked us “Did you get it?” regarding a particular take, we turned with a confident thumbs-up and moved on so we could “make our day,” as they call it. It was hard work, but we felt great and everyone loved us so much. We never knew making a film could be so much fun and, honestly, so easy.
When the shoot was done, word spread around Austin how nice, awesome, and professional The Boys were. We went into the editing suite immediately and started putting it together. And that is when we started to get a growing feeling of trouble.
The first thing we noticed was that there wasn’t much of that “magic” we were hoping for in the footage. This realization didn’t rock us to our core, but we couldn’t help remembering the feeling we’d had that previous Christmas when we watched the aborted test running footage from the levee in New Orleans. The rawness, the life in it. But we powered ahead and waited to watch a full cut before making any judgments.
And that’s when we started to panic. When we watched the first cut together, we realized that something was deeply wrong with the movie. And the worst part was that we couldn’t define the problem. It was beautifully shot. The production design was elegant. The performances were not stellar, but they were fine. And the story itself was being conveyed in a clear manner. Yet the whole movie was just kind of…blah. Being inexperienced filmmakers, we wondered if we were just sick of our movie and maybe this thing really was great! (NOTE: If you are ever wondering this same thing, chances are your movie isn’t great. Sorry.)
So we decided to hold a test screening for about fifty friends and local filmmakers to see how it played. And that’s when we knew. Even before the film ended. Vince Del Rio was dead. We could feel it in the room. See it on people’s faces. They were all sitting there thinking the same thing: “It’s not bad, it’s just not really anything.” Our friends stayed and gave us their most polite feedback, and we dragged ourselves back to the office to decide what to do.
We could try to salvage the film with rewrites and reshoots. Really dig in and see what we could do to make it better. But how? We’d thought what we were shooting last time was good. Who was to say that we wouldn’t go back and just shoot more bad footage? We felt lost and incapable of understanding why the movie wasn’t working, much less what would actually improve the film. The more we talked about it, the more we realized that Vince Del Rio was endemically flawed to its core and we were in no position to be able to save it. Not wanting to throw good money and effort after bad, we decided to bury the film. We had to call everyone who had worked on it and explain what had happened. We watched our bank accounts drain of all the money we had made on our big corporate documentary six months earlier. We were now twenty-four and twenty-eight. We were pretty much broke. And we were beginning to realize that our dreams were probably not going to happen for us.