Poster created by Luke Matjas

Maddoggin’ is a short film about two teens in East L.A. being pressured to join the local gang.  The choices they make over a single day will alter their lives forever.

WINNER:  Special Jury Prize San Luis Obispo International Film Festival

WINNER:  Best Narrative Short, San Diego Latino Film Festival

Cast & Crew list on IMDB

Maddoggin’ Facebook page

Director’s Note:

If you believe, as I do, that all people desire emotional and financial security, then why is it in a kidʼs emotional and/or financial self-interest to join a gang?  Maddogginʼ started with that simple question.  What followed was eighteen months of work.

“It Takes a Village”

I spent two months researching everything from memoirs of former gang members to massive sociological studies on street gangs.  Then I attempted to write a compelling story incorporating all that I had learned.  Following multiple drafts, with essential input from my closest collaborators, I finally felt it was ready to show to Eddie Ruiz.  Eddie is not only a gifted, working actor, but a natural born producer who was raised in Boyle Heights, the neighborhood in which the script is based.  Thankfully, Eddie loved the script, contributed insightful notes, and signed on to shepherd Maddogginʼ from script to screen.  From that first meeting, Eddie and I both shared a common vision:  We would not tell the communityʼs story for them, but enlist the entire community to tell their own story.

The first person Eddie contacted was his former high school classmate, Dario Debora, who uses music to mentor at-risk youth in East L.A.  In turn, Dario connected us with his brother Fabian, one of the most prominent Latino artists in Los Angeles and a former gang member.  Fabian also counsels at-risk youth at Homeboy Industries, a non-profit organization that provides jobs, training, and social services to former gang members.  When Fabian reviewed the script with me at the Homegirl Café, he remarked, “This is my story.”

Having Fabian on our team was more than I could have hoped.  Not only is he responsible for all of the incredible artwork in the film, including a huge two hundred square foot mural he created specifically for the project, he also gave us vital script notes and introduced us to many of the kids in the film.  Dario, besides acting as Music Supervisor, overseeing a brilliant hip-hop soundtrack consisting entirely of local up and coming artists from East L.A., also introduced us to the multi-talented hip-hop artist, Leonard “Y.O.” Davenport.

Leonard, as he puts it, is a “hood rat” raised in the projects between the L.A. River and the 101 freeway.  His cousin, musical collaborator, and best friend was shot and killed at the age of eighteen by a rival gang member.  When Eddie and I met Leonard, we both had the same thought, could he read for one of our two lead roles?  There was only one catch:  Leonard had never acted before, not even in a school play.  With the help of our intrepid casting director, Paige Orr, we prepped Leonard for a few days before giving him an official audition.  During his read, I turned on my camera and put it in his face to see if he could handle the pressure, and thatʼs when Leonardʼs performance came alive.  All Leonard needed was a camera on him.

Following some hard math, Eddie and I realized that including pre-production, production, and post, the absolute cheapest we could produce the film for would be $25,000 – approximately one thousand dollars per minute of screen time.  As a side note, Eddie brought the film in $1500 under budget. Thankfully, the Latino Film Fund accepted our application for fiscal sponsorship, which allowed us to raise funds as a non-profit project.  Their support and mentorship gave instant credibility to our nascent film and opened up a lot of doors for us.  Unfortunately, Eddie and I were so consumed with pre-production we were unable to spend much time raising funds.  Tim Hart and Janice and Ronald Fox gave us generous contributions.  I supplemented the rest of the budget from my savings.

The casting process continued.  We combined non-traditional methods, such as visiting Drama departments at local high schools and community centers with the established method of sending out “Breakdowns” and auditioning actors.  Paige did a phenomenal job finding our other lead actor, L.A. native David Castaneda.  Once we saw David read for the role of Pedro, no other actor had a chance.  He is one of the most talented, hardest working, young actors I have ever met.

Justin Huen was another great discovery by Paige.  Justin, also born and raised on the eastside, has played lead roles at most of the major theatres in Los Angeles.  Justinʼs audition for the role of the gang leader, AK, was one of the ten best auditions I have ever seen for any project.  I have seen tens of thousands of auditions.

Paige also introduced us to two up and coming actresses:  Victoria Moroles and Damaris Diaz.  Victoria was only thirteen when we filmed, but performed like a pro twice her age.  Since working on Maddogginʼ as her first professional job, Damaris has already booked a FOX TV pilot, Family Album, as a series regular.  Another great actress in the cast, Kikey Castillo, is the child of migrant farm workers who grew up picking vegetables in the fields, before becoming the first in her family to graduate from college.   Stewart Flores, who lived on the streets prior to being adopted by a family at the age of sixteen, gave us a perfect performance.  He is also training for the Olympic trials in boxing.

Due to their generosity and passion for the project, we were able to add some of the most successful working actors in L.A. in minor roles that would have usually been far too insignificant for their talents:  Ingrid Oliu (Stand and Deliver), Alejandro Patino (Iron Man 2), Lex Medlin (Southland), Rawle Lewis (Cool Runnings), Nicole Ghastin (Coyote Ugly), and John Serge (Veronica Mars). The rest of the cast is made up almost entirely of former gang members and at-risk youth from East L.A.  I loved working with every single one of them.  They were all unfailingly polite and hard working.  I would unequivocally recommend them for any future job in or out of the film industry.

I could write dozens of paragraphs about the production team, designers, and crew, but in a feeble attempt at brevity, I will just say that they are people at the top of their profession, who volunteered to work for a fraction of their usual rates, on all-night shoots and twelve-hour location days in the L.A. heat.  In truth, our skeleton crew, that often numbered no more than six, was doing the work of scores of crew on a regular film shoot.  Check out their credits on I.M.D.B. you will see how blessed we were to have them.

The entire film was shot on the streets of East L.A. and Boyle Heights and at the homes of Eddieʼs friends.  The only exception was Scott Robinson Honda in Torrance.   Eddie cold-called all the Honda dealerships in L.A. and Eric Bolstad, the General Manager, gave us carte-blanch to shoot in their dealership once he learned we were telling a story about at-risk youth.  His generosity added thousands of dollars of production value and he asked us for nothing in return.  So, if youʼre in the market for a Honda…

As the shoot approached, we rehearsed the lead actors for many weeks in rooms donated to us by the Boyle Heights Tech Center.  Joe and Ozzie, who run the Tech Center, have created a place where kids are safe from life on the streets.  Built on the site of a former crack house, it is an alternative school for at-risk youth and community center.  I encourage you to visit the Tech Center and support the wonderful work theyʼre doing.

We shot over eight days in June of 2010.  Eddieʼs family cooked all the meals and set up and struck base camp every day and night.  Fabian brought a van full of kids from Homeboy Industries to play background artists and acted as a tattooed “den mother” to them on set.  Our friends and family pitched in with props, allowed dozens of strangers into their homes through the night, lent us vehicles, provided transportation, played extras at four in the morning, and much, much more.  I will always be grateful for the tremendous effort our entire team put into creating Maddogginʼ.

Post Script

Six weeks after filming I received a text from Fabian that one of our kids in the film, Irvin Panameno, had been shot and killed.  He was nineteen years old.  Irvin was walking to the bus at 7:30AM on his way to work at Homeboy Industries when he was shot in the face, neck, and back.  The LA Times spelled his name wrong and included the following information, “Investigators believe the shooting was gang related”.

All of us are guilty of glossing over similar stories while reading the paper.  If we are honest with ourselves, we may have even thought deep down, that the kid probably had it coming.  My hope is that after seeing this film, you will never pass by a similar story in the paper again without remembering that that kid had hopes and dreams and a family.  I also hope that you will no longer see these kids as a frightening “other”, but recognize that if you were in their shoes, you would very likely make some of the same mistakes.  Perhaps, you might even be motivated to help create economic opportunities for at-risk youth.  In the words of Father Greg Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries, “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.”

Maddoggin’ is a coming of age story about two boys living on the streets of East L.A.  Pedro is a charismatic, natural born salesman.  His best friend, Ernesto, is a gifted street artist.  When the local gang leader, A.K., asks them to join his “family”, the boys must choose between a life of violence inside the gang, or a life of poverty outside of it.  The choices they make over a single day will alter their lives forever.

We wanted a title sequence to establish the world of the film, the relationship between the two boys, and the artistic gifts of Ernesto.  Therefore, we decided to use Ernesto’s sketches to capture the boys’ life in the streets along with their dreams for the future.  To bring this idea to fruition, we were incredibly lucky to to have the prominent Mexican-American artist Fabian Debora, a native of Boyle Heights, whose work has been shown in major art galleries both nationally and internationally, collaborating with Smith+Lee Design, the successful duo behind the title sequences to “Thank You For Smoking”, “Juno”, and “Cinema Verite”, among many others.   The idea was for Fabian to make the sketches believable as the work of a talented teen sketching in his notebook and for Smith+Lee to assemble them into a story within the story.

The final sketch in the sequence would also be the basis of a huge mural that Ernesto paints in the second act of the film.  In order for Fabian to create the sketch and the mural, he needed to know what our actors looked like and the location at which we were shooting.

Three weeks before principal photography was to begin, we produced a still photo shoot on location with Pedro (David Castaneda) and the neighborhood kids (Producer Eddie Ruiz’s cousins).  Out of a few hundred images from the shoot, the photo above was chosen to be the basis of the sketch/mural by combining it with the background below.

Below is the sketch Fabian created combining the two pictures.

Above is the the 200 square foot mural Fabian painted based on the sketch.  Due to production time constraints, he painted it in six hours.

The photograph on the left captures Fabian creating the actual test sketches of the mural and opening credits in his studio.  Once the sketches were finalized, he re-drew them in the spiral notebook.

Smith+Lee made the decision to shoot the sketchbook on a motion control rig to give it an analogue feel.  It makes the camera moves feel much more organic than if they had scanned the sketches into a computer and then added the moves digitally in post with software like Adobe After Effects.  We were very lucky that Smith+Lee were already renting an elaborate motion control rig for a feature film title sequence they were producing, so we were able to piggy-back on their rental.  The motion control rig functioned as a remote control “lazy susan” that traveled on a long rail.  We placed the sketchbook on the rotating disc of the “lazy susan” and shot.  Every once in a while Gareth of Smith+Lee would call for a page flip.

Fabian’s brother, Dario Debora, who works as a music producer in East L.A., supervised the music in our film and introduced us to a wide array of brilliant East L.A. hip-hop artists and their work.  Boyle Heights native Dario “King Darius” Lomeli’s beautiful hip-hop song ,”Parallel Lines”, underscores the imagery of the title sequence.

]]> http://www.trebuchetfilms.com/2011/08/07/maddoggin-mural-title-sequence/feed/ 0 http://www.trebuchetfilms.com/2009/10/16/russel-fish-the-sausage-and-eggs-incident/ http://www.trebuchetfilms.com/2009/10/16/russel-fish-the-sausage-and-eggs-incident/#comments Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:39:47 +0000 admin http://www.trebuchetfilms.com/?p=45 A quirky comedy starring Chris Colfer (”Glee”) as Russel Fish, an awkward teen who discovers he must pass the Presidential Physical Fitness Test or fail gym class and lose his admission to Harvard.  With the help of his best friend Jorge, an aspiring Latino ninja, he must overcome an evil gym teacher and sociopathic bully to achieve his goals.

DOWNLOAD the film at rfthemovie.com

WINNER:  Best Comedy Short – AOF International Film Festival

NOMINATED:  Best Director (Terence Heuston) & Best Supporting Actor (Eddie Ruiz) – AOF International Film Festival

OFFICIAL SELECTION:  Palm Springs International Shortfest, Austin Film Festival, Detroit/Windsor International Film Festival, AOF International Film Festival, New Filmmakers Los Angeles, NYC Downtown Shorts Film Festival, and Los Angeles Comedy Festival

Credits

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