Screening Room: Jay Bauman

In Screening Room, Decider invites a Milwaukee filmmaker to show us their movies and share stories about how they were made. This week features Jay Bauman, director of the no-budget horror feature The Recovered and member of Team Foxtrot, which won the Audience Award in Milwaukee at this year's 48 Hour Film Project for short "Das Foot."

Jay Bauman: I'd like to say The Recovered is the most successful project I've done as far as exposure goes, but honestly I have no idea at this point. It's been playing on about a dozen cable providers throughout the U.S. as a Video-On-Demand option for the last three months, which has been pretty exciting because it's available to something like six million people. But because it's such a tiny film with virtually no marketing behind it, it could have been ordered by only five people for all we know.
Decider: What was it like working with B-movie star Tina Krause?
JB: Having Tina in the movie was beneficial from a shooting aspect. We were on a ridiculously tight shooting schedule and Tina's worked on over 100 low budget pictures so she knows exactly what needs to be done. She nailed every scene in one or two takes, could cry on command, never complained about 13 hour shooting days, and even helped out with make-up effects when needed. She's the perfect low budget actress. Ninety-nine percent of the reason the movie works at all is because of her performance. We've gotten a lot of really great reviews from horror websites and the majority of them are totally focused on Tina.  There would be no movie without her. Also, she's a lunatic.

JB: Das Foot had the potential to be a total disaster because there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen during the brainstorming session. For a 48 Hour Film Project, you have two days to write, shoot, and edit a project. You draw your genre out of a hat and we got horror. The other guidelines for the competition were so vague that it was difficult to narrow down what exactly we should do. My initial goal was to make something that would just irritate and confuse everyone in the theater. I didn't care about following the rules; I just wanted to fuck with people. The movie ended up being a hybrid of everyone's ideas, which could have been a mess, but somehow it seemed to work. It barely qualifies as a horror film, but the theater went nuts for it. I've never had something publicly screened get that great of a reaction. My intentions to just irritate the audience were undermined, but hearing all that laughter made it worth it.

JB: When I do something a little more experimental it seems to baffle everyone, which is fine with me since I think I like confusion almost as much as laughter. It's fun to elicit reactions from people that movies don't normally elicit. I was taking a shower one morning and looked down at my little rubber duck and the image for Rotten Honeymoon just popped into my head, so I immediately got out of the shower, shot the live action footage, and then spent a couple more hours animating, mixing the sound, and editing. It was like instant filmmaking. The dialogue is taken from a random B-movie that nobody's seen called Lunatics: A Love Story starring Ted Raimi. This played at the Rock River Film Festivala few years ago and got a very loud "WHAT?!" from someone in the audience, so that was fun.

JB: We always describe The Grabowskis as "the internet's least-loved sitcom." It's sorta the anti-Chad Vader. I hate most internet comedy, and Chad Vader is the epitome of why. The Grabowskis started as a parody of a web series, mainly about how people have no attention spans thanks to viral videos. The first few episodes were all under a minute in length and contained no jokes—the episodes themselves were the joke. But as it went on, [Grabowskis co-creator and star] Mike Stoklasa and I got a little more elaborate with it. We had our 15 minutes of fame when an episode ended up as a featured video on MySpace and we got something like 150,000 views in one day. There were hundreds of really nasty comments about it because we set a plastic doll on fire and that apparently offends people. It's hard to take offense to such nasty comments though when the people leaving them have the grammar skills of a third grader. I like constructive criticism and I don't even take personal offense to someone flat-out hating something I've done. One time at a film festival in South Dakota, I had a gentleman stand up in front of the theater after a movie I made played and tell the entire theater that I was a nihilist and my movie made him feel bad for all of society. All of society! I just went up and gave him a hug. But as long as there's a point of view, I'm cool with it. What really irks me is illiterate 12-year-olds leaving comments that are barely comprehensible. "Gaaaaaay" is not a constructive comment or useful to me in any way.