When, half jokingly, I refer to him
as “a poet of the Oakland flatlands,” the Alabama born but Bay Area loving
Frazer Bradshaw is slightly startled and little amused. But nobody who sees his
meticulously crafted first feature film, Everything Strange and New (opening
Friday at the Roxie), will doubt for a second that this career cinematographer
has lovingly, tenderly, dare I say hypnotically captured a landscape and a
people, who are at times as much prisoners as residents of that landscape.
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For ninety minutes at a press
screening I found myself just going with the flow, mesmerized by a decidedly
minimalist plot – a barely keeping his head above water carpenter, Wayne,
despairing of being able to talk with wife, Beth, or to exert the least amount
of discipline over his rowdy grade school age boys, starts spending more and
more time drinking beer with his buddies. Suddenly, Wayne has a decidedly
carnal moment with his friend Leo. Spoiler alert: Leo gives Wayne a blowjob –
and then everything snaps back into place and Wayne, Beth and Leo reach another
startling climax (which I won’t spoil) and the movie ends leaving us praying
for the survivors.
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Frazer Bradshaw takes pains to fill
me in on his sexual orientation – more on that in a moment – and admits that
this non-league sanctioned blowjob, the first of two shattering climaxes in his
movie, sort of caught him by surprise, but then circumstances made it seem
almost inevitable: two lonely men: Wayne, slender, somewhat clueless white guy;
Leo, hunky, recently divorced Latino – guys bonding over beer, baseball and a
prickly discussion about whether Wayne wanted to have intercourse with a woman
of their acquaintance.
“I had gotten to some
dialogue where (Leo) says, ‘You should fuck that woman,’ and (Wayne) says,
‘No,’ and then (Leo) says, ‘I got this porno movie where the chick looks just
like her.’
“Suddenly I knew where it was
going for me – a sort of a dangerous, poignant moment. In a way it’s a cheap
shot because every guy can relate to that scene….It could be the difference
between how a gay man and a hard core straight man, who’s never had any sort of
contact with another man, relate. But people engage really hard when that scene
comes on – men do at least – because it twists the knife in a way.”
Bradshaw explains that the blowjob
is intended to catch viewers with their guard down. “When you’re driving along,
you don’t check your watch and say, ‘Gee, I’m going to have a car wreak in five
minutes.’ You don’t see things coming in real life.”
Bradshaw marvels how at Sundance Everything
Strange and New kept being compared to that other straight guys headed over
a carnal moment cliff, Hump Day. “In a way they have absolutely nothing
to do with each other but they have a couple of threads that cross.”
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Frazer Bradshaw
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Bradshaw likes to make a comparison
between the taboo he confronts and another dilemma of the Obama era. “We don’t really
live in a ‘post-racial world’ but we’re moving towards it. I love the idea that
it’s just not an issue. Race just fades in the background. Sexually we’re not
there yet and I like to pretend in my work that we are there and just pay no
mind to the idea that you have to care about sexuality.”
Back now Frazer Bradshaw’s sexual
orientation. “I try not to identify. One of the reasons is – when someone says
bi-sexual, are they speaking of romantic attraction or purely sexual
attraction? That’s complicated. I’ve had sex with men but I don’t feel
attracted to them in general – I don’t see men walking down the street and go,
‘Wow! He’s really hot’ – which I do with women, so does that make me straight?
I’m married and have a kid, so that makes me ‘straight!’ It’s so limited.”
Bradshaw subscribes to the notion
of sexual orientation as a continuum. “I think there’s something in the brain
and it’s got a left and a right, top or bottom, whatever – there are a few
people who are at either end but mostly it’s people in between. Culturally most
people have no idea that they are in between.”
Bradshaw jokes, “I always say, ‘I’m
opposed to gay marriage because I’m married and if gay people are allowed to
get married, then I might be gay, and I’m NOT GAY!”
Bradshaw subscribes as much to
unorthodoxy in his creative process, describing the ‘Eureka moment’ from whence
Everything Strange and New was born.
“I conceive things in a very
stream-of-consciousness way. I had a visual/auditory moment that I started with
which was essentially the opening shot of the film and the music that
accompanies it as a sort of seed moment. I started writing from the sort of
vague emotional content of that moment.”
That moment, repeated later in the
film has Wayne up on a roof looking out over what for many might seem a drab
and dreary landscape, but which for him sings in a special way: it’s home. The
flatlands, his underwater mortgage, stressed out wife – a few of Beth Lisick’s
rants against Jerry McDaniel’s Wayne are photographed with camera gazing on her
back for long stretches of time.
Bradshaw explains that originally
he conceived of his aerial shot filmed from a passing BART train, “but I
couldn’t get access to BART so I moved it to the top of the Children’s Hospital
parking garage, which I didn’t get permission for, either.”
“I wanted Oakland to be very much
Oakland but I wanted to pay tribute to the specificity of the neighborhoods of
Oakland that it was shot in. but I also wanted it to be anywhere in the country
– people who know that landscape (can claim it) but people in the Midwest can
find their own city in it.”
Frazer Bradshaw is a product of Mobile,
Alabama. “I know when I was thirteen that I wanted to get out of Alabama. It’s
a nice place if you never want to talk to anybody about anything interesting.
It’s quite beautiful but there’s a strange void of culture.”
Bradshaw describes struggling with
this culture beginning about the first grade. “I was always an outcast until
eight grade when I changed schools and (discovered) I was good a riding a
skateboard which made me popular. But I got disillusioned with being popular
very quickly so soon I was an outcast again. I started looking for something
more and I ended up at a fine arts high school in Birmingham (the Alabama
School of Fine Arts), which oddly enough Alabama has one. I got an incredibly
good fine arts education -- there were two fine arts teachers who were as good
as any professor I had in college. I was surprisingly disappointed when I got
to college because I thought it was going to be harder and more interesting
than it was in high school and it wasn’t. Actually most of the people in
college weren’t as smart or as interesting as my high school peers were.
“I moved to San Francisco to go to
the Art Institute and still had no interest in filmmaking – I just kind of
stumbled into filmmaking because I had gotten a job as the evening audio/visual
tech and I kind of fell in love with what light looked like when projected. I
started making films not because I had any feel for narrative but because I
just loved the visceral feel of the medium. A lot of my early films could
probably be described as structuralist although I don’t really think of
them that way. It kind of evolved from the emotional effect you can get
from the quality of the medium.
“I then made thirteen sixteen mm films between 1992 and when I graduated. It was a lot. I had gotten this staff job
making twelve dollars an hour! I was making more than twice as much as I had been
making before as a student – so I just continued to live the way I had been and
funneled everything extra into filmmaking.”
Bradshaw notes that his post school
work consists mostly of being a director of photography on a lot of mostly
unreleased films. “It’s the sad story of independent films where I’ve probably
shot two hundred and fifty projects and you probably haven’t heard of most of
them. Most notably I worked on Margaret Brown’s two films,
Be Here to Love me, a film about Townes Van Zandt and
Order of Myths, which is about Mardi Grais in Mobile, Alabama. I’ve shot
eight features and mine has been the only one that has gotten any major
attention.” One of the other films Bradshaw’s worked on is David Lewis’
Redwoods, a gay romance, just now being released on DVD.
One of the intriguing things about
Bradshaw’s Oakland characters is that they resemble some of the people he knew
growing up in Gulf Coast Alabama – people who as kids grew up in a seventies’
America weaned on junk food and a dumbed down education system.
“There’s that sort of myth
that we all grow up, that we suddenly, once we’re grown up, are able to be
somebody completely different that we used to be, take on more responsibility
than we ever could before, but a good metaphor is we think of children eating
junk food and adults eating correctly but the reality is that most adults don’t
eat a healthy diet, they eat more or less like they did when they were
children. They know they’re suppose to eat their vegetables but it doesn’t mean
that they actually do it. These characters are just a new version of the people
they were when they were younger and not a more organized, more responsible
person.”
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Bradshaw freely admits Wayne’s
inadequacies on almost every level of his life. “He’s not quite come to grips
with the responsibility that he signed up for: his mortgage, his marriage – he’s
not good at being a husband, he’s not good at being a parent, he’s not good at
managing his money. He spends too much of his time drinking with his friends
instead of being at home and I kind of wanted to make that present. He’s not
actually home all that much and I think his wife feels kind of betrayed by his
absence.
I confronted Bradshaw with the fact
that I found Wayne, family and friends as coming off as real as some of the
people I’ve been downloading on You Tube amateur boxing videos, where best
friends will wail away at each other for the benefit of a friend’s cell phone
camera, while mom’s best lamp hovers precariously in the background.
“I think it’s authenticity. I
haven’t seen the stuff you’re speaking of but I imagine it rings true because
it is true. I’ve attempted to craft characters that people could experience as
real. They don’t say things that people wouldn’t say – even in the best of
studio films people usually have lines that people don’t really say. I’m very
care that every line of dialogue is something I can imagine saying in
conversation with a friend."