Shane!

Two years ago, Shane Carruth's film, Primer was making the rounds of indie theaters. It came for one week at the E Street Landmark. There are two Landmark theaters in the DC area, one on E Street in Washington, DC, the other in Bethesda.

I find it easier to get to the one in Bethesda, though I have to drive there. Well, it's because I have to drive there that it's convenient. Some people hate to drive, and find opportunities to take public transportation much more palatable. I hate the extra time it takes. Every time I take the DC Metro, I wonder why they didn't design express trains that would skip ever ten stops. You would then get off and take another train that would go, at most, 5 stops away.

It's too bad, really, that the E Street Landmark almost always has the better films. Wouldn't it make more sense for both theaters to carry the same films, staggered by a week or so? If you missed it at one theater, you could get it at the other? But, no, that would be too convenient.

The Landmark Theaters, as I understand it, are the brainchild of Mark Cuban. If you follow any NBA basketball, you know he's the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and is himself, something of a maverick owner, wealthy from a company that he sold to Yahoo.

What is Primer? The ads don't give you much of a clue as to what the film is about, and so by telling you, I'm spoiling it.

Basically, Primer is about time travel. Here's the basic idea. You turn on the machine with a timer set for, say, five minutes, and leave. The machine warms up and stays humming for five hours. After the five hours, you enter into this machine. When you're done, you're at the other end.

To illustrate. Suppose you turn on the machine at noon. You leave and come back at 5 PM. You get in the machine. You get out at noon. Now, when you get out, there's really two of you. The one that started the machine at noon, and the one that got out at noon, after getting in the machine at 5.

Of course, what's weird is that between noon and 5 PM, there's someone in that machine, going back in time.

The film gets even more confusing, because you can bring in another time machine with you at 5 PM, take at out at noon, and fire it up elsewhere. That way, you can always get back to noon over and over, while more and more copies of you occur.

That sounds simple enough, but if you watch the film, you'd be hard-pressed to follow all of that without multiple viewings.

The story follows two inventors, Abe and Aaron, who work at a startup company by day, and work on this mystery project at night. They're trying to build some new tool, and stumble upon the creation of a time machine. They wonder what to do about it.

Eventually, there's a shooting where someone gets hurt, and they think they can travel in time to prevent it from happening. There's also a question as to whether the time travel is causing them permanent damage, and what this power does to their friendship.

Made on a shoestring budget of $7000, Shane Carruth enlisted the help of his family and friends. He hired only one real actor, the guy who played Abe, and cast himself as Aaron, since he couldn't find another actor to play the role. He figured that's one less person he'd have to worry about showing up.

Shane has an uncanny resemblance to Topher Grace, the lead guy (well, assuming you don't think Ashton Kutcher is the lead guy) in That 70's Show. Shane pretty much did everything. Acted, wrote music. He did have a director of photography, who doubled as an actor. He had his sister play his wife. I believe the brother of the D.P. played a role as well. His own brother dubbed the voice of another actor, when that actor was out of town and unavailable.

Carruth said he barely had any more footage than what he took. Despite the small amount of money used to make the film, Carruth decided to make the movie using film, instead of digital video. He wanted it to look as good as possible, but using film meant that he could afford, at most, one take excepted in limited circumstances.

To offset this huge problem, he had the cast rehearse and rehearse. The film is primarily two actors, with everyone else having minor roles.

Because Shane was so small-time, I could actually email him and get a response. Now, I know how this typically works. You might get one or two email exchanges going, but it's not going to last long if they think you're boring. Even if there aren't many people taking to you, ten or twenty people ends up being more than most people would care to talk to.

I asked Shane about movie making, and he said that he wished he had taken some courses. He had been an engineer, and hated it. Then, he read up a lot on filmmaking. He also received a lot of bad advice, mainly passed on from people who should know better, but which didn't bear out when he tried stuff for real.

After two emails, I haven't heard from Shane, which isn't to say I've written him since two years ago. I think I sent him an email about a week or so ago, trying to see what he's up to.

Consider the accolades he received. He received an award at Sundance. Mike D'Angelo pointed to his film as one of the best of the year. D'Angelo's quote about the film is actually in the film poster (I've sent email to D'Angelo as well, way before I knew about Carruth).

In interviews, Carruth said he wanted to write a romantic comedy, a change of pace of the heady science fiction story he came up with. Perhaps the person people think of most when they think of indie film to success, at least, in recent years, is Darren Aronofsky, who wrote Pi, and followed that up with Requiem for a Dream.

Of course, the king of the indie films of recent memory (I won't go as far back as Cassavetes) is Steven Sodebergh, with his precocious debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape from which he's gone on to have excellent films such as Traffic and Erin Brockovich.

Carruth never quite got that famous. I think his film is starting to get noticed a little. Two of my coworkers have seen his film, though I'm sure I'm the only to have seen it in the theaters.

So, my question, and the point of this blog, is to ask, "What ever happened to Shane Carruth?". Here was a guy that had a fair bit of promise, who earned some money for his film, and seems to have disappeared. I see no mention of him in Google. Nearly every interview is around the time the film came out. It's been at least a year since he's had an interview.

Where are you, Shane Carruth?