Gluttons for Punishment

Behind the making of Feast, the horror-film spawn of Project Greenlight

Julie Seabaugh

Creating a feature film is a daunting process at best; at worst, it's a nightmare of epic proportions. Escalating budgets, little sleep, bad food, creative differences and dozens of other factors can derail schedules, egos, even entire productions. Add a reality-TV crew capturing every behind-the-scenes breakthrough and blunder, the pressure of living up to expectations inherent in winning a national competition and the fact that your film's executive producers include Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Chris Moore and Wes Craven, and you might recognize the uphill battle that was Feast, an offbeat horror-comedy featured in the third installment of the Bravo-by-way-of-HBO reality series Project Greenlight.


Feast's ensemble cast includes Judah Friedlander, Henry Rollins, Jason Mewes, Balthazar Getty, Navi Rawat, Eric Dane, Krista Allen and '80s cult-horror legend Clu Gulager, all of whom find themselves stranded in a secluded bar as creatures of unknown origin systematically (and humorously) devour them. The cast and crew also found themselves in front of the Project Greenlight 3 cameras, participating in private, oftentimes leading interviews.


"I wonder if having all those cameras around wasn't beneficial in some ways," quips Marcus Dunstan, whose "very hardcore" script, co-written with Patrick Melton, was chosen out of 4,000 entries. "When a camera is on you in heated situations, it's like anyone you'd ever want to meet, anyone you'd ever want to work with, is watching you. It makes you think very carefully about what you want to say.


"They have a mandate to have a dramatic show, so they did take some liberties here and there, but I think for the most part we all came out pretty well."


"With the whole reality thing, there's always some paraphrasing that goes along with it, but I think as a subject, you kind of have to give yourself over to it," adds former special-effects artist turned first-time director John Gulager (son of Clu), whose cinematic trial by fire provided the emotional heart of PG3.


Raised on classic horror B-movies, including old 16mm prints of Frankenstein, Creature From the Black Lagoon and Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, Gulager has a goal as a director that is both sweeping and clear: "I want to make world-class films that will be able to be watched beyond the current generation. The people I admire make films that I watched years after they were made, and they still are films that I use to gauge where I would like to go with filmmaking. Whether they're horror films or not, you sort of bring your sensibility to them, and hopefully at some point in time people would be able to tell that I worked on a film just by watching it."


Feast will enable Gulager to establish himself as an edgily retro auteur. Or as Friedlander puts it, "Gulager's a really talented guy. Great visual style, and he's got a real quirky sense of humor, really twisted. He's a weird, odd cat, and I mean that in a good way. And that's one of the reasons he's such a good director; so much of it just comes down to taste.


"I'm a big horror movie fan, and this movie is kind of a throwback to the '80s ones in a sense, where there are no or very few CGI effects. It's all old-fashioned blood and makeup effects."


From getting beaten up by two girls and sprayed with projectile monster vomit to getting his (prop) eyeball gouged out and temporarily housing live maggots, Friedlander bore the brunt of the film's cinema-verité mandate. "He was pretty brave," Gulager says. "The maggots were coming out of his nose and his mouth, between his fingers, in his hair. He was a real trooper."


But surviving a camera crew and dealing with a few creepy crawlies were merely small steps in what would ultimately become Feast's Sisyphian quest to arrive on the big screen.


PG3's nine hour-long episodes began airing March 15, 2005. In previous incarnations, each Greenlight run concluded with the completed film's theatrical premiere. But when the Weinstein brothers abruptly left the Disney-owned Miramax (Feast's original production company) as the film neared its wrap date, Feast's future turned as dark as its humor.


"We knew that we had gotten caught up in a situation that was beyond our control," says Gulager. "The process stopped before we were finished with the film. It would have been fun if there was a Project Greenlight 3.1 or 3.5 episode that showed how everything ended up. I mean, we've just now completed the movie."


Though the Weinsteins ultimately opted to take the film to their newly formed Weinstein Company, Feast spent several months making the horror/sci-fi festival rounds (with a patchwork film score pieced together by seven composers over the course of a single weekend, no less) without a concrete release date in sight. Originally scheduled to arrive in theaters last January, it was pushed back to April, then left in limbo indefinitely.


"I always just assumed we'd be going with the Weinsteins," says Gulager. "They could have left it with Disney. It's a little lewd in portions; I don't know what would have happened to it."


Yet the rumble of fan interest in Feast remained steady, PG3 became a 2005 Emmy nominee for Outstanding Reality Program, the cash needed to complete rewrites and reshoots eventually made it down the pipeline and composer Steve Edwards produced a complete, final score. As a creative bonus, Gulager, Dunstan and Melton visited fanboy mecca Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas' 5,000-acre, $100 million compound in which Feast's sound was mixed.


"Holy cow, was that wonderful," gushes Dunstan. "It was like how everyone has memories of their favorite summer, where all the edges melt away. This place had trees so tall they scraped the bottom of clouds, you're surrounded by friendly deer, it has its own crystal-clear water supply ... they're the best of the best, but they embraced our dirty little bumper sticker of a movie like it was the biggest blockbuster ever."


Due to low ratings, the Greenlight series was cancelled immediately after the third season, yet two years after initial filming began, Feast makes its premiere at the Palms on September 12 under the banner of the Weinsteins' Dimension Films unit. Select theaters (including the Brenden Palms 14) will hold special late showings September 22 and 23, followed by a DVD release on October 17.


"If I had watched [PG3] and I wasn't involved with it, I'd feel compelled to go see the movie, just to know if it was good or if it blows," laughs Gulager. "It was nine weeks of all buildup and no punchline! But it's definitely the biggest thing that's ever happened to me. It's changed my life. And I hate to sound all puffy about this, but I believe that everyone who worked on the film is very pleased with it."

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