The story of why it took nearly two years to make a 10-minute movie
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Sarah Carmody
Some things—like money and legitimate fame—can take a little while to come by in the movie business. Others—like, say, the predilection for showing up late to an interview—evidently do not. It’s probably entirely apropos (or ironic, depending on how you look at it) that a Back to the Future cultist like Darold “Doc” Crotzer would show up an hour after he said he would for an interview at a Starbucks on the Webster University campus, but the absurdity of his excuse sort of makes up for it: “Sorry I’m late. My clothes and cellphone got locked in a room.” (We’ll come back to that.)
It’s only fair to cut the 23-year-old Clayton native and fledgling director some slack. He got up at 4 this morning to catch a flight home from Los Angeles for Easter weekend; he’s been making ends meet by working late nights on the bonus material for the DVD of a big-budget computer-animated movie that’s in theaters now; and the score for his first short film, “The Agonist,” still needs some finishing touches before it screens at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase in July.
“It’s so close,” Crotzer says. He’s sitting at a table in the back of the coffeehouse now, looking a little bleary-eyed and nursing a hot chocolate. “It’s just a few pieces away.”
It’s about time, too: It’s been almost two years since Crotzer and his best friend from SLU High, Dan Cooper, optioned the absurdist story of a schlub who discovers that he can make money fall from the sky by hurting himself. So, uh, what took so long? For starters, they hadn’t finished their first movie yet.
Self-professed “products of the ’80s,” Crotzer and Cooper were seniors in college and still wrapping up Looking Back at the Future, a no-budget documentary about the Back to the Future trilogy—for which they’d smooth-talked their way into sit-downs with director Robert Zemeckis and stars like Christopher Lloyd—when they came upon the script for “The Agonist” in 2005. “It’s not like we weren’t busy enough with the documentary, but we thought, ‘If we find a funny short, let’s do it,’” Crotzer says.
Youthful determination got them in the door at Zemeckis’ house, but it didn’t change the fact that they had no money and the script that they were so in love with came from Craig Good, a veteran Pixar artist with an imagination you’d expect from a veteran Pixar artist. “Everything was so exaggerated,” says Cooper, who functioned as the film’s producer. “It was so over-the-top that some of the stuff would have been way too expensive to shoot.”
Well aware of the pair’s budget constraints, Good tweaked the script’s tricky scenes and eased up on the effects—except for the ultrasplashy denouement. “We were just like, ‘We can’t change this. It’s the core of the movie. How are we going to do it?’” Crotzer says, careful not to go into specifics about the scene. (It’s a 10-minute movie—anything more than the characters’ names and you won’t need to bother seeing it.)
And that’s why it helps to make your first film something written by a Pixar artist: Good agreed to ask around at the office whether anyone was willing to create the final shot, and sure enough, someone was. “I think it took us a couple weeks to even think to ask Craig,” Crotzer says with a laugh, “but it turned out great.”
Shooting the rest of the scenes went quickly—a dozen locations in seven days—but the fact that Crotzer moved to L.A. after graduation while Cooper stayed in St. Louis made for a slightly nontraditional editing process last winter. But finally—after two years—it’s done. “Luckily we can be brutally honest with each other,” Crotzer says of the long-distance editing. “We don’t have to worry about hurting each other’s feelings if a scene’s not working.”
Speaking of brutal honesty ... about that wardrobe malfunction before the interview? Crotzer got his first lesson in changing clothes for a magazine photo shoot: Make sure you’ve got the keys to the dressing room.
