Corridor Buzz - The Premier Source of Arts & Entertainment News and Information for the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City Corridor

Sympathy for the independent filmmaker

By Loren Keller

Early in Benjamin Busch’s film “Sympathetic Details,” the conversation turns to gravity and the fact that a 190-pound man would weigh 72 pounds on Mars and just 11 on Pluto.

“I find it fascinating that the smaller the planet, the less a man’s matter really matters,” says Carson, an employer of assassins played by actor Clarke Peters.

To fans of “The Wire,” Peters’ face is a familiar one; he played the wizened Baltimore police lieutenant and dollhouse miniature builder Lester Freamon for all five seasons of the HBO series that ended earlier this year.

That line of dialogue he delivers may also strike a familiar tone. “The Wire” creator David Simon has often said the show is about how contemporary American society—“raw, unencumbered capitalism” in particular—devalues human beings. Over the course of five seasons, the series examined that idea through the prism of cops and drug dealers, longshoremen, City Hall politicians, teachers, and journalists—all of whose individual efforts to make changes for the better are continually thwarted by larger institutional forces at work.

“Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less,” Simon told The New Yorker in 2007. “We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did.”

In “Sympathetic Details,” the world of organized assassins—and their ranks— shrink even faster when a hitman working for crime boss Carson is stricken with a bout of conscience and wants to walk away.

The sphere of American independent film is also getting smaller. "You have a 99-percent chance of being a failure if you are an independent film," Mark Gill, a veteran film executive from the art-house world, told National Public Radio this week. Of the 5,000 smallish films with budgets under $10 million submitted to the Sundance Festival each year, he says, perhaps only one-half of one percent will ever make money in the theaters.

But there’s much more to film—and many more worth watching—than what Hollywood brings to the local cineplex. Audiences will have the chance to check out more than 70 films—ranging from three-minute animation productions to two-hour feature length films—for free at the Aug. 21-24 Landlocked Film Festival in downtown Iowa City.

A complete schedule with locations and times for individual films, panels and workshops is posted here.

“Sympathetic Details,” scheduled for a 7:45 p.m. screening Friday at the Englert Theatre, was written and directed by “Wire” actor Busch on the slimmest of budgets.

“I had $50,000 and that could get me 12 days of crew, film equipment, insurance, hotels, transportation and lunch,” Busch wrote in an e-mail interview with CorridorBUZZ.com during a late-night break from digging dirt in an effort to jack up and repair his house in Michigan.

It’s exhausting work, even for a veteran of the Marines who took some shrapnel in the arm in Iraq—he served stints there in 2003 and 2005 and has produced two photography exhibits from those deployments. But jacking up a house— “that only requires one bad idea and a good sense of balance,” Busch jokes—is proving easier than getting his film made.

It helped that the actors in his film—including Dominick Lombardozzi, Seth Gilliam, Jim True-Frost, Ryan Sands and John Doman, who along with Busch had roles as Baltimore police officers in “The Wire”—donated their performances. The movie was filmed in Baltimore between shootings of the final two seasons of the landmark television series.

“I am deeply indebted to them for that,” Busch says. “When you watch the film, you will see how great that debt is.”

Busch says he wrote every character in “Sympathetic Details” with a particular actor from “The Wire” in mind. Domenick Lombardozzi (Officer Thomas ‘Herc” Hauk), Jim True-Frost (cop-turned-teacher Roland ‘Prez” Pryzbylewski) and John Doman (Deputy Commissioner Operations William Rawls) took the longest trip from their “Wire” personalities; all play assassins in “Sympathetic Details.”

“I wanted to give them a certain departure from roles that they had been playing for four years and so they walked across the line to the dark side,” Busch says. “They all made immediate adjustments so it seemed that they had no baggage to discard. Clarke Peters is in my head most of the time now so I will have to write him some more work.”

Busch shares story and producing credits with Ryan Sands, the lead actor in “Sympathetic Details” and another veteran of “The Wire” (Officer Lloyd “Truck” Garrick.)

Busch’s own role on “The Wire” was that of Officer Anthony Colicchio, a character whose sense of morality often clashed with those of his fellow officers. He has a small acting part in “Sympathetic Details” and plays Major Todd Eckloff on “Generation Kill,” a seven-part HBO miniseries on the war in Iraq and Simon’s first post-“Wire” production.

As a former Marine, Busch says he had some baggage of his own to deal with on “Generation Kill,” currently airing on HBO. (“It was a strange place to revisit so soon after experiencing it,” Busch says. “I did the best that I could to be honest to the Marine Corps and to both ‘Major Todd Eckloff,’ the character and the man.”)

But Busch is clearly a resourceful guy, and not just when it comes to his current house project.

For “Sympathetic Details,” Busch was advised that his $50,000 budget would get him a 30-minute film on the cinematic scale he envisioned, though he had written a 90-minute script. He says he compromised to force a 56-minute film out of what he had “with very tight planning.”

Busch is looking for the funding to restore the film’s original script and complete the project as a full feature-length work.

“I am hopeful that we can find an investor soon who believes in the film and gives me twelve more days to shoot the rest of the script and reshoot the abridged moments that were necessary to present the film as it is now,” he says. “Based on the praise that the film and the performances have already been awarded, I am certain that the investment will enjoy great dividends from a run on cable TV and DVD.”

The filmmaker acknowledges that “The Wire” is a very tough act for all those involved to follow, and that the writing on that show is hard to match.

“But the mission of the artist is always to endeavor to find something more important. There are other ideas out there,” he says.

“We are all writing new stories in new ways now. I think that everyone hopes that some of us will do it that well again. What I enjoyed about their work the most was the craftsmanship. Everything was so carefully articulated. What they gave us was important and what they left out was considered unimportant or willfully omitted for proper and very intelligent writing.”

He has high praise for “Wire” creators Ed Burns, a former Baltimore homicide detective and school teacher (“America’s great unelected statesman,” Busch says) and Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter before he went into television (“Speaker of the House in exile.”)

“I would say that what Ed and David seem to share most is an acute sense of social equity, of fair justice. It is a central political fearlessness that is born of uncompromising belief and they exercise it through their art. I know that their work is above entertainment. Although entertaining, they always seriously examine the human condition with research, experience and evidence. Even the news can’t say that anymore. I hope that that has influenced everyone who has watched ‘The Wire,’ ‘The Corner,’ and ‘Generation Kill.’”

Writing in the shadows of “The Wire” would be a certain challenge for anyone, though Busch has genetics on his side. His late father, Frederick Bush, served as acting director of the creative writing program at the University of Iowa in 1978 and 1979 and wrote nearly 30 books over the course a highly prolific career before he died in 2006.

“Sympathetic Details” is dedicated to the memory of Busch’s father and the late John Henry Sands, the father of Ryan Sands.

Busch says he is looking forward to returning to Iowa City to present the film at the Englert Theatre Friday night.

“We lived there twice and I remember really enjoying Iowa City,” he says. “All of the homes on the streets that we had lived on were immense old houses and there was a tremendous reservoir of kids nearby so it truly felt like an endless neighborhood. I have very complete memories of those times as a rural boy in a big city.”