Oh g is, folks, it's showtime.
People say good money to see this movie.
When they go out to a theater.
They want clothed soda, pop popcorn in no monsters.
In the Projection Booth, everyone for tend podcasting isn't boring.
Got it off? Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of the Projection Booth. I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking about the movie for Lock. That's f O R E l O c K. It's not the fourth in a film series about locks. It is a brand new movie directed and written by Caleb Alexander Smith, and it stars David Crumhol as well as mister Smith.
It is all about a naive fitness enthusiast who looks a lot like a particular superhero who ends up getting a job over on Hollywood Boulevard and all kinds of wackiness follows. It is making the rounds at festivals. There is not really a poster or even a trailer for this one, and as those rolled out, I will definitely be updating folks on where they can see Forlock. I had a lot of fun with this and I was
super happy to talk with mister Smith. And especially mister Crumholtz, because I've been watching him since he was in Adam's Family Values, so kind of watched him grow up through the magic of the movies. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you enjoy this interview. Mister Smith, I'm not that familiar with your work. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you got involved in filmmaking and especially how you came to be a writer director.
I moved to Los Angeles after college, where I studied film, and I was very much my intention to be a writer and director, and when I landed in LA what actually got going a little bit more was acting. So I've acted on a lot of TV stuff, Network TV stuff, but all the while I was pursuing writing and directing.
I co wrote and directed the micro budget film here nine years ago that made a little micro splash, but that did get me representation, and I optioned some scripts, sold some things, got very close to a few projects before Forelock. Actually, it does seem like I'm new to the scene, and I am in a way as a writer director, but also I've been pursuing it for a very long time.
And how did you mister Crumholtz meet.
He was the right person for the role of Randy. And when the first time we met was over Zoom after we sent him the script and within the first five minutes of talking to him about the story in the project, it.
Was obvious that this is the guy.
But despite the fact that he lives in New Jersey now and I'm from New Jersey, we hadn't actually met before this project.
How did Black get going, where did the idea come from, and how did it actually get made.
I was in La New to La. Like many people, I needed a side hustle and a side gig. And what people kept saying to me, mostly ironic, although some not, was well, you look just like Superman. You should put on spandex, go to Hollywood Boulevard and take pictures of the Taurus and get tips. And that idea stuck in my crawl for a very long time, and I was as I was writing other projects and things were some
things were selling, some things weren't. I had this idea over time that I was holding back a little bit and I wasn't writing something personal, and I wanted to do something that was based off of my own experiences. So that's when I wrote Forelock about this guy who it's a flip of me where he doesn't want anything to do with movies. He moves out to be a personal trainer and he falls into this kind of bizarro entertainment world.
But yeah, I.
Started the production company with my wife and we got very lucky, frankly to have the steam going and the financing and everything. Fortunately, everyone really connected with the script and the story.
Yeah, but what did you think of the script the first time we saw it.
I never read anything like it, and right away I thought, this is wildly unpredictable. Didn't really know where it was heading, and that's always a relief. There were no he didn't tip the nose or tip the hat or any kind of clue as to where this was heading. And then all the way till the very very end of the film, it's oh okay. And I love that the film didn't satisfy any trope that has been long established with films like these. Does the mystery get solved or does it deepen?
Or it didn't matter there is this is a comedy, mystery, romp adventure action thing, and I and it's a high ybrid thing and it's beautiful. I also just felt the writing was just super honest and also very informed from a very relatable place of resent towards Hollywood, towards Los Angeles, towards big business corporations. I felt it was just very honest and brutally honest about all that, and so it was a breath of fresh air. I was charmed by it.
It was quirky and weird and out there, and I was also I don't get opportunities to play roles like this very often bold scheming, lying, cheating guys who are fun to watch because they're headed for the inevitable crash. And I really jumped up the chance to play a role like this, and his voice was so succinct in what Caleb broke, it was a no brainer.
Yeah, how was that kind of finding your inner ratz ol Rizzo to play next to Joe buck here.
He's always been there. It's been in my grab bag for a while, and I've brought versions of that out into other characters where I felt it wasn't egregious to do, but this one was just like the full on there's nothing. There was no rules, There are no rules, and that was the other thing was Caleb as a director was kind enough to give me a lot of rope to just play with just how deviant and dvs Randy was.
And it wasn't something that I had to invent, but it was something I got the chance to really expand on and it was a lot of fun, A lot of fun.
I was going to ask, was there a lot of room for play as far as the characters that you guys are playing or were you pretty strict to the script?
I think both, wouldn't you say? The movie doesn't have to be two and a half hours long, though, and there is a longer edit of this film that has all those playful things. But ultimately, what you're seeing is mostly what was written, with the exception of a couple moments.
And obviously you've written, you've produced, You've done a lot of things. You know, I can't tell you just acting because again, your career spans decades now, which is wonderful. But how is that for you playing the role of both executive producer and one of the stars of the felt.
I'm so grateful that they said yes when I said, Hey, I want to produce this thing too. I want to be hands on, had a sense it might be needed. I'm at a point. It's the strangest thing. Man, I'm at a point where I do find myself sometimes being the most experienced person on a set in terms of filmmaking, and sometimes by far. I knew this was Caleb's first film.
I knew or first film as a solo director. I knew that there were a lot of people experiencing their first go at indie filmmaking, gorilla filmmaking, if you will. And so I've had experience doing all those things, and I've seen things go wrong, and I've seen miracles happen, and I would have been frustrated to not be able to share that those experiences, share the knowledge that I've gained from those experiences of the stuff, what to do, what not to do, And they were kind enough to listen,
and I loved I love producing. Producing is like party planning. It's like putting together a wedding where you're very concerned about what your guests are going to think. It's not so much about what the host wants, it's what ultimately, it's what the guests are going to walk away with. And I love that attack. It's a lot of fun and a natural fit for me, so just grateful to have had the opportunity.
How was it for you? Being the writer, the director and in front of the camera for what fifty sixty eighty percent of the time, that must have been a little difficult.
It was made more difficult by the spandex. Part of the joke of the script is keeping this poor guy in that suit as long as possible. And I was obviously talking a lot on set. I was losing my voice sometimes overhydrating, had to go to the bathroom. It was a whole thing of undoing the zipper, redoing the mic every single time. So it had its practical difficulties, but ultimately, anyone who gets the opportunity I did is extremely fortunate to tell a story that is very personal.
It's not based on me, really, The character is quite different from me, but it's still it's a very personal story that no one else was going to make. No one else was going to write it or direct it. So I tried to have fun with it. It's not always fun sometimes, like David said, it's filmmaking, and indie
filmmaking particularly is difficult because of the time constraints. And we did have a pretty healthy budget actually by indie standards, but it's still difficult and shooting in LA can be a little bit of a nightmare, which is extremely sad, but that is the truth of the matter. Besides for the tax incentive and all that kind of stuff, there's a whole other smorty sportive issues around that. We dealt with some of those and we got through it. David's
leadership was key. We had people like ROBERTA. Schaeffer, who is our director of photography, who's done everything from all the Mark Forster movies like Monstrous Ball and Stranger in Fiction. He's done a James Bond movie, all the Christopher Guest movies that we love, like Best in Show. He was also great to have to be able to lean on him and for him to be able to say, oh, Caleb, this is a great idea, or Caleb, we can't actually
do this one. It's teamwork. Filmmaking is very collaborative. It has to be that way, and fortunately I had people who believed in the vision but were also able to disagree when the time came, because those times do come.
One pitched in and I'm really pleased with the result.
Tell me a little bit more about your crew. You mentioned your DP, and I'm curious how the rest of your folks came together.
It's kind of like you hired the department heads and then let them do their thing. Roberto hired Jim Planette, who is a very famous scaffer, one of the few famous scaffers probably gentlemen.
Jim Planett.
He's done everything from et to Braveheart to Ocean's eleven. He's in his mid eighties, his energy level is off the charts. He's an incredible resource. And not kidding.
When I say he had more energy than I did on our overnight shoots.
He truly did. So we were really spoiled with an incredible crew. For me, it was just talking to department heads, making a choice and then letting them do their thing.
Can you talk a little bit about the post process on this The.
Post process was interesting because I had my first child in the.
Middle of it.
Actually, so I made I had a cut in the movie. I felt pretty good about it. I stepped away to be there for the birth of my son and be there for those first several months, and when I came back to the movie, it was like I just had this whole new perspective on cutting, and that's where David came in and the editing booth helped out try to show the movie to a lot of different people. We took our time with it because we didn't have any external deadline, so we were able to really test it
out over and over. And the response so far has been pretty positive about the movie, and I think a big part of that is the fact that we were able to take some time in post production and really get it right.
The jokes are really tight, and I was curious if you had many test screenings in order to get that material so tight and so well worked out.
There were a few, like official kind of things that we did, but a lot of it.
Was just having new groups of people every weekend to my house to watch the movie, people who hadn't seen who knew nothing about it, and just gauging their reaction. We do that on Saturday, and then in the next week editing have a different group come in the following
Saturday get their reactions. So it was just a lot of that, and I think for a comedy it's necessary because it is so much about the rhythm and about trying to cut extraneous things when necessary, but also knowing when to let a moment be a moment.
But there's no such thing.
As perfection with this kind of thing, but it's an intuitive led process. And yes, we were thank you to everyone out there who saw a cut of the movie and weighed in.
Have you had your premiere?
Yep, yep. We premiered in Austin at the Austin Film Fest. We were opening night and it was a raucous response. This is probably the best way to describe it. I'm just very grateful and humbled by the response in the room, the response afterwards. We're starting to get the early reviews and that kind of thing, and it's been awesome letterboxing,
the funny quips that people have about the movie. Someone commented this is a big himbo movie, which I really liked that comment actually, because it is so Yeah, it's we had a premiere. We have some more stuff upcoming as well. That's in the works. Hopefully we'll be able to announce soon.
What was it like for you guys to see this with an audience for the first.
It speaks to the communal experience of theater viewing that seems to be lost. But the wonderful thing about more comedies being made, right. We were in this dry spell of comedies for a very long time. Certainly studios stop making comedies, and they seem to be making more now they're reinventing it. And that's kind of the nature of comedy, right, Like there's some bumps in the road of what's funny, what works, what doesn't. But I think comedy is you want to You don't want to laugh.
In your head.
If you laugh in your house alone, does anyone and no one's around.
To hear you laugh?
Did you really laugh? Whereas in a theater it's this communal, joyful experience. And so so it's nice to see a comedy in theaters, and it's nice to be in that comedy and watch people laugh at my work, and you know, it's a bit of a party. And so it was great. It was a great feeling. You worry about these things, right,
they're your little baby. You pour your heart and soul into a very sort of precious egg, right that you can't drop, and you got to be really gentle with and so you worry, like, how is the egg going to play? And is it going to come out scrambled or is it still going to be intact, and our little egg was really beautifully received. Everybody got everything like no one missed a beat, and everyone was surprised by the twists and turns, and everyone was very engaged from
the beginning to the end. It's exactly what you want, So couldn't have gone better.
You're talking about seeing comedies in the theater, which I completely agree with your feed off of that energy. The last must see in a theater movie that I saw also had you in it, which was Oppenheimer. Talk about a difference of scope and scale between Oppenheimer and Forelock.
But mon and tone.
Yeah, nothing funny about that movie. I'm an eighties kid, right, So it was two movies a weekend with my dad, who didn't know what else to do with me. He had customy custody if me on the weekends, and he would. He was like, let's see whatever's out. He took me to some crazy movies, nothing too scary and nothing too violent. But I saw pretty much every eighties comedy, and I just that is such a romantic thing and the it
shouldn't be nostalgic. It should still be happening and developing and evolving now, whether it be because of the pandemic or for whatever reason, we've sidetracked into home viewing and streaming, and it isn't the same. It is not the same. And movies are made to be seen in a movie theater. Certainly with Caleb with making this film, writing this script, having Roberto Schaeffer and Jim Plannett shoot and light this thing, this was meant to be seen in a movie theater,
and it plays beautifully at home. Sure, movies are meant to be seen on a large screen with people around you. The movie's funnier if you can if you're not laughing alone.
When you're talking about nostalgia, and there are elements of forelocks that really speak to me as far as screwball comedy. So much of the scene in the house, that big set piece of the house. He's upstairs, you're downstairs, you're outside, he's up all those different things so remind me of some of our better screwballs that we have back in the thirties and forties. So again I applaud that so much.
Thank you for picking up on that. That is something a lot of people understand them Cowboy jumping off point and the sting is in there, and some things from the seventies. But I love Lubitsch. I love Billy Wilder, especially my dog is named Billy Wilder. I love the energy of Screwball. I think that it is it, you know. I know the Cohens have some of that in there in especially the first half of their career, and I
love it. I love the idea of just being mad cap and raising up the hilarity and the absurdity all the way as high as you can in the scale and just then letting it fly. I didn't want to be too cool for school with this movie and hold back. I just wanted to let it be zany. And I think that's reflected in the colors and like the bold saturation and these primary red blues and yellows, and I think it's reflected in the setups and the payoffs and
in the performances too. And one of the funniest lines in the movie is in the bathroom of that house, and it's a line with Randy in the bathroom. He has some activity in there, and I'm not going to spoil it, but it's something that Dave just came up with on the spot. And there's another moment leading into the chase scene that it was something that just before we rolled cameras.
It was a line I gave to Dave, and.
I think we had a lot of it is built into the script. But when you're in that spirit of play, I think you open yourself up to hopefully mining the material to even greater depths. So yes, I love the films of the thirties and forties, and if there's just a little bit of that energy, and for Lock, I'm very proud.
No, you can't be wilder.
And I think Lubitsch is a lot of his stuff is less seen, but Nanatchka and all these things where it's about I like mix up humor.
It's a really silly thing, but when it's pulled.
Off so satisfying that if they think you're supposed to be acting, there actually why people get their wires crossed and there's confusion and it's silly stuff, but hopefully it does get our shared humanity and we're all a part of this human struggle together.
We kind of pick up on David's egg metaphor from before. I know, the chicken is hatched, but now you have to nurture it. Now you have to get this movie out there, get more people seeing it. You talked about getting it out to different festival, different events and things. But past that, do you have your next idea? Do you know where you're going to go after this one?
I'm always writing and I have something that I'm zeroing in on.
I can't say too much about it because it's just at such a nascent stage, but yeah, we'll We're happy to be promoting Forelock. I think we're probably looking at some more festivals and doing it that way because we do love the audience ground swell and building this buzz. And then we would hope for it to be released next year, maybe next spring or so. We'll see about the details on that and then, yeah, the idea is to just get the band back together and make another one.
David, how about yourself? I know you are always working. Where are you going to be up next?
I'm in that Supergirl movie coming out June twenty sixth, twenty twenty six, six six six. That's going to be very exciting. I've never been in a superhero film before. I've only been this is not a superhero film, but it's just following me the whole Superman thing, and so now, yeah, I play Supergirl's father. I'm Zorel, brother of Joorrel. Bradley Cooper's brother has been established in the Superman film, which makes sense.
It's very exciting.
I got a couple other things, hopefully a horror film I made last year in eight twenty four Horror from cler will find its way to theaters, and a couple couple other things in the works. So it's plugging along as I've done for a long time, and I'm just super grateful to still be alive.
Frankly, I'm glad you are as well. Gentlemen, thank you so much for your time today. This was so great talking with you. I'm very honored to make your acquaintance.
Thank you, Mike, Thank you, Mike, thank you so much.
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