Could the Santa Monica Museum of Art be leaving Santa Monica? “Unfriended” producer Jason Blum and Couper Samuelson talk about the challenge of making a thriller that plays out in real time on a single laptop; the band Sylvan Esso, currently playing the Coachella Festival, talk about the perils of being on tour.
'Unfriended' producers say creating suspense via computer screen is harder than it looks
Teenagers spend an awful lot of time on social media, and it’s not a spoiler to say that the teens in the new movie “Unfriended” have an awful time on social media.
The thriller focuses on a group of high school classmates who like to hang out on Skype video calls. A stranger mysteriously joins one of their group chats, and just as mysteriously bad things start happening to all of the students.
“Unfriended” is presented entirely from the perspective of one of the high schoolers' computer screens. It’s just one giant desktop of Skype, Facebook, Spotify, YouTube and several other apps and websites.
Opening Friday, “Unfriended” is coming out from Blumhouse Productions, the company behind the “Paranormal Activity” and “Insidious” movies. Director Timur Bekmambetov is also part of the project.
When Blum and Samuelson came by The Frame, we asked them about the difficulty of showing a whole movie on one computer screen, creating horror without a point of view and accurately capturing millennials' Internet habits.
Interview Highlights
The frame of the movie is a computer screen, so it seems like an easy enough idea to execute. Cooper, you're shaking your head very hard.
Cooper: We were really impressed by the degree of difficulty. You don't even have the tools you have in a traditional found footage movie, you don't have any variety of frame — it's just five people looking down the barrel at a camera. When we first saw it, we were so amazed that it worked at all.
Jason: We brought a couple different editors to get their opinion on the movie, and they had never seen so many layers in the project files. There's the computer screen, which has its elements which change throughout the movie — the clock in the top right-hand corner ticks the minutes away and all the different Internet windows. Sometimes there would be entire minutes in the movie that had 36 layers in the file, and those editors' heads exploded when they saw those files.
Cooper: It turns out that looking at a computer screen in a movie is incredibly difficult to replicate. Even if you're trying to tell a story on just one computer screen, it takes 10 different shots all the time to make that happen.
When your perspective is locked into a computer screen, you give up one of the most important elements to horror: point of view. How do you create suspense when you're giving away any kind of point of view?
Cooper: We discovered that the thing you have to rely on is the idea. We thought about it like, What would a scary stage play feel like? If you're sitting in an audience watching a stage play, how do you make that scary when you don't have the editorial tools you'd have in a movie?
The story's constructed like it's a stage play, and what's scary about it is the idea of someone who died under strange circumstances presenting themselves to you — via Facebook in this case. That's what's scary, not necessarily something jumping out from behind you.
"Blair Witch Project" launched the found footage genre. If "Unfriended" is successful, is there a new genre about to be launched here? What should it be called, and what are the rules?
Cooper: [laughs] I think we just want the best for "Unfriended," but it was really cool to use the format. It was fun to decide whether or not story points should be delivered by the performance of two actors talking to each other or the "bloop" of a Skype message. That was always a really fun question that we could ask ourselves.
Jason: I also think one of the really interesting things about the movie is that it's the next step of voyeurism, because what you're really doing is getting inside a young person's brain and seeing the choices that that brain is making. You're inserting yourself between their head and their computer screen, so it really feels like voyeurism at the next level.
But that's something the movie gets frighteningly right. I'm sure there are young people in your office, as there are young people at KPCC, who seem to have eight different applications running at any given time and you don't even know what they're doing with their mouse. It's almost an organized schizophrenia?
Cooper: The joy of the movie is that you don't have to sneak a look; you can sit there and stare. I had younger people come in and watch the movie, and I'd say, "Does this feel real? Does this feel authentic?" And they all said, "Yes." I was like, "Wow! I can't believe that's what kids do on their computers." [laughs]
Coachella 2015: Sylvan Esso play Zelda, meditate in public bathrooms to relax on tour
The North Carolina duo Sylvan Esso made its Coachella debut this past weekend, and they attracted one of the first big crowds of the festival. They released their self-titled debut album last year to widespread acclaim, and they've been touring ever since.
The Frame’s James Kim spoke with singer Amelia Meath and producer Nick Sanborn about their endless life on the road.
Interview Highlights:
What's your current tour schedule like?
Nick: I've never been on tour this consistently for this long. I've been doing six months a year since I was 20, but this is a lot more taxing than I'd predicted it would be.
Amelia: The longest break we've had in 20 months has been two weeks off.
So do you still enjoy touring?
Nick: You play all these shows and it's so much fun. We both love being on tour and love playing shows, and then everyone's constantly like, "You should have more new stuff!" And you're like, "I've been on tour forever and I'm emotionally dead." [laughs] I feel like I'm on my 20th wind, if that puts it in perspective for me.
Amelia: It's also the best. But all of a sudden for me as a singer, all of this new stuff has started cropping up. Like, thinking about conserving my energy in a whole different way. It's forcing me into grownup behavior — I just can't drink gin all the time. Which is really sad for me. [laughs]
How do you stay sane on tour?
Amelia: In order to keep sane after having spent every waking moment of my life with both Nick and many other people that I love, I play "Zelda: Majora's Mask," probably on average about two hours a day. [laughs]
Nick: I used to do cool stuff before shows, like drink and hang out with homies, but now I'm sitting down and listening to a meditation app — like, what has happened to me?
Amelia: It's really fun to watch him listen to his meditation app though. [laughs]
Nick: Did I tell you that I did it in a public bathroom stall the other day?
Amelia: No way.
Nick: It was like two weeks ago. There was no backstage bathroom, so I literally sat on the lid of the toilet in a public bathroom and found my center. [laughs] Not in a dirty way!
What's your favorite song to perform?
Amelia: My favorite song to sing right now is "Dress," because it's a real rollercoaster of a song. It's really fun to sing.
Dress by Sylvan Esso
Nick: My favorite song to perform live right now is probably "Come Down," the last one on our record. We do that as an encore sometimes, if we get an encore. It's a pretty noisy, drone kind of song, so for me is really wide open to improvisation. I can play it really differently every night that we do it. Most of the set I feel like I'm smacking people over the head with a hammer a little bit, so that's a song I can really take a breath and be a lot more subtle with.
Come Down by Sylvan Esso
Does touring ever feel repetitive for you?
Amelia: There's a different audience every night, so if you're doing your job right, it's a different experience all the time. You're still showing them stuff, but it's like your dumb jokes that you memorize and tell everyone all the time.
Nick: It's so much more audience-based or based in my headspace, which totally changes night to night. It's more like, if something doesn't land, then I'm more inspired the next night to make it land. So my worst part of the set one night will be what I try to make my favorite part the next night.
Dennis Quaid 'freak out' was a hoax, but it was for Funny Or Die, not Kimmel
It's official: Dennis Quaid is a good enough actor to convince the Internet that he was having an actual meltdown yesterday. Instead, it's a hoax — and not by Jimmy Kimmel, who many believe was responsible for it since he's done similar pranks over... and over... and over again. Instead, the fine folks at Funny Or Die are behind the prank.
Here's the video hoax, meant to show Quaid flipping out on a crew on set (Warning: contains adult language):
Here's Funny Or Video's video showing what actually happened... or, uh, didn't happen... you get it. (Warning: contains adult language, and a guy in a giant penis costume.)
The video was meant to harken back to Christian Bale's real-life on-set freakout on the set of "Terminator Salvation," down to Bale's rant including complaining about distractions. (Bale later apologized for the rant.) Here's the audio (Warning: contains adult language):
Kimmel had denied on his show that he was involved with the Quaid video, saying, "I have to say, it’s disappointing. You play 50 pranks and suddenly people don’t trust you anymore."
Kimmel responds to Dennis Quaid video
The most famous of those Kimmel show pranks was likely their Worst Twerk Fail Ever video, which showed a girl trying to twerk and then falling through a table and catching on fire — before it was ultimately revealed that it was a Kimmel prank and that the woman was a stunt person.
Watch Kimmel revealing his subterfuge in that instance:
Kimmel revealing he was behind twerk hoax
Quaid is starring in a new show on the streaming site Crackle, called "The Art of More," but the video service has denied being involved in the prank.
Quaid has a history of being a prankster; he's appeared several times over the years doing pranks on "Ellen."
Funny Or Die's highest-profile hoax previously: Their attempt to get people to think someone was actually able to make a Back To The Future 2-style hoverboard.
Santa Monica Museum of Art is leaving Bergamot Station
The Santa Monica Museum of Art is leaving its longtime home at Bergamot Station because the proposed re-development of the arts center has been delayed. The museum does not own a collection, so the move only involves people and furniture. The staff will be based in Century City while it seeks exhibition space.
The Metro Expo Line will extend to Santa Monica next year, including a stop at Bergamot Station. The portion of Bergamot currently controlled by the City of Santa Monica will be contracted to a private developer, and the plans are supposed to include a new home for the museum. But the process of choosing a developer has been prolonged. Whatever happens there, it won't be finished when the trains start rolling in next year.
"We certainly would be happy to come back as the anchor tenant when Bergamot is redeveloped," said the museum's executive director, Elsa Longhauser, in an interview for The Frame.
Longhauser said museum leaders had hoped to remain at Bergamot, where the museum has been based since 1998, but decided to leave their current space, which is rented from gallery owner Wayne Blank.
Santa Monica Mayor Kevin McKeown said the city wants the museum to end up back at Bergamot.
"We not only want to have a museum, we want to have that museum, and what we have right now is a conflict between long-term plans and short-term circumstances, because we don't control the property that they rent at the moment," McKeown said. He added that will change after the property is redeveloped.
"We will have some control once we build the new Bergamot Station, but obviously the museum needs to keep operating, and they don't have a place to operate there, so they have chosen to go into what they're calling 'an unbound phase'," McKeown said.
Longhauser said that permanent relocation outside the city is an option.
"We had always hoped to be in Santa Monica, but now I think the board is open to a possible move," Longhauser said.
She said that the museum's future location could be anywhere, including downtown L.A.. A number of galleries have relocated to that area, including prominent former Bergamot tenant Rosamund Felsen.
McKeown said he's been on Santa Monica's city council since 1998 and has been fighting to retain both art galleries and artists.
"Our challenge on the Westside is that land is very expensive, and rent for space is very expensive, and housing is very expensive" he said. "So, in a way, we're kind of bucking the economic trend to retain artists who sometimes have to get by on lower incomes for a while until they hit it big, to retain galleries where the space is expensive to rent, but we are a very arts-committed community."
The mayor noted that 43 percent of the city's residents make their living in the creative arts: "As a market and a springboard for the arts, I think we have a role to play for a long time to come, and we'll fight to fulfill that role."