The making of 'Tangerine'; music industry accounting; Tim & Eric's awesome book

Sean Baker: I had wonderful producers — Darren Dean and Shih-Ching Tsou. We did this film on an extremely low budget and for them to be able to lock down these locations for close to nothing is quite a feat. But I did tell them from the very beginning: "I will not make this film unless you can lock down Donut Time," because it's such a landmark. It's right on the corner of Santa Monica and Highland on the Northeast side. It's sort of a hub. It's where a lot of the working girls from the area used to, and still do, hang out between their jobs.

SB: It took a lot of convincing, not only of my team and of Radium, but also of myself. This is my fifth feature film. You always work towards getting a bigger budget, getting better cameras, and stuff like that. [With] the state of the industry right now, we're forced to work with a budget that was less than half of the budget of our previous film. Yet we had this treatment that was asking for a lot — multiple locations, exteriors, ensemble cast. We wanted to put all of that money up on the screen. Basically, I'm out of favors. I couldn't shoot on film. I couldn't shoot on higher end cameras.



What got me was when I found this Kickstarter campaign for a company called Moondog Labs. They created an anamorphic adaptor that fits over the iPhone lens. When I saw those tests I thought, This could elevate this to a cinematic level. So, long story short, we shot on the iPhone 5s the entire film. 

Radium Cheung: If it had been anybody else either than Sean who called me and said, "Let's shoot a movie, but we only have a budget for a couple of phones to shoot it on," I would have said, Get the f*** out of here. Dead serious. What really convinced me — it took a while, like Sean said, to convince himself and the team — were these lenses. They actually allow the phone to capture in anamorphic, squeezed images. Much like an anamorphic lens on a real camera. That really elevated the look of the film. It really brought this film up to a different level than what you would expect from a mobile phone movie. 

SB: I am a white, straight male. I'm not from this world whatsoever that we're focusing on. So we knew that the only way to do this correctly, responsibly and respectfully was to find a consultant — and not just a consultant, a true collaborator. That was Mya Taylor. Who knew that she was also going to be an amazing performer? We found her one morning hanging out in the courtyard of the LGBT Center, which is basically about a block away from this intersection. We exchanged contact information and we started hanging out on a regular basis. That was sort of our research process.

She would actually tell us stories, anecdotes and stuff that she knew from the area because she had friends who had worked the streets. She witnessed first-hand a lot of the stories that eventually made their way into the movie. About three weeks in she brought Kiki to the table. Kiki sat next to Mya and I saw the two of them together and I thought, Wow, the dynamic duo! They contrast each other, but they compliment each other. They really have this wonderful interaction. I thought, We're going to write two characters for these two women to play.

SB: Well, that is funny. For about 20 years I have wanted to shoot a scene in a car wash. I didn't know what it was going to be, but I always wanted to do a take in a car wash in which something happens in that car. Maybe it is what happens in "Tangerine," or maybe it's a mob hit. I never had the opportunity to do this until when we were actually discussing these things with Mya and Kiki.



Mya actually mentioned that some of her friends took [clients] to the local car was because it would give them five or six minutes of complete and utter privacy.  If they didn't have time or the money to rent a hotel room, the car wash was their way of completely isolating themselves. I thought, Thank you Mya, now I have the opportunity to shoot the scene I have always wanted to shoot.

SB: Only two takes. I was very happy with the performance. It was very simple. It was one shot. We shot it — maybe Radium can speak more about this — at the right time. 



RC: One of the many good things about shooting in Los Angeles is that you can count on the sun. You look at your app on your phone and it tells you what time the sun will be where and you show up at that time and the sun is there. The technicality of it was very, very simple. Just Sean sitting it in the backseat holding the phone and then you have our two performers in the front.



SB: And our wonderful sound recordist, Irin Strauss, who is six-foot-five, in the trunk of the car. It was a rented cab so I don't think it was properly watertight. It wasn't sealed. He was in a puddle by the end of the second take.



RC: The car was very clean afterward.  

SB: In that particular case there was the first part of the scene that was — I guess you could call it violent. It was a semi-fight going on in the bus. First off, I'm focused on the monitor. I'm not looking around, and neither is Radium. The bus pulls over and we just assumed we were at a stop, but they were pulled over for a little bit too long. I started to realize that something was up. I looked up and said, "The bus isn't pulled over because of us, is it?" A passenger turned around and looked at me and said, "Yeah, not only that, but they're calling the police." So we scattered into the night. 



RC: From the front of the bus you could imagine some people in the back and these two girls kind of slapping each other. It wasn't very violent — that is the wrong word to use — it was just commotion in the back. Being responsible, the driver pulled over and we didn't realize. We kept shooting and kept waiting for the bus to move. We thought it was a red light. We thought it was a stop and then, like Sean said, after a while we kind of stopped and realized something was up.



They're calling the police. We all ran. We literally all ran out of the bus. We went in different directions and we had to call each other and converge somewhere. The good thing about that is we ended up at a place we never expected to be — a certain corner where Sean noticed this amazing graffiti mural. We shot a very nice shot just tracking back from that wall. So that was a blessing in disguise. But it was really funny that night. We felt like young kids getting in trouble. 

SB: It's a wonderful thing what has happened in the last year. Awareness and visibility have grown substantially. When we set down this road two-and-a-half years ago, we really did not know it was going to be as much of a part of the zeitgeist as it is now. My hope is that people just see this as one of many stories that can be told about the movement. But this is of course not about the trans movement, this is about one microcosm, a sub, sub-culture of the movement and of the community. If anything, this just will add to further awareness. The way we approached our film — you could basically call this film a comedy — this is entertainment.



My hope is that the audiences will connect and identify enough with our two leads that they might take it further, do their homework, explore and know more about — just take it upon themselves to learn more about the movement. What's distressing to me is that with all this awareness that is growing, there is so far still to go. The murder rate of trans people in the United States has increased 13 percent this year alone. There is still an incredible amount of change to happen. Hopefully, this is just one of many stories. This is just the beginning of us telling many diverse stories of different parts of the trans community. 

Tim Heidecker: We did send an assistant to the Goodwill to pick up a number of these books because that is where they generally all end up.

Eric Wareheim: Yeah, I ordered something — I can't remember the name of it — but it was basically a lot of recipes of different herbs and natural Eastern medicines for a new age diet, which sort of inspired us. But, to be honest, we didn't really want to base it off of any of that stuff. It's more fun just to create our own universe.

EW: Yes of course. Just moving to this city you get overwhelmed with people that are involved in all of those things — even some friends. Even some things that we do. Other people in other cities would laugh at us for juice cleansing and doing meditation. All of our comedies come from where we are and Los Angeles has really pushed us to make fun of those things.



TH: My wife works for the Transcendental Meditation center.

TH: Hah! Yes, it's all good.

EW: If you look at Scientology, they're obsessed with taking these old memories and getting them out of your head so you won't have this distress. In our Zone Theory, we believe that you have this anxiety and depression because poems are locked deep in there and we'll teach you simple steps of hypnosis to unlock hundreds of thousands of poems to make you a better person.



TH: Yeah. Part of a comedy principle I suppose is having this counterpoint of when you say something is easy, and then [when] you actually talk about what is easy about it, it's incredibly complicated and horrific. That should technically be considered funny to some people.



EW: Yeah, on the title it says, "Seven Easy Steps" — and once you start reading what you have to do in these zones, it's a nightmare.

TH: That is a good question. We worked with our longtime designer that we've had on for a lot of our DVDs,  posters and stuff. We also had our guy that would do a lot of our graphic stuff on the shows. So there is this mix of beautiful design in the book that goes way beyond just a self-help parody book. It's kind of meant for the book to be an aesthetically pleasing experience. Then there are images of people's faces, charts or graphs that are meant to be kind of grotesque and unsettling.



EW: I also think the pacing of the actual writing of it is similar to all of our video work. We've been going around the country doing these healing seminars where we read from the book. It is an example of length. Of hitting a joke way too many times and going too far into the darkness where it makes people uncomfortable and the laughter builds until the end.

TH: They're playing along. We do chanting and hymns and things like that.

EW: Absolutely. Scientologists have the E-meter and Zone Theorists have a diarrhea dipstick. There is a direct joke on what people are really doing everyday to get better.

EW: I think it taught us that we're going to write a much shorter book next time.

TH: A couple years. Maybe three years since we got the idea. It really was a thing that was hard to get into. With a TV show you're getting immediate results — shooting it, watching it and doing it with other people. This felt like a total mess until it was absolutely finished.

EW: Yeah it's way above what we started out to do. I'm pretty proud of it.



TH: Yeah. The book is meant to be enjoyed as a book, make you laugh when go through it, and make you think about some things of course. Ultimately, we're going to have fun distancing ourselves from it immediately. The second [phase] of the book promotion is going, Well, I don't know if you want to do all these things... Then, over the next several months I'll probably introduce my full retraction from the book. Just this joke of throwing everything under the bus.

Well, every year we graduate some 800 new alumni that go into the industry. For years, as a college we saw our job as primarily developing their skills as musicians, but they're graduating and going into an industry that is vastly different from the one that I graduated into about 20-plus years ago. We feel that guiding them towards understanding the way that the money flows, and the way that they will be compensated, is absolutely critical and I would say central to our mission as an institution.

That's fair. It has both exacerbated it, but also presents us with interesting opportunities for remedying a lot of things. I feel that in many ways, given the technology that we have in 2015, a lot of the issues that the industry is facing and is challenged with just simply should not be there.

We started by asking, Are the popular narratives that are out there about the music industry correct? If you ask anybody on the street they'll tell you a few things: first, consumers aren't willing to pay money for music; second, the music industry is in decline; third, the streaming services are killing it. So we said, Let's figure out if this is true.



We looked at money flows from all different revenue streams, including what they call "interactive" and "non-interactive" online services — including money from traditional broadcast radio, from TV licensing, and other sources of income from creators. We also focused quite a bit on online services as that is increasingly becoming the primary way consumers access their music today, and is by all accounts the future of music consumption.

It's a name that, even though I've been in the music industry for 20-odd years, I had never heard myself. This is effectively a [collection] of funds that normally should've been distributed to artists. Often it's kept by the major record labels. A good example is money that streaming services — like Spotify — will pay as an advance to a particular label in order to access its catalogue. Even though it's leveraged the assets of its recording artists in order to get that advance, none of it necessarily makes it back to the artist.



There's also quite a lot of controversy about the fact that a lot of the traditional big players on the label side actually have ownership stakes in the streaming services, which they get precisely because they are the administrators or the owners of the large catalog of music. But when services are sold, such as Beats to Apple, or eventually go public, such as the much anticipated IPO of Spotify, none of that money generated ever makes it back to the artists. Given how the industry has changed, given modern music consumption habits, given technology — there is a whole lot of infrastructure there that hasn’t quite shifted along with it.