Tag: Chad Allen Barton

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From Dumb County to ‘Dog Police,’ a Q&A with Piano Man Pictures’ Chad Allen Barton

CREDIT: Courtesy Piano Man Pictures

Courtesy Piano Man Pictures

File this one under “audiobooks.” The Bluff City-based film collective Piano Man Pictures has released the recording (podcast? audiobook? radio show?) of Dumb County, the script too outrageous, too expensive, and (at least right now) too on the nose to film.

The group is known around the Memphis film scene, having been frequent contributors to

 the Indie Memphis Film Festival, the Time Warp Drive-In, and being co-creators, with long-running Memphis video rental store and venue Black Lodge, of the Cinematic Panic film festival. Most recently, PMP’s “We Got a Problem with Groundwater,” directed by Shelby Baldock, screened at Indie Memphis 2020 and is a Bowery Awards finalist.

Courtesy Piano Man Pictures

Chad Allen Barton

Dumb County is a delight — if the listener can stomach the absolutely awful cast of characters. The full cast of voice actors and occasional sound effects up the production value — I’ve listened to professionally produced audiobooks with less pizazz. It follows an out-of-town couple broken down at the edge of town, and the mechanic named Cornfed, the sheriff, the town preacher, and other county residents they meet. Dumb County was recorded in front of a live studio audience at Black Lodge, where Barton is a co-owner. The audiobook stars Stephen Teague, Michelle Allmon, Steven Burk, Greg Boller, Jason Gerhard, Ryan Scott, David Hammons, Markus Seaberry, and Jimmy Hoxie. Teague is the narrator.

I spoke with PMP’s Chad Allen Barton about the catharsis of character work, the music video “Dog Police” by the Memphis band of the same name, and of course Dumb County.

Memphis Flyer: So you guys did a table read, essentially?

Chad Allen Barton: We did basically a live table read with nine different actors. We had everybody mic’d up, and it was at Black Lodge one night in front of about 25 people.

And that’s the recording — that’s what we’re hearing?

Correct. We recorded it live.

Part of why this is the audio play version instead of the feature film is that it would be way too expensive to produce by yourselves?

Yeah, it’s a large cast, and there are also a lot of really expensive things like cars exploding and flipping downhill and gas stations exploding and all kinds of wild shit that we just don’t have the money to do.

Right.

And nobody in their right mind would give me any amount of money right now to do it because it’s extremely offensive toward certain people. Namely awful rednecks.

That might actually be pretty cathartic right now.

[Barton laughs]

Courtesy Piano Man Pictures

Charlie Metz

So “wild” is on brand for Piano Man Pictures, but why did you write something that would be so expensive? I mean, this is not like spray-painting gourds, which you did for your macaroni farm short. You always find a way to make things look good. I feel like that’s part of the ethos, but it’s balanced with practicality. So what happened?




This took like seven years to write, with Charlie Metz. Basically it’s just me and Charlie sitting around and drinking and just doing characters. We did the characters enough that we started constructing stories. So, we said, okay, let’s work on a script. We would go on these long tirades where we would slip into the characters and [keep drinking]. Then we would wake up the next morning and see what we had and edit sober. It was the right mindset for those characters.

That seems like a pressure release valve. Do you think that kind of exposure to hateful and willfully ignorant people is what made Dumb County happen?

Oh, definitely. Especially for Charlie, who is just so frustrated with the way things are. So to be able to slip into these characters who aren’t self aware, but to add something that makes it funny [is really relieving].

Courtesy Piano Man Pictures

The cast of Dumb County performing live at Black Lodge.


So, more generally, what’s going on with you at PMP?

Well Lights Camera Bullshit is on Amazon. We were editing Soft Boy the other day. We’re getting it to a pretty good place. We were going to move faster with it, but with all that’s going on, what’s the rush? I don’t really want to do an online release. Probably before the end of the year, we’ll have a decent cut of it with effects.

Have you got anything else in the works?

I’m working on a short with Rachel [M. Taylor] that has to do with education and the future of education. It’s kind of sci-fi. My mind always goes back to science-fiction in some form.

Anything else?

There’s that, and I’m still trying to finish the “Dog Police” documentary. We’re going to have to do something without a lot of photos to cut between, so we’re probably going to have to do something with animation and 3-D stuff. Some weird, crude reenactments of certain things.

Well, it’s “Dog Police.” You said “weird” and “crude,” and nobody’s going to say “This doesn’t fit! Have they even seen the music video?”

It does make total sense. All we have to do is go into the space [at the Medicine Factory] and throw on a smoke machine and strobe light, and that’s pretty much what the music video looks like.

Is there anything else you want people to mention?

I guess you can mention our Patreon page for anyone who wants to contribute and help get the movie made. And you can always mention Black Lodge.

Listen to Dumb County at the Piano Man Pictures website.

Courtesy Piano Man Pictures

Black Lodge

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Memphis Made Feature Film Lights, Camera, Bullshit Debuts on Amazon Prime Video

Eric Tate stars as a desperate director in Lights, Camera, Bullshit

Director Chad Allen Barton, one of the founders of Memphis production company Piano Man Pictures, won Best Hometowner Feature at the 2014 Indie Memphis Film Festival with his full-length debut Lights, Camera, Bullshit. The film stars Eric Tate, the lead actor from Craig Brewer’s 2000 debut The Poor and Hungry, as Gerald Evans, a filmmaker returning to the Bluff City after an unhappy sojourn in Hollywood.

At first, he is idealistic, going to heroic lengths to make the artistically interesting independent film he was prevented from making by the industry. But life always forces compromises, and he is forced to make a devil’s bargain with shady producer Don (veteran actor Ron Gephart) to make, in Don’s words, “dog shit.”

Gerald plays straight man as his world gets more and more surreal. He gets in trouble with the mob — and caught in a gang war between two groups of very unconvincing presidential impersonators. Then, his girlfriend becomes pregnant.

Lights, Camera, Bullshit is a gonzo comedy with some dramatic overtones, influenced by the work of Spike Jones and Charlie Kauffman. The cast features some of the best Memphis actors of the last decade’s indie movement: Markus Seaberry, Don Meyers, the Memphis Flyer‘s own Jon W. Sparks, Dorv Armour, Brandon Sams, McTyere Parker, and, in his final role, Tate’s co-star in The Poor and Hungry, the late John Still as a terrorist disguised as president William Henry Harrison. The narrator is Michael Horse, the actor who became famous as Deputy Hawk Hill in Twin Peaks.

“Many of the events in the film happened to us while we were actually trying to make the film, albeit not as exaggerated and cartoonish,” says Barton. “We had to film in back alleys and behind abandoned buildings in order to have locations that required no money, and at times using our film slate to show the cops we weren’t trying to break in anywhere, just film a movie.”

Lights, Camera, Bullshit makes its streaming debut on Amazon Prime Video this week. Piano Man Pictures will celebrate with a watch party tonight, (Thursday, July 9th) featuring the stars and crew of the film. To watch along, you can go to the Piano Man Pictures website tonight at 7:30 p.m. CDT.

Memphis Made Feature Film Lights, Camera, Bullshit Debuts on Amazon Prime Video

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Cinematic Panic Film Festival Brings The Weird

When you think of “film festival fare,” what usually comes to mind are sincere indie dramas, light language comedies, and earnest documentaries about social issues. But that’s not what’s on the marquee for Memphis’ newest festival, Cinematic Panic.

Black Lodge Video was a Cooper-Young institution for 15 years. As anyone who frequented the place can recall, there was always a few film freaks hanging around in the store watching selections from its vast video catalogue. You never knew what you were going to see on the vintage big-screen projection TV.

Since the Lodge shut down its original location four years ago, co-owner Matt Martin has been on a frustrating and seemingly quixotic quest to bring it back to life. Last year, it was announced that they had finally found a new home. The bigger and better Black Lodge would relocate in a storefront at 405 N. Cleveland. The completely new space will include not only the legendarily huge video collection for rent, but also an arcade with new and vintage video games, and a combination movie theater and music venue in the back.

Evil Dead

Once the new Black Lodge was in operation, Martin says he envisioned a weekly event called Cinematic Panic that would be in the spirit of the old days of cinephiles daring each other to watch the unwatchable. “The idea was to show the most weird, off-putting, bizarre, uncategorizable movies I could find.”

But while he was helping Memphis filmmaker Chad Allen Barton with the Piano Man Pictures Roadshow, a touring retrospective of films created by the collective, Martin says Barton suggested changing the concept. “He said something that struck me: If you do it every week, the shock loses its power.”

Barton and Martin set out to try something new: a film festival dedicated to outré cinema. They scheduled the first Cinematic Panic festival for October, when the new Black Lodge was scheduled to be completed, and called for submissions. “We wanted to see what we can find here locally, and as far as our reach can muster,” says Martin. “That turned out to be global.”

From Beyond

Barton says they were unprepared for the more than 300 submissions they got from all over the world. It was an avalanche of the kind of movies that rarely get screenings in conventional festivals outside of midnight slots. “Everybody wants to be Sundance,” says Lodge co-owner Danny Grubbs.

“We’re underneath Sundance,” says James Blair, Lodge partner and chef who is designing the menu for the new kitchen. “We’re in the sewers of Sundance. That’s where you’ll find us.”

Last House On The Left

Martin says movies intended to unsettle have been around the beginning of cinema. “What does Edison first shoot for? A version of Frankenstein. Shock and horror has been a staple of fiction since drawings on the cave. We look back at the Edison stuff, or look at Nosferatu, or “Un Chien Andalou” by Dali and Buñuel. These are all films that were trying to explore the newly created concept of cinema, and asking, how far can this go? Can we shock and terrify with just images and sound? The answer, of course, was a resounding yes.”

But the Black Lodge team was dealt setback after setback as they tried to create the new space. “We’ve been panicking for a year and a half at this point,” says Blair.

‘Return of the Flesh Eating Film Reels’

Grubbs says the construction is “80% done.” The 6,000-square-foot space lacks internal walls, but the floors, plumbing, bathrooms, and other critical systems are already complete. When it became apparent that the store would not be complete in time for the scheduled film festival, the team did some soul searching and decided to stage it as a pop up event in the cavernous space as a thank you to the Black Lodge faithful. “People have waited a long time, patiently, for the new Lodge to be built,” says Martin. “We don’t get to be public about its development very often. We knew everybody was anxious, so we decided to give them a glimpse. Come inside the space and watch movies on this massive screen. Get a feel for what the Lodge is going to do.”

Running five days starting Wednesday, October 24th, Cinematic Panic is jam-packed with classic weirdness and new strangeness. To set the tone, the first night will feature Videodrome, David Cronenberg’s landmark mashup of body horror and mass media theory, as well as David Lynch’s little seen 2002 “sitcom” Rabbits which stars Naomi Watts as a humanoid rabbit.

Cinematic Panic Film Festival Brings The Weird

Other werid classics screening include Todd Solondz’s 1998 black comedy Happiness, Peter Jackson’s perverse puppet show Meet The Feebles, the 1986 H.P. Lovecraft adaptation From Beyond, Sam Rami’s groundbreaking comedy horror Evil Dead, and a pairing of Last House On The Left and Audition. “[Last House On The Left] is a brutal film by anyone’s standards,” says Martin. “It’s a difficult watch. But it’s 40 years old, and as relevant as ever with its comments on assault and sexual trauma. It’s one of the films that changed horror from the old school world of monsters and castles to the monsters next door to you. Then we chose Audition because of the role reversal of female as tormentor.”

Memphis made movies include two features: Barton’s satire Lights, Camera, Bullshit and Jim Weter’s 2012 At Stake: Vampire Solutions. Among the 101 short films are John Pickle’s “Return of the Flesh Eating Film Reels,” and works by several Memphis filmmakers, including Ben Siler and Laura Jean Hocking.

Joe Finds Grace

Eight features will screen in competition, including Joe Finds Grace, a film Barton describes as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame goes on a road trip of self-discovery.”
There’s no jury, so winners of the short and feature competition will be determined purely by audience reaction.

The snacks Blair has prepared fit with the festival’s “I dare you” theme, such as chocolate covered grasshoppers and fermented Japanese string beans. There will be musical performances scattered in with the films, and Saturday night after Evil Dead, the festival will transform into the popular Black Lodge Halloween show, headlined by Negro Terror.

Grubbs says after the festival is over, they plan to finish construction and hope the new Black Lodge will be fully operational by the end of the year. This will be the first of many Cinematic Panic festivals. “We’ve got eight projectors, so we could do multiple screens in the future if we wanted to,” says Grubbs.

“No. No.” says Barton. “Please. No.”

Cinematic Panic runs from Wednesday, October 24 to Sunday, October 28 at 405 N. Cleveland. Schedule available here.

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Piano Man Pictures Retrospective Screening At Crosstown Arts

UPDATE: The Piano Man Pictures Roadshow screening has been postponed due to weather. According to organizer Chad Allen Barton, they are looking at rescheduling to “mid-February”.

The story of independent film in Memphis is the story of friends banding together to make the most of scarce resources and realize their dream projects.

Piano Man Pictures is the perfect example of how we do it here. It’s a film collective made up of young Memphis filmmakers like founder Shelby Baldock, Lights, Camera, Bullshit director Chad Allen Barton, fantasy director and Indie Grant recipient Rachel M. Taylor, cinematographer Stephen Lewis Hildreth, Charlie Metz, editor Stephen Teague, filmmakers Celeste Dixon, Thomas A. Hunt, Jordan Alexander, musicians Jacques Granger and Zach Glover.

This Saturday, January 13, the Piano Man Pictures collective will bring a selection of some new and old works to the big screen at Crosstown Arts. Short works screened will include Baldock’s existential horror “Faceless, But Remembered”, Taylor’s acclaimed fantasy short “Avarice”, Barton’s “H.I.D.”, and a conspiracy theory comedy by Teague called “The Price of Air”. There will also be sneak previews of upcoming works by Piano Man Pictures.

This event will also be the kickoff for an upcoming tour to take these films to cinephiles around the country. The program will start at Crosstown Arts at 7 PM on Saturday, Jan. 13. The cost is $10, and if you pay on the Piano Man website, you’ll be entered to win a $25 Amazon gift card.

Piano Man Pictures Retrospective Screening At Crosstown Arts

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Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo

Welcome to our final installment of the Indie Memphis Greatest Hits series, which brings our list of the top vote getters in the Best of Indie Memphis poll to the present day. If you need to catch up, here’s part one, part two, part three, and part four.

Lights, Camera, Bullshit (2014)

It’s hard out there for a…well, you know.

14 years after starring in The Poor And Hungry, Eric Tate joined director Chad Allen Barton and Piano Man Pictures to cast a satirical eye on the whole indie film thing. Tate stars as a filmmaker who comes to Memphis to make art, but finds himself constantly sidetracked by increasingly absurd obstacles. His boss is a delusional crook who wants to stay in business despite the fact that his business has literally burned to the ground. And he being hunted by a terrorist organization who wear masks of Presidents. Lights, Camera, Bullshit is a maze of jokes and old school indie surrealism that takes on the myth of the self-sufficient auteur. Tate puts himself in the tradition of Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd as the last sane man in a world gone nuts.

Comments from voters:

“The irreverence of the story to all things political as a subplot. The main plot was interesting, dealing with a power hungry record producer who hires a young man to work on a film who has his own ideas…. the diversified cast with so many fine performances. The Memphis locations were also a highlight…Also great photography.”

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo


Anomolisa (2014)

Being John Malkovitch and Adaptation screenwriter Charlie Kaufman used stop motion to adapt his stage play about a man drowning in depression who meets and briefly falls in love with a woman at a conference in an anonymous hotel. It’s safe to say that this is not familiar ground for an animation disciple best known for Ray Harryhausen’s skeletons battling Jason and the Argonauts. Anomolisa uses its formal tricks to great emotional payoff.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (2)

Movement + Location (2014)

Lots of people want to move to the big city, reinvent themselves, and forget their past life. That’s Kim Getty’s (Bodine Boling) plan when she arrives in Brooklyn. What’s different about Kim is that she’s from 400 years in the future, a time when the planet is overcrowded, resources are scarce and life is miserable. Who wouldn’t want to go back to the luxury of the early 21st century, when there was enough clean water to boil pasta? The problem is the past—which is to say, the future—is not done with Kim yet. Movement + Location is directed by Alexis Boling, and the combination of shadowy tension and Bodine’s intense performance made this low-budget sci fi a big Indie Memphis hit.

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The Keepers (2015)

The Keepers won the hearts of the Indie Memphis audiences in 2015 by exploring the relationship between animals and people in a humane and empathetic way. With subjects like the staff of the Memphis Zoo and a skittish teenage giraffe, getting people to care was a matter of patience and editing in this cinéma vérité tour de force. “It was a very tight edit,” says Joanne Self Selvidge, who co-directed The Keepers with Sara Kaye Larson. Amy Scott, who was our editor, is a total badass. She started with a 2 1/2 hour cut, and got it down to 70 minutes. I had done all the editing at that point, but Amy was wham bam thank you ma’am done. It was amazing.”

Larson and Selvidge started their festival run with a win at the Nashville Film Festival and made it two for two at Indie Memphis. The director/producers hustled to transform their festival wins into wider success. “We were able to secure national distribution, which was huge. We worked at that. We were approached by a couple of people who thought it seemed like an interesting film…” before signing with Vigil, Selvidge says.

Now on Hulu, the film got a name change to See The Keepers: At The Zoo. Selvidge and Larson were recently approached by Real South to air the film on more than 200 PBS stations across the country, and possibly internationally as well. The pair are currently back in the editing room creating a 56 minute TV version.

The Keepers – Festival Trailer from True Story Pictures on Vimeo.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (4)

Tangerine (2015)

The technological revolution that made the digital indie era possible has only accelerated. When Indie Memphis started, submissions were on VHS. Director Sean Baker shot Tangerine with three iPhone 5s, and it is visually beautiful. But it’s not the gimmick that makes Tangerine special, but the layered performance of Kitana Kiki Rodrigiez as Sin-Dee Rella, a transgendered sex worker just out of jail who tries to get to the bottom of her boyfriend’s alleged infidelity. Indie Memphis was lucky to get one of the defining moments of this film decade.

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Carol (2015)

Indie film hero Todd Haynes brought a Douglas Sirk aesthetic to this period piece of forbidden lesbian love in an America on the verge of a cultural revolution. The list of accolades won by the film is long enough to rate its own Wikipedia page, so if you haven’t seen it, you probably should. 

Voter comment: “One of my favorite films of the century so far, from its resplendently photographed Christmas-mode period trappings to its aching expression of unspoken longing to its “Brief Encounter” cribbing structure, “Carol” is my idea of pure heaven. It’s a coming-of-age story AND a midlife reckoning in which neither lead is a navel-gazing, dissatisfied man, and one of whom is Cate Blanchett. Need I say more?”

Cameraperson (2016)
Every filmmaker finds out quickly that you have to throw out perfectly good material in order to make the whole film stronger. Cinematographer Kirsten Johnson saved memorable shots and moments that didn’t make the cut from her twenty year career shooting all over the world, and then put them all together in this tribute to the emotional power of collage. Cameraperson is one of my personal favorite documentaries ever to screen at Indie Memphis, and I was glad to see I wasn’t the only one that felt that way.

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Jackson (2016)

The human cost of the culture wars is front and center in this arresting doc about the relentless assault on women’s reproductive rights in Mississippi. Jackson won Best Documentary Feature at Indie Memphis 2016, and it’s currently finding a national audience on Showtime.

Voter comment:
“This documentary pissed me off and made me feel hopeless, but it also encouraged me to talk to strangers about these feelings. Our national apathy (veiled contempt?) directed toward women and their bodily agency is unacceptable, particularly when it comes to poor women of color. Jackson didn’t flinch.”

“On The Sufferings Of The World” (2016)

Filmmaker (and Memphis Flyer contributor) Ben Siler is one of Memphis’ most prolific filmmakers. His work got a lot of votes in the our poll, and unexpectedly “whichever Ben Siler film gets the most votes” was a fairly common response. I’ll let his fans speak for themselves:

“Ben Siler was always an unsung hero for me in Memphis movie-making. His strange and unexpectedly poignant short films were always favorites of mine.”

“Just everything Ben Siler’s done. He’s one of the few filmmakers, in Memphis or elsewhere, with a truly unique voice.”

“Ben Siler should be at the top of every list. I idolize him as an experimental filmmaker.”

“Ben Siler is literally a genius and all of his films should be in the Smithsonian.”

The Siler film that closes out our list of Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits is one of the most radical works ever produced in the Bluff City. Funded by IndieGrant, a program begun in 2014 to give competitive grants to Memphis filmmakers, it’s a collaboration between directors Siler, Edward Valibus, actresses Jessica Morgan and Alexis Grace that started when Siler wanted to marry images with philosopher Arthur Shopenhaur’s essay “On The Sufferings of the World”. It’s most striking feature, the layers of images that are similar but not quite the same, came about when Valibus and Siler were trying to reconcile different cuts of the film. It’s a haunting, beautiful end to our retrospective of the best films of indie Memphis’ first twenty years.

On the Sufferings of the World from Edward Valibus on Vimeo.

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