Making Fluff

What follows is the mostly true, only lightly airbrushed, story of the making of the gay cult classic Fluff by Steve Hutton (writer, producer).

Spoiler warning: This article contains a few spoilers, but the worst of them have been removed. If you want more spoilers, see the major spoilers version.

"Hey kids, let's put on a show!"

Back a few years ago (let's not dwell on how many) when I was at the University of Waterloo, I belonged to a musical comedy group. It was a lot of fun, and I got to work with talented people like R. J. Currie, Drew Post, Ronald M. Green, and Sheral Lynn. Later, whenever I saw an ultra-low-budget movie (like El Mariachi or Clerks), I would ask myself "Why don't my friends and I do that?"

Finally, in the fall of 1999, I talked with my nephew, Gregory Duke, who was studying drama at the University of Guelph. I offered to write a comedy film for him to direct. We could cast it with his friends from drama shool and my friends from Kitchener-Waterloo Little Theatre where I used to be President.

At this point, I knew that the story would be about some guys who make an amateur porn movie and there'd be a scene where a woman gets into a highly compromising situation while her husband watches. And I knew whose situation I wanted to see highly compromised: Julie Liz Taylor. I didn't know how I'd use her husband, Jonathan C. Dietrich, but I was sure I would write something good for him. J&J said they'd love to do this sort of film, and introduced us to Peter Lee Cameron, who I'd seen onstage in a couple of shows (and maybe swooned over) but never really met. It looked like we had a lead.

"Even the orchestra is beautiful."

Robert Rodriguez says you should write your ultra-low-budget film script around what you have. He had a turtle, a guitar, and a Mexican prison and wrote El Mariachi. What did I have?

Well, there's David Welbourn, an actor whose distinctive voice and manner mean that he's usually cast as a child, a woman, or a space alien. I figured he'd jump at the chance to play an adult male human. (David is supposedly "difficult to cast", but I would love to have a dozen more actors who stand out from the crowd - especially if I can write the role for them.)

I had a friend who played in a German-Swiss band. They might be a bit conservative for this film, but I wrote them in anyway. I also knew a really cute teller at my bank who's an actor/pop singer/opera singer: Rafael Araujo. Greg and I did some thinking about how we could use a polka band and some opera singers.

"Mars Needs Women"

At the start of January 2000, I finished the first draft. I asked a bunch of people for comments, including an old friend who'd gone to film school in England (someone who actually knew something about making movies!), Stephen Hull. I figured he was out of my league (and continent) for this film, and I already had a director anyway, but he might want to direct something for me in the future. He gave me detailed, occasionally brutal, feedback and then asked if he could edit the film. Yes!

Steve suggested adding a subplot, by which I assumed he meant adding mimes - so I wrote in a couple. In case he really meant "subplot", I decided to add a group of people who wanted to do something other than make a porn film. I had a lot more male roles than female, and I expected lots of talented women to audition, so my subplot should involve new female characters. And what would these women want to do? For some reason, the words "feminist opera" popped into my head.

I then made a fateful trip to Kitchener to see Janelle Wielhouwer and Caitlin Glasson. I wasn't sure where to go with my feminist opera subplot. Cait said, "They're writing the libretto by consensus." I asked Janelle what people say at feminist meetings, and she gave me "check in, my cat died" and "before we go any further, I need to address the male energy in the room". I decided I'd better sign them up as feminism consultants: "There's no way I'm taking the hit for this alone!"

On the same visit to Waterloo, I mentioned to Christa Ptatschek that I would need someone who looks good with a breastplate and spear. I also chatted up two of KW Little Theatre's technical wizards: Angela Chambers and Jordi L. Mendoza. Christa and Angela later convinced Richard Injen to contribute his unique skills.

Meanwhile, I was talking about Fluff to everybody who'd listen, including my co-workers. A bunch of them ended up taking parts, including: Dan Price, Chandra McKelvey, Dana Sixty, and Blair Kenneth Adamache.

I also got locations from co-workers Kali Hutton (no relation) and Barbara Fryer, from my dentist, and from the gay erotica emporium Priape. Throughout our shoot, my crew couldn't believe how friendly and cooperative our hosts were. I agree, but wonder if they were asking "why are Steve's friends so nice?" or "why are such nice people Steve's friends?"

We also got permission, but not in writing, to film the theatre scenes at the University of Guelph.

"I am big. It's the pictures that got small."

In April 2000, we held auditions in three cities: Toronto, Waterloo, and Guelph. We had specific people in mind for some of the roles, but the auditions were completely open: anyone could audition, every part was open, and nobody was guaranteed a part. In a couple of cases, auditioners were so good that they bumped aside people who we had already "pencilled in" for a particular role.

Each auditioner had a 15-minute slot to fill out some paperwork, do their audition piece (if they had one), and read from a couple of parts for us. The paperwork included questions like:

• Are you willing to appear in the film wearing only underwear?
• Are you willing to do a nude scene, filmed from an angle where "everything" isn't seen?
• Are you willing to do a scene where you pretend to have sex with a man?
• Are you available the first four weekends in July?

We described Fluff as a very gay, very sexual comedy but not a porn film (no real sex, no full frontal nudity). Somehow this message didn't get through to everyone: some actors expected a script with guys who just hug a lot, and some of them to this day believe we were trying to trick them into doing porn.

The Toronto audition brought us many fine actors, including Tal-orr Maisner, Malcolm Gow, Jeff Hodgins, and Anthony Bragg. One actor, Jay Cormier, performed a wonderfully psychotic audition piece, so we cast him as the ultra-bland Derek. I also phoned a legend in the Toronto gay theatre scene, Harold B. Desmarais, and begged him to audition.

We recruited a lot of our cast from student actors at the University of Guelph, including Lucas Raymond, Laurie Ann Jones, and Marc Apollonio. When Donovan Woods gave us a spirited performance of The House of the Rising Sun, we knew we had our Auditioner 6.

We found half of our cast in David Welbourn's apartment (the Waterloo audition), including John A. Strucke, Kara Johannson, Dawne Stevenson, Tracy Grieves, Alex Wielhouwer, Greg Morey, Anthony P. Fejes, and Darrie Hope.

I went looking for some Beethoven music for the climax, and found two labels that offered a good recording, acceptable terms, and a price that's painful but not life-threatening. (I later heard from a couple more.) I gave Greg his choice, and he picked the recording of Gustav Mahler's 1895 re-orchestration of Beethoven's 9th from Bridge Records. We were very happy to do business with a classy independent label like Bridge.

I recruited four excellent musicians to pretend to be musicians: J. Marshall Freeman, Michael R. Brown, Karen J. Greene, and Daniel B. Scott. Marshall also offered to write a love theme (Epic Love) and compose the score, and suggested I get his friend Robb Gorman to do makeup.

"I'm sorry, show business isn't for me. I'm going back to Allentown."

Back when we did 100-character shows at university, we had a rule: everyone who auditions gets a part. Not necessarily a big part, or a singing part, or a dancing part, but a part. For a major motion picture, things are different and we planned to audition at least two people per role. But, that's hard to do when you have 50 parts and a script full of gay sex. Greg and I ended up with essentially the same number of auditioners as roles. If we changed Auditioner 10 from male to female (which is funnier anyway), we could offer everyone a part.

We settled on the roles and prepared to deliver the good news. Then Greg got a message from the university student who we cast as Will. (No, it wasn't the cute bank teller. I kept going to the bank and not seeing him. I didn't want to make trouble for him at work, so I didn't ask his co-workers where he was.) Our actor couldn't get the weekends off from his summer job. If you cast people with no money, and you can't pay them, you're bound to lose a few when eating becomes a priority.

This wasn't a big problem. We had another very good Will in the cast. Since we hadn't told people their roles, he didn't even need to know he was our second choice. But this raised a question: how many people were we going to lose before this was through?

We gave everyone a copy of the script and gave them one week to confirm that they accepted the role. A couple of them declined, when they saw the amount of sex in the script. No problem, that's why we asked them to read the script. Some accepted, but later dropped out - which isn't quite as cool.

Fortunately, one actor we did have was Kate Beynon, who mentioned that she wanted to do production design and her mother owned an art gallery. The production team went on a rampage through Harbinger Gallery with Kate saying "This would be nice for Julian's place" or "How about this for Mom & Dad's kitchen?" She then called up the artists, and most of them agreed that we could use their work in the film.

"We don't like to pick up actors off the wharves, but we can't be choosy just now."

Since we cast everybody who auditioned, we didn't have any spares for people who declined their roles or accepted and later bailed. And bail they did. We lost a continuing stream of university students with summer job problems, people with bit parts who decided they really deserved something more fabulous, and (my personal favourite) people who just decided not to show up.

We lost our Zack when he decided that commuting from his summer job in Ottawa wasn't very practical. I hunted down actor/model/publicity hound Mark Henderson. (Publicity hounds aren't hard to find!) If you are short of people, cast someone like Mark who knows everyone. Need a drag queen? No problem: Michelle DuBarry. Someone who can share the screen with a drag queen and not be overwhelmed? Johnny Paparazzo. A publicity photographer for the shoot? Maylynn Quan. Next time, Mark will be the first person I talk to.

Toy boys and fluffers are a lot easier to find than to keep. One guy smashed up his car and wouldn't be able to commute to Toronto, another had problems with his living arrangements that forced him to leave town, and a third couldn't reconcile Fluff with his schedule as a flight attendant. Eventually, Julie mentioned that she worked with a really cute deaf guy who would be perfect for a role with no lines: SPC. At another audition, the delectable Alain J. Arcand came along to keep a friend company and I persuaded him to audition himself.

We also had to recast a role with no words: Eusebio Machado, a role with only two: Béla Hegedus, and two roles with a spiritual dimension: Michael G. Bennett and Michael Albert Robinson.

We rehearsed every second weekend, and Greg did a great job. The only thing is, he never had the same cast for two consecutive rehearsals. We got Carmen Manuela to take portrait photos of some of the "auditioners", and hoped most would still be in the cast when we started shooting.

We had to fill two major roles just before our final rehearsal. Philip Cairns, who I remembered from a Shakespeare in the park production with (inevitably) Mark Henderson, took on the role of Julian two and a half weeks before shooting. Unlike just about everyone else in the cast, Philip had genuine film experience. We also lost our Will (by now, our third) and everything seemed lost when I went to the bank and saw Rafael. Two weeks and a day before the camera rolled, we got our fourth Will - the guy who I originally wrote the part for.

Through most of our rehearsal period, we didn't have a cinematographer. A Bulgarian friend mentioned a couple of his countrymen who lived in Toronto. We liked the idea of filming Fluff in socialist realist style, with beefy industrial workers and smiling peasant girls but it didn't work out. If we couldn't get Bulgarians, how about film students? A couple read the script (and their teacher agreed that they could use it as their project), but both passed. Finally, we went to a party for local filmmakers and somebody recommended Christofer Boehnisch, who had won Best Cinematographer at the recent On The Fly (films shot in one day) film festival. Chris accepted, so we had an award-winning cinematographer. He brought along his young ward, Sebastian Cluer.

A couple of weeks before we started shooting, Greg went to Ottawa for a film directing course. (A bit late maybe, but I still haven't taken a writing course.) He told everyone that he would direct a feature with 50 characters in a couple of weeks. At least one of them believed him: Angie Driscoll.

"Inconceivable!" "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Greg decided to do all the hardest, most embarrassing, scenes first (the exact opposite of what the film books recommend). That way, the rest of the shoot would be downhill - and, if anybody was going to bail over nudity at the last minute, at least we'd know before we shot them in the other scenes. July 1 and 2, we shot all the Mom & Dad's place scenes. We went late and made a mess with the feathers (which, it turns out, Rafael is allergic to) but we got everything shot except for some optional footage of the mimes doing the Ode to Joy. Everybody showed up, nobody bailed, the equipment worked, and, ten months after we did our fertility dance in their living room, Barbara and John had the first Fluff baby.

The next day, Monday July 3, was a Canadian holiday. We filmed the scenes that take place at Julian's, including the big party in the middle of the film. People were worn out and the apartment was hot. (To get reasonable sound, you have to keep the windows closed and the air conditioner off when the camera is running, and the lights and bodies all generate extra heat.) This would not have been a good time for an Entertainment Tonight reporter to ask everyone "what do you love most about your fellow cast and crew members?" But, with a bit of minor rewriting to allow for actors who had to leave early, we got everything shot.

Three shooting days down, and we had the biggest, most complicated, scenes in the can. The second weekend, we shot the "meeting with the stick figures" scene, plus a bunch of short scenes with only a few actors at Victor's apartment, the dentist's office, the bank, the doctor's office, the adult video store, and outside on the street. Malcolm Gow's gorgeous apartment served as both the bank and the doctor's office.

The third weekend, we planned to shoot the theatre scenes at the University of Guelph (an hour or so from Toronto by car). As the date approached, I started to worry that we didn't have an actual piece of paper saying we could shoot there. The people at UoG were great, but it would only take one uncooperative campus cop to ruin our shooting schedule. I asked Greg to gently press them to sign the location agreement. In retrospect, this was A Big Mistake.

The problem: no university (or other provincial government institution) will give you permission to shoot on premises unless you have $5 million of liability insurance. For the federal government, it's $10 million; for the airport, it's $25 million. So now, on Tuesday, we found out that we'd lost our Saturday location. My friends at the Staircase Cafe Theatre in Hamilton (another city an hour from Toronto by car) agreed to help us out. We just needed to schedule our shoot around their open house that weekend, juggle the work schedules of 20 or 30 actors, and make sure everyone who lived in Guelph (and didn't need a ride before) had one. Welcome to indie filmmaking!

We shot the "Mark & Phil at home" scenes Saturday morning, and the theatre scenes Saturday evening and Sunday. The theatre scenes include a whole lot of characters who have hardly any lines. We weren't sure they would all show up, and in the end Greg ended up filling in for one of them. We tried to convince some people from a local improv group to be "audience" extras but they didn't go for it so Jordi L. Mendoza and I were the audience.

The final weekend, we shot the scenes at Will's apartment (Mark Hendersons's place, with the M on the wall turned upside down), the lecture hall, Trevor and Amelia's apartment, Cyril's apartment, and the prayer hall. When we had a problem with the sound equipment, the nice people at Long & McQuade stayed open late so we could pick up a replacement even though it was somebody else's equipment that was broken. That sort of customer service will get you favourable mention on a film producer's web site! We also ran so late that we lost one of our extra missionaries - the only time my scheduling mistakes cost us a cast member. (As it happens, the communion scene looks better with four people anyway.)

It was a wrap.

"Want to buy some illusions, slightly used, second hand?"

We made a lot of mistakes, but in nine days we shot a feature film. (Some people say it's too short to count as a feature - there's no standard definition - but this is my web site, and I say it's a feature.) A feature film with 53 actors, locations in two cities, missionaries, mimes, feminists, a polka band, and feathers. Not bad.

The cast was a complicated mix of gay and straight (about half and half, for both the men and the women - we don't have an exact count because we didn't ask), experienced actors (mostly on the stage) and newcomers, Toronto people and small-town types, students and professionals. There was a lot of potential for conflict and "us versus them" thinking, but the cast and crew hung together remarkably well. (Some of them may not have been in love with each other by the end of the shoot, but it was never much of a problem.)

They seemed to remember the second paragraph of the actor contract:

Prima Donna Clause: I will show up on time and sober for my
rehearsals and shooting dates.  I will cooperate with all
of the other people involved with the film, even if they
are talentless hacks out to ruin my career.

Quotes:

1. Babes in Arms (and many other shows)
2. Cabaret
3. Mars Needs Women
4. Sunset Boulevard
5. 42nd Street
6. Showboat
7. The Princess Bride
8. A Foreign Affair