Invasion Of The People Canners
Trying to remember just how this little cult film epic was made is a bit foggy now that some twenty-eight years have passed, but here goes.
Second year of Film Tech at Columbia College began slowly. After just making it out of Tech One by completing my Plainfield Farm film, I was ready to jump into another creative project as soon as I can. My new instructor was a Mr. Michael Ratagberger (sorry, that's how I remember his name. I really don't know how to spell it). He was a tall thin Brit who would often reflect on his past film appearances (most notably playing one of the infernal alien plants in the British film 'Day of the Triffids'). He was a nice enough gent but he did spew an attitude to the class of fresh students year after year. It always seemed like he wanted to be somewhere else instead of teaching the art of film. He was quite a departure from my previous and very helpful instructor Dan Dinello.
My first project this year was a now lost film short entitled 'The Nightmare Intrusion'. A Twilight Zone'esq tale of a man waking up in the night to the knock of a stranger delivering a letter of financial fortitude. Then being struck by a car on the way to the bank only to wake up in a cold sweat realizing it was only a nightmare just in time to hear that knock on the door again.
It was a cool ditty of a film,
and it's a shame it has become lost. I believe it was lent to someone and sadly
never returned. The film was also made with the help of some really great new
film classmates. Two in particular would then join me in making Canners, Richard
Lamberti and Bill Gudmundson.
Richard was a die hard Mel Brooks fan. We'd constantly joke around reciting various lines from Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety and even Get Smart. He had the twisted sense of parody humor that I was used to& wanted to be a part of my next film.
Bill on the other hand was just as twisted, by making
heads turn with his loud screams of 'Extraordinary' to his love and passion for
the Toho Godzilla productions. He was also
deathly afraid of the film 'The
Shining' just because of those two little twin girls. Just mentioning them to
him made him cringe in discomfort. Bill was also taking an animation class that
year so he was a great choice to work on the film's titles for us.
During the last part of the year the class was grouped together as in Tech One to make a final 10-minute film. But this year was going to be special, this would be the first time we'd make a film with actual sound. Not exactly sync sound, but sound used in our films for a narration or background music. That was good for all the other students who we're going to be doing documentaries on jazz bands, or poetic artsy fartsy films. But that wasn't good enough for us, we wanted to see our actors talk, but more on that later. After a bit of discussion the three of us decided to do a parody of a movie. Phillip Kaufman's Invasion Of The Body Snatcher's remake was recently being screened in theatres across the nation, so it was a simple target to choose. As in the original film, earthlings we're being turned into pod people, so the three of us decided to go in a more un-organic way. The earthlings in our film will be turning into cans. Our British instructor just didn't get it after we told him what we planned to do. He suggested we have the earthlings turn into watermelons instead. Like I said, he didn't get it.
Preparing to shoot the film was easy enough. The only thing we really needed in the way of props we're cans - lots & lots of cans. Within the weeks leading up to our shooting date we all started collecting cans. Pop cans, food cans, coffee cans, oil cans, cans cans cans!!!! Rich and I would come up with a script, Bill would edit the final film, and all of us would take part in the cast.
We we're going to be parodying the Body Snatches remake so it was decided that I take the lead. I did have a certain Donald Sutherland look at that time so that worked out well.
Cast in the roll of our heroin Elizabeth was Judy Parker, another classmate who had really nothing to do at the time.
Thinking back on it now I'm not sure where most of our ideas came from. I think Bill developed the 'Old Man' character based on a peasant character in the film 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'. One of the reoccurring lines was 'I just couldn't put my finger on it' and I think we wanted to actually see the character trying to put his finger on a can that was constantly moving away from him. Instead Bill came up with the idea of the Old Man scraping his nails across a blackboard. That sounded weird enough for us & we kept it. Bill also created the entire opening credit sequence. His animation talents helped the alien cans travel to earth to the music of the great Akira Ikufube. The 'No Place Like Home' montage sequence was created by chopping through my 16mm movie trailer collection & piecing together various visuals, again all edited by Mr. Gudmundson.
Shooting the film didn't take long at all and locations varied around the city of Chicago. Opening shot from the top of the Hancock Tower, Columbia's lobby, men's room, and registration office, Patricia Langley's apartment & courtyard, around the Buckingham fountain, the old original Navy Pier, and finally on the corner of Wabash & Monroe across from the Auditorium Theatre.
Filming that final scene was quite a fun situation. On that corner a building was demolished to make way for a new parking lot. We set up that mock bed in the middle of the rubble & shot the sequence as people passed by actually not taking much notice of us. We'll we did wave at some people on the passing elevated train once or twice. Those wacky 'You we're there' characters were played by both Bill & Rich, but also by Rich's friend Glen Selig & my ol' buddy Terrence O'Donnell, returning to another production by yours truly.
The big set piece of the film was the transformation from human to can, followed by the can attack on yours truly. The transformation effect was done pretty clever. We just filled balloons inside the clothes of the actors and once we started shooting we just let the air out of the balloons.
The can attack was done in reverse with pre set cans already attached to my body and pulled off with fishing line. When played in reverse it looked as if the cans were jumping onto my body.
Once the shoot was completed Bill took over the editing duties while I searched through my soundtrack collection to find some nifty score to go along with the film. Chosen was the soundtrack to the Body Snatcher's remake, Mel Brook's High Anxiety, and an old Andrew Sister's recording of 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game'. We then spent some time in the sound booth recording my best Donald Sutherland impersonation for the narration & various lines of dialogue. Opening narration courtesy of Rich Lamberti & 'Over the Rainbow' vocals courtesy of Miss Langley.
Once we had recorded the various sound bits we rented time in the sound studio & began mixing the film. The supervisor of the studio couldn't believe how many audio tracks we had for the film, much more than any film he had seen there at Columbia. See back then everything was on a film stock. There was the visual film itself that would be spooled on a projector, and then there was the audio film that was spooled on the various audio machines. We had five different audio reels, a presence track, a sound effects track, a narration track, a dialogue track, and a music track. All of them synced and playing simultaneously, as we would adjust the volumes recording it all onto a master reel.
Things we're going along well for us until the studio supervisor began to watch the film. See, I need to go back here a bit. Rich and I got the bright idea to pre-promote our epic little film in a very unique way. We had taken the cans we had used and placed them all over the school. After all, we didn't need them anymore. We placed cans in a few instructors' desks, in the elevators, balanced on top of pictures, along the hallways, wherever we could think of putting cans we put them. Then I took out a small ad in the Columbia Chronicle announcing 'They're Coming From Dead Space' - a take on the remake's tag line 'They're Coming From Deep Space'. So when the studio supervisor saw our film depicting cans taking over the world, he asked us if we we're the perpetrators. Without really admitting it we asked why. Apparently some of the higher-ups at Columbia we're searching us out and to possibly 'Black-Ball' us from College. Needless to say, our promotion techniques ended extremely fast.
Well, the film was completed & I believe we got a grade of B for it. B for Bad some may say. In fact years later when I met up with a friend of mine, who was attending Columbia, had told me that our film was screened in his class recently and is part of the schools library now. He claimed that the instructor stated that although the film may be humorous, it is not what he expects from his class. People Canners had become a film to show students 'How Not To Make A Film'. Hey I didn't care, at least it was being seen. I don't know if it's still in their libraries, but Rich, Bill & I all got our own 16mm copy for our very own. Only recently did I get it digitally transferred to DVD. Now twenty-eight years later, it has now been unearthed to spread horror among a future generation.
Invasion of the People Canners lives again!
Watch Part One!
Watch Part Two!
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Copyright ©2001 Roger B. Domian