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'Urbania' director finds a new niche
San Jose Mercury News - September 17, 2000
BY KEVIN THOMAS
Los Angeles Times
"URBANIA," a young man's harrowing
odyssey in overcoming trauma, is an intense
experience and so, it turns out, is an interview
with the film's director, Jon Shear. "The movie
is about a man who has no control over his life
-- and I had no sense of control over the film
while I was making it," Shear said over a recent
breakfast at a restaurant in West Hollywood.
His movie, which has electrified film festival
audiences across the country, opened Friday.
"I had worked on it for three years," Shear
said. "I knew what I wanted, and I just had to
go with that. We had 18 days to shoot, we had
to do six pages a day. . . . It was shot like a bat
out of hell."
Stage actor
Shear, whose boyish looks belie his 36 years, describes himself with a
smile as "a lower-middle-class Jew from Brooklyn" and "one of
those obnoxious kids who acted, wrote and produced at Harvard,"
where he won prizes for writing and directing. But it was as a stage
actor that he first made his mark.
"I was at the right place at the right time," he said. "I got cast in plays
like 'Angels in America' and 'Six Degrees of Separation.' In 1979, I
was in the first play about child abuse, 'Runaways,' on Broadway."
While appearing in a developmental workshop of Daniel Reitz's
"Urban Folk Tales" at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, he
found himself envisioning it as a film that he wanted to direct. The long
journey to "Urbania" had begun.
" 'Urban Folk Tales' was very linear, composed of seven scenes, and
it would have to be completely re-imagined for another medium," said
Shear. "Reitz and I worked together for a year, and after that I
continued on my own. Having played the role, I had the actor's point
of view on the material -- that sense of free fall the man is
experiencing.
"What excited me was to try to take that subjective point of view and
express the extremes of this man's experience -- of finding the love of
his life and then losing it."
Folk tale
Shear also wanted to preserve the folk tale quality of the play. "Folk
tales seem patently absurd," he said, "yet are true."
Consequently, in the man's struggle to regain control of his life, he
encounters numerous bizarre situations. There are movies that are
more graphic than "Urbania," but few are so sexually intense.
It doesn't become clear that the leading character is gay until 25
minutes into the film. By that time, his life has been so richly detailed,
making it so easy to identify with him, that his story ultimately
transcends sexual orientation, even as the film reveals the darker side
of being gay in America.
Shear said that at one screening, a member of the audience called the
film the " 'Network' for the Year 2000," in that it's about a man's
arrival at the point where he's mad as hell and won't take it anymore.
Yet "Urbania" moves beyond anger and desire for revenge, landing in
a place where an individual moves past self-absorption to generosity.
When it came to casting the lead role of Charlie, Shear picked the
actor who had succeeded him in "Angels in America," Dan
Futterman, now a regular on TV's "Judging Amy." Shear compares
Futterman's performance to Hilary Swank's Oscar-winning turn in
"Boys Don't Cry" as Brandon Teena, the young woman who passed
herself off as a young man, and the comparison is apt. Charlie is not
pretending to be what he is not, but his rite of passage involves
confronting the same kind of destructive forces that in Teena's case
proved fatal.
Groundbreaking
"Urbania" is a groundbreaker not only for its storytelling methods and
its sexual candor but also in the way it was made. It was shot in Super
16-millimeter, which was both economical and flexible and provided
the kind of sooty color and grainy look appropriate to the film's
somewhat surreal quality, reflective of both the film's urban legends
motif and to Charlie's feeling that his world is crumbling around him.
Because "Urbania" has more than 1,500 cuts and because Super 16,
with its small image, becomes degraded in negative cutting and also
acquires a certain softness and heightened contrast in an optical
blowup to standard 35-millimeter film, "Urbania" became the first
Super 16-millimeter film to use the digital process as its blowup
medium. Shear predicts that this approach will swiftly become
commonplace, for it saves the filmmaker money while facilitating his
control over the editing process and simplifying the post-production
process.
Shear is already thinking about what he wants to do next. "I have five
scripts I want to do, and I'm primarily working on two of them," he
said. He would consider an acting role, but explained, "It's in directing
that I've found myself."
Copyright © 2000 San Jose Mercury News. All rights reserved.
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