Life and conflict in the streets... we've seen movies struggle their way through this topic before, and not one of them comes minutely close to capturing the brutal complexity and misdirected violence the lifestyle offers as raw and as candid as Threat has.
From the first scene in the opening series- the extreme camera angles, fast paced and elegantly written dialogue- and the outlandish actions of the characters, we know what we are to expect: An honest, unedited (as most Hollywood films [see: censorship] aren't) depiction of kids in the streets.
The documentaryesque story is centered around the lives of two completely different street kids (Jim: a quiet, young, homeless, kinda punk rock white boy and Fred: a black, too wise for his years, hip hop kid who is trying to support a family) who share, besides friendship, a common realization: the fact that different cultures, races, beliefs, and the mounting agitation between them is splitting up their already fragmented community. Their failed attempt to unite their scenes leads up to a full scale, bloody, riot.
Jim, who is attracted to Mekky, a violent, HIV+, sexually active, 16-year old girl, realizes that being close to other people in today's diverse society is hurtful, even perilous. Jim's straight edge friend Marco, along with several of his hardcore pals, forms an anti-drinking and driving "gang" who's main intent is pummeling intoxicated bar patrons as they leave for the night, before they get to their cars.
Kat is a bitter, sort of aloof girl who is harrassed to the point of violence by random strangers on the street and by her neighbor across the alley, who feels it necessary to masturbate out his window toward hers as well as perform other crude types of provocation. She snaps and gets her revenge in a great scene with a giant hook.
Meanwhile, Fred makes friends with Desmond, a rough cut black kid from Jersey who attempts to rob Fred's comic book store. Instead of arresting him, Fred spends some time trying to teach Des the error of his criminal ways. Each separate story dives deeper into the lives of it's respective characters and the plot begins to thicken and the tension builds.
Jim and Fred meet up with Des and his gangsterish hiphop crew and head to a hardcore show where Marco and his drunk thrashing buddies are at. The tension builds more and the threat of conflict is almost imminent.
One small action sets it all off. The two sides, Marco's straight edge gang and Desmond's hip hop crew are throwing down. Fists and knives are drawn, followed soon by guns and pipes.
The fight moves to the streets and it becomes every man for himself. To quote the synopsis (as I probably couldn't put it any better): As Jim and Fred find themselves in the middle of a full scale riot, they learn that there are some battles where you can't choose sides, you can only choose whether or not to fight.
I'm not sure what is happening with distribution, so seeing the film might prove difficult for someone in a town like Topeka. But, King's Mob production is taking Threat on the road following several film and music festivals. Who knows, maybe they'll end up in your town.
***************** INTERVIEW *****************
On the drunken icy streets of Park City, Utah is where my adventure with Kings Mob began. As not to bore you with every detail on how it happened, I will give you the short version of the "How Marko got to hang out with Katie and Matt" story. Again, we met Katie Nisa on the streets of Sundance, she gave us her flyer and said, "I made a movie, come see it tomorrow." The card was intriguing and colorful, we were stoked. That is, until we realized we were leaving the next day and wouldn't be able to make the screening after all.
So I went to their site when I got back to Hollyweird and wallah. I filled out the survey thing and got an @ mail telling me that Threat was coming to LA.
A few weeks later I was chatting with Katie and Matt Pizzolo, her partner in crime, at a hard core metal bar on Sunset that only served coffee and foo foo coffee-like concoctions. We chatted about life, bad 80's bands, "the business," Threat (which I had finally seen at a screening two nights prior), Kings Mob and its future, and how bad Sundance sucked this year amongst many other things.
buddyhead: So you guys met at NYU, right?
Matt: We weren't in film school though...
Katie: We were in writing school...
[We bickered for a bit about the 32,000 dollar a year price tag on NYU tuition as we sipped our Lattes.]
buddyhead: So, the script was just fucking great. Um, were the actors really actors, or just kids off the streets, or friends or was it mixed?
Katie: The only actors that were cast... I stopped, um, Keith Middleton (Fred) on St. Marks Place and I was like, "Hi, I'm making a movie and you look like the guy that the character's based off of. You wanna come down and do a reading?" He was all (she makes a happy face). He freaked out, said yeah. It turned out he was going to Stomp, he was in Stomp.
Matt: He was more of a dancer and a drummer. He never acted dramatically in a film before, and we hadn't seen Stomp yet, we didn't see it until we were almost done shooting, and he plays the wild child, like the funny character in Stomp, the fun one who sticks his tongue out to mess up the others dancing. So we were like, we would have never cast him for Fred if we had seen that first, and he did such an amazing job. But yeah casting was weird, we did get hundreds of headshots in the mail.
Katie: I auditioned three times.
Matt: We worked her hard man. We weren't fuckin' around.
Katie: I mean, I didn't want to suck and, I don't know... Cuz it's all based, the script is based on... Our experiences. So...
buddyhead: Yeah, I was gonna ask that: If it was based on past experiences.
Katie: Totally.
buddyhead: Like I read you (Matt) were living on the street and that you would sleep in buildings, like the scene with Jim sneaking into the office building.
[Matt nods his head.]
Katie: Yeah, it's really based... Kinda like, we took it to the next level... Like in my apartment building, I had this guy that would masturbate out his window at me and shine his light at me and would trace my face and I'd hang up all this shit; and he was like always invading my space so, it was very cathartic to finish him off. You know what I mean? I was screaming, "Fuck you, fuck you!" (as she beat him with a bloody hook) when we were shooting that scene, because it was just... We took everything to the next level.
[In case you are wondering, no Katie is not insane (she's actually quite intriguing), but her character was a bit, how should I put this, neurotic (and very well written). They go on to reiterate on how Threat was taken from real life experiences, and how the actions were, as Matt put it:]
Matt: Somehow, the movie really works by creating this false reality, so that people think it's documentary, that it's all improv, they think that's there's no script or anything. Which really blows my mind because it's so complex, there's so many things going on.
Katie: People ALWAYS think it's improv. It wasn't.
[It was just an amazing script. I complimented them for a few minutes before the topic of Sundance and the politics of the industry comes up.]
Matt: We didn't know when we were going into the whole Sundance thing... Like we didn't know... What it was all about, if it was gonna be worth it to go out there-
[It was worth it. They ended up renting out the local shoe store to screen their film. They stunned a lot of people by selling out four consecutive shows and getting acclaim from everyone who saw them. Still though, they learned that without an agent or a publicist behind you, it was nearly impossible to get into any festival. Over and over, the industry shunned them.]
Katie: Yeah, but that's like the story of everything. We wrote a freakin script and the myth is, or the story or how you 'do it in the industry is': You shop your script around. So, we wrote a script and started shopping it around. We weren't film makers, you know? And, the response was, "This is a really well written script, but it's too controversial," or... This one guy wanted to cut Mekky because she has sex, she's sixteen, she's HIV positive and that won't... That's just not done in the movies... We were still young and dumb and idealistic... So, we just looked at each other one day and were like, "Well, lets try and make it." We had the dumbest rationale, "I mean independent film exists so it can't be that hard."
[As they had already discovered, it was much more difficult then they could have ever imagined. They are proud (and they should be) of the fact that they came into the task with a different view, a different style. Neither had gone to film school and neither really had any film making experience. Their original idea was to shoot most of the film, then fill in the gaps with stock footage. "Totally renegade," as Matt put it.]
Matt: We also went in to it with a whole different style, cuz we didn't go to film school...
Katie: We didn't know how everyone else does it... So we made up how to do it, and that just worked...
[They ran into a film student during production who knew some of the technical aspects that the two of them were lacking and brought him on as the DP. Katie and Matt had a great script and a vision, but at that point, the new DP was the only person on set who knew anything about film making.
Soon though, as the shoot moved on, friends who had started helping out after hardcore shows or swinging by after work for a few hours became a full-fledged film crew and they were walking the walk, talking the talk and doing a great job at it. Kings Mob was beginning to come together.]
Katie: We had no one to record sound the first night, so my friend Marco came, he had to go to work, but he was concentrating on sound in school... So he...
Matt: He gave her a fifteen minute lesson on sound.
[Katie ran sound almost until the end of production. I brought up money and the problems of financing your own film. They summed it up in a few sentences:]
buddyhead: How was it coming up with the money. I mean, are you paying alot of bills now?
Katie: We started out with nothing, and now we still have nothing, but debt.
buddyhead: You have more than nothing, you have a great film.
Katie: Yeah, yeah... You know what I mean, we started out with no money...
Matt: Our electric was on. Now our electric is off.
[Then more into the struggle. They explained how Matt was working at a film co-op for free in exchange for night use of the rickety old equipment. On several occasions, Katie would sneak into law classes at NYU to learn the legalities of business.
The locations were mostly places that each of them had worked: A pizza shop, a comic book store, the fan zine store and even Katie's apartment (don't tell the landlord) where she would bring home leftovers from the little grocery store she worked at to feed the hungry crew (which grew to over 200, mostly young non-professionals) before they slept, most of the time no more than a few hours a night.]
Katie: One time, we blew the fuse and the whole building went out... It was this like old tenement in the East Village... We just plugged in all these lights... (They both laugh).
[I smiled through evading the cops stories and a bunch of recollections of how the neighborhood treated them during their year long shoot (many of the pedestrians and neighbors actually helped out in the crew or became extras, and even the cops eventually "turned the other cheek.")]
Katie: Random dudes would be directing traffic for us, telling people to walk around the other way and stuff...
Matt: But... We ran from the cops alot... The best thing was, one night Katie was doing one of her violent scenes and her face was covered with blood, so she kinda like wandered off set a little bit...
Katie: And the sun's just coming up...
Matt: Five in the morning, it's like the middle of Brooklyn and these cops roll by, they stop and they see her and they go, "Are you okay?" And she's bloody as hell and she's kinda dazed because we've been up for like a week straight. So, I come up behind her and I go, "It's okay officer, we're shooting a snuff film." And they just look at me like...
Katie: And they were ready to get out of the car. I was like, "You're such an asshole. God, he's such an asshole." And I had to be like, "No! No! Blah, blah blah..." But really, like, shooting around, because we were so small, we didn't draw alot of attention. We didn't close down blocks like everyone does when they shoot these.
[They had many more mischievous, partially illegal, and extremely entertaining tales (many would be proud): A slew of tickets for double parking, sneaking onto the subway to shoot a scene (normally the rate is two thousand dollars a day), shooting without any permits, stealing lighting from the new Kevin Costner movie (not a light, but they had lit the Brooklyn Bridge and Katie and Matt used it to beautify their bridge shot), and stealing gaffer's tape from Godzilla just to name a few.
They explained how thirteen year old girls were coming up to Katie after screenings telling her how much of an impact she had made in their lives and how she has taught them not to be intimidated anymore. The acceptance was overwhelming to them.]
Katie: As we were making it, more and more people got involved, and everyone somehow, magically, was REALLY talented... Other projects have evolved from the people coming together...
buddyhead: That's what it's all about.
Katie: That's how it sustained itself for three years, it was like... Somehow, even though everyone was from totally different worlds, we all came together, we had this common purpose, la la la... But...
Matt: So much energy shot out of it because there were so many talented people working together...
Katie: Meanwhile the whole industry, like people that we knew around were still laughing at us, patting me on the head like, "Oh cute little girl."
buddyhead: But how does it feel? You made a great movie, went to Sundance out of spite, sold out all of your screenings and pretty much scared the shit out of the festival directors and industry people.
Katie: We haven't really had time to sit and think about it until today, and as it sinks in we're like, "Holy shit, we made a movie..."
[The interview and the entire experience was such an inspiration for me (as I will someday make a film, damnit!) and this pair's belief in the DIY approach makes me appreciate the film that much more. Their outlook on the film industry was fresh and encouraging: Kings Mob is pushing for change within the independent film scene and is sharing their experiences of making "Threat" with others along the way.]
