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5
Conversations premiered
at the Wichita Orpheum Theatre on May 28, 2005.
See
the complete cast and crew here.
The past few years have seen a decline in the frequency of Films On
Consignment projects, due chiefly to the success of the group’s
theatrical off-shot, Theatre On Consignment. With 5 Conversations,
Bailey was able to enjoy the best of both worlds.
The project began as an original play for the group’s “Poorman’s
Theatre Festival”, a yearly search for new plays by local writers.
Bailey submitted the play anonymously, and saw it selected for performance
in May 2004. Bailey then lobbied to direct the play.
“I always intended to try to stage it myself, and then shoot a
quickie film version,” he notes. “We’d done something
similar to that with Barrel, but on this one, I wanted to make it even
more a film of the play, with the entire cast intact.”
The play was performed, to great acclaim, on May 20-23, 2004. True to
his word, the “quickie film version” went in front of cameras
on May 27. First were two short evenings of the new “bookend”
footage that would begin and end the movie—scene showing the characters
before and after the events of the play.
On May 29, the cast and crew arrived early at Club Indigo, a bar in
Wichita’s Old Town district, for two long days of shooting.
“The entire play takes place in the bar,” Bailey says, “and
with the exception of the little bit of bookend footage, the film takes
place there as well. We were lucky that we were doing a film that the
actors had already performed on-stage, because normally you would have
to take over a bar for at least a couple of weeks to shoot the bulk
of a 100-minute film there.”
Two of the “conversations” (conversation two and four) were
shot in the first day, followed by the improvised interviews that begin
the film and provide voice-over for the bookend footage. “That
stuff was all improvised by the actors,” Bailey explains. “I
had a list of possible questions, but no one had seen any of them. They
were all expected to answer as their characters, and many of them provided
some of the film’s best moments.”
The fourth and final day of shooting (May 30, 2004) entailed the shooting
of three more “conversations” (conversations one, three,
and five), followed by the footage of The Bartender (Meridith Jones)
opening up the bar. The film wrapped by 6pm on Sunday, in time for Club
Indigo to open up for its Sunday night patrons.
“By the time the movie was shot, I was just tired of the material,”
Bailey says. “So we walked away from it for about six months to
get some perspective.” In early 2005, director of photography
Matt Frank (in his alternate role as editor) began assembling the footage
for the May 28 premiere at the historic Orpheum Theatre.
“We’re very proud of the film,” Bailey says. “I
think we started with a solid piece of material, well-acted by a top-notch
cast, and did just enough tweaking to make it feel like a film without
destroying what made it work on-stage.”
The film was presented by Films On Consignment and the Wichita Orpheum
Theatre's Orpheum Film Series as a joint fund-raiser on May 28, 2005.
Order
5 Conversations online from indieflix.com!