FROM THE DIRECTOR
The Story of Jews at Sea
Since my tenderest days as but a wee Jew, I've wanted to be involved with movies. In high school, a few friends and I pooled our wits and concocted our own full-length feature, Now Leaving Handeyville. I was the esteemed co-writer, co-director and co-star of that early-'90s classic of VHS cinema, and so enchanted were we with what we had crafted that we spent the entire summer after I graduated making the sequel, Jurassic Pork. (That was the same summer, in case you couldn't guess, when Jurassic Park was released.) Irrevocably bitten by the movie-making bug, I marched off to college and took very little interest in just about anything except whatever movie-related courses I could plunk myself into. One of those was Documentary Production ... something I never really thought was especially up my alley, but which did in fact concern the making of movies, so I was on board. As it turned out, that class shaped my destiny in more ways than one: It was therein that I teamed up for the first time with Todd Gilchrist, who would go on to play one of the biggest roles in my life and in paving the road to Jews at Sea.
After college, I didn't know what to do. I spent a year trying to figure it out, during which time I managed to land a brief gig as a p.a. on Patch Adams. Finally, I decided I was going into the master's program for screenwriting at the University of Miami. The next summer, I picked up another p.a. job, on The Green Mile. And then I decided I didn't want to go to grad school anymore. But I stayed in Miami. And Todd joined me there. Why he chose to join me in Miami I may never know, but had he not, I'd almost surely still be there, languishing away waiting tables or some other thing having nothing to do with movies. For two years, that's essentially what we both did—until Todd finally threw down the gauntlet and declared that we were moving to L.A. or bust. It was 2001. We made all our arrangements, and were set to hit the road ... and then 9/11 happened. But we were undeterred. It was surreal times, and if we were hazarding something as crazy as moving across the country with no plan as to what we were going to do once we got there, it seemed oddly apropos that we should be doing it then.
In L.A., we took up the same menial jobs we'd held in Miami, but we also connected with one of our old college classmates, Brent Simon, who was working as the editor of a weekly paper, Entertainment Today, where he gave us both the chance to start writing movie reviews and the like. We each parlayed that into other side writing work, all the while maintaining our regular shit jobs, and more importantly, always bandying about the idea of shooting a movie. I was heavily influenced by The Blair Witch Project, and the potential it opened my eyes to for using a lack of resources to your advantage in conveying the right premise. So Todd and I were on a mission to dream up the right premise. We had an idea. It wasn't bad. I bought a video camera, and we even took a trip to Vegas and began shooting it. Ultimately, that was about as far as it got.
However, over Thanksgiving of 2002, myself and a number of other relatives converged on my parents' house in Charlotte, N.C., and I brought my new video camera, intending to gather some footage for possible use in the fledgling production Todd and I had cooking. I shot some stuff, not really having any idea what I might do with it, but if nothing else, I had caught a few funny moments on video. From there, I flew down to Miami for more holiday time with yet other family folk, and when we viewed what I'd shot in Charlotte, we were all a little dumbstruck by just how funny it actually was. It was very much akin to seeing a real-life Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm play out. We couldn't stop watching it, and we couldn't stop laughing.
Meanwhile, a big topic of conversation during that trip was my grandparents' upcoming 60th wedding anniversary and the plans that were being put into place for all of the immediate family members to go on a cruise together the following summer to Alaska as a means of marking the occasion. A lightbulb ignited in my head: If that little bit of video I'd taken in Charlotte of just some of the people who'd be part of this outing was any indication, the prospect—not to mention the sheer absurdity—of all of them assembling on an ocean liner of all places for an entire week presented an opportunity clearly not to be passed up. It was sure to be lightning in a bottle, and to not capture every possible second of it would be a certain travesty.
So I had found my right premise. All of the key ingredients had serendipitously fallen into my lap: It wouldn't cost a thing, the home video camera aesthetic was virtually essential, I already had the video camera, and practically all I was going to have to do was turn it on and gold was bound to throw itself at me. I could even put some of what I'd learned in that documentary class in college to use. And then an interesting new dash of elixir got thrown into the cocktail: During the months leading up to the big cruise, I nabbed my most major freelance writing gig yet, for the one and only Adult Video News (AVN). I had become a porn reviewer. And while I certainly didn't want to turn down any work they saw fit to throw at me, I also wasn't ready at that point to fill my entire family in on this particular venture. The rub, though, was that they were throwing so much at me, it became an unavoidable surety as the cruise approached that I was going to have to take some of it with me. Meaning I'd need to do my best to hide what I was working on from everyone. Now there were actual stakes at hand.
And so we embarked on our family cruise to Alaska, and not only did the wackiness exceed my wildest expectations, but some rather serious developments took shape as well that, while causing all of us a good bit of concern, rounded out what I had to work with as the makings of a far richer, more compelling storyline than I ever could have foreseen.
The Music of Jews at Sea
The power brought to and upon any movie by the music used to score it cannot be overstated—it commands everything from the rhythm of the editing to the emotions a scene will evoke within the viewer. If employed effectively, it will become inexorably intertwined with the picture, like in the case of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" over the opening of Manhattan or Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" during the driving scene in Wayne's World. (How's that for an unlikely connection?) I was acutely tuned into this as a result of having been raised in a musical household. Apart from being full-time players with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, my parents—who got me started on the violin at the age of 3, something I stuck with all the way through college—formed their own klezmer ensemble, Viva Klezmer!, when I was about 9. In a very real sense, that music became somewhat of the soundtrack of my life. So it was not only fitting but downright preordained that it should also serve as the soundtrack of Jews at Sea.
At a certain point in the molding of the movie, I did find myself needing some non-klezmer music in a couple spots for reasons not all that exciting to get into. To my great fortune, someone I befriended early on in the porn industry was Jonni Darkko, a director who also produces original electronica that he uses in his movies. Jonni was among the first people to ever see Jews and he loved it. Since he'd been such an avid proponent of it, I asked him if he'd be willing to contribute a couple of his tunes to the cause. Without hesitation, he told me I could use anything I wanted. And much to my delight, the tracks I selected worked beautifully. In fact, the one I used over the closing credits, "Movin In," transformed them into a somehow wonderfully apt quasi-homage to one of my all-time favorite films, Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
How It Took 10 Years to Make
Well, you can't rush art, as they say. You also can't trump laziness and Adult ADD. And while all of those things were undeniable factors, an even bigger one all the way along was,
ironically, the above-mentioned lack of resources that made the movie seem viable from the outset. Probably the most scarce resource of all to me was time—AVN, of course, turned into my full-time job just after the cruise, and while I felt then and still do now like I had won the golden ticket, the fact is it's a very demanding job. If you'll excuse the obvious porny innuendo, it requires long hours, hard work, and leaves me with very little energy to devote to, well, anything. But whenever I was able to muster the motivation to put in some time on Jews, I did.
It took me about a year to produce the first rough cut of the movie, and when I showed it to people, I knew I had something special on my hands. It was met with an overwhelming roar of approval. But it was far from done, and I knew it. For starters, it was entirely too long ... pushing two hours if memory serves. And before I could dive into the nitty gritty of tightening it up, I was literally sideswiped by the most calamitous event of my life when a car hit me one night on the street outside my apartment, crushing my left hip and sending me into five months of recovery. Needless to say, getting back to work on Jews at Sea dropped pretty far on my priority list after that and remained there for quite some time.
Even once I had rejoined the living and regained some interest in tackling the project anew, I quickly discovered that I was at a bit of an impasse with it: I simply needed more computer power to go any further. Specifically, I needed more memory. And I didn't have any money to spare for it. Enter Kimberly Kane, the very first porn star friend I ever made and one of the biggest fans of that first cut of Jews. She was pestering me one day about how I had to finish it, and when I explained the problem, she offered to make a little investment in it herself. She bought me a hard drive. Thus, Kimberly Kane became the co-producer of Jews at Sea, and I was able at last to push onward.
As I worked on it off and on, I developed new ideas about how I wanted to shape it. I was unsatisfied with the way it looked—while the home movie form was inherent to its very being, I still wanted it to feel more movie-ish. Something I wanted to suggest visually if I could was the idea that in my own head I was placing myself into a living piece of cinema throughout the experience of the trip. For a time I was in discussions with someone about rotoscoping the majority of the movie, but that turned into a dead end, so I explored other ways of realizing my vision. I bought some new editing software and eventually a whole new computer, and I went about re-jiggering Jews at Sea for the third or fourth time from square one.
Along the way, there were a lot of nit-picky but very critical details that had to be addressed. Most significantly, there were faces that had to be obscured. Lots of them. An almost unending amount, it sometimes seemed. And the process of obscuring faces is, to put it in ever so mild terms, excruciatingly tedious. There also had always been audio problems that I'd attempted to clean up without too much success. Well after seeing a close-to-finished cut of the movie, another adult industry acquaintance (and close friend of Kimberly's), Eon McKai, volunteered to lend me a little expert help in that department.
As of this writing, with the making of Jews at Sea at a sweet, sweet end, it has been an ongoing labor of love for over a quarter of my life. Without exaggeration, I know every single frame of it like the back of my hand. What can I say? I'm a perfectionist ... to a ridiculous fault, I realize, but every step of the way, I held firm to the conviction that if I was going to do it, I had to do it right. And now I can finally say that it's where I want it. Or at least as close as it will ever be. So then, what lies ahead? First, shepherding this baby of mine out into the big, bad world. And then, eventually, heading all the way back to the starting line to get cracking on the sequel...
— Peter Warren Kavadlo