The Making of the Manhattan Project

The Making of "the Manhattan Project"

By Peter John Ross

In January of 2000, I was working for a brokerage company and was just finishing up a yearlong merger. To say I was burned out is like saying "occasionally a boxer gets punched". I had a fixation with filmmaking, after hearing all the publicity about Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Edward Burns, and Richard Linklater it seemed the late 1990's was geared for no budget firsties that could get a studio first look deal inside of a few months. Of course, I didn't even have a few thousand dollars saved up yet, but believed the answer was to sell a screenplay for a significant amount of money (IE around $20,000-$50,000) and live on half of it and use the other half to finance my own "Clerks" or "El Mariachi" first feature. Sadly, for over a year, I had writer's block, so even that wasn't panning out so well.

Every year at Ohio State's Wexner Center For the Arts, they have a guest filmmaker come in & do a Q&A as well as a screening. This year (2000), it was my idol Richard Linklater who had done SLACKER, DAZED & CONFUSED, BEFORE SUNRISE, et al. I went to the event and Richard had a ton of great stories and was very influential - even more than I could have imagined. Afterwards there was a reception. Film school students bussed in from Ohio University and Wright State University to see him and the best they offered up question-wise was "Do you remember when you said the dollar bill was based on the Masons?" "Yes.", "I liked that part... thank you...". I waited my turn further away, waiting for the Chris Farley interviews to end. When we finally spoke, it turns out we knew a few of the same people in LA and talked for a while.

We eventually got on the topic of if I wanted to direct something. I said yes, but didn't have the money to do a 16mm feature. He got angry & told me to go buy a camcorder & make a movie. Rick said, "Which is more important to you, owning film stock or telling a story?" He also gave he advice I’ve been preaching for 4 years about learning the craft of motion picture storytelling a few minutes at a time before tackling a full-length feature. Short films teach you the basics and you learn from mistakes with a smaller audience before making a feature where mistakes can cost you a larger investment.

Two weeks later I was in production on not 1 but 6 short films. I broke the writer's block and wrote about what I knew... how much I hated Corporate America. Also, looking at people like poor Wes Craven who made it big as a horror director can never make a non-horror movie, so I wanted to use my "first time" to show some versatility since I wanted to do all kinds of movies. I choose to do a series called "Back Office", which included a chick flick love story, an action piece, a very slapsticky comedy, a cynical dark comedy, and a potty humor bit, which is the Manhattan Project.

Within two weeks of meeting Richard Linklater I had purchased a DV camera and had shot the first short, the Job Interview. For my very first experience, I used friends, not actors, and I shot it myself. Both of these steps were MISTAKES. I had no idea how to direct and I certainly couldn't get a great performance out of someone who does not act. I wound up editing out 75% of the written material because of my failings as a director (and writer in some cases). For the other shorts, especially the Manhattan Project, I wanted real actors. I started trying to find actors by asking everyone I knew if they heard of local actors.

When telling my one friend Mac about the short, he said he this large guy in the warehouse wanted to be an actor. I gave him my phone number. A day later he called me and said he did not have any experience but always wanted to do this type of stuff. I was thinking "Not a chance in hell..." and then he described himself as "The Fat Kevin Costner" and I said, "You're hired". Anyone with a sense of humor about his or her weight is exactly what we needed.

The rest of the cast came from a casting company out of Cleveland and they sent 3 guys down to Columbus on 11 hours notice. These guys were classy, even when there was NO PAY. We met at my house and did a rehearsal an hour before we went to the brokerage where I worked to film this. At the rehearsal, already the actors were doing variations on delivery on the lines I had written. They brought something tot he parts I had not considered. It was an eye opener to work with actors. I gave a lot of freedom to interpret as well as any input as to a history for the characters, not that this was an in depth character study. Paul, our fate Kevin Costner was delivering lines in a generic monotone, disinterested voice and it sounded like he was reading the Sunday obituaries. I was terrified, but it was too late to change my mind. We packed up to head to location.

No the script was entirely based on true events and stories. At the brokerage there was a guy who was a menace to the men's room. 3-4 times a day he would nuke the men's room and from the C.E.O. down to the mailroom guys, he was NOTORIOUS. People had discussions and bonding over horror stories of this guy's lack of bathroom etiquette. I formed a screenplay based on the best stories I had experienced and heard. There was a strange irony in filming this in the exact locations where this actually took place.

When it came time to shoot the bathroom scenes with Paul, I was nervous because the rehearsal was awful. When I said action and Matthias the Director of Photography hit the camera button, Paul came to life. He did NOT hold back. He started improvising lines and noises and we could barely hold ourselves together. Poor Vincent who plays the man trapped in the stall peeing almost burst a blood vessel because he had to not laugh for a 4-minute riff from our Fat Kevin Costner. When we yelled cut there was a 10-minute intermission as we all collected ourselves. We didn't do any other takes. It was too good and plenty of useable material. We did do coverage and some other angles, but the bulk of it was already in the can.  

All in all, we spent 11 hour shooting 3 shorts in 1 day in the office where I worked. I edited the piece over the ensuing week. I had it online shortly there after with a 5 minute 42 second run time. I put it on such sites as IFILM.COM, UNDERGROUNDFILM.COM (now.ORG), ANTEYE.COM, ATOMBOMB.COM, FILMFILM.COM, and tons more. I got mixed reviews and a lot of criticism, mostly about the bathroom humor and less about the filmmaking itself. I learned pretty quickly how to take criticism, as I got a LOT of it for this piece.

When approached by a short film distributor for TV rights in 2003, I felt it essential to re-edit the movie and re-edited it again. It's now a trim 2 minute 39 second short and yet the entire story is still there. I have honed my skills as an editor and gotten better as a filmmaker as a whole and I wanted higher quality product for TV and DVD distribution.

This movie is either loved or hated. People either like the bathroom jokes or they are so creeped out that they hate it with intensity. My job was done. The whole point was to make people cringe or uncomfortable. I was able to make a viewer angry or upset or nauseous - which is one of the goals of a movie - to make the viewer FEEL something they were not feeling before watching the movie. I had succeeded and understood the power of moving images and the words spoken by fictitious characters I had invented and actors help bring to life. I guess a part of me STILL loves getting reactions to this piece even though it's over 4 years old. When people get riled up watching it, good or bad,  I can only chuckle to myself and think "It's a movie... this was not real, so why are you so upset or grossed out?" then I laugh and laugh and laugh.