Q&A: Disappearing Act

On page 56 of its Jan. 26 issue, Newsweek ran a story about
the makers of “The Blair Witch Project” with the
following introduction, parodying the film’s opening title
card: “In January 1999, “˜The Blair Witch Project’
debuted at Sundance. The movie went on to become a cultural
phenomenon and make $250 million worldwide. And the directors and
stars were never seen again.” When “The Blair Witch
Project” left theaters, it was the biggest-grossing
independent film of all time (It has since been passed by “My
Big Fat Greek Wedding.”), and its three stars and two
directors seemed destined for immediate Hollywood stardom. But that
didn’t happen. Instead they all faded out of the
public’s consciousness as quickly as they came in, a seeming
testament to the absolute fickleness of the film industry. But when
I met Dan Myrick, who cowrote, directed, and edited the film with
Ed Sanchez, his friend and partner from film school, he
wasn’t upset about it. Instead, a relaxed Myrick ““
slouching in his chair and dressed modestly in olive-green khaki
cargos, a gray Gap sweatshirt and Sketchers sneakers ““ told
me the real reasons for his elongated absence from the spotlight.
They were more internal than external. “I’d rather make
10 great films than 50 OK films at the end of my career,”
Myrick said. “I’ll be perfectly happy when I’m
old and gray to look back on a handful of films that I’m
really proud of.” Through most of the two-and-a-half-hour
interview, conducted as a part of the English department’s
Art of the Interview seminar, Myrick rambled. Short questions
yielded long answers that jumped from subject to subject, but never
without a connection. His style of speech parallels his
professional life. After a few failed projects after “Blair
Witch,” including a romantic comedy called “Heart of
Love,” Myrick now seems set with his next work, an ambitious
episodic series about L.A. County’s own Venice, titled
“The Strand.” Every network passed on it, but just as
the maker of “Blair Witch” would do, he’s
independently financing it and making it anyway. After all, one of
Myrick’s film professors at the University of Central Florida
called “Blair” the “lamest idea”
she’d ever heard. At once proud of
“Blair’s” success and aware that it probably
won’t happen again, Myrick’s mind is on the future,
even if everyone else’s is on the past. In addition to
“The Strand,” Myrick is also working with Sanchez and
Lion’s Gate Films to develop a “Blair Witch”
prequel. He hopes it will wash away some of the memories of the
universally disliked “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,”
which neither he nor Sanchez had anything to do with. Regardless,
he’s come a long way from his first claim to fame of putting
together red-carpet clip videos for Planet Hollywood restaurants.
Thanks to “Blair Witch,” the restaurant chain’s
bankruptcy won’t affect his employment opportunities.
“¢bull;”¢bull;”¢bull; dB Magazine: Why haven’t you made a
high-profile movie since “The Blair Witch
Project”?

Dan Myrick: “Blair” was a blessing and a curse, pun
intended. It made me enough money to be comfortable. I can live a
normal, middle-class lifestyle and not have to do any work that I
don’t want to do. I wake up every day counting my blessings.
I’m just very selective about what I do and get involved
with. I’ve had lots of offers to do bigger films. I like the
freedom and liberation you have (in) being able to say
“no” in a meeting, being able to walk away and say,
“I don’t need this. I don’t like it, and I
don’t feel good about it.” The only way you can do that
is to not be relying on that guy to pay your mortgage. I have the
same car I had before “Blair Witch,” and my wife drives
a beat up Tercel, but we’re perfectly happy.

dB: What drew you to “The Strand”?

DM: A lot of things in “The Strand” are wonderful
anecdotes that I’ve heard from other people. It’s just
our job to listen. I love that. The simple things in life are also
the most interesting. One of my favorite characters “¦ is
Isabel. She’s a 70-year-old, washed-up ’50s movie star
who still thinks she’s a movie star. She still lives in that
world. She falls for this Nicaraguan immigrant kid that’s in
town looking for his mother. He’s walking around, speaks very
little English, showing this picture of his mother to all the
vendors in Venice. Eventually he goes into this hair salon where
this woman is getting her hair done, and he recognizes her because
where he’s from, all the movies that he sees are these third-
and fourth-run ’50s flicks with her in the starring role.
He’s had this infatuation with her as a movie star all
through his childhood, and there she is, as a 70-year-old, but he
doesn’t care. He’s freaked out. So here’s this
immigrant that doesn’t speak a word of English, and
he’s the one person in Venice that recognizes her.

dB: Is she your version of Norma Desmond?

DM: Well, her story was kind of based on the true story of a
woman that was an old B-movie star who got kicked out of her house;
developers were coming in to mow it down. It was a newspaper
article.

dB: Is there a market for that?

DM: I’d like to think that there is. I’ve been
reading that the whole 18-34 television audience is going away, and
nobody knows where (it is) going. Young people are going somewhere,
and no one’s watching TV anymore. I’ll tell you why:
Most of it sucks. That’s just a reality. I submitted my
script to a potential sponsor (who) sent it back to me and said,
“It’s too obscene.” It just has some cuss words
in it, and some kids are smoking cigarettes. There’s nothing
obscene about reality. I have skate kids that smoke pot and cuss.
Well, skate kids (in reality) smoke pot and cuss. I have homeless
people that look like homeless people. That sense of authenticity
is what is missing in television, and this audience out there
that’s becoming disenfranchised by what’s been fed to
them is hungry for something that’s identifiable.

dB: Is that the “new kind of audience” your Web
site says “The Strand” is for?

DM: I look at “The O.C.,” and ““ don’t
tell Fox (Television) I said this ““ not everyone looks like a
model. That’s not the way everyone looks. (In “The
O.C.”) the kid who’s from the other side of the tracks
has a $50 haircut. I don’t understand it. When I say “a
new kind of audience,” it isn’t really a new kind of
audience. It’s just that disenfranchised audience. “The
Strand” will say, “These are real people. Not
everyone’s beautiful.” If the networks won’t show
my show, fine. I would love to have a billboard on Sunset Boulevard
saying, “”˜The Strand:’ the show the networks
won’t bring you.” To heck with them. We’ll find a
way for you guys to see it.

dB: How?

DM: We’re starting off with the Web. We’ve got a
bulletin board, and we encourage the actors to participate and
develop mythologies for their characters and do just what we did
with “Blair Witch”: allow people to generate the buzz,
not the other way around. Let that be your marketing. Word of mouth
is the best marketing in the world. Hopefully, once we start
enriching the site with that material, people will start wanting
more, and then I can point to Investor A and say, “Hey, look,
we’re getting X number of hits a day, and I want to shoot a
couple more episodes.”

dB: If you find a fan base, would you fear an
“O.C.”-like trendy popularity?

DM: I have no problems with popularity, and popularity by
definition is trendy when you dissect it. “Blair” was
trend, but you give all the credit to the fan base on
“Blair.” We still have our hard-core fans that dial
into our bulletin board every day religiously. They know more about
“Blair” mythology than I do. They’re our versions
of Trekkies.

dB: Are these fans of the film or its marketing
campaign?

DM: That’s going to be the debate for centuries. As a
filmmaker, I’d like to say the film, but we went to great
pains to market it. The hype became bigger than the movie.

dB: How did you feel when people said that
“Blair” tricked them, believing the project to be a
hoax?

DM: It marginalized the film because it wasn’t designed to
be a hoax. But, then again, it was. I don’t have a
definitive answer because every interview I did explained the
process of how we shot it. You know it’s all fictional. We
weren’t trying to hide the fact that this was a narrative
film, but at the same time we went to great pains to make it look
absolutely realistic. Its being a hoax was a by-product of the
process. To pull a hoax, we wouldn’t have said anything to
anybody; we would let it go out there and do its thing and portray
these actors as if they never turned up.

dB: Have you ever played a real hoax on someone?

DM: In the late ’70s, I used to be into Bigfoot. This was
my first hoax; I go on record here. I made a fake big foot out of
plywood. And there was a creek behind my house, and I put the
footprints in the mud and called all my friends and said,
“Check it out. It’s Bigfoot.” And they said,
“It looks like a big duck.” I made a gigantic duck
print. I couldn’t get it right. It was a bad hoax. But I was
always fascinated by that type of thing. I guess
“Blair” was a logical extension of that.

dB: What makes you unique as a director?

DM: I horseback ride. No. It always surprises me whenever I work
with actors how surprised they are when I give them freedom. I
think a lot of actors go through a fundamental lack of respect for
what they do in this business. Why wouldn’t you respect that
process? The actors in that process are it; they’re your
movie.

dB: How do you find actors who can handle that
freedom?

DM: It’s sad. The audition process is the most practical
way to see a bunch of people in a short amount of time. It’s
not necessarily the best way to see what an actor can do. I go to
acting classes because you’re looking at the actors in their
more comfortable and natural environment. Some people just
don’t read well in front of three people sitting behind a
desk. Who does? It’s about doing a little bit of extra work
to find that actor, the real nugget of gold that’s out there,
that the system has become lazy in doing. I’ve got nothing
against the star system, but give me a little extra time, and
I’ll find the talent and pay a hell of a lot less money for
it, too. Casting a Tom Cruise is just easier.

dB: Are you Hollywood’s antithesis?

DM: Yeah, I think so. It’s funny because Hollywood is
comprised of a lot of really creative people. I’ve met some
wonderfully creative people in this business, and they shake their
heads as much as I do about how things get done in this town. I
don’t think I’m the antithesis to that group, that
creative strata. There are a lot of like-minded people out there,
but there are a handful of gatekeepers that do or do not get what
it is we do. Those gatekeepers sometimes don’t seem to get
it. I’m kind of the antithesis of that, but I jive with a lot
of people who are out there. It’s a very strange business in
that regard, where you’ve got these whacked out, creative
people having to work with these business-minded bottom-liners.

dB: What current creative work do you like?

DM: For television, I really liked the first season of
“24.” It went lame on me last season because it fell
victim to its conceit in the “24” premise, which was a
brilliant idea. But television is television. There’s not a
muscle in (the networks’) head that says, “Well, this
is only good for two seasons, and then we should cut it.” For
movies, it’s hard to pin anything down. I haven’t been
scared in a long time. I saw the original version of “The
Ring.” That movie freaked me out. The Hollywood version was
not bad as far as bigger budget Hollywood films go, but the
original version was pretty damn creepy. I get chills thinking
about it now.

dB: Did “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2″ scare
you?

DM: It scared me, but in a different way. That’s an
example of making movies for the wrong reason.

Foreword and interview by Jake Tracer, dB Magazine senior
staff.