Some thoughts from the director...

So. Walking Shadows. Over the years I've been asked about this movie more than any other. The infamous Walking Shadows is the very first Look Sharp! production. It began shooting in the Spring of 1999. It has yet to be completed.

For a few years there, when people asked how my movie was going, it was Walking Shadows they were referring to. Eventually the question became, "Will that movie ever be done?" This wasn't a Heaven's Gate/Apocalypse Now-style runaway production. Walking Shadows was created as an independent study at Virginia Tech. It was a movie made for college credit. Because of it, Sean MacLaughlin and I graduated (with special thanks to Betsy Waterman and Jerry Scheeler for that). Conceieved as a mini-series, the script was enormous, and we shot most of it. Principal photography lasted three years. Every few months or so the volunteer cast of Tech students reconvened to have a Canon XL-1 camera pointed at them as they selflessly let a first-time director put them through the ringer of his learning experience. It was a lot of hard work and a lot of people did great stuff in it, for free and with a level of commitment that since then has only occasionally been matched, never exceeded.

So what happened? If anyone watches the director's interview on the FOOL dvd, the unfinished movie I'm talking about is Walking Shadows. What happened is that I cut the whole thing together on analog decks, the kind you might find at a public access cable TV station. The rationale was that I had over 60 hours of footage and no idea what the end result would be like. So I made vhs copies of all the footage (so I wouldn't wear out the original mini-dv tapes) and spent the better part of 2001 splicing. I still have all those old cuts; the one that's basically a single four hour feature film, the incomprehensible ninety minute edit, every version except the one that broke in my VCR over Christmas vacation (e.a.c. You kept me from collapsing that night, and I'm still grateful). When I figured out just what this movie was going to be, I moved to digital. I set up residence in the Virginia Tech New Media Center and cut most of the epic using the Media 100 editing program. I stored the enormous project on a Sancube, which I'm not even sure they make anymore. Hopefully they don't make this model; the bastard crashed and in a few seconds took out a year's worth of long hours spent in an editing booth roughly the size of a closet. People ask me why I didn't back up my work. The project media alone took up 300gb, if anybody wanted to buy me another 300 gigs worth of space I would have accepted. After the crash I was given the opportunity by the people running the NMC to save my work on their teraserver. When a couple of drives crashed a year later, mine was one of only two folders that couldn't be rebuilt. The digitzed footage, the scenes I had cut, all unrecoverable. I had lost the movie again.

I gave up. I couldn't go back through all those tapes again, I was exhausted. That was late 2002. "When is the movie going to be done?" sounded like how long is left on your sentence? I couldn't bring myself to get excited about the film. I abandoned it, and proceeded to make FOOL, which has gone on to be my most well-known and popular production to date.

So where does that leave Walking Shadows? The movie is and always was a hard sell; existential quandries and disaffected youth explored through a cold, brutal slasher flick. A mini-series in two feature-length episodes that doesn't even reveal the true nature of the plot until the second installment. A dialogue-heavy character study with thirty speaking parts but no production value or budget to speak of. Deeply personal material staged as a genre film with no irony. A college movie that makes sex and drugs look like no fun. Just how many marketing proflies can I alienate with a single production? But Walking Shadows is still the most important movie in my own personal growth. It's how I learned most of what I know about constructing a narrative film. Because of it, I decided to consciously tackle more universal themes and more humor in the next flick, resulting in FOOL, and many cast members of that twisty romantic satire met me one way or another during Walking Shadows. And honestly, when I look back, some sequences of Walking Shadows represent the purest and best film-making I've ever done.

So will it ever be finished? Will any of those people who watched my first digital cut of Part One (still got it on VHS, in a crate in my house) ever see Part Two and figure out just what the hell was going on? Will Dreagn Foltz, Kati Barefoot, Kelly Finnegan, Mark Raterman, Casey Braxton, Charles Leonard, Anna Evans, Anne Bovard, Dave McKendry, Sean MacLaughlin and everybody else who worked with me on that flick ever have a DVD of it sitting on their shelf? Well, I'll let you in on a secret... over the years, while working on other projects, I've cut together new versions of a few scenes from Walking Shadows, here and there and out of order, using Final Cut this time. It's still a strange flick, clearly a first film, but when it works there's something fascinating about it. People who have seen parts of it have found those parts hard to shake.

So we're going to keep the official status of Walking Shadows as In Post-Production. The flick has not been abandoned, and one day some version of it will be complete and available. I don't know when, but any updates will be announced here on the site. When I get a little more footage digitized I'm going to cut together a new trailer, and maybe I'll put some of those scenes online as well. We'll see. I'm still grateful to everyone who helped me with it, and the persistence of their interest is what keeps me wanting to revisit the flick. There's a lot there for me, too... it's my first movie and a pretty incredible indication of who I was and what I was thinking way back when I was 20 years old. I want it finished, and seen.

When that's going to happen, you'll be the first to know.

Jack Bennett 9/17/06