The Clean Dozen
After pledging to make 12 movies in 12 months, Hendersonville's Cring family completes its impossible dream
by Jim RidleyArticle Tools
- ...and One on the Goalpost? The Cast of Four on the Floor
In a career spanning almost 50 years, the late Stanley Kubrick directed exactly 13 features. In the years since 1973's Badlands, Terrence Malick has made just five (counting one coming next year). In the decade bracketed by 1950's Stage Fright and 1960's Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock made 12. Compared to Jon Russell Cring, only one word describes these august filmmakers as a group.
Slackers.
At the start of 2007, Cring, a Hendersonville filmmaker, announced an insanely ambitious scheme called the Extra/Ordinary Film Project. In a town where some would-be directors have talked for more than a decade about the films they'd make if only someone gave them a chance—and money, and stars, and a studio deal—Cring said that he and his family would endeavor to complete 12 feature films in as many months on limited means. That would beat even Japan's wildly prolific Takashi Miike, who in the late 1990s/early 2000s was maintaining a feverish pace of five or six movies a year.
But as Cring will be the first to tell you, he failed.
"It really took about 20 months," he says, relaxing at a table as Lower Broadway's lazy lunchtime din murmurs outside. Beside him, his wife Tracy laughs. "We'd wake up in the morning thinking, 'Who the hell's idea is this?' " she says. Her husband joins her in laughing but remains resolute. "It's death to filmmaking," he says, "when you can't pound it out like a war."
If filmmaking is a war, the Crings have finished what can only be called a 20-month surge. After 11 previous forays into beat-the-clock suspense (Mervyn's Clock), character comedy (Summer's Morn), homelessness ($6 Man), Yuletide festivities (Wonderful), farce (Has Been) and even topical drama about a distraught military parent who plots to assassinate the sitting president (The Drive), they saved the toughest challenge for last: a high school musical titled Four on the Floor, shot entirely with local bands and music. It shows 11 a.m. Saturday at the Capri Theater in Shelbyville, then makes its Nashville premiere 7 p.m. that night in the Watkins College of Art, Design & Film's auditorium.
That they have made a career's worth of feature films in less than two years—and on a combined budget lower than the sticker price on a Ford Taurus—is hardly the only unconventional thing about the Crings. At their table in Paradise Park, the prefab trailer-trash hangout on Lower Broad, they'd pass more for tourists than auteurists: Tracy in a floral-print blouse, Jon Russell in a weatherbeaten straw hat, open-necked shirt and close-cropped beard. On the subject of film, though, they talk with great enthusiasm, especially when asked if any particular movie inspired the Extra/Ordinary Film Project.
"It was a ruse—just an idea to force us to get into filmmaking," Jon Russell says, barely audible as the fry cook cautions a clumsy patron to stop monkeying with the soda machine. "Lots of people say, 'I want to do a movie like so-and-so.' Well, that's doomed to fail. 'I want to make my own Night of the Living Dead.' Well, guess what—somebody already made that movie, and it was somebody a lot better than you. Make your own movie!"
And so the Crings have, a dozen times over. Jon Russell's father Jonathan Richard Cring, described by his son as "a Renaissance man" who spent much of the family's childhood as a traveling lecturer, gospel performer and even a Bible-school teacher in Shreveport, La., writes the scripts. Tracy, who first met Jon Russell a decade ago when they were doing phone surveys out of a Green Hills office, does the camerawork and stepped up to direct the all-female ensemble Summer's Morn. Jon Russell's brother Jasson, pronounced "Jay-sahn" ("He's one of those pretentious freaks who has to have extra letters in his name," his brother kids), acts in the films. Another brother, Jerrod, donates studio time.
Along the way, they've learned valuable lessons about how to get the most production value for, hell, nothing. "Restaurants? Easy. Bars? Easy. Antique cars—man, we've had a lot of antique cars in our movies," Jon Russell says. "Hard? Anything with a board, like a hospital. Police are hard." One giant challenge was to find 20 unused Dumpsters for a sequence in their street-life drama $6 Man. All looked hopeless, until the Crings stumbled upon a lot in Columbia where 100 giant garbage units sat rusting in a field. They've also managed to find cast, crew and extras willing to work for little more than digital immortality, sackfuls of Krystals and sugar drinks.
The Crings' scrounging abilities were put to the test in Four on the Floor, the story of a high-school garage band, which required not only tons of local music but also a small army of extras, several pivotal locations and even a climactic high-school football game. On the first score, they were boosted by Jasson's friendships in the local music scene and by MySpace, which helped them corral tracks by The Pink Spiders, American Bang, Luna Halo, De Novo Dahl, The Tits, And the Relatives and others. On the second, they were able to secure a local garage called Shade Tree Auto and the full cooperation of Cascade High School in Bedford County, where the Crings massed some 200 extras and two football teams in the school's stadium. "I don't understand why independent films have to look small," Jon Russell says.
Of course, there's a reason why the work of slowpokes like Kubrick and Malick has survived through the decades: because they took great care in making it. By producing films at such a furious pace, are the Crings worried that they might be shortchanging their work artistically?
"That is an issue, that we might lose the specialness of it," Jon Russell Cring says, strolling past the Schermerhorn Symphony Center and the Country Music Hall of Fame to his parallel-parked car. The silver 2001 Dodge Neon has figured in all their films, all road-worn 145,000-plus miles of it: They affectionately call it "the clown car." "But what matters is that you have to have the idea, you have to have the story," he continues. "I could make, what's that movie...Little Miss Sunshine. I could make Little Miss Sunshine for $1,000. Anyone who says they couldn't doesn't have the vision to make movies."
Asked what they have learned from all their experience making movies, Tracy Cring just laughs.
"It is just as much effort," she says, "to make a crappy movie as a good one."
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