"Looking for Lenny" - a doc exploring the legend, the man, the martyr... Lenny Bruce

[adkimery]

"Looking for Lenny" - a doc exploring the legend, the man, the martyr... Lenny Bruce

Hello all,

I'm cutting "Looking for Lenny" and after three long years on this labor of love we finally see a light at the end of the tunnel. And in celebration of that we have officially taken the wraps off the movie, if you will, and launched an official site as well as set up camp on Facebook and Twitter (links at the bottom of the post). For those of you not familiar w/Lenny you can hit up the almighty Wikipedia to get an idea of why Lenny is not only considered the father of modern stand-up comedy but also a fighter for Freedom of Speech in the US.

The movie was originally going to be a short (10-15min) behind-the-scenes piece about a new one-man play about Lenny Bruce but it somehow snowballed into a full-blown movie (seemingly on it's own). When I started on the project I knew of Lenny but I didn't really know a lot about Lenny. After researching him, listening to his routines, and watching the dozens (literally) of interviews we shot it became apparent that the Lenny Bruce that actually existed isn't quite the same as the Lenny Bruce that pop culture remembers. I guess this is probably true of any celebrity and separating "Lenny the Legend" from "Lenny the Man" is one of the goals we have for the doc. We also talk about his fight for Freedom of Speech and how much has changed, or hasn't changed, since his death over 40yrs ago. We aren't doing a cradle-to-grave biography but more of focusing on the latter part of his life, his impact on stand-up comedy and his impact on the First Amendment.

We are deep into editing right now and I'm constantly amazed at how what started out as a gig for a few weeks evolved into a movie I've become very passionate about over the past three years. The point where it really settled in that we were making a 'legit' movie was when we started getting interviews with people like Roseanne, Phyllis Diller, Lewis Black and Orlando Jones and I was like "Holy crap! I'll mention these names and people will actually know who I'm talking about!" Many of our earlier interviews were with people like Paul Krassner, Shelly Berman and Mort Sahl and these guys were friends with Lenny, as well as being key comedy figures in their own rights, but really no one outside of big stand-up comedy fans would know who they are. I think we have a very well-rounded 'cast' of interviewees that shed a very complete light on who Lenny was and what he did.

Well, I think that's enough rambling for one post. There is an official blog on the official site but I will of course post news, updates, and future ramblings here on dvxuser too.


Looking for Lenny official site
Facebok
Twitter
IMDB
YouTube Channel

-Andrew

UPDATE 3/1/12: added YouTube channel link.

 

[Martay]

Sounds like an interesting piece. Good luck completing it and keep us posted.

-M

 

[adkimery]

Okay, wow, after a ridiculously long time I'm back. "Looking for Lenny" is finished and coming to a TV/computer near you on March 9th (more details to come).

The edit was locked last spring and we snagged a North American distribution deal late last year (after a lot of rejection from both festivals and distributors). I know that the many people use this forum though out the production process but ours was such a stopping/starting project stretched over the course of nearly six years that it just didn't seem practical to keep something going here. Now that the road is near its end I fee like I have the experience under my belt to field questions in a helpful manor so please ask away and I'll do my best.

Bottom line, and this is true for anything, is that if you have a dream keep plugging away at it. It's 2012 and "Looking for Lenny", which was shot primarily with DVX100's, is going to be available in over 100 million homes in North America on VOD as well as streaming/download. SD in 2012... how f'ing crazy is that!

Here's the movie poster.


-Andrew

 

[AdrianF]

This looks like a really interesting film. Being a Brit, I'm not really familiar with Lenny Bruce, only from reference from a few American friends. The trailer already has me hooked to want to know more about him.

I'd be interested to know how you managed all of the material over the course of six years and how this affected your post production?

 

[adkimery]

This looks like a really interesting film. Being a Brit, I'm not really familiar with Lenny Bruce, only from reference from a few American friends. The trailer already has me hooked to want to know more about him.

I'd be interested to know how you managed all of the material over the course of six years and how this affected your post production?

I hardly knew anything about him either until I started the project and it was a real eye opener to see how different things were back then. Not only in terms of stand-up comedy but also in terms of what was deemed acceptable speech. Raking authority figures over the coals (cops, presidents, the pope etc.,) is pretty standard for late night talk show hosts these days but back in the 50's that type of comedy would land you in jail.

As far as media management went, it helped that the project was initially going to be small and kind of grew on its own over so the influx of footage was never excessive. I usually only got a few tapes in at a time. Also, since we had far more time than money on this project I was rarely under the gun to get things in and organized immediately. I used an Excel spread sheet to keep everything organized and I cut in FCP (5, 6 and 7). So I would get a tape in, number it, clone it, capture it and make a QT for transcription. We ended up with about 55 interviews (over 100hrs of footage) so keeping each step of post logged in the Excel spreadsheet was critical to keep things organized. Using the transcripts to do a paper cut was also critical. Without transcripts I'd probably still be editing! If I was doing this today I'd probably take advantage of CatDV for asset management as well as something like Boris Soundbite or Avid's ScriptSync.

I used the Excel sheet to keep a log of all the third party media as well (music, photographs, footage, etc.,) even if it was just something I pulled off the internet I logged the URL. I knew we would need a way to back track through all this third party media down the road once we decided what we were going to try and license. And, oh boy, getting clearances was a nightmare. It was probably the single largest expense we had, people threatened to sue us... it was just horrible. And unfortunately it impacted the edit. Some sections of the film had to be re-cut, or dropped entirely, because we couldn't get the clearances we needed. Sometimes we couldn't afford it and sometimes the rights holder just refused to talk to us. It was very disheartening to lose a couple of great pieces of the film because the person that held the rights wouldn't even return our calls.

A program called Sequence Clip Reporter made my part of the clearance process much easier because it analyses your timeline then creates a spread sheet with all of the clip information in it in chronological order (sequence TC I/O, clip TC I/O, etc.) so anytime my producer needed an updated list of what footage was being used where and for how long I just used Sequence Clip Reporter and it did in a few minutes what would've taken me hours.


-Andrew