The scene: Kurt Huxley, a college senior in an unidentified university in a nondescript town, has been kicked out of school for toking up one too many times. He waits—symbolically, some would say-—by a lime green help phone for his ride to take him away.
This was the sight that greeted bemused motorists on Towerview Drive last Saturday. A ragtag crew of Duke students were trying their hands at movie magic as an icy wind swept through the Gothic Wonderland.
This shot is the opening of a heretofore untitled project led by budding filmmakers Michael Burakow, a senior, and Nick Hawthorne, a junior. If successfully completed, Intervention—the working title—will be the first entirely student-produced feature-length movie made at Duke in recent memory.
“We’re not expecting a perfect film, but we do want to show college students can make a good movie with decent production quality,” Burakow said.
The film follows “pathologically rebellious” habitual marijuana user Kurt—played by Burakow himself—as he is court-ordered to undergo treatment at Clearing Waters Rehabilitation Center.
Inspired by films like Juno that used humor and wit to deal with weighty subject material, it’s a tale of self-discovery. But it’s one that prides itself on its nuanced approach to the topic and its cast of oddball characters.
Mom is a pill-popper, Dad’s an alcoholic, love interest Kate is waging her own battle with the bottle, while best friend Art is a computer engineer with obsessive-compulsive tendencies who also happens to dabble in heroin. It’s a story that’s as all-American as baseball and apple pie.
“It’s a misunderstood subject—the subject of addiction,” Hawthorne said. “People view substance addiction much more seriously than other addictions. But an addiction is an addiction. Everyone’s got one.”
Burakow and Hawthorne first entertained the idea of making the movie when Hawthorne was a freshman and Burakow a sophomore. Over the course of the next two years, Burakow and Hawthorne—also brothers in Sigma Nu fraternity—hammered out a script and took various screenwriting and directing classes within the Film/Video/Digital Program (now, the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image) to hone their craft.
Last spring, when Burakow went to Los Angeles as part of Duke’s then-FVD study-away program, the duo finally began recruiting other cast and crew to get the project rolling.
“This idea that you have to wait for a golden moment... well, there’s no reason to postpone,” said Elisabeth Benfey, a lecturing fellow for AMI. “Michael feels like it should be happening now, and he has confidence in his collaborators.”
It’s an ambitious feat to be sure—120 pages of material to film, produce and edit within one academic year. The team-—made up of about 14 crew members, a dozen main characters and miscellaneous extras—began shooting in August.
It’s apparent that the team has made good use of Duke’s surroundings and resources. For the purposes of the project, Bell Tower dormitory has been transformed into the interior of the rehab facility (“There’s similarities between the sterility of classrooms and the sterility of rehab,” Hawthorne noted), the exterior of the John Hope Franklin Center into the outside of Clearing Waters and a house off East into the Huxley abode. The project is so Duke-driven that even rising pop phenom Mike Posner, another senior Sigma Nu, is contributing a track.
Despite the support provided by the University community, however, there have been plenty of naysayers, Burakow said.
But the film has become something of a labor of love for those involved. Burakow especially oozes enthusiasm, even as he shivered on the curb as other crew members fiddled with the malfunctioning camera and tried (unsuccessfully) to keep fascinated passers-by out of the frame Saturday.
The life of an amateur filmmaker is not as glamorous as you might think, Hawthorne said. It took about an hour to shoot what will most likely be at most a minute-long clip within the finished product.
“You never understand why there are so many people in the credits of movies until you make a movie,” Burakow said. “It really is a team effort.”
And there’s been no shortage of hiccups along the way. Operating on a $3,000 budget and borrowed equipment from AMI, whether the right cameras will be available at the right time is something of a crapshoot.
In addition, there are some things that not even the keenest of directors can plan for—like Mother Nature.
“You know Murphy’s law? That if something can go wrong, it will?” Hawthorne said. “Murphy was a filmmaker.”
In response, the team of amateur filmmakers has developed a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants attitude, learning to roll with the punches. Flexibility, a necessary virtue for aspiring Spielbergs.
“I can kind of tell it’s the first student-led feature film,” said senior Adam Barron, who plays heroin junkie Art. “There’s always slip-ups, but it’s just part of the game.”
Burakow said his team is committed to seeing the project finished. He and Hawthorne hope to wrap up shooting by the end of this semester and do the bulk of post-production work in the spring. The filmmakers want to premiere the movie at Duke by early May.
“I think, all things considered, it’s going well,” Burakow said. “People did not expect us to get past 20 pages. Now we’re at over 40.”
Burakow and Hawthorne said they are planning on submitting Intervention to the festival circuit after it’s completed, but collaborators also have high hopes for what the finished product will do for the film culture at Duke.
“I don’t know if FVD will be able to support these kinds of projects in the future,” Benfey said. “I think they are looking at an experimental documentary approach but I would love to see good stories get made. Fiction projects like this.”
Editor’s Note: recess writers Emily Ackerman, Andrew O’Rourke and Jenni Wei are part of the film’s production crew.
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