“It's about the energy you bring to the life of your film, not just the film itself”: Al Warren on Dogleg's six-year journey

Dogleg

“I love the feeling of watching a good movie in a crowded house,” says writer, director and actor Al Warren by phone from Los Angeles. “I want to base my career on that. It has become a priority for how I approach my work. How will it be shown to an audience in person? When I see a friend who has put their heart and soul into creating and finishing their film and then doesn't really have any plans for how they want to show it, I'm confused.”

At this moment, when the future of independent film distribution is surrounded by more walls and question marks than ever before, thinking outside the box is not only a good idea, it may be the only viable option. The way Warren delivered his film Dogleg for the audience is an inspiring example of intention, patience and stubborn DIY determinism. But actually these words can also describe the making of the film.

Warren was born in Mississippi, where his father was a local filmmaker. “I grew up with a house full of equipment,” he said in our conversation last year filmmakersis the Back To One podcast. “The language of film has always been in my house.” This influence manifested itself in Warren as a desire to act. He performed constantly as a child, and at age 15, a Los Angeles talent agent signed him with the promise of stardom. But that fame never materialized and Warren began to focus on his other passion: music. He found some success when his band signed to a label and began touring. But his dormant passions – film and especially acting – never quite left him. He moved to LA, started making short films, writing screenplays, starring in friends' films and began building a reputation as a solid filmmaker. He was approached by a new micro-budget film company with an offer of $50,000 for a feature film. Warren took this offer to his producing partner Babak Khoshnoud, who was optimistic that he could find the equivalent $50,000 somewhere. That would give them the money they needed to make the feature film that Warren and his writing partner Michael Bible had written.

The shooting was about to begin when they learned that the company had collapsed and the $50,000 was missing. Production was in limbo until Warren's friend, sound engineer Fred Helm, raised $5,000 to get the film off the ground. To raise the rest of the budget, Khoshnoud then offered to direct Warren in performances through his company Yours Truly, with the understanding that half of the money earned would be used for the feature film. So Warren accepted every directing gig Khoshnoud offered him until they had enough money to start the film it would become Dogleg.

The idea that Warren developed with the Bible was similar to that of Richard Linklater lazybones – a continuous presentation of different stories that have a unifying effect from one character to the next. They filmed three episodes in Mississippi, one in Colorado and two in Los Angeles. When the pandemic hit, a few more were scheduled to film in New York and Tokyo. The break proved auspicious. Warren and Bible feared that audiences would not maintain interest with all these stories. Structurally, they had driven themselves into a corner. “So we had time to revisit the material we already had,” explains Warren, “and our desire to entertain the audience and not necessarily alienate them.”

Bible's idea for solving the structural problem was to create Warren's “Alan” character, the fictional director of these shorts, whose own story about trying to find his lost dog and not completely collapse in the process would function as a “shish kebab”, to tie the stories together. This was exactly what the film needed to work. In fact, it's hard to imagine the film without this plot.

In mid-2021, the filmmakers were able to shoot the footage needed for the Alan character and the overall storyline, and finally completed principal photography. The day after production wrapped, Warren had breakfast at Rae's Diner in Santa Monica and felt great. “Life couldn’t be better,” he remembers. “We finished the film last night. All are happy. It's been such a long process and now it's in the can.” He looks over and sees David Mamet. Already feeling high on life, Warren goes to Mamet and introduces himself to Mamet, and they end up talking for a while. “He was so nice…and I leave breakfast thinking 'God is good.' I'm so blessed.'”

The next day, Warren receives a call from his data manager, who begins the conversation with “Are you sitting down?” It turned out that all the sound files from the last three days of filming had not been properly transferred to the drive and the cards had been deleted. “I’m in one of the deepest depressive moments of my life,” Warren says, reliving that day. “Physically I couldn't stand up.” Four data recovery sites told them it was impossible to recover the files. They were directed to a location in Wisconsin that the FBI uses for data recovery, but the job would cost thousands of dollars. With no other option other than a complete reshoot, “we just bit the bullet,” says Warren. “And they were able to extract all of our data and we were able to get our sound files.”

After that nightmare was over, Warren began editing. After major versions were completed, he and Bible hosted screening parties for invited guests whose opinions were important to them. Then, after evaluating these notes, they returned to editing. “It was less about their notes and more about how the room felt. Does it really work? Let's pay attention to the panting in the room.” They repeated this exercise over a period of a year and a half until they reached the point they felt was right. “We were never really in a rush. We wanted to make the film as good as possible. Once we felt like we were there, we wanted to take as much responsibility as possible for how we brought that to the audience.”

For Warren, that meant bringing something with him Intention came up with the idea of ​​distributing this film. Early on he was approached by a company and told that it was a film of that size DoglegThe best-case scenario would be to have the game play in ten cities across the country within the same 10-14 day window, and that would be t. “It was so unappealing and unappealing,” Warren told me. Rather, it was his days as a touring musician that inspired the filmmaker's approach. His band used to support and tour with major headliners. “I remember how valuable it was to play in Lincoln, Nebraska, for a group of people who had never heard of us before. They were there for the band that played after us.” But after they played the best show they could, they would sit at their merch table or at the bar and socialize with the people there, have a drink and chat deal with them. And then on the next tour, headlining this time, back to Lincoln Nebraska, the friends they met at that first show brought ten people with them this time. “There's value in just putting the work into exhibiting what you're doing and then communicating with people,” Warren says.

So after that Dogleg played three times in LA and then three times in New York, conversations started happening online. Warren began receiving direct messages from programmers and various film people around the country asking him when the film was coming to their city. “I would just throw the ball back into their court. “When should it be? Which theaters are you associated with? How could we do this?'” Without money, renting theaters wasn’t an option. However, ticket splits were possible. And Warren's idea to make the events special was to have a local artist or someone with a local audience moderate a question-and-answer session. And he got other people to throw an afterparty. “That feels better in my gut than saying, 'Let's have it play in Austin on a Wednesday at 2 p.m. for 10 days.' Nobody will go or care. And when they go and deal with it, it will be two people who have a very limited need to cater to a different audience because no one is there.”

And so Dogleg The tour took place in summer 2023. Enthusiastic programmers in cities like Toronto, Austin, London and Seattle booked them with people like Pauline Chalamet, Zia Anger, Edy Modica and Ben Sinclair to moderate Q&As. Add an afterparty and suddenly these performances feel more like “happenings” that people didn’t want to miss. “I feel like it worked. There is an audience there Dogleg because of this process.”

But Warren is under no illusions that this is the surefire answer to independent cinema's distribution problem. “Your film resembles a restaurant,” he explains. “It wouldn’t make sense for a taco truck in LA to necessarily serve this cuisine at Musso and Frank. Likewise, it wouldn't make sense for Musso and Frank to do their cooking from a taco truck. So if your film is about your dying father and it's a serious film, a tour where you bring presenters and host afterparties might not really work for you. Ultimately, I believe in the Mark Duplass quote that was doing the rounds: “The cavalry is not coming.” There will be no such angel working in a studio or a financier from Switzerland. Nobody comes and says, “You’re the next big thing.” And even when they come, you still have to be the engine of that vehicle. We have to ask ourselves what we can do to advance our films that we can control from our phone or computer. How can we maintain the integrity of our film lives while reaching the widest possible audience? And I don't know if we did it right, but it's the only way that made sense to us. It's about the energy you bring to the life of your film, and not just the film itself. If you feel like something is wrong, then don't do it. And that was kind of the impetus behind it Dogleg.”

Dogleg is now streaming on MUBI.