By Rod M. Lott
Christopher Sharpe has created a monster.
We refer not to the scientific freak that serves as the title character of his debut feature film Sex Machine, but the film itself. Written, directed, produced and edited by Sharpe, the independent film is being shot entirely in Oklahoma City and is financed entirely out of his own pocket.
Despite the title, Sex Machine is not pornographic. Rather, it’s a crime/horror/romance hybrid about Frank, a young man who emerges from unconsciousness in a room full of dead bodies, with a gun in his hand and having no memory at all. Making matters worse is that his body no longer appears to be entirely his own, but pieced together; one arm is black, another apparently from a biker, given the “Sex Machine” tattoo that adorns it. Slowly, Frank unravels the mystery of who he is and what has happened, all while being chased by goons and trying to reconnect with his ex-girlfriend.
In other words, if this were the Hollywood pitch, you’d call it Frankenstein meets Memento.
But this isn’t Hollywood. And that’s a good thing, because if this were anywhere else but Oklahoma City, Sharpe likely wouldn’t be making Sex Machine at all.
SPARE PARTS
A self-employed graphic designer, Sharpe has wanted to make movies for a long time. He made student films while pursuing his film degree at the University of Oklahoma in the mid-‘90s, but he didn’t think seriously about it until the Internet boom near the close of the decade.
It was then he came up with the idea for a weekly Internet-broadcast series that would cross monster movie archetypes with the conventions of independent film, then on a revolutionary upswing thanks to the likes of Pulp Fiction.
But then the dot-com bubble burst.
“I had a lot of concepts ready to go,” he said, “particularly this idea of a guy wrapped in bandages, with body parts from different people of different races, but still one person. I had started visually and was really interested in exploring that, and wrote a screenplay around it. When the web thing collapsed, I still had the script, so I thought, why not do movies?”
Drawing on a variety of influences – ranging from Marvel Comics to B-movie purveyors Full Moon Pictures – Sharpe banged out several drafts of Sex Machine over the next couple of years. But anyone can put ideas to paper; translating them over to film or video is the hard part.
“I knew I could only talk about doing it for so long before I actually had to do it,” Sharpe said. “I had basically talked about it too much not to do it.”
Over the past year, he had been working for free with friends on their short films and knew he could “rope them into” his feature-length idea as payback. The only problem, naturally, was money.
“Financial constraints had stopped me in the past,” he recalled. “I have gotten involved with lots of crazy projects, thinking I could get enough money. I finally got enough to buy a high-end digital video camera last year. I did a lot of work to get my budget.”
That budget – “when it’s all said and done,” Sharpe said – comes in at just around $10,000.
In other places, 10 grand may not be enough to bankroll an independent film, but Oklahoma City is on his side.
Explained Sharpe, “The cost of living here is so low that it allowed me to spend a bunch of money on the movie that I’d normally have to spend on living.”
But cost of living is only advantage to living – and shooting – in the Sooner state.
“The real advantage is that Oklahoma City is unspoiled right now as far as locations go. They have a lot of character, different from what you normally see in movies,” he said, noting motels on 39th St., downtown streets and establishments like 66 Bowl, all of which will see screen time in the film.
“Plus, everyone is super cool here. There haven’t been a lot of film productions here for everyone to get burned on yet,” Sharpe said. “We always try to leave the location in good condition, so that the people that let us use it are happy. We don’t to burn the bridge for everyone else. We want to encourage everyone to do the same.”
Julie Porter with the Oklahoma Film Commission said indie productions like Sex Machine currently comprise a majority of the shooting in the state.
“Nine times out of 10, the productions that take place here are guys funding projects – whether shorts or feature-length films – out of their own pockets,” she said, adding that Oklahoma had not played host to a major studio film since Twister lensed here in 1995 until Cameron Crowe shot scenes for Elizabethtown at the Oklahoma City National Memorial this summer.
She agreed that the state offers locations that “absolutely cannot be duplicated” and said that aspiring directors like Sharpe often have “friends and family in town that are supportive to help see the project through to fruition.”
“If you’re a filmmaker, shooting here is a no-brainer,” Porter said.
Shogo Nakagawa, Sex Machine’s director of photography, echoed these words.
“People are nice here. Sometimes almost too much,” Nakagawa said. “In L.A., if you ask the owner of a house if you can film there, she’ll say, ‘How much will you pay me?’ In Oklahoma, if you ask the same question, she’ll say, ‘Would you like some lemonade?’”
IT’S ALIVE!
With an unpaid cast and volunteer crew, Sex Machine began an ambitious 10-or-so-weekend production schedule in July.
Starring as Frank is John Howell, manager of The Library bar in Norman. He got the job partly because Sharpe had worked on Howell’s short film last year, “and I couldn’t say no.”
“Everyone here likes making movies,” Howell said, “and you can’t do it alone. You have to have help.”
As the female lead, Oklahoma State University sophomore Jessica Alfrey is sacrificing a few months worth of weekends to be a part of the project, for no money whatsoever. And that’s fine by her.
“This is my passion,” she said. “People ask me, ‘How can you give so much time for nothing?’ But it’s so much fun, I don’t even think about it.”
Alfrey – whose brief thesp resume includes a couple of commercials and the aforementioned Elizabethtown – said she likes acting so much, she wishes she could “put it before school.”
There’s no better school for filmmakers than making a low-budget or no-budget movie. Because no matter how hard you plan, some things will go wrong.
On one Saturday morning in August, the Sex Machine team was on location at ACTS Warehouse, which they had spent the week prior converting into an elaborate, impressive, no-detail-spared set of a mad scientist’s laboratory. The first few hours that morning were spent lighting the set with an array of candy-colored gels; great care was taken to put every test tube and Bunsen burner in its proper place for optimal framing.
But before Sharpe could utter “Action!” that day, they blew a fuse. And only then realized their set blocked access to the fusebox.
After some quick but careful dismantling and reassembling, the problem was solved. But then a perfectly good take was blown when a live cricket – heretofore silent – chirped noisily from within its jar on the scientist’s tray of tools. The insect was thrown off the set, effectively killing his own cameo.
Other problems abound, from the rumbles of nearby passing freight trains to an actor having trouble remembering his lines. Yet Sharpe remained unfazed, even a couple weekends later, when a downtown alley serving as a fight scene location reeked of urine and was littered with human feces.
“You just have to roll with that stuff,” he said later. “We haven’t had that many problems, but it has been a lot more stressful than I thought. We’re doing set building and stuff that I didn’t foresee, like special effects makeup taking a lot of time, but it’s no fault of the people. This is not just shooting two people talking in a location that already exists. We’ve put a lot of thought into lighting and coloring the movie.”
Sharpe added that it’s been difficult to schedule everyone, a task made harder when everyone works for nothing more than at sandwich at noon.
“It’s a big commitment, and the days are long,” he said.
BRIDE OF SEX MACHINE?
Sharpe has no pretensions of Sex Machine winning awards or even making money. He’s simply doing it to do it, though he hopes to use the completed film as a calling card for future projects, hopefully at the pace of one a year.
Though the DVD market is currently saturated with genre films – most of them “really bad,” he noted – he is in talks to get the film released in video stores nationwide. It’s no accident; the title is what it is simply because “that will rent. Sex Machine just sounds cool. It’s not cheesy like Attack of the Metrosexual Frankenstein.”
Editing will be complete before year’s end, and he hopes to premiere the film next year at OKC’s own DeadCenter Film Festival. He promises “if someone’s into movies, they’ll have a fun time,” as the flick is peppered with influences from and references to Ed Wood, Dario Argento, Universal monsters, Re-Animator, Godzilla, Kevin Smith – heck, even French new wave fare like Breathless – as much influenced by maverick director Hal Hartley as it is the four-color adventures of comic books.
He hopes to get as much exposure as possible, even if it means sacrificing money to do so. His next project won’t be about monsters, but will share a certain sensibility with Sex Machine. Whatever that follow-up will be, being in Oklahoma City will help make it a reality as well.
“Definitely you can be a filmmaker here and take advantage of certain things,” he said. “There are a lot of people doing cool stuff that need help and will help you in return.”
He advised fledging filmmakers to network and volunteer on other people’s productions, but cautioned to do so without falling into “that egomaniac filmmaker mentality.”
“Everyone asks me why this movie, and why not a romantic comedy or Quentin Tarantino knockoff,” Sharpe said, “and that’s the problem with a lot of independent film. If you can get Kate Hudson or Meg Ryan for your romantic comedy, great. If you can get Michael Madsen or David Carradine for your Tarantino knockoff, great. But otherwise, no one wants to see it.
“But genre films like Sex Machine allow you to inject a lot of creativity and experimentation. It has a built-in base whether it has stars or not. As a film, this is a fat, greasy-spoon diner, not some big, fancy, five-star restaurant in New York City.”