Guns and Weed: The Interview (Part III)

This is the conclusion of my interview with Michael W. Dean and Neema Vedadi, creators of the film Guns and Weed: The Road to Freedom.

Part I.

Part II.

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We pick up in the midst of Michael’s answer to yesterday’s question about the challenge of finding actors and others to appear onscreen in Guns and Weed.

MICHAEL DEAN: We did a lot of things ourselves, to solve problems. There aren’t a lot of good actors in Casper, so Neema and I played multiple parts. I’d thought of asking Boston [T. Party] to play the bad cop, Sergeant Dan Banning. I really like the idea of ironic casting, like how rapper Ice-T, who wrote the song “Cop Killer”, now plays a cop on Law and Order.

Dan Banning is partially inspired by the fed goon called “Feathers” from Boston’s book Molon Labe. Dan Banning also has some Hank Schrader from “Breaking Bad” (my favorite TV show, and it’s pretty libertarian too), some Vic MacKey from “The Shield”, and a dash of Cheech and Chong’s “Sergeant Stedenko.” And of course Dan Banning’s line “I’ll enforce any law out there” in the “tribute to a fallen hero” part is paraphrasing when Sheriff Joe Arpaio said “I’ll enforce any law on the books.”

But I nixed the Boston idea because of logistics. The actor who plays Crunchy O’Doule, the health food store owner that Dan Banning oppresses, was only available for one night, and on short notice. (Are you seeing a pattern here about making movies? A lot of resources are “one night only”, and you have to be ready and able to marshal your forces with aplomb.) So I just played Dan myself, and I’m pretty happy with the results.

Playing Sergeant Dan Banning was the only time in my life I’ve ever pointed a gun at a human being. It was difficult. It felt counterintuitive to do that under those circumstances, even though Neema and I and the actor checked the revolver three times each to make sure it was empty.

The bear-death audio of Dan Banning was strongly inspired by things on the Cheech & Chong records I listened to as a teen, we just took it a little further than they did back then. And our movie is being released by the same distributor who is doing Chong’s documentary A.K.A. Tommy Chong, so things have gone full circle for me. (By the way, A.K.A. Tommy Chong is a great movie about government oppression. I highly recommend it, even if most of the people in it think only Republicans are the problem and Democrats are here to help us.) [NOTE from Claire: I concur; good movie.]

NEEMA VEDADI: We both contributed creatively and technically, but I’d really give most of the props to Michael for the cat herding. He spent a lot of time tracking people down. And he’s got an amazing rolodex – he had a lot of people he could call on for favors, people who worked quickly and expertly. Not only just people in the movie but for additional art and music as well. He also made the whole Denver shoot at the medical marijuana clinic happen. We had a place in Montana that was interested. They flaked, and Michael pulled the Denver shoot out of thin air. The guy is tenacious and pushed me hard to get things done. I remember running into Sheriff Mack at Liberty Fest. I called Michael and was like “I don’t know if I really want a cop in our movie” but Michael convinced me to interview Sheriff Mack and it’s a good thing, too. Sheriff Mack’s words are some of my favorite in the movie!

CLAIRE WOLFE: What’s your favorite thing about the film? Or if you’d rather, your favorite story from the making of the film?

MICHAEL DEAN: My favorite aspect was my friendship with Neema. My second favorite aspect was that we made a movie in four months for six thousand dollars that looks and sounds better than some movies people spend four years and 100,000 dollars making. And we got a DVD distribution deal the week before we even finished it. I’d say all of this combined is a total slam-bang home run as far as independent cinema is concerned.

CLAIRE WOLFE: Who’s going to distribute the movie, and when and where (other than PirateBay) will people be able to get it?

MICHAEL DEAN: A medium-large independent DVD distributor is putting it out worldwide on DVD. Same folks who put out my other three films. They’re putting up the money to manufacture and market it as a DVD, and they have the idea to only sell a cuss-free cut to colleges for the first year, starting in March 2011, then release the full cut to the general public in March 2012. I don’t love that plan, but they really know their market.

They did a great job with my other movies, and they’re a large part of why I make a living doing “art.” They understand the business and have the pipeline, so I’m going to trust them on this.

They asked us to do the 91-minute cut for colleges from the 99-minute director’s cut. The college cut has no cussing, less hip-hop, less governmental violence, and chops out a few things some nanny folk could consider sexist (like Neema rapping a line about “Napolitano’s cooch”), homophobic (telling San Francisco progressives to “eat a bag of dicks”) or racist (for the college cut we removed the scenes of the India call center operator Johnny Patel).

CLAIRE WOLFE: I hate to see Johnny Patel go. And how can it be racist when he’s played by a person of (I’m supposing) the actual ethnicity involved?

MICHAEL DEAN Neema isn’t Indian, he’s just a good actor. His ancestry is Persian/Italian. His dad fled Iran in the 70s just before their “out of the frying pan, into the fire” revolution.

We basically did the college edit at the behest of the distributor to fly under the radar and placate media buyers at progressive liberal arts colleges. It’s going to be in a catalog alongside video hagiographies of Hugo Chávez, Che Guevara, Naomi Klein, Mumia Abu Jamal, The Black Panthers, union organizers, etc. But that audience needs this the most.

I love a challenge and I hate preachin’ to the choir. I’d rather reach progressives than liberty folks. Liberty folks already know most everything in this movie anyway. Though liberty folks seem still to like the film. A lot. There aren’t a lot of good libertarian movies, and of those that do exist, most don’t have much humor in them, for some reason.

Some people will only do business with companies who are of the same philosophical bent as themselves, but not me. I do business with people who can get the stuff out there. Our distributor does not have any agenda except making money. I find that people who do that best often don’t care if they’re selling art, bibles, insecticide, or soap. They also tend to pay on time. I’ve been inadvertently screwed out of money far more times (especially in music) by people who were fans of the art but didn’t understand basic commerce. People who love art and philosophy, in my experience, tend to go out of business owning you money much more often than large corporations who exist solely to ship “units.”

I mailed out home-burned copies of the full director’s cut of the movie to everyone who’s in it or helped with it, and to a bunch of bloggers. And someone put it up on BitTorrent via PirateBay. But we don’t mind that the movie got out now. As MamaLiberty told me, “In a year there may not be electricity to watch a DVD!”

And the movie is released Creative Commons, so whoever put it on the Internet technically has the legal and ethical right to do that. Someone would not have the legal and ethical right to produce commercial copies and sell them, but they do have the right to make a few copies for friends and give them away, whether they’re burning five DVDs or downloading it with BitTorrent (as long as they seed it after!).

My experience, from people doing this to two of my other films, is that it does not decrease DVD sales, it actually increases DVD sales. People who download from PirateBay are not generally people who buy any DVDs, ever. And getting the movie out gets the word out and gets other people to buy the DVD. Also, colleges would never put a bootlegged version in their library, so the “straight-to-PirateBay” leak will not affect those sales.

Basically though, I make movies to get a message out. It’s gravy that I make money, and I do make money, but I measure success in eyeballs more than dollars. If I break even and 100,000 people see something I make, it means more to me than if I make $10,000 and only a thousand people see it.

When I was a kid I built a micropower AM transmitter into the handset of an old telephone. It had a range of about 200 feet. I’d walk around talking into it. Neighbors thought I was crazy and talking to myself, but I didn’t care. I have no idea if anyone ever heard me on their radio, but the fact that someone could hear me was important. I felt like I was speaking to the sky, speaking to the infinite.

When I see someone on the BitTorrent map downloading this movie in India, Brazil, Australia, Ireland, San Francisco, Cleveland, I feel the same way. Except better, because I know they ARE hearing the message. It may not always get through, but they are hearing it.

CLAIRE WOLFE: Do you have another project on the horizon?

MICHAEL DEAN: Just promoting this movie, and very part-time at that. Mainly I’m spending time with my wife and our three cats, and going to the gun range, catching up on mail, reading your new book, sleeping eight hours a night … basically catching my breath. I tend to work 120 hours a week on something for four to six months, then take a few months off to regroup and wait for inspiration. I never do a project because I think I should be working, I do a project because nothing like it exists in the world and I envision it as something that needs to exist in the world.