Dispatches From Texas: The Cinema of John Carstarphen: The Cinema of John Carstarphen, #1

By JOHN CARSTARPHEN

Pulitzer Prize finalist Matt Zoller-Seitz called him the "Poet of the Ellipse" for his subtle, artistic, engaging film dialogue. Philadelphia-born and raised African-American writer-director-cinematographer John Carstarphen moved to Dallas, Texas following his education at the renowned American Film Institute in Hollywood. In the ensuing decade of the 1990s, he began creating his groundbreaking cinematic works that speak to the complexities of the Black experience in the South, changing the conversation about both American cinema and the Black Southern experience. Like Black Hollywood filmmaker Spencer Williams before him, an independent film artist who also made films in Dallas---and like many other film artists of the 1990s, Carstarphen used whatever resources were at his disposal to tell low-budget regional stories with passion and creativity. Working entirely with local actors and crew in his region of Texas, his films won multiple film festival awards and worldwide acclaim, including an official invitation to the world's most prestigious film festival, Cannes. Volume one  includes the feature-length screenplays for The Weekend of Our Discontent as well as the script for the short feature film, Mea Culpa. Each  screenplay includes numerous still images from the award-winning films themselves, as well as some Director's commentary, a forward by Zoller-Seitz and a Producer's commentary by Rebecca Rice, an award-winning Queer female producer who also worked behind the scenes on these unique and powerful films. A glossary of script film terms is included. Digitally re-mastered copies of the films themselves will be available at a later date.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JOHN CARSTARPHEN
• Release date: Nov 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223235545

Book preview

FOREWARD

Matt Zoller-Seitz

orig. pub. June 1994, The Dallas Oberserver

I've been following local independent filmmaker John Carstarphen's creative odyssey for several years now—watching him scrape together loose change, cobble favors from friends, and struggle, in between his various gigs as a teacher and working professional, to make art. Which is why, when I watch his features, I have to fight the tendency—ingrained in any film reviewer with a jones for non-mainstream art—to give low budget movies points just for having gotten made at all. Such an attitude leads to critical inflation; too many misplaced raves and viewers quit trusting you. Case in point: Siskel and Ebert's review of El Mariachi, which saw the Fat Guy and the Other One reassuring viewers that they weren't just saying Robert Rodriguez' movie was good for something that cost S7,000; they were saying it was good, period.

In that light, I'm pleased to report that the newly reedited versions of Carstarphen's first two features,The Weekend of Our Discontent (a 1991 examination of black-white relations, class warfare, and the wall between academia and life, revolving around the plight of an African-American college professor whose most gifted student has mysteriously disappeared) and Mea Culpa (a 1993 thriller about an adulterous white female journalist whose investigation into a turn-of-the-century, racially-and sexually-motivated Dallas murder unearths eerie parallels to her own life) aren't just good despite their cheapness. They're good, period.

And they ought to be: like Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, To Sleep with Anger), Carstarphen has returned to his movies repeatedly over the years, chiseling away at them, knocking out chips and chunks of raw material until art shines through like buried gold. His works are truly labors of love. A graduate of the American Film Institute's directing program, a former cameraman for PM Magazine, and a film and video production teacher at SMU and other area colleges, Carstarphen has endured financial and personal setbacks that would test the patience of Job (or at least John Cassavettes).

While working on Weekend, Carstarphen identified a number of supposedly enthusiastic funding sources, only to watch them systematically flake out and disappear. Then his job teaching video production at a local trade school went kaput when the Texas Board of Education declared the place incompetently managed and yanked its accreditation. At that time, Carstarphen had already shot a trailer for Weekend on lush 35mm film; he hoped to shop it around as an example of his technical proficiency and gather enough money to expand it to feature length. But because of his sudden poverty, he couldn't claim the trailer from the local film lab that developed it (When he came up with the money later, they claimed to have simply lost it. By the time they found it again, it was too late to do him much good.)

Unemployed and demoralized, Carstarphen vacated his apartment and holed up in a ratty suburban motel room and bided his time, trying desperately to convince different people around town to invest in his movie. He had to restrict his meetings with these potential good samaritans—who would have to he persuaded by Carstarphen's enthusiasm alone, since he had no 35mm trailer to show them—to locations serviced by DART, since his car had given out during a trip to Los Angeles.

Carstarphen eventually ended up shooting Weekend on video, not film. Although he was proud of having completed it, he was disappointed by certain aspects of its technical quality—particularly the sound, which ranged from competent to wretched. He learned from some of his mistakes while planning his second feature, Mea Culpa.

Like Weekend, it was primarily financed through a S7,000 grant from Irving Cable (with assistance from the National Endowment for the Arts and other sources). Carstarphen decided that if he meticulously planned every shot beforehand and rehearsed his actors obsessively, he could shoot the thing on 35mm film and make up in inventiveness what he lacked in resources.

But even Mea Culpa didn't come off hitch-free. His decision to shoot it without synchronous sound and dub in the dialogue later proved immensely time-consuming and tricky; early cuts resembled those 1970s karate pictures that show up on