Flaming Lips’ Movie to Premiere During deadCenter Film Festival
By Gene Triplett, The Oklahoman
Jun. 6–Leave it to Wayne Coyne to screen a home movie in his own backyard that draws police intervention.
Of course, this isn’t some ordinary video of kids and dogs on the lawn. It’s “Christmas on Mars,” a seven-years-in-the-making Flaming Lips production that finally gets its long, long-awaited formal Oklahoma City premiere June 13-14 at the deadCenter Film Festival.
And the soundtrack is LOUD — as it should be.
That’s what drew the cops.
“The police showed up in the last five minutes … not to see the film,” said Coyne, leader of the Flaming Lips, Oklahoma City’s own contribution to the world of visionary underground rock and, now, experimental low-budget film.
Coyne had set up a circus tent in his sprawling backyard to run a sneak preview of “Christmas on Mars” for a “select few” who might appreciate his quirky sci-fi rock ‘n’ roll fantasy, and while he worried about disturbing the neighbors, he didn’t want to skimp on the sound.
“It was amazingly loud,” Coyne admitted. “But you can’t fake these things, you’ve got to do them (right), and the police that showed up were guys that come around the neighborhood here all the time. You know what the neighborhood’s like, and I think they’re just relieved that they’re not pulling up on a drive-by shooting.”
Coyne and his wife, Michelle, live in the midtown Classen-10-Penn area, the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of his youth where he chooses to remain.
And by now, the neighbors are used to such uncommon sights as a circus tent in the Coynes’ backyard. After all, that’s where most of “Christmas on Mars” was shot, using as its centerpiece prop a 10,000-gallon fiberglass tank salvaged from an old gas station and tricked out with blinking lights, old computer parts, wiring and tubing that make it look very much like a space station outpost on Mars.
Beginning in 2001, between touring and recording and other Lips-related business, Coyne set about making his movie, directing from the “script” in his head and scribbling notes as he went along, using as cast and crew his bandmates — Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins — his wife, family members, friends, volunteers, TV/film actors Fred Armisen (“Saturday Night Live”), Adam Goldberg (“Saving Private Ryan”) and Steve Burns (“Blue’s Clues”), and, in particular, Oklahoma-bred filmmaker Bradley Beesley, who’s been making videos and documentaries with the band since 1991.
“After seven years of shooting it, it’s nice to know that it’s finished and it’s an actual story with a beginning, middle and end,” said Beesley, who also will be introducing his own new film at deadCenter, “Okie Noodling II,” the sequel to his critically lauded documentary about hand fishing in the muddy backwaters of Oklahoma.
“For a while there, when you’re working without a script, you kind of wonder if it’s all going to make sense in the end, but kudos to Mr. Coyne for bringing it all together.”
Coyne’s homemade space oddity is set in the midst of an earthling-built colony that’s going to seed in the middle of the Martian wasteland.
It’s Christmas Eve, and everyone appears to be in various stages of mental deterioration, especially the central protagonist (an effectively gloomy Drozd), as systems are failing and the entire grand experiment seems doomed. Most tragic of all: the endangered birth of an artificially incubated human baby.
But then, a mysterious green-skinned alien (Coyne with antennae protruding from his forehead) arrives from somewhere far, far away, and things begin to change.
“The oxygen generator and the gravity control pod have both gone so haywire that if they don’t fix these, this baby won’t be able to be born,” Coyne said. “And in some ways, I think the baby is slightly symbolic. Like, if the baby makes it, we’ll all make it. And if the baby doesn’t make it, maybe we just weren’t destined to live in space or live on Mars, or however those sort of more cynical themes could play out.”
The film was shot mainly in black and white with occasional flashes of color punctuating it at just the right dramatic moments, and its effectively moody, noir-ish look is reminiscent of the fever-dream qualities of early David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick, when they were starting out on shoestring budgets.
Add some surprisingly dazzling, seemingly LSD-influenced visual effects courtesy of technologically handy George Salisbury, and some incredibly crafty use of Home Depot odds and ends, junkyard cast-offs and an abandoned south Oklahoma City cement plant, and “Christmas on Mars” is a pretty impressive home movie, considering its piecemeal, seven-year shooting schedule.
The whole thing cost about $350,000 all told, and although the spare-time endeavor never came close to taking priority over the Flaming Lips’ main mission of making majestic alternative rock, Coyne is relieved that a message emerged from his “fantastical kind of freak-out” in the final editing.
“I think it goes along these themes that we’ve kind of accidentally stumbled upon as Flaming Lips philosophy,” he said. “Maybe it’s proclaiming that there is a kind of cosmic mercy that happens when we feel like, despite our best efforts, we really are defeated. … Happiness can await us despite our worst failures. But it’s a happiness we must create. And since everything we believed in is destroyed, we have to create this happiness out of nothing.”
Underline all of that with the band’s soaringly cinematic score, and Coyne sums it up this way: “It’s psychedelic, it’s loud, it’s Christmas, it’s Flaming Lips, it’s optimism, it’s all these things. I can’t wait for you to see it.”
Uninterrupted by the cops, that is.
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Copyright (c) 2008, The Oklahoman
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