No Rules

Ego. Money. Control. Power. War may be hell, but consider the perils of making and distributing your own full-length film.

Lawrence Bridges has written, directed, produced and financed his own movie, a quirky film called “12.” It cost about $300,000 to make and ate up half a million feet of film. Bridges has missed holidays and family gatherings; he’s pulled all-nighters and, on occasion, relegated his day job to the back burner. His movie is screened, guerrilla-style, for free, on the sides of buildings throughout Los Angeles.

Forget focus groups and questionnaires. Forget filmmaking by committee, by teams of screenwriters. Forget everything you ever knew about movies and how they are made, released, and shown. (You might also want to forget that it took Bridges about a dozen years--hence the film’s title--to finish.) This is the story of a guy who maintained total creative control.

Bridges is a 52-year-old advertising exec who owns Red Car, Inc., a well-known editing and digital design company based in Santa Monica. At 23, he had his first real movie job as a production assistant on Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation.” At the time, he knew he wanted “to make a film outside the film industry model,” but he wasn’t sure about the direction he wanted his movie to take.

Then, in 1988, while directing TV commercials and music videos, Bridges asked three young actors--Alison Elliott, Tony Griffin and Allen Lulu--to form a workshop “to explore acting on the big screen.” Bridges also was developing his own movie-making skills. “I owned a camera, had a regular crew, and was able to offer filmed scene study to the three actors in the workshop.” Bridges found their collective acting chops so impressive that he wanted to write something specifically for them. But he didn’t want to be part of a project that conformed to any template of popular movie-making. So “12” was born.

As the years passed, Bridges’ cinematic conceit for “12” grew ever more ambitious and audacious. Though the plot turned out to be negligible, the movie plays by its own unique rules. Here the ancient Greek gods are an eccentric bunch of Southern Californians feuding and fighting like stubborn children. The movie concentrates on the journeys of Marie-No’l West and her half-brother Filmore West, the illegitimate offspring of Zeus. The goddess Athena is an on-camera reporter, Mars is a Marine recruiting officer and Poseidon is a bottled-water deliveryman. The siblings wind up stranded on an island ranch just off the coast of Los Angeles, where they wait for their father to move them into new lives. But Zeus has a few tricks up his sleeve and requires his kids to perform Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”--indefinitely. The tone of the movie alternates between sitcom shtick and the explosive shrapnel of black comedy.

Among Bridges’ more daunting challenges in shooting “12” was maintaining the same cast of 17 over the long shooting period. At one point, Griffin and Lulu were so furious with one another over a botched screenwriting partnership that they refused to appear together in a scene. Bridges had to shoot them separately, and then splice. When Lulu started out on “12,” he was “a young Turk trying to make it in the business.” But by the time it was over, he “had a baby and a marriage. I also had a divorce.”

Alison Elliott starred in “The Spitfire Grill” in the midst of making “12.” But she has nothing but kind words for what will undoubtedly be the longest acting job of her life. “I would say it’s rare for an actor to have that kind of continuity with a project, to chronicle one’s growth and experience and how that changes someone’s maturity.”

Making his own movie was far different from shooting commercials, which Bridges describes as producing visual haiku. His work on “12” was a way of getting at more gritty concerns, such as riots, floods and fires.

“My camera was always loaded and the batteries charged, and often it traveled with me in my car to and from work,” Bridges says of his hit-and-run tactics. “When there was a disaster, I was always ready to document it.” Amid scenes of real lunar and solar eclipses are scenes from the 1994 riots.

Not that Bridges discarded the tricks and techniques acquired as a commercial and video editor and director. “I have a rule that something has to happen every 10 seconds,” he confides. Even in “12.”

as a stanford undergraduate in the late 1960s, Bridges concentrated on literature and poetry. After completing his degree in English, he landed work at several small editing companies. But in a few years he became restless, and so he enrolled at Dartmouth and earned an MBA.

Consequently, he made his way into TV commercial work and music videos, editing Michael Jackson’s breakaway hit video “Beat It” in 1982. But as the 1980s boogied on, he grew more dissatisfied with the standard method of producing commercials. The accepted elements had become stale; there were no visual risks to captivate viewers. Changes had to be made; things had to be shaken up.

Infused with this radical fervor, Bridges experimented, reconfiguring the look of ads and their stories. One of advertising’s new angry young men, he made “anti-commercials” notable for their herky-jerky, hand-held camera angles and lightning quick whip-pans captured on grainy film. In 1984, he edited the “Walk on the Wild Side” Honda motorcycle ad featuring Lou Reed and his song of the same title, as well as the 1988 cinema verite Lee Jeans campaign. The following year Bridges was selected Best Advertising Auteur by Connoisseur magazine, the editors writing that “whenever you see an ad that verges on art, chances are that Bridges had a hand in it--as either director, editor or graphic designer.” Ironically, the techniques he pioneered as a backlash to formulaic commercials are now staples of the industry, as well as hallmarks of countless Hollywood feature films aiming for “realism.”

The same boundless but sometimes reckless enthusiasm is embodied in “12,” along with an earnest yet impulsive need to ransack tradition. There’s an aggressive air of disenfranchisement, something that dares you to throw the first punch. But just when matters threaten to turn hostile, humor swoops in and saves the day.

Given Bridges’ idiosyncratic approach to filmmaking, his method of distribution makes perfect sense. On Friday and Saturday nights, Bridges projects a two-hour, 15-minute version of “12” onto “appropriated” public spaces and building exteriors on the Westside and in Hollywood. It’s as if he’s created an instant drive-in. He has not secured permits or sought local government approval to blitz “12” on city streets. He is, as he puts it, operating “total guerrilla.”

On one particular night, as “12” flashed across the side of a building in Santa Monica, a police car happened to cruise by. While images flickered on the building’s exterior, the officers sat and waited, seemingly poised to take action. But after watching “12” for 15 minutes, they simply moved on.

Norman Cohen, whose company manages an office building at Santa Monica Boulevard and 5th Street where “12” has been projected, calls Bridges “a muse,” adding that the unconventional screenings are “a lovely thing to do.” But local governments take a dimmer view. Debra Scott of the Los Angeles Department of Public Works’ Street Use Inspection Division says Bridges needs to clear screenings in the City of Los Angeles with her department; he also is obligated to notify the Department of Transportation and obtain permission from police and the Department of Building and Safety. Deputy Sheriff Donald Mueller of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department says clearance is necessary from the police and fire departments for any screenings in West Hollywood; the city has street and permit requirements as well. Amanda Schachter, a principal planner with the city of Santa Monica, says Bridges is required to secure a temporary use permit to show his movie outdoors in that beach-side city.

Bridges is not concerned with legalities and statutes. A manifesto posted on the “12” Web site, www.12.org/, declares “these screenings reclaim the last patch of legitimate ground left in truly independent filmmaking.” In the same communique, he announces: “Art belongs to the people and this film is my gift back to the city of L.A. It’s a rolling installation and tribute to my home city . . . .”

In addition to delivering Bridges’ war cry, the Web site serves as a means of rallying the faithful to upcoming showings, posting times, directions and maps to the secret locations where the movie will be flashing. In this way Bridges recruits a growing tribe of predominantly young urban nomads, numbering some 10 carloads of moviegoers at each screening. (One devotee who had just seen the film remarked in a cyber interview on the Web site, “This is so L.A. We’re sitting in a car looking at a wall!”)

On any given weekend evening on such instant screens as the Hollywood Staples store off Sunset Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue, “12” bursts from the darkness, commanding tall walls as a compact generator rumbles and powers a projector strapped to a car hood. Viewers tune car radios to 103.1 FM, the soundtrack broadcast by a low-level transmitter that sends its signal within a 100-foot radius

. Bridges’ wife Betsy, a savvy woman who possesses no small insight into human nature, has at times found herself mystified by her husband’s fixation. Bridges’ work on the film has spanned nearly all of their 15 1/2-year marriage and the birth of their only child, Melanie, now 11. The movie “kind of moved into our house, ever present” in her husband’s mind,” she says. But rather than try and persuade him to abandon his dream, she embraced it.

“Betsy is a supportive partner,” Bridges says, but quickly adds with a double-edged grin, “I think she just wanted me to finish it before my 65th birthday.” Would she characterize “12” as something decidedly quixotic? “Probably.”

Not everyone views “12” as a cinematic success. Carl Bressler, whose agency represents cinematographers, line producers, costume designers, production designers and editors and who was an executive producer of the award-winning independent movie “Smoke Signals,” isn’t impressed by “12.” “If you are doing a flight of fancy it’s best just to show it to your friends,” he says. Susan O’Leary, director of Fox Searchlab, a group that develops innovative directing talent, calls Bridges a bold original, someone who is “used to being the smartest person in the room.” But although she applauds his brash approach, she thinks “12” would be more cohesive if it were shorter and that it does not have enough plot to drive the film.

Bridges remains unrepentantly proud of his fantastic creation. He sees “12” as the start of ever more demanding challenges. “For me, ‘12’ is just base camp, the beginning of a more difficult ascent.” He plans to shoot his next self-made feature in eye-popping 3D. “I’m the only untainted director in Hollywood, besides the ones who just fell off the turnip truck.”

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Miles Beller is the author of “Dream of Venus (Or Living Pictures),” a novel about the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and is currently writing a biography of Robert E. Sherwood for Putnam.