Smiling Fish & Goat On Fire

How do you make an award-winning feature film for $40,000? You write what you know, mooch off of friends for location shots until they are no longer friends, get evicted from your apartment because you keep painting the rooms different colors for your film work, film parked cars because you don’t have enough money to film in motion, pay large parking fines, push the technical limits of your film stock and equipment, and use every scrap of talent available from your cast. The entire film was shot in twelve long hectic days. The brothers’ home in Smiling Fish & Goat on Fire is a composite of three different dwellings and the film includes numerous personal mementoes from the director and principal cast. The bond company that funded the picture held some of the old family photographs hostage until all bills were paid.

Kevin Jordan began work as a teen actor and public television host before attending New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts where he received the Martin Scorsese Filmmaker’s Scholarship. He began work on this film after graduation as a cooperative project with Derick and Steven Martini who incorporated stories and pictures from their personal lives. All three were native New Yorkers in their early twenties when they began assembling the best cheap cast they could garner. The scenes at the beginning really were of their parents and pictures from their childhood. While there are several painful gaps where the improvisations fall flat, there is more than enough truth in the script to make it work. Jordan’s technical mastery, and educated risk taking with the script and film process enabled him to deliver a quality production.

One small story in the script was about an old White soundman they had met who had worked with Paul Robeson. They struck gold when a Black former jazz vocalist with Count Basie and professional actor named Bill Henderson applied for the part. Henderson was so good; they built his role up to the point that he walked away with the film. A festival audience gave Henderson a standing ovation after the film was over. The final product explores different kinds of maturity, variations on respect for life, and the fragile nature of romance and life choices.

The studio system, like the book industry, is designed around multi-million dollar productions where a few blockbusters provide the only profit. The net result is that few take chances by appealing to anything but the lowest common denominator. The glory of our age is in the way DVDs have invigorated the foreign and independent film market. It would have been easy for the Martini brothers to write themselves as mature, focused, caring individuals. This independent film would have gone the way of thousands of others before. Instead, they were brave enough to show themselves as childish, self-absorbed, inconstant, and entirely unsure about how to be adults. When matched up with iconic types in films like Stagecoach and Casablanca, they offer the question of what leaves us better off. Is it more important to strive for unreachable ideals or to see ourselves as we really are? Jordan and the Martinis offer an engaging image of a new honest generation of filmmakers more interested in exploring reality than in romanticizing our past.