Sweet Stories #2: Be Born in Obstacles
Phone rings.
I turn with a groan.
It rings again.
Against my will, I reach for the sound and look at the display. 6:00am. On a Sunday. My director on the East Coast was calling from the future.
I think I answered with some sort of disgruntled groggy greeting. (I was on a set the night before after a very long week and am not a morning person.)
Then came the familiar, “Do you have a minute? I have an idea.”
Early in my producing journey I started saying “it’s not a real project unless something goes horribly wrong.” After 2 features and dozens of shorts or other pieces I still stand by that catchphrase. But, All is Calm and other projects this season taught me a lot about seizing obstacles optimistically; the solution can often be better than the original plan. That’s certainly true of our most well-received scene in All is Calm, “Be Born in Me (Mary).”
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch All is Calm or at least this scene at about 29:40 before continuing.
This song wasn’t even originally intended to be in the film at all. From our first week of development until the start of post-production we instead planned to feature a professional vocal ensemble singing “Mary Did You Know” and even filmed their music video.
But, a few days after their night shoot, things started to unravel. I still can’t publicly divulge what transpired, but right before we started one of our final days of principal photography we had a very testy phone call and it looked like the “Mary Did You Know” scene might be cut. Suddenly we were faced with the very real possibility that a whole song might evaporate from the film. We still had an hour until cameras needed to roll for the day, so Peter Scheibner (the director) and I set the crew to work and found a quiet spot away from set to look at the script. We were filming the narrative scenes with the grandpa character that weekend and suspected we might need to patch the hole with a quick re-write.
We were both flustered and furious, but we quickly canvassed the scenes and songs around it. The film still worked if we simply cut the whole song and its accompanying introductory narration scene. Or, the narration could be combined with another monologue before a different song already in the film. Or, SDG, our church’s vocal quartet that sings elsewhere in the project, might be able to sing “Mary Did You Know” instead.
Or, I remembered way back in development I suggested another song for this “Mary moment” in the film: “Be Born in Me (Mary)” made famous by Francesca Battistelli. We listened to it again. Maybe there was something there. Either way, we had to go film other scenes soon and there was a chance the original idea and artist still might get to be included after all. Just in case, we wrote an alternative version of the scene to cover our tracks if we ended up using “Be Born in Me.”
That was Friday, November 6. Nothing was going to happen on the original “Mary Did You Know” idea over the weekend and that Fri/Sat/Sun were our most critical days on set yet. So, we filmed our re-write and the original narration scene and tabled the problem until the end of our shoot. I flew back to Los Angeles early on Monday after wrapping that morning, promptly took a nap before an exam, took the exam, did some pressing homework, then fell back asleep again.
I woke up Tuesday morning Pacific Time on November 10 and called in to the East Coast to my fellow producing team who had been managing things with the original artist and situation. By then, things had happened. Decisions were already made. We couldn’t move forward with the original professional artist singing “Mary Did You Know” and we were asking our church’s vocal quartet, SDG, to work on the same song instead to shoot sometime the following week.
I have to truncate my telling and exclude all the reasons why, but I was not happy with how the whole situation was handled and felt like we ought to keep fighting to save the original video we already made. As a producer I was lamenting losing our most marketable asset (a labelled artist with a following outside our church), one of our strongest musical performances, our best-looking video, our strongest overture to younger demographics, plus an entire night shoot’s expenses were now rendered wasted.
Yet, no matter how I felt or argued, we had to find a new solution and as the screenwriter and producer I felt pretty strongly that we both needed some replacement to solidfy the first half and this new plan B with our own internal group’s rendition of “Mary Did You Know” wasn’t it. Our SDG vocal quartet is good (they sing elsewhere in the film), but from a story perspective, Be Born was growing on me and I still wanted some kind of named talent in the film if at all possible.
We moved forward on two fronts. First, we pivoted to Be Born and immediately knew Karen Cummins from our church was the singer for the song. (Plus, she had sung it before for a past Christmas Sweet.) We scheduled to bring her in and record that very week with an orchestral backing track we bought. (We had already wrapped our instrumentalists and there definitely wasn’t time to schedule, record, and mix another song from scratch with all the other work our audio team had on their plate.) Peter started spinning new concepts for some kind of performance or narrative-based music video.
On the second front, I pushed to make an offer to another professional artist we already have a relationship with. If we could get this new specific artist we could either drop Be Born or simply add another song to the film. We had some contingency in our budget we could offer and I prepared to bend over backwards to get a crew out of state if needed to film a music video of “Mary Did You Know” or, frankly, almost any Christmas song they wanted from their recent holiday album. Peter and I hashed out a couple concepts and I even started scouting Christmas tree farms near their home for shooting locations. Our offer stuck a chord and if it weren’t for extenuating circumstances we would have gotten them.
So, we continued developing Be Born with Karen. I got the rough mix of her recording modeled after Francesa Battistelli’s original… and I still wasn’t happy. Her track was good (we ended up using it for the credits), but something about it in context of the whole film bugged me. It didn’t sit right. It felt like we were just imitating something. And, we were struggling to come up with a convincing and practical visual idea. We had already locked talent and crew to film something on the following Wednesday, November 18; that was the only day before Thanksgiving that enough of our core creatives and crew could squeeze in a pickup. The clock was ticking and I felt backed into a corner and out of options. I mentally knew Peter and our team could make the default concept work, but I wasn’t feeling it and the whole week left me more discouraged about the entire film than any other point in the process.
That was Saturday night. I told Peter I didn’t feel good about Wednesday’s plan and we seemed to be on the same page. The next morning I woke up to that annoyingly excited phone call at 6:00am. Peter had been listening to Be Born on repeat for several days and something at the end of the bridge where the soloist sings vowels instead of lyrics felt different that morning on the way into church. A lightbulb went off. It was awfully early, but I think Peter said something along the lines of, “That song, that humming, is a lullably. What if we got Karen in costume alone in a barn somewhere holding Wylder [his 1-month old baby] and shot it in one-take like that scene in Les Mis?!”
The rest, you could say, is history. I wasn’t sure at 6:00am exactly how or if we could pull it off, but I knew it was the right choice. It was intimate, simple, emotional, and a totally new take on the song that we hadn’t seen before. Apparently Karen wasn’t sure she could do it either and told Peter “I can’t act” yet sacrificially came in for rehearsals for the next 3 days until the shoot and delivered the best performance in the film.
I was still in Los Angeles that week but called up some PAs, helped get a barn on a couple-day notice, ordered dinner for the cast and crew, and did what I could from afar to help coordinate things and then let the creatives do their thing.
We brought a keyboard and a pianist (Carissa Wronski) on set (off camera) and gave Karen an ear piece (yay for long hair) so she could hear a foundation for pitch in a way that allowed us to get clean audio in case we wanted to re-record piano later. (We didn't.) Wylder (the baby) was acting pretty well, but had a pacifier (hence why you don’t see his face). The crew ran cables and paired other monitors wirelessly so everyone except Karen, Wylder, and our DP operating the camera could clear out of the room. On the first take they ran into a technical glitch. On the second take they got what’s in the film. Peter watched it back right afterwards to confirm and called wrap.
Later in post, 3 final changes happened. First, Peter wanted a cello to softly compliment the piano and vocals so we asked Gary Hallquist to write a part and I brought in a former teacher of mine from the NC Symphony, Elizabeth Beilman, to record. Her part is the only element in the scene not recorded live on set; the wind, piano, even the baby noises were all captured in that one-take.
Second, the original “Mary Did You Know” and its introductory narration originally came much earlier in the first half of the film, right after “Almost There.” At our first full rough cut screening we sensed Be Born carried far too much emotional weight for that point in the film and the sequences didn’t flow quite right anymore. So, Peter and I covered a wall in sticky notes with our songs and scenes and tried every possible combination until we landed on what’s in the film. We essentially just moved Be Born and its narration about “prophets and poets” to the last slot before intermission (rather than closing the half with “Silent Night”).
Third, since that narration now came after Jesus’s birth in our narrative, the last bit of the alternate line we wrote on set the month before with language like “wrapped up inside Mary” no longer made sense. So, we brought our lead actor in for a little bit of ADR/voice over work and again, for the third time, re-wrote the end of that scene.
That week after principal photography when everything with “Mary Did You Know” fell apart might have been the worst week on the project for me. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t peeved with people and circumstances. I still never got named talent in the film, but what we got instead is by far the stronger story, emotional, and directoral choice. It gives All is Calm a deeply personal and musically intimate core, an element we were missing before. It’s the song that over and over again audiences name as the most powerful 5 minutes of the entire runtime. And, its simplicity allowed us to complete the film on time; as a one-take it required only a handful of hours in post production. (I’m not sure if we could have squeezed in another VFX or coverage-heavy music video with less than a month until delivery.) If I had gotten my way at first, we would have missed out on this beautiful moment entirely.
Like many other smaller examples on this film, almost every obstacle we encountered diverted us to a better result. While it can be incredibly stressful in the moment, that’s one of the most rewarding and exhilarating parts of filmmaking. Over the course of writing, shooting, and editing we get to make the same film 3 times and each iteration finds new twists and turns along the way that can make the film better or worse. If I let myself sit in misery for any longer that week and just washed my hands of the thing with a disheveled shrug and moved on with the easy choice, the film would have been worse off. Once I finally moved past my bitterness I took some advice I heard a few weeks earlier from a legendary TV executive: as a producer you have to identify what’s not working and create an environment where the creatives can find a better solution. That’s really all I did. I just stoked discontentment with our initial backup plans and Peter, Karen, and our stellar crew delivered discovered something far better. Kudos and thanks to them.
