Talking to Kenneth R Frank about HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION

 

I have been circling Ken Frank and the other filmmakers connected to In The Garage Productions for several years now.  I have been watching their films from the early days, and watching the group grow as filmmakers. I have enjoyed all of their films. Ken and his crew are turning out amazing features for less than most other filmmakers proof of concept shorts

A couple years back I made a comment in a review of MY SISTER’S WEDDING that Ken should reduce the comedy and focus on making a drama. Insanely Ken took it to heart and made HOW I SPENT MYSUMMER VACATION and turned out his best film to date and one of the best films you’ll see all year. Ken, let me know what he did by inviting me to the crew and family screening and he blew me away. I went with Hubert Vigilla and the two of us spent an hour after the screening standing in Penn Station just discussing it.

When I got home I emailed Ken and asked to do an interview. Because we live near each other, and because the talk went all over the place, one interview became two dinners and a talk that last over four and a half hours.

What follows is a small portion of our talk focused on Ken and the making of  HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION. I removed roughly 55 pages of material, not because it is bad but because it is largely focused on being an inde filmmaker working with micro budgets. There is a another great interview in there, but to include it will overwhelm the story of the film at hand. (I am slowly working on trying to shape all of that extra material in to a long piece.)

I want to thank Ken for letting me see the film early and for being insane enough to sit through two dinners with me.

STEVE: How did you, and the in the garage guys get together? Because there is you, Chris {Mollica] and Steve [Tsapelas. Director of BIGFOOT CLUB] and everybody else in this tight cinematic family. 

KEN: So, it starts with, back in high school, Chris and I, who plays the father in this film, he's the star of Family Outing. We're the same age, we went to high school together. 

He wanted to be an actor, I wanted to write. I went to NYU, he went to Ithaca, and we kind of formed this company. We called ourselves In The Garage Productions, and we tried making movies. And this was in in the mini DVD tape days where you could kind of do something, but it was very hard to get anything kind of off the ground. 

So we did our best. And when we got out of school, my wife Shawna [Brandle}, who produces the films,  and I actually made a kind of legitimate business, and we did some, like, wedding photo and video, and we would end up in film.

 And we would go into the city and film plays, these little black box theaters and make DVDs for people. So we just took all these little video and photo jobs we could with the idea of, you know, getting experience, making a little money so we could buy equipment, and eventually making movies. And so Chris moved out to L.A. Chris ended up marrying Shawna's sister, so Chris and I married to a pair of sisters. And the four of us were the backbone of the company. And so as technology kind of got to a place where we could genuinely make a feature film, we made THE MIX. It was our first film.

 We shot the movie in 2014, and it on the streaming in 2017. We did The Festivals in 2016, and that was our first feature.

 And, you know, that was in the earlier days of streaming where you could kind of make a deal, get a movie out. We actually got a little minimum guarantee. It was encouraging enough at the time.

 It won a couple of awards. People liked it.

 Chris and I wrote the script together. He starred in it. We filmed it out in L.A. because he, by that point, had been in L.A. for, I guess, he'd been out in L.A. for, like, seven, eight years by that point. And he got a great crew and group of actors to be in it. I was teaching full time. You know, Shawna and I with our two little kids, like, hopped a plane to L.A., and I was the boom mop on set for a week in L.A., which was kind of crazy but worked well.

 And then the movie came out on streaming. I wanted to do something next. We got into a place in our lives where Shawna was doing her Ph.D. She had landed a full time tenure track position in a university, and we kind of always said, if we got to a place, if she could replace my income, I should focus on my writing and try to really do this, genuinely. And so it all kind of coalesced at the same time that that movie came out.

So I was like, all right, I'm going to pack it in teaching, and I'm going to try to write more and try to get movies off the ground. I stopped working full time, I started on FAMILY OBLIGATIONSs, and that was kind of the first one that we did back here in New York because we did THE MIX out in L.A.

FAMILY OBLIGATIONS was made in 2018, released in 2019, and kind of was a different environment. It was no longer like the early days of streaming, so it was kind of a little more getting closer to what it is now, where it's just chaos, it's crazy getting movies out. But we did it small enough and we had enough success with it that it was kind of like, I can wrap my head around this.

 And at the very last festival with that film, I met a guy who said, “what are you doing next?”

 I'd been looking for somebody to back us financially. He said, “I really like this film. What do you got?”

 And so that was kind of like a perfect storm of things happened. So he's been with us now for a couple films. I've been kind of leading the charge on this.

I met Steven at the festivals with FFAMILY OBLIGATIONS. so he came through that. Chris and I continued working together. So that's sort of the early beginnings to where we are now. And this movie, I guess to be kind of Steven's, is either a sixth or a seventh, depending on how you think of this one.

 STEVE: I think when I  went to the screening, somebody said something was the seventh.

 KEN: Yeah, so we did THE MIX, then FAMILY OBLIGATIONS, we did a movie called SOFA KING, I think you reviewed SOFA KING. And then we did UFO CLUB and MYSISTE'S WEDDING, and then this is, whether you count BIGFOOT CLUB and How I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION, or vice versa, we did them back to back.

 So it's really funny. My wife is a professor, and she got a Fulbright Fellowship to send us to all live in Japan for half a year. So I had had My Sister's Wedding set up, I had the financial investment, and we were set to go, but with the pandemic, we were kind of shelled for a while, and we were trying to get that off the ground.

 Stephen had similarly written a script and gotten financial backing to try and get that off the ground, and we were gearing up with our two kids to move to Japan for half a year, and my wife was saying to me, just please, let's not shoot two movies back to back and then move to Japan, that sounds dumb, and that's exactly what we did. We shot two movies back to back and then moved to Japan. We shot Stephen's movie in July and my movie in August, and then we went to Japan for five months, and we came home and those movies were kind of nearing the completion point and we were getting them out.

 And so now, Stephen kind of went back to his investor, I went back to mine, and they both said, let's do it again. I had a script ready and was gearing up to do HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION, and Stephen got the money to do BIGFOOT CLUB, and my wife said, we're not going to do this again, are we? We're going to do two movies back to back, and we did.

Yeah, so we kind of did the same, frankly, ill-advised thing again, we did two movies back to back. It was still a lot of fun, but it's kind of insane. So that's the seven, two that Stephen's written and directed, this is the third one I've written and directed, just me, Chris and I wrote THE MIX together, Kevin [Wolfring], who's worked on all the movies with us, directed SOFA KING.

 That's kind of the very quick origin story of it

 STEVE: I have to say, because I've watched you guys almost from the first, and it's like, you guys are getting better and better and better and better.

 And that you have these people who are around you, these filmmakers and actors and stuff, and it's like, how the hell do you do that?... Because I've met other filmmakers, and that you have this family of people who can work together is, like, rare.

 KEN: Yeah, we're very lucky. We go along, and with each project, you always go, OK, I know I want so-and-so to be on board for this, and we have a certain... And then there's always an outlier where you go, well, now I need somebody that I've never had before.

 With this movie, The Summer Vacation, we needed kids.... My kids have been in the movies just because we need a kid. It's certain logistical challenges with child actors.

 There's a permit from the state you have to get, and it's paperwork, and it's a fee, and then the actors you cast, they have to have certain accounting. The parents have to have what's called a Coogan account, so when you pay them, that means you have to use a certain payroll company. So it's a little restrictive, and  certain people look at it and go, oh, I guess we're not going to do that. 

But I'd written the story, and I'd said to my wife this really is what I want to do. And she just kind of looked at me and was like, you find new ways to make this hard. Every time out, we finally know how to do something simple, and you come up with something difficult.

So we've got to get these kids. And, you know, and like, Paolo [Kossi}, who plays the uncle in this movie, came from Steven. Steven cast him in this web series he made, and then he was in UFO CLUB, and I really liked Paolo. I shot UFO CLUB, so I really liked being on set with Paolo. I thought he was very funny, he was very good. And so I'd written this movie, and I knew Chris would play the father. Christina [Elise Perry] is, I guess her title is, like, director of development, or? At the Chain Theater. She's married to Kirk [Gostkowski]. Kirk was in my last movie. He was in My Sister's Wedding. And we've been seeing plays at Chain, going to the Chain Film Festival for years, and I said, oh, I'd love to get Christina in it.

Jerry [Colpitts] had been in FAMILY OBLIGATIONS and been in UFO CLUB. And so I had, like, the people all filling out, and I needed the kids. And that's like, you know, so you try to add to it.

 STEVE: Where did you get the kids?

 KEN: I wrote the thing, and it's a 13-year-old girl at the center of a movie. And Shawna said to me, where are you gonna find a 13 year old girl? But she’s one of those people that really can do anything. So if you're the type of person who goes, you know, I wrote a movie, but I gotta cast kids in it, and we gotta figure out a way to hire kids legitimately. She, by 9 a.m. the next day, has it. It’s  incredible.

 And so we went looking. Obviously, you go looking for her first, because it's the big part, right? So I'm looking, and I saw this girl.

And I guess I could lie to you, but I'll tell you legitimately, she's the first kid I found. I went looking for, you know, on Long Island, a girl about this age. You know, I go to Backstage, I go to Actor's Access, I go to the usual places.

 And I come across her. I know that Chris is going to play the father. I know Chris's look. As soon as I see her, I go, oh, she is very believably Chris's daughter. Chris is like half Sicilian, half Polish. Her dad is, I don't know if he's Sicilian, he's Italian. And her mom is, you know, I don't know if she's German.  It's like the combinations are perfect. You look at her, and you're like, she can believably be Chris's daughter, no problem. I watch her act, I watch her sing, I see her reel, I see all her stuff, I go, I show it to Shawna, I say, Shawna, this girl will be perfect.

 She goes, all right, you know, let's reach out. So I reach out to her mother. Her mother gets back to me right away. Lovely woman. We have a conversation. I send her the script.  We talk about what this is. She goes, let me look at the script. Raquel  [Sciacca] looks at the script. We talk. And she sends me more stuff. Just, you know, she can see more stuff that Raquel's done.

 Raquel did this thing, which I thought was great.  I laughed so hard. She did a thing for Cozy TV for their 10th anniversary. It was this bit where they did 10-year-old, in quotes, the Nanny. And the premise was it was the nanny played by 10-year-olds. This was a couple years ago. And she played Fran Drescher. Oh, good God. She was probably 12 or 13, but, you know, the idea of being a 10-year-old nanny.

 And it's hysterical. It's as funny as you'd think it'd be. It's staged in a theater. The narrator comes out and goes, we hope you enjoy 10-year-old nanny. And these kids come out, and they're in the costume, and it's funny.

 But then there's a link, and it says, 10-year-old Frasier. And I go, how about 10-year-old Frasier? And I see this little boy playing Martin Crane. And it says Dawson Sciacca. And I'm looking at him, and I'm like, it's gotta be. So I click through, and I find links here and there, and I go, okay, so there's an actress on Long Island named Raquel Sciacca.  

There's an actual line that says Dawson Sciacca. So I called, I speak to the mother again. I said, listen, I looked at the link she sent me.

 She said, I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and I'm gonna say that you're also Dawson Sciacca's mother as well as Raquel. She goes, yeah, yes, I am. I said, let me talk to you as the parent.

 I said, I have two children. Obviously, I contacted you about Raquel. And the part is, Raquel's what she wanted.

 You've read the script by now. She goes, yeah, I wouldn't bring it up with you, but since you're bringing it up, I said, I said, do you think Dawson would want to be the little brother, and you as the parent who's gonna be on set, are you okay with that? Because I could see this being a wonderful experience for your two children, or I could see this being absolutely maddening where it's both of them, and she goes, no, no, no, I think they've gotten to work together once or twice, and it's been really fun.

 So let me, that'd be great. So I got two for one. I just got lucky, you know?

 I didn't go looking for a brother and sister, but it fell in my lap, and I wasn't gonna say no to it.

 STEVE: How much of Dawson’s role, was written, and how much did he improvise?  I ask because it’s it's one of the most amazing physical performances I've ever seen. He's just really funny. The whole performance is him reacting. You can't teach that.

 KEN: Right. It's very funny, because there's an element of it that's the two of them. Raquel, They're both a little older than they look, she just turned 17, and he's turning 13, and they're playing 13 and 9.

 She's a senior in high school. She doesn't look it. We got her between her junior and senior in high school. And, he's my younger daughter's age. They took a picture together. My kids are towering over the two of them. It's very funny. Anyway, they have a big sister, little brother relationship.

 I'm so glad I've got a brother and sister because it's just there. Like, when he comes out and he's chasing them down the street and they're walking, there's just that thing of, like, oh, my God. I even joked on set one time because it took him a couple seconds to get ready to do a take for something, and he's kind of dragging, you know, he's kind of, he goes to put a drink down, but then he realizes he needs something and he goes back and Raquel's kind of waiting for him. I'm glad I could be there for what could be the last time Raquel ever worked with Dawson.  There's just  good family moments where you know you're just putting the camera on it, you know, and it's happening, you know.

 But the idea of the relationship was supposed to be that she was this kind of all brain all neurotic kid, bright, sees it, understands it, and he was just kind of the lost in the clouds, you know, dopey little brother. And he's actually an incredibly bright, very articulate, constantly thinking little boy who like, between action and cut just switched into like, which way did he go, George? He's a much more cerebral kid than that performance implies.

 STEVE:  But even then, there's a whole sense of life beyond, behind the eyes. I mean, that's always the one thing where you get with great performances is they are they acting with the eyes.

KEN: You know, like I said, it's very, very lucky in that we got who we got because if I had had to cast a little boy to play her brother and I had put the two of them in that bedroom and they have that conversation of why do people think I'm dumb, you know, you shoot that scene 100 times and probably 99 times out of 100 you don't get that that you get between the two of them but just him slowly processing what she said and smiling was like everything I would have hoped that scene would be and it's just him, I just put the camera on him and let him run it and you're like, okay, I don't have anything to tell you,

 STEVE: You nailed it, you know, like. How much did you have to retake?

 KEN: We, we did incredibly fast. We didn't reshoot anything in terms of so principle, we had, let's see, we shot one day at Town and North Hempstead Park up in Port Washington, just me and Raquel, Shawna and her mom. That's where she's running. I guess it was five days at a house in East, Quogue, East Quogue, and then we shot which is right by where my parents live, ironically. We crashed with my folks those days. 

That's where most of the film was shot. You know, it was week, between, I think it was June 24th to like June 29th maybe we were in that house. We also did Quogue Village Beach for the beach scenes and we did the Quogue Wildlife Refuge for the scenes of them walking in the woods,  and the bridge.Then we had a day in Buddy's house in Seaford. That's at their house before they go out where it's like the kitchen table where the uncle comes in. That's like the family's home. Her asleep in bed, them having this discussion about her going out.

 And then we did school out in East Quogue again and we did the funeral home. The restaurant was on the funeral home day. I guess a total of nine, ten days and we were shooting like ten, eleven, twelve pages a day. We had one or two days where it was really dull. The day of just me shooting her and running is very light in terms of script. So the other days we had to make up.

 So we're shooting probably about thirty set-ups a day, thirty-five set-ups a day. We're cranking through like ten, twelve pages of script. And like again, Raquel's in on every page. She's in every scene. She was a machine. She was fantastic.

 We ever got to a scene where she asked, what are we doing here? You're doing so much so fast.

 And you economize is like we're doing all the dinner table scenes right now in this location.

So we're going to put the Chinese food out and he's going to come in and we're going to do the dip with the Chinese food and then we're going to strike it and we're going to do lunch, we're going to do that. And you know, after you do two or three of those you go, I'm sorry, what the hell are we doing? I've been in this seat for six hours shooting nine pages over the course of a whole script.

And if you were disoriented and didn't know what you were doing, that's why I'm here. Don't worry, I'm directing. And Raquel was like, okay, here we go. And just nailed it.

 STEVE: How was everybody else?

 KEN: They were fantastic. I love ensembles, I love families, I love family stories. And to me, you're really just hoping that you put these people in the room and they just all kind of get on the same page.

 I was fortunate.

 STEVE: You're really good at writing that stuff. If you watch  MY SISTER’S WEDDING, and you can see it. That’s why I said you have to do a drama because you're writing these scenes of families that are so brilliant.

 KEN: I take it you probably grew up in a family like mine or something like that. Which is why it makes sense to you.

 I think for some people it connects. Some people really, they see something like this and they go, oh, yeah, the relationship between the father and the son, the way the siblings, like Clara and Richie are the adult siblings and the way they interact. And it's really just kind of born of, you know, I'm one of three and my wife's one of three. We have our own kids. We're those people in the middle. I've got two kids entering their teenage years. I've got parents who are approaching 80. I was saying to my wife today, if I was a painter, I'd paint families.

If I was a musician, I'd make music about families. It's what I'm always thinking about. It's what I'm always involved in.

 STEVE: You've managed to take everything in and put it on the screen, which is like brilliant.

 KEN:  Well, thank you. What's interesting about this film is that the idea is born out of an experience I had as a kid, but now I find myself writing and relating to it from the perspective of that kid, but also realizing that I'm the father in the film as well.

 You know, that I have the perspective of, when I was 11, my grandfather died. It was a summertime when I remember hearing that he was sick in May and he passed in October. And that summer was just very kind of crazy in the family.

 I think of that as my entry into the adult world where I think before then, I was young, I was a little kid, I thought that adults had the answers, they knew what they were doing, and that one day I'd get there. you know, I would see these people in charge are, you they tell me what's right and what's wrong, and I listened.  But I kind of saw, you know, confusion, I saw misunderstanding, I saw disagreement, I saw genuine tension and sadness, and just kind of was like, oh man, are we all just making this up as we go along? Because no one has a plan of what's going to happen here.

 And so, that was the genesis of this idea. But then I found myself also realizing that you watch your kids grow up and you see your kids have certain anxieties, or you see your kids confront certain things for the first time, and how you want to kind of, how you want to intervene or don't intervene, and how you talk to them about it, and so I also had that.

 I found that the father in me was, so I was in both positions doing it, and there was this moment where we were shooting in the driveway of the house, and it's complete, you know, it's very kind of classic filmmaking one-on-one stuff where like, you schedule it for a time of day when the light's going to be decent, and you're going to bang out three or four quick shots in the exterior, it's MLS, there's no dialogue, you know, it's like, okay, place the camera, and you're okay, you guys come out first, then he gets in the car, you guys follow, stay on the steps, the car pulls away, then I'm going to punch in, and then we're going to turn it around and we're going to get a different scene where the car pulls up, and you're just getting through your shot list, and it really hit me that shooting Uncle Richie and the two kids on the steps waving goodbye, I was like, this is the goodbye I didn't have, this is them realizing they're seeing their grandfather for the last time, and Uncle Richie realizing he's seeing his father for the last time, and I was like, how did I not realize I was doing this until right the second I'm doing this? And they're saying, sun's coming down, we got to move, we got to get inside and do the dialogue scene but we're only going to wrap the kids for this time because I only have so many hours with them, whatever, but I was shooting it, and like, oh my god, look what I did.

 It was a full circle. Because the analytic side of them doing it as a director, You kind of let go and you go, oh you wrote this however many months ago and now it's coming true.

 STEVE: How long did it take you to cut the film?

 KEN: It was quick. So, we wrapped shooting on July 2nd. I had a first full cut by the middle of August, so about six weeks later. Refined it, refined it, refined it.

 I sent off that cut to my composer, who's Kevin, who directed Sofa King, he's been my assistant director and he's edited my movies before, we've worked on them together. He was a former student of mine from when I was teaching. I sent the cut off to Kevin to do work on music.

 I locked picture kind of like early October. I said, alright, this is the edit. And I started doing all the sound work, I started doing all the color work. And really right before the holidays, it was like, alright, we're good. We did it.

 The thing is  whether I try to or not, the movies all end up being about the same length. It's just an ironic thing, they all end at like 82 minutes.

 I think, something of a product of the resources we have. We're pretty small and we're pretty fast.

 STEVE: But there's an economy to your storytelling. There's nothing strenuous and anything that's there is the right coloring.

 Do you throw anything out in any of your movies?

 KEN: I always hear filmmakers talk about they shot this scene, they cut it, or they had this sequence. And I have that back in the script phase.

Where I think about different movies, like FaAMILY OBLIGATIONS, 82 minutes. I could tell you, now, if I got to make that for 100 minutes, what I would have done, or in MY SISTER'S WEDDING. In certain cases, there's a whole other character I want to introduce but they just didn’t fit.

But it usually ends up being this size. And I'm very happy with that. I really like the way that works.

 What I usually try to do is, I sit and work so things find their way out through the course of the planning and the writing phase. And then, by the time I give the scripts to the actors its all set.

 I like to schedule a reading. You know, whether we've done it in person, we'll try to do it on Zoom a couple times. And, you know, kind of hear it through. And then sometimes after that, I will try to bring things into people's voices a little more, if necessary. It wasn't really necessary with this one. The kids were incredible.

 The child actors. The level of professionalism and training they have. Like, they really are trying to make what you're doing work.

 Because then, once you're on set, money's burning. And if you're setting up a shot that you don't think you're going to use, why are you doing it? I can't imagine shooting scenes that don't make it because I worked so hard to be able to have those scenes.

 And, you know, I do understand it from a narrative standpoint. There's something about how we've done this that... If we show up to shoot that day, I know I'm going to make this work because I really had to kind of claw to get this much.

I will have more from writer director Ken Frank soon.

HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION plays at the Miyakojima International Film Festival in OkinawaJuly 4-6. The film then comes home to play LIIFE in Bellmore (along with another In The Garage film make Steven Tsaplas' BIGFOOT CLUB).  Before it heads to Europe for the Nice International Film Festival