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Speed
Freaks [film]
Unconscious
Motives of the Motion Picture Industry
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"The
Need For Speed" The critically-acclaimed claustrophobe's nightmare that was Robert Cucuzza's madcap comedy Speed Freaks was a singular expression of hallucinatory velocity and prodigious sweat, as it played at the avant-garde Ontological Theater in 1999. (The play occurred at rapid pace on a stage space that was four feet deep by ten feet wide.) Now the drug-laced canned-pea factory run by hedonist Ivan and his confused cronies reaches new heights of immobility in the eight-foot square film set of writer/director/actor Cucuzza's digital video rendering, playing at the Axis Theatre through December 9. "The movie has modulated itself back into a somewhat similar frenetic pace as the stage play," Cucuzza tells CultureFinder, "while standing on its own as a cinematic piece of work. It doesn't look like a play. But it has somehow retained theatrical qualities. I had no intention of making a movie like "Rope," which also all takes place in one room. Great as it is, that movie to me looks like a filmed play." To get the full effect, wait for the home video release and watch it in a very small room.
TAKEOUT Speed Freaks heated up the downtown theater scene last summer, and now it's back–in digital video form– working up a sweat at Axis Theater.
September 14, 2000
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"Speed
Happens: A Playwright Turns to DV"
The writer, actor, director and producer Robert Cucuzza's best play and biggest hit, Speed Freaks, ran for 15 performances in 1999, and then, like most downtown shows, disappeared, despite positive reviews. Cucuzza, 32, has staged 11 such productions at the Ontological Theater at St. Mark's in the past six years. "After making ephemeral art for 17 years," he reasoned, "I wanted very badly to create something that I could completely shape, hold in my hands and give to people for the rest of time." Where did he turn? Digital video. Cucuzza took Speed Freaks, a screwball comedy play about Ivan, the psychosexual ringleader of an illicit drug operation, and his idiotic helpers (think Marx Brothers on meth). and turned it into Speed Freaks the movie–a lurid, intense dark comedy also about Ivan (played by Cucuzza in both instances), who's taken too much of his own product, becomes jealous and paranoid, and goes on a shameless tear of weird pleasure seeking and murder. The tall, affable, Cucuzza (kuh-KOO-za) credits fellow theater artist D.J. Mendel, a Hal Hartley veteran, as his "main source of inspiration." Mendel had made his own full-length original movie, Afterbirth, on DV, and even loaned Cucuzza his high-quality DV camera. In turning the stage play into a screenplay, Cucuzza says he "took out flowery or poetic or excessive language, because that stuff holds up better in theater than on film," as well as certain "dramatic moments that bordered on dance." He hopes his video stands alone as a film, and not just as a play on tape. Cucuzza sees potential in DV for theater people everywhere. "The advent of digital video, which, to the naked eye, looks like film, has placed the holy grail of moviemaking into the hands of everybody," he says. Using DV cuts the budget to about one-tenth of what a film would cost–Speed Freaks will run in the range of $12,000–$15,000. Cucuzza thinks that filming on DV can be liberating for actors. "Because the DV camera is so much smaller than a film camera, it feels more relaxed to act in front of one," he says. There's no worrisome feeling that you're burning film and money's flying out the window. It allows you to be more playful, more experimental." He edited the film on his home computer. "The editing has become my favorite part of the whole thing," he says. "That's where I feel as if I'm actually directing it." Cucuzza agrees that where the play was somewhat goofy, the movie is insane. He shot from a lot of different angles, which allowed him to get right "inside" his main character: "It eventually becomes more psychological, because of [DV's] intimacy." The born-to-ignite Cucuzza hails from Bradford, Pennsylvania, home of Zippo lighters. He enrolled at Carnegie Mellon as a theater major, but soon transferred to the English department because, he felt, "That was not the kind of theater for me," and continued to perform and write plays. After graduation in 1990 and a spell in Europe, he moved to New York and interned with the Wooster Group and then with Richard Foreman (acting in two of Foreman's plays). Cucuzza directed his first play, Love Clump, in 1993, and staged about two each year after that, calling his company Hangdog Theater. For the future, he says, " I would love for someone to see Speed Freaks and say, 'I would like to produce your next movie.' I have screenplays I'm writing. At least now I have a calling card–as a writer, director and an actor–that I can send out to anyone at any time." |
