I
fell in love with these characters, what
can I say?" says writer/director Frank Novak, about his
outrageous satire, Good Housekeeping. Winner
of the Grand Jury prize at Slamdance, it explores the white-trash
life of loud-mouthed long-time married couple Don (Bob Miller)
and Donatella (Petra Western).
Shot
in a fast-paced, reality TV style by cinematographer Alex
Vendler (Kurt & Courtney), the camera follows
the couple and their maladjusted young son in their crappy
North Hollywood home as they count down the days to their
divorce decree. Surrounding
himself with a cluster of belligerent loser buddies who cheer
him on, the husband a flabby raging bull, with a taste
for Puppetmaster action figures is bent on harassing
his Italian wife out of hearth and home. Matching him stroke
for stroke, she is a foul-tongued Sophia Loren from Planet
Jerry Springer, who works by day as a
forklift operator at a local factory, but whose main passion
is to give her mate as good as she gets. When she ups the
ante by taking on a new lover, a woman, who is also her company's
middle-class accountant, all bets are off and the war of the
dysfunctional sexes begins in earnest.
Although
he didn't attend cinema school, Nebraskan-born Novak, 41,
has been making his own films since he was a teenager, gathering
experience along the way as a production designer/art director
for Roger Corman. "People still think it's odd that I'm not
'educated' in that way," he says. "I did take an editing class
once, and a film course once. But then I own Modernica [the
Los Angeles-based furniture design company] and I didn't go
to furniture school or anything. By
1992 he was filming scripted, Cops-style reality newscasts,
and from that aesthetic, he says, sprang the short, Domestic
Disturbance (which screened at New Directors/New Films
in 1996), which in turn became the inspiration for Good
Housekeeping.
It was produced, grass-roots style, out of Modernica Pictures,
along with his executive producer brother Jay, which the film-maker
says is not the wacky idea it seems. "You know those Korean
stores that have food and videos?" he laughs. "We have furniture
and film. Seriously, it actually kind of made sense doing
it out of there. Our budget was very, very tight, and if we
used Modernica, everything's kind of built in. We have a site
downtown where we make hings
and ship them all over the world, the accounting stuff and
payroll department is there, and additionally, it was there
for us to use as a free location.
"I'm
not interested in making a film that I don't believe in,"
he adds. "It's not like a musician playing a bar for one night.
It's a year or two of your life. It's amazing to me that people
can do that, just as a job."
Shari
Roman
