Somewhere Over The...

What's at the end of the rainbow? A pot of gold? Cereal? How about a well-crafted, thoroughly entertaining documentary conceived and produced in East Texas, featuring a cast of fascinating characters in settings that jump off the screen at the audience. Well then, viewers, you are in luck.

"Rainbows End" tells the story of musicians Country Willie and The Cosmic Debris and their epic road trip across the country in a broken down school bus called “Green Hell” to record with The Legendary Stardust Cowboy. The journey is also shared by several Deep East Texas acquaintances who have dreams they hope to realize out West.

Through the years reality television has mutated the art form of the documentary into something horrible and overproduced: the opposite of what a documentary is supposed to be. A film like "Rainbows End" is a wonderful example that, when executed properly, an interesting cast of real characters and intriguing obstacles to overcome … there's no need for “The Situation.” So, when East Texas native Eric Hueber (Director/Producer/Writer/Editor) and Andy Cope (Producer/Writer) sat down to discuss their film, its subjects and the muggy, pineywoods tint on every frame of their movie, BSCENE was more than excited.

Initially a graduate student at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Hueber wanted to make a feature film project. While he didn't have any actors in the area he could assemble – he did know quite a few colorful characters. “I had to, over time, figure out how I could make a movie with these people – because you don't want to script them. You don't want to feed them dialogue. It comes out of their mouth golden anyway,” he said with a laugh. “I figured the documentary form was probably the best way to go about it – if I could get them to be natural.”

Hueber pieced together that everybody had ambitions that converged out west and started to form around the idea of a road trip, and gathering this band of merry men toward California and try to accomplish some of their goals. And in the way that documentarians tend to mingle with the ambition of their subjects, Heuber would be realizing a goal of his own. “That was really the genesis of the idea,” he said.

“Everybody has their own little dream, and mine was to make a movie. I figured if we all had congruent fantasies, why not collaborate? And ... it really paid off.”

It certainly did. Four hundred casting calls across America couldn't have produced this group. There is Peter Guzzino, the one-man band permanently stuck in 1978. There's Brian “Birdman” Birdwell, an avowed cockfighting expert, and Zach Jones, the “mathemusician.” Audrey Dean Leighton is a parapsychologist/hitchhiker/global twirler. And, of course, you can't forget “Country” Willie Edwards. A real cast list should also probably include Birdman's two roosters as well as their oft-malfunctioning bus, The Green Hell.

The film was originally shot in 2004, but the movie is being released now, and making the rounds at screenings across the state. “Well the trip itself was about three weeks,” Hueber said. “I did a lot of filming and I did a few pick up things after. I guess all-in-all I would have to say about a month of straight filming ... I had 110 hours of footage and I edited it hard and heavy for a year, then, I was asked to go to Austin, and edit on Terence Malick's film “The New World.” We worked on that for months and months and months. When I came back to Nacogdoches, I really felt frustrated with the material. I felt like we had all gone out to California, and none of us had really accomplished what we set out to do. Except for Willie, he got to record with the Stardust Cowboy – [who was] some geriatric dude who sat on the porch and sang songs with us out of key and out of time. I just felt like my film had no climax, had no proper ending. So I really just sat on it for a long time, occasionally I would come back to it and pick away at the edit. It was a very difficult project, because I didn't have a structure or a narrative. Which is why I relied so much on the voice-over to set it up. Which actually turned out to be a very interesting facet of the film. I'm glad I did it that way.”

Toward the end of 2008, Hueber was traveling and feeling “frustrated at life in general – not having finished my film, or finished a film.” Hueber had attempted, unsuccessfully, a few different occasions to accomplish that and then, “Thats when I kind of realized that, the beauty of the material wasn't that we accomplished what we set out to do, but that we had the [courage] to do it. So, the film kind of started to play in my mind, from a more mature place. I started to realize how I could really express the ending of this film, so that it wasn't about us going out and failing, it was about us going out and trying. And really just kind of celebrating that, rather than the fact that we may not have accomplished some bold accomplishment we set out to do. That wasn't the point.”

Vision firmly in place after two years worth of hard work, Hueber wrapped up the edit of the film and realized he really did have something there – something that other people responded to and that spoke to them. “It's a tough film to edit, just having that much footage that doesn't really have a plot or have a script. Having to really kind of write the script from the material. Andy [Cope], really came in and helped me. Without his discriminating eye and fresh vantage point on the material, the film would not have taken the shape it did. He really helped me put the finishing touches on it and making it the film it is.”

With such a cast of characters, one has to wonder if there were any Springer-style interactions between them – though none were really shown in the film. That dynamic – or lack of it – was something that Hueber saw as a possibility. “Initially, when we set out on this trip, I anticipated more interpersonal drama from these characters,” he recounted. “I wasn't trying to set them up for that, but I expected it … Later when I looked at the footage, there was a lot of drama. It may not have been man vs. man, but it was man vs. machine or man vs. animal. These were all my friends and we all got along, and it was never my intention to portray them unfairly. Later on, as I matured in editing it, my approach to the material changed too; where I really wanted to celebrate the characters and not show them in any kind of negative light. I really wanted to show more of their personal struggles ... I think the biggest thing is, I wanted people to, ultimately, identify with these characters, because the beauty of the film is that everybody identifies with somebody in the film. Even though, in the beginning [the audience] looks at these people and think 'there's no way!' As the story moves on, I think they really find that they have a lot more in common with these people than they ever imagined they would have.”

One thing local audiences and the cast inarguably share is their home. From the way people dress, to the accents, to the sense of humid heat drenching every frame … East Texas permeates the film. “I think it was organic because of the people I was dealing with,” Hueber said. “But ultimately it became something I wanted to wear on my sleeve. Now I live in Austin, and I love Austin, but my heart's always going to be in East Texas. I love the people [there]. I love how open they are. I love how they think, I love how eccentric they are without trying; how natural they are at just being themselves. There's a lot of innocence, and I just think there is a lot of art and beauty in that. And I think it gets lost outside of that world. So I really wanted to preserve it ... I really wanted to present it to people. It's like, 'Here's a little slice of East Texas life that I think is really beautiful.'”

The naturally slow pace of life in East Texas also fills the film, and is juxtaposed with a frenetic editing style and musical montages. Hueber said that's as much of a construct of fitting it into the watchable time frame as anything else. “The pace of the film is dictated by the 90-minute cutoff mark,” he said, laughing again. “It's me trying to compress as much in there as I can, and not killing any more [film] than I have to. There's going to be pretty extensive special features when the film is released, and a lot of deleted material.”

Cope and Hueber both come from a background in advertising and are used to the pacing needed to compress a narrative and a message and a product into a 30-second spot – possibly the perfect training for turning 110 hours of footage into 90 short minutes. “That's where the pacing came from,” Hueber intoned, “but I think it does help. This film was hot. We shot it in July going into August, between Nacogdoches through the Mojave desert, and you get to California, and you're like, gosh, you understand why people live there and never leave. And then having to drive all the way back to Nacogdoches and back into that swelter. It was a hot trip. Our thermometer literally melted.”

So with a finished product showing off East Texas, the colorful characters that inhabit it and their struggles to fulfill their dreams. Hueber and Cope are left with a great movie, and then what... ?

“Our goal is to try and get it into festivals,” Cope said. “It's funny, even with the festivals we haven't gotten into, the big ones like Sundance and Slamdance ... the two festival directors ... are both aware of the film and they both like the film a lot. The festivals are just tough to get into. They can only take so many films because they only have so many places and so many time slots to screen them. Everybody and their dog is out there making a movie now
– and there's a lot of good ones out there. So, getting into festivals is a tough deal, but we're going to keep trying throughout the spring and summer. I'm sure we'll make hopefully two or three more, even if they're smaller ones. After that, we'll just look at locking down our rights so we can self-distribute the movie, or get a distributor that's going to lock those things down and take it to an international level of distribution. That's where we are right now … trying to up our ante as far as the selling point. Every time you get into a festival it helps you out with recognition and notoriety, but also it ups your asking price a little bit I think. And also, we're both very new at this. This is our first film, so we're learning a lot as we go. We're not in a big hurry to rush in and sell it and make any mistakes. We're kind of holding it, keeping it close to our vest and seeing what it does naturally at festivals. Then, we'll take it and really try to sell it to a distributor or self-distribute at a later date.”

Unfortunately, that means the only way people will be able to see the movie at the moment is through screenings set up throughout East Texas. It's not out in any form of release – DVD, online, anything – because once that happens “the festivals won't even look at you,” said Cope. Fortunately, there are screenings set up, with more to come. It will have shown in the Austin Film Festival as of publication (to rave reviews, no doubt). Until then, people can follow the film on Facebook or get info online at rainbowsendthemovie.com. And be sure to check out the trailer on traileraddict.com – just a few months ago, "Rainbows End" made it to the number one watched trailer on that site, beating out Hollywood blockbusters simply by word of mouth.

Another question looms, will you ever be able to see "Rainbows End" at the cineplex down the street? Perhaps there are more avenues of distribution? Maybe the availability of advanced screening or communications technology will allow more people to get their eyes on it? (as of press time, Rainbows End was accepted to the Dallas International Film Festival, running Mar. 31-April 12. Check out DallasFilm.org for details.)

“That's true in a lot of ways, because of the fact that you can [distribute online]. But because of the fact that there are so many people doing that – it kind of balances it out,” Cope said. “There is so much competition, it's so much harder to get your film seen. That's why we're really lucky that Eric made a movie that's so unique. In its genre, if you can even stick it in the documentary genre, there's just nothing like it. If somebody's looking for something that's completely out there and completely different [then we've got it]. We think this thing will have kind of a cult-classic status. I think they'll find our movie. If they're searching for something strange, they'll find it.”