'A country-western black-comedy musical'

Jason Bloom: 'Viva' independent filmmaking

By Porter Anderson
CNN

(CNN) -- "I just love doing it. I've wanted to do it since I was in grade school. This was the best experience making a movie I've had. But it's always about continuing to do it. So it's a wonderful thing and very nice it's being recognized in Seattle. But it's hopefully one of many."

And as independent filmmaker Jason Bloom readies his film "Viva Las Nowhere" for the Seattle International Film Festival, opening later this month, he's as relieved as anyone in Hollywood that the feared writers' strike hasn't materialized.

QUICKVOTE Could you handle the schedule Jason Bloom talks about? -- no work for four months, no break for a year? A career in filmmaking would be worth it. Sounds disjointed to me. That schedule would make me crazy. View Results

Friday, writers and studio executives reached a tentative agreement on new contracts, heading off a long-feared strike that could have cost the industry and Los Angeles billions of dollars.

"But things have been strange the last four months with all the strike issues going on. A lot of jobs depend on bank loans and completion bonds -- a strike environment makes those very dicey. Everything has dried up over the last two months. There's a couple of projects I'm involved in but who knows now how soon things will get back underway?"

And Bloom is as unusual a member of the independent filmmaking community as this season has been in Tinsel Town. He's the son of an entertainment attorney. And he's had a hand in a major release, albeit what one character in that film called a "moron-a-thon." Bloom directed "Bio-Dome," the 1996 Pauly Shore bathroom-joke fest that might have sent you screaming into the night but racked up more than $26 million in box-office business.

And "Bio-Dome" had distribution from MGM. So Bloom is in a rare position. Although "Viva Las Nowhere" is his third key effort, and an independent one at that, he's done some TV directing and the Shore film -- and he's got family connections. This all adds up to promise in Southern California.

Still, Bloom says, "It's a strange occupation."

On. Again. Off. Again.

"This work goes from having three or four months off to having a year on. So in relationships, you're there -- and you're there way too much. And then you're just not there at all.

"A lot of people don't get why it's difficult to stay with somebody when you're 6,000 miles from them and not talking to them because you're on the set."

Patricia Richardson and Daniel Stern in a scene from Jason Bloom's "Viva Las Nowhere"

So Bloom, 33, is single, successful and Seattle-bound -- not quite the personals ad this might have been, but wait: He has a film under his arm that features James Caan. In a singing role.

"I sent the screenplay to him. I'd had a family relationship for quite a while" -- the entertainment-law family business paying off. "So I sent it to him, he liked the part. I look at it as the kind of thing he did in 'Honeymoon in Vegas' (1992), that very light, menacing comic touch. Plus he got an opportunity in this to sing, which he hasn't been able to do in a while. He's great. He really is."

Bloom's cast also includes Daniel Stern (Mary in "Home Alone," 1990) and Patricia Richardson (Connie in "Ulee's Gold," 1997).

The film is about Frank, a would-be country-western songwriter (Stern), owner of a dirt-roadside motel said to be "smack dab in the center of the U.S. of A." Frank's wife (Richardson) makes a fatal mistake and is buried in a tomato patch. Lacey Kohl ("How the Grinch Stole Christmas," 2000) plays Julie, a lounge singer who draws Frank's attention, only to suffer a peculiar accident. And Caan plays Roy, a leopard-jacketed personal manager of bad talent.

"Because these people want to be country singers," says Bloom about the film -- written by Richard Uhlig and Steve Seitz -- "they'll pick up a guitar and sing a song.

"In a nutshell, 'Viva' is a country-western black-comedy musical." Bloom cracks up. "Daniel Stern's character (Frank) has to die, a number of people have to die, actually. Things spin out of control. This is a moment-to-moment film about a guy who's been henpecked forever by his wife. And when he finally decides to assert himself, he takes the wrong turn, every step of the way."

DVD. Video. Cable.

Bloom does have arrangements in place, he says, for "Viva Las Nowhere" to go to DVD, video and cable. But this, he says, really isn't the result of his having had an entertainment-attorney father who knows how to make such agreements. Nor is his work as a filmmaker.

"I've been exposed to the business since I was a kid, having been born here in LA. But this was a different kind of exposure. I've known and met a lot of these people" in the business, "but physically knowing what it as like to make a movie and be involved in the creative process? That was new.

"I went to college at Yale. Did a lot of theater there. Set design, lighting design. I wasn't in the Yale Drama School, but New Haven (Connecticut) is one of the best places to do theater as a big extracurricular activity. Great audiences, 30 shows going up every weekend.

"I went to USC film school for graduate work, switching from theater to film. And in 1994 I did a short film called 'Irving,' the story of a Jewish vampire -- what it would be like to be a vampire if you didn't want to kill for blood.

"'Irving' did a lot of festivals, too, including Seattle." That and the "nutty little comedy" called "Bio-Dome" mean Bloom has something of a track record going into Seattle, where the festival opens May 24.

"The thing that 'Viva' has taught me," he says about his developing career, "is that things just generate at their own time and pace. As long as I can hang in there, it's OK. Besides having a great cast, the production-side people were also great.

"The hardest thing," he says, "is to get everybody on a film moving in the same direction. To be able to work with designers who were all seeing the same movie -- and then to have actors who were all seeing the same movie.

"If you can get everyone walking in the same path -- that's terrific."