Out There . . . Somewhere
Indie filmmaker Trent Harris goes beyond borders
By Jeremy Mathews
Filmmaker Trent Harris sees his camera as a weapon. In the past, he’s used it to skewer, celebrate, and
exaggerate. Lately, he’s using it to activate.
Part homebred avant-garde philosopher, part world traveler, and part purveyor of the strange and amusing, Harris is best known for writing and directing films that are—depending on whom you ask—either brilliant cult classics, impenetrable oddities, or something no one's ever heard of. The most popular of these are Salt Lake City cult staple Rubin and Ed, made in 1991, and The Beaver Trilogy, a critically lauded 2001 compilation of three early works about an odd young man from Beaver, Utah, who impersonates Olivia Newton-John.
But for the last decade, Harris has devoted most of his time to global issues, shooting films in exotic locales and Third World countries—most recently Tanzania. His hour-long 2001 film The Cement Ball of Earth, Heaven, and Hell follows Aki Ra, a former Khmer Rouge soldier who now disables landmines in Cambodia. Ra is scarred by the memories of his time as a soldier, and his quest for redemption is a profound one. Local filmmaker Tyrone Davies, a former student of Harris’s at the now-defunct Utah Film and Video Center, showed the film at his touring Free Form Film Festival. “When we showed it in San Francisco,” Davies said, “people came up to thank us for showing it. They were really inspired by it, touched and moved by it … It's hard not to be interested in a story like that.”
Harris hopes his films will make audiences think and feel—and do something.
“If the pen is mightier than the sword, a video camera is more powerful than a tank,” he says. “And you can really change things if you get certain kinds of films and certain kinds of stories … You do a story on somebody and it gets broadcast nationally and gets attention, and then they get attention—and then they get money.”
There may not be an immediate connection between Ra and Rubin, Crispin Glover's antisocial twentysomething who keeps his cat in the freezer in Rubin and Ed, but the two hold a similar appeal, Harris said. “They're definitely both way outside the norm and both what I call heroic misfits.” This love for the unusual spills over to Harris’s freelance work, which includes producing, shooting, and editing segments for the PBS news program Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, made in collaboration with on-air personality Lucky Severson, whom Harris met in 1979 while making segments for the KUTV news program Extra.
These freelance projects feed Harris's interests while allowing him to finance personal projects like the in-the-works Delightful Water Universe, a political satire and thriller. It’s Harris’s first feature in 13 years. The film is set in the not-so-distant future, where, in Harris's words, “nincompoops are in charge, free thinkers are locked up, and some believe Bigfoot controls the major TV networks with a hat he constructed from stolen windshield wiper blades.” Weaving stinging commentary with a hard-boiled plot, the film explores this bleak future through the eyes of a revolutionary madman who believes in the world-changing power of art.
The new feature, which Harris started shooting last October, rumbled back into production in March, when the writer-director posted an open casting call that stressed “no experience is OK” and promised a day rate of $50. The brief descriptions of roles included “T.T. Swackhumma: female, must be able to talk like Elmer Fudd.”
Hollywood studios are rarely interested in financing such movies, but Harris has long abandoned the quest for Hollywood money. After Rubin and Ed bombed at the box office, Columbia Tristar, the studio that owns its distribution rights, removed it from circulation. Harris now circumvents the Hollywood bigwigs by financing his own films and editing them in his office.
“I can do everything myself,” Harris said. “I write a script, I don't send it out to producers—I just go make it. In the first place, I don‘t think any of them would like it. And in the second place, it would take them five years to tell me they didn't like it.”
It took a decade of financial failure in Los Angeles to get here, but Harris is comfortable in his cozy office, tucked away in a narrow building on a sliver of land near downtown Salt Lake City. After living 13 years in Los Angeles, he decided that he’d rather be isolated from the industry than isolated by it. He packed his ideas, returned to Salt Lake City, and never looked back.
Though he spent much of his childhood in southern Idaho, he considers Utah, where he moved about the time he started high school, his home. “I hear a lot of people complain about Salt Lake, but I tell ya, all you've gotta do is move away to someplace else for a while,” he said. “And then you appreciate it a lot more. If you think Salt Lake's a drag, move to L.A., move to Phoenix—move to some of these other places—and suddenly Salt Lake looks a lot better.”
In Plan 10 From Outer Space, a 1950s-sci-fi throwback, Harris depicts some of Utah's less-known history, which, in Harris's view, is more compelling than the mainstream version. (It also has space aliens.)
“One thing that really interested me is the fact of how embarrassed people were who lived in Utah, about what a kooky place it is,” Harris said. “And I thought, yeah, it’s kooky. That’s kind of great. So I like that part of it and that’s what I tried to point up in my book—that Mondo Utah book—and in Plan 10. To not be embarrassed by our culture, but to celebrate it.”
When he lived in Los Angeles, Harris still chose to shoot Rubin and Ed on location in Salt Lake City and southern Utah. “It's cheap. It’s beautiful. People are friendly. It’s easy to get around.
And there’s not a lot of distractions, so I can work,” he said.
His modest lifestyle allows him to devote funds to his craft. He lives in a little apartment, drives around on a scooter, and doesn't own real estate.
Glance around his office, and this is what you’ll see: The fake cat that went water-skiing in Rubin and Ed, sculptures and artifacts from around the world, a stack of recent paintings, and a collection of books by him and others about local history and global adventure.
These are souvenirs from a three-decade career spent searching for new topics to explore and adventures to document. They’re also clues to an ever-shifting world view where he remains steadfastly an outsider. As a maker of fictional features, he is on the fringe of the system, cut off from the heart of the industry. As a documentarian in Third World countries, he is a foreigner trying to understand strange lands, their people, and—hopefully—himself.
His current goal is to make Salt Lake City a workable and affordable place to shoot a movie. Harris, who is giddy over the cheaper cameras and editing solutions available in the digital age, runs a tight set consisting of four crew members who can do a number of jobs well. He shoots and edits about five portions of Delightful Water Universe one at a time, before compiling the full-length version. He does everything to make his vision a reality—except think about how or if he’s going to break even or, in an unlikely turn of events, make a profit.
“If I thought about the end game, I probably wouldn’t make the movie,” Harris said of his latest film’s financial prospects. He doesn’t expect to receive national distribution beyond DVDs sold off his Website. “I just like to make the movies. I create these strange little worlds and I like to bring them to life. If I’m the only one who watches them, then there you have it. It’s about making them and doing these things more than it is making money. Fame and fortune is not really the goal. I don’t really care if I get into Sundance and stuff anymore. I’m just not that interested in that world.”
A journalist and film critic, Jeremy Mathews has written for Film Threat, The Salt Lake Tribune, and Salt Lake City Weekly. He writes movie reviews and a weekly column for In Utah This Week and runs the weblog www.thesamedame.com.
