How many actors have directed another actor in the movie version of the role they created on stage?
Jon Shear can’t think of any, but he believes the genesis of “Urbania,” his film-directing debut, would make a great trivia question. He played the leading role in Daniel Reitz’s stage piece, “Urban Folk Tales,” and he and Reitz collaborated on the rewrite that became “Urbania.”
Shear’s knowledge of Charlie, the central character, must have helped that other actor, Dan Futterman, because it’s become a breakthrough performance for him.
At the Seattle International Film Festival in June, Futterman won the Golden Space Needle award for best actor, and Shear believes that made a difference in the film’s distribution.
“When Danny won, that was a turning point,” said Shear during a recent Seattle visit. “I think it made them [the distributors] feel that there was an audience that was up for `the game’ of the movie.”
The film is constructed as a puzzle. Not until it’s nearly over is it clear exactly what is going through the mind of Charlie, a traumatized New Yorker dealing with an unspecified loss. Shear and Futterman spent several months working together on the part.
“For the first 22 minutes, you don’t know anything about Charlie’s sexuality,” said Shear.
As Charlie talks to a bartender (Josh Hamilton), an old friend (Alan Cumming), a street person (Lothaire Bluteau), an arrogant yuppie (William Sage) and a brute (Samuel Ball), the nature of his torment gradually comes out.
Shot in two weeks in New York, the movie was such a low-budget affair that Barbara Sukowa, who made her name in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, was paid only $250. Hamilton made just $750 for his somewhat larger part.
“Most of these people are not personal friends of mine,” said Shear. “I just told them, if you guys would have me [as a director], I’d love for you to do this.” He said he had to go through “a gantlet of agents” to get the screenplay to them.
“The script did not put anyone at ease,” he said. It involves a masturbation scene that put off several actors who decided not to do the picture.
“That’s a really important scene, but there’s a thin line there,” said Shear. “It could become exploitation of the actor. It shouldn’t become too graphic.There’s a point where sexuality on-screen makes me uncomfortable for the actors.”
When Shear appeared in the original workshop production of the play in Los Angeles, it was quite a different piece. “It was no big professional production, and it was very linear,” he said.
Shear wanted to push the material further in the film, by tapping into “the way the world seems to you after a trauma. On stage, you’d have to make such an effort to explore this state, but film lends itself to it quite naturally.”
Shear appeared in the original stage production of “Angels in America,” as well as the Broadway premiere of “Six Degrees of Separation.” As an actor, his movies include “Heathers” and “Independence Day.”
Some of “Urbania” is drawn from his own experiences in New York, where he once saw a wounded, bleeding man, clearly in shock, get off a bus and head straight for a hospital emergency room. It’s one of the reasons he decided to move to Los Angeles.
Only three urban myths are mentioned in the play, while the film version makes references, sometimes quite oblique and personal, to many more.
“The movie,” said Shear, “is filled with things that haven’t quite made it to tale.com.”
