This article is from the March 2012 issue of KC Stage
If over the previous Halloweens you’ve witnessed zombies and vampires grace the Kansas City theatre scene, then you more than likely saw some of Mitch Brian’s latest works: Maul of the Dead and Sorority House of the Dead. Well, Brian is at it again, and this time it’s going to be a bucket of blood. No, not a literal bucket of blood, but his stage version of the Roger Corman cult film classic Bucket of Blood. The Corman classic centers on a poor talentless dweeb who murders the living and turns them into works of art and ends up becoming an overnight success; only to come to a bad end when the heat gets turned up on his gruesome sculptures and they begin to melt.
Brian’s start as a screenwriter is the true Hollywood screenwriter beginning. Transformations was Brian’s first produced screenplay, and according to Brian, the producer Charles Band gave him the blueprints for the set of his previously produced movie and told Brian to make sure the script he wrote would work on the set that was laid out in the blueprints because he wasn’t going to spend money for another one. The producer then gave Brian two weeks to get it done. And get it done he did, and it’s been full speed ahead ever since, with more than 25 scripts to his credit, and with scripts ranging from an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd to a remake of Seven Days in May, by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, a political thriller about an attempted military coup in the United States.
Brian feels his skill set as a screenwriter has been very beneficial to his playwriting career in that he enjoys doing things that you can’t do in a screenplay, while blending the two forms together. Brian views his work as a “conversation between two forms, that of playwriting and screenwriting.” He wants to make “something engaging and inviting to an audience” and enjoys blending the elements of screenwriting in with those of the theatre, which is easily apparent in his play Sorority House of the Dead where in one of the scenes a letterbox frame is lowered on stage to create a cinematic effect for the scene.
If you were to ask him what he likes about writing plays over screenplays, he’d tell you, “Plays are a direct invitation to the audience to use their imagination. The intimacy and use of imagination are what’s wonderful about plays.” In addition to that, screenwriting is a fickle business and as Brian states, “The trouble with screenwriting is that you write a lot of stuff that doesn’t get made.”
Brian goes on to explain how he enjoys the immediate feedback a writer gets from playwriting. And how he can immediately tell if things work or not and then be able to supplement what works based on audience feedback. He’s learned about comedy by observing the reactions of the audience. In his opinion, there are two genres that truly connect with an audience, which are horror and comedy, because with them, “you’re either trying to get them to laugh or to frighten them.”
Brian goes on to explain how he dislikes utilizing blackouts on stage, preferring instead to keep the action moving along. As Brian states, “I enjoy sustained drama without cuts.” For Brian, blackouts on stage are like the cuts in screenplays and are to be avoided.
When asked about which genres he prefers, Brian offered history, crime, and horror as his genres of choice. As to history, he added that the truth in it is what appealed to him because often history is quite comical and at times you just “couldn’t make this stuff up.”
Brian has lived in Kansas City since 1991, at first traveling back and forth from Los Angeles to Kansas City. He started teaching at UMKC in 2001.
To the beginner in the industry Brian has this advice, “You gotta put the time in – 10,000 hours. In that time you’ll learn what you’re good at and good stuff will get noticed.” Brian is referring to the Malcolm Gladwell book Outliers in which he discusses the 10,000-Hour Rule, where you need to have been working at something for at least 10,000 hours before you have truly become proficient at it.
If you’re interested in reading some of Brian’s work, you might start with his latest short story “Last Night at Rialto” which will soon to be out in the short story collection Kansas City Noir, published by Akashic Books and edited by Steve Paul. If you’re interested in getting a copy of either Maul of the Dead or Sorority House of the Dead for your own theatre group, they are available through Dramatic Publishing at www.dramaticpublishing.com.
Brian’s Bucket of Blood will be performed in a beatnik café setting ala 1959, and according to Brian should be a lot of fun. Based on the responses from his previous work, it’s a given.
Bucket of Blood will be presented at the Living Room in March and April from March 19 - April 1.
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