Jay Newman: A Doer

I admire people who get busy when they see that things need to get done. So, when I heard that one of my former classmates, Jason “Jay” Newman, had become a doer of sorts, I immediately requested an interview. What does Jay do? He makes movies.

To Jay, movies are fascinating because of the way everything in each mise en scène — the “overall composition of a frame” — is important. “There’s so much to absorb in 90 or 120 minutes. So much you don’t notice.” He used a hypothetical camera angle of our interview as an example: the clothes he and I had on, the stuff spilling out of my bags, my note taking, the placement of our table in the coffee shop, and the lunch time crowd of old people work together to “tell the viewers what’s going on.”

Since Youngstown State University doesn’t offer a film major, at the end of the Fall 2008 semester, Jay formed the Student Filmmaking Association to “get students who appreciate film ... together for the common goal to make something.” That something will be, of course, short films. Jay has about five years' experience making low budget, feature length horror movies with a local company, Schotten Filmworks. The club is designed to be a fun, “learn as we go sort of thing.” Meetings don’t operate like classes; reading the novel before watching the adaptation, while beneficial, is optional.

The club is made up of people who know Jay and are, too, fond of movies. There are five or six dedicated members, but the numbers fluctuate weekly because people don’t understand just how “tedious” filmmaking is and how delayed the outcomes are, so they “get antsy and quit.”

There’s also the feeling that sitting around watching old movies is a waste of time, but “in order to make movies, you need to watch them.” Watching for specific aspects is crucial to the filmmaking process because analysis helps you understand what’s involved in creating something people will want to see. Some of the movies and aspects the film club has covered are: Eraserhead, because movies “don’t have to make sense”; Scarface for acting; and American Psycho for novel adaptation.

The Student Filmmaking Association will be creating a short horror film. Members are taking the summer to write individual scripts as Jay’s vision for the flick is a “themed anthology movie,” like Four Rooms, or for those of us who are more familiar with public radio, an episode of This American Life.

Jay says horror is an “easy genre” that “most people ... take for a joke,” mostly because it’s “grotesque, gross and scary.” But the genre “exists to show us what is wrong with us; the ugliness we don’t want to address or pay attention to.” Horror is easy because “comedy is hit or miss” while “drama is tedious.” And besides that, Youngstown, Ohio’s Midwestern, mid-size steel-town landscape doesn’t very well lend itself to westerns (which are boring anyway).

Photo courtesy of Cherise Benton.