Wieners save world from aliens!

Niagaravation

Eight years ago, when Maria Newsom, MC '87, and her then-boyfriend Joe Romano set off for Niagara Falls to make a short film, they began a seven-year filmmaking odyssey that proved to be almost as outrageous as their final product: the full-length, sci-fi feature Niagaravation. Not only did the two co-star and co-write the screenplay, but Romano directed and Newsom produced. They also attended to everything in between, from writing some of the soundtrack, to assembling the non-alien costumes, to designing sets. They even recruited family members to join the cast and crew, financed the film, went into personal debt, and distributed the movie themselves. Now, that's aggravation.

Looking back to the project's beginnings, Newsom said, "To be honest, I didn't have a whole lot of foresight. I really didn't know how much was involved. If I had known how much was involved in terms of commitment and money and time and energy, I don't know that we would have made it." A year out of college, Newsom had spent 11 months as an intern for a New York documentary maker when she and Romano first visited the falls in August 1988. Newsom said that while there, she and Romano were inspired to expand their idea for a short film into a full length story; they felt the Falls deserved it.

Shooting began that October at Niagara Falls. At that point, Newsom said she and Romano began to argue. "Everything was going wrong. By the end of the year the relationship was over. The pressures of making a movie were just too much," she says. Both Romano and Newsom continued to work on Niagaravation. "We had this kind of child together," Newsom said. "It's like when two people get married and they have a child, and they have to continue to work together because they're both committed to the child. It was that way with the film," she said. Over the years their new love interests joined the cast and crew of 200. "Several of Joe's girlfriends are in the film after that, a couple of my boyfriends are in the film after that," Newsom said, laughing. "Over seven years you accumulate lots of people."

Newsom's and Romano's time and effort resulted in a movie that is surprisingly elaborate for a 16mm independent production. There are horned aliens, spaceships (all right, they're coffee cups and saucers, but they fly), aerial views of Niagara Falls, indoor and outdoor locations, and an original score. Newsom said, "Our movie was not like Clerks, which was done pretty quickly in a 7-11 without that much in terms of art direction or set design or costumes. [For Niagaravation's filming] there was major preparation between each shoot, and loans and everything else."

The plot is no two-hour existential coming of age crisis story, either. Aliens are coming to steal earth's water supply in 1961, and only the newlywed Wiener couple, spurred on by some territorial ghosts who live in caves under Niagara Falls, can stop them.

Newsom attributes her contribution to the story development to her penchant for B horror movies from the fifties and sixties. "I knew that I wanted to do a sci-fi," she said, "and the idea of stealing the water--I feel that I lifted that from a sci-fi movie... In The Man who Fell to Earth, David Bowie is an alien and he's coming from a drought-ridden planet, so that's where that came from. But also, my favorite sci-fi movie is The Day the Earth Stood Still. They have a kind of around-the-world sequence in which everything is still, in London and Rome and Russia--I kind of lifted that idea for showing the drought around the world. The honeymooners idea, I think came from the fact that at that time, Joe and I were dating," she said.

When Romano and Newsom completed the film in 1995, they were dissatisfied with the offers they received for distribution, and decided to distribute Niagaravation themselves until they found a better deal. "Self-distribution is not an uncommon path for a lot of first-time filmmakers," Newsom said. The offers she and Romano had did not allow them any money up front to cover the debts they incurred over the years; moreover, Newsom felt there was little assurance the distributor would actually market the film. "It's not just about money," she said. "You work on a project for seven years, you're committed to it, you believe in it. I wasn't about to give it to a big distributor who did not have a vested interest in trying to make money back. They could put it on a shelf and not promote it, and because it wouldn't be ours anymore, we would have to do what they said. To hell with that; I wanted to have more control over where this film went, and what audiences it reached. It's some effort to bring it to college campuses, and I think the distributors feel that it's not going to bring them any money, so why should they bother. But what I care most about is having the film be seen and enjoyed," Newsom said.

Newsom and Romano have submitted Niagaravation to festivals around the country and have arranged for screenings, including its Connecticut debut on Saturday at 8 p.m. in Davies Auditorium. The film will be also be shown at the first Lower East Side Film Festival and at the Knitting Factory in Manhattan later this fall.