Bride may wear blood; Bluebox wears success

By Soheil Rezayazdi / THE DAILY IOWAN / November 10, 2006

Success for Scott Beck and Bryan Woods hardly even registers as news anymore. So entrenched in acclaim, the filmmakers' prizes and honors have become the local cinematic equivalent of starving African children. We read about their award-snatching films and think, "Yeah, what else is new?"

Well, how about five more awards?

Made under their production company, Bluebox Limited, the duo's latest film stomped competitors at the Wild Rose Independent Film Festival in Des Moines in October, earning five honors, including best feature and best director.

The Bettendorf natives will debut their hour-long film, The Bride Wore Blood, at the Putnam IMAX Theatre in Davenport, 1717 W. 12th St., on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

"We were waiting for our development-deal contract to come back from MTV, so we thought 'Well, it's taken a couple months; why don't we just make another film, just as an exercise?' " Beck said, noting that the film began with a sparse 15-page script. "Over time, [The Bride Wore Blood] kind of grew from an exercise into a short film on its own."

In December 2005, the duo sparked the envy of nearly every film student in Iowa when MTV Films crowned Beck's trailer for University Heights the winner of The Best Film on Campus contest, offering Beck a development deal with MTV Films.

Along with such honors, the two have also been top-three-percentile finalists for Project Greenlight and have been hired to film a documentary for 68-year-old Italian filmmaker Pupi Avati's upcoming film The Hideout.

The Bride Wore Blood's intricate plot involves two bounty hunters, a bride and groom, a corrupt cop, and a splattering of, well, blood. As an unabashed throwback to the days of Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns, the film sports many of the Bluebox team's best known trademarks: smooth tracking shots, crisp visuals, an ensemble story line, and rumbling, David Lynch-style sound design.

Beck's monotone speech and plainspoken attitude signal he hasn't let praise morph him into an egomaniac. While there remains a subculture of students who adamantly disparage Beck's work - either to his face, secondhand, or, on one occasion, on message boards - Beck tries not to mull over the negative.

"I don't need to deal with that, because my concentration is on how I can make the best film possible," the UI senior said. "You can trash talk my past work as much as you want. That's your opinion, whether it stems from honesty or from jealousy. I don't want to put my focus on that, because it's not going to help me become a better filmmaker - unless if it's valid criticism."

Woods, co-writer and director of The Bride Wore Blood, had the opposite opinion. A single criticism, even if buried within a hundred compliments, he said, can haunt him indefinitely.

Although they prefer to test-screen their films prior to release, the two simply used the Wild Rose Independent Film Festival screening as a trial run to get feedback on the film because of a lack of time.

It was encouraging for Woods that The Bride Wore Blood - even with three absent scenes, rough sound, and placeholder music - could still round up five of the night's top awards. Even so, the UI senior worries the film might be "too much of a style piece without enough story."

"Then again, that's what the spaghetti Westerns were," Woods said with a laugh. "You don't really care about Clint Eastwood's character; you just want to see him go around and shoot people and have fun. I hope that's what we captured."