'Blood' brothers

By David Burke / QUAD-CITY TIMES / November 5, 2006

It all started as a way to keep their chops up.

Bettendorf natives Scott Beck and Bryan Woods — as their production company, Bluebox Limited — were waiting on MTV Films to make progress after the duo won a student filmmaking contest last year, which included a deal with the cable channel’s movie division.

The two — both seniors at the University of Iowa — had been working on writing some screenplays, but hadn’t directed anything in more than a year.

“We thought we should get our feet wet again, get our hands back into filmmaking again,” Beck said.

While haggling is going on with MTV Films — a corporate restructuring is going on now, but Beck and Woods say eventually MTV will have its own movie studio — the two wanted to make a 10-minute movie for their own sakes.

“What they kept asking us is like, ‘Can you send us a sample of your directing work?’,” Woods said. “Not that we weren’t proud of (previous films), but it didn’t really show people what we were like now, today.

“We wanted to have a better representation of what we could do.”

That 10-minute movie grew exponentially to “The Bride Wore Blood,” a 60-minute movie that will debut later this month on the IMAX screen at the Putnam Museum, Davenport.

They call “Bride” a “contemporary Western,” but don’t look for horses or cowboy hats. It’s more along the lines of the Sergio Leone movies that made Clint Eastwood a star in the early 1970s.

They were encouraged by Scott Morschhauser, leader of the Quad-City surf-spy-noir-spaghetti Western band The Metrolites, who has been moving into more film soundtrack work.

“I liked it right away when I read the script, and I haven’t read a lot of scripts lately,” Morschhauser said.

Beck and Woods said Morschhauser’s score was just what they were looking for.

“It really compliments the movie, because the score we were going for has the 1960s, ’70s feel to it,” Woods said. “And I think it’s something where everything — the production design, the costumes — we weren’t trying to push it overboard.”

“As a composer, he was very in tune with the story, very aware of it,” Beck said.

In the movie, the Hired Gun (played by Travis Shepherd), a bounty killer, must protect the Bride (Christy Sullivan), but she vanished, and her body appears in an abandoned train yard. The Hired Gun must find the killer, and avenge her murder.

Beck and Woods share both the writing and directing credits for “The Bride Wore Blood.” It’s tough enough for any filmmakers to share writing and directing duties — but the longtime friends and 10-year moviemaking veterans say it’s never been a problem.

“To me, it feels like one (voice),” Woods said. “It’s bizarre how it works.”

There’s no division of labor, said Morschhauser.

“I’ve looked for it and I can’t find it,” he said.

In writing, they alternate, each refining the other’s work, until the finished product is complete.

“We kept bouncing it back and forth off each other, so it kept evolving with our own personal tastes — but those tastes are very similar within themselves,” Woods said.

“We try to put our heads together and think what’s best for the film,” Beck said.

All but one of the nine-member cast has been in previous Bluebox films. The two said the movie was easy to cast.

“We knew their strengths, we knew their weaknesses, we knew it would be a comfortable working environment,” Beck said.

Morschhauser said he was amazed to see how smoothly the production went.

“Everybody kind of knew what they had to do, and everybody knew what they had to do to chip in,” he said. “It was like a machine, it was really neat.”