Behind the Scenes

Ray Revello’s Parker was an adaptation of Richard Stark’s hard-boiled crime novels, filtered through the visual influence of Darwyn Cooke’s graphic interpretation of the character. The project gave Ray a chance to work in a much colder, more controlled register than most of the films he and Daryl were making at the time.

Chris Cairo played Parker, with Kristin Mayer opposite him as Lynn. Rather than trying to tell an entire Parker story in eight minutes, the film concentrates on a single confrontation: Parker returning from the dead, finding the woman who betrayed him, and waiting for the money that might lead him to the man he actually wants.

Ray had a considerably more ambitious opening in mind. He envisioned Cairo as Parker suffering through a nervous breakdown in a motel room, taking inspiration from Martin Sheen’s hotel-room breakdown in Apocalypse Now.

Ray rented a room at the Travelers Inn in South San Francisco, next door to Carl’s Jr. The motel already carried its own piece of group mythology. Nate Blonkenfeld claimed he had been conceived there, a fact he felt compelled to announce to anyone unfortunate enough to pass the building with him.

Daryl, Ray, and Cairo brought lights and tripods into the room and began shooting. Eventually the motel management called and told them to leave.

The three went down to the lobby to plead their case. Daryl figured there was little point hiding what they were doing. The staff had already watched them carry filmmaking equipment into the room. Ray chose another strategy.

According to Ray, they were simply three brothers out on the road. They had just gotten off that weary old highway. The road was a long, dark place. They needed somewhere to rest their weary heads. And shower. The more Ray tried to explain why three adult brothers desperately needed a motel room together for rest and showering, the less Daryl and Cairo were able to keep straight faces. Ray was floundering. Neither one helped him.

Eventually the actual concern became clear. Management just wanted to make sure they weren’t shooting a porno. They weren’t. Technically.

The motel sequence did, however, produce another Dollars & Donuts milestone: the first nudity in one of the films.

Cairo decided that when Parker stepped out of the shower, the audience should see his ass. There was no elaborate artistic debate surrounding the decision. Cairo wanted to show his ass, and show his ass he did.

The rest of Parker was shot on the sets at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. Ray directed while Daryl handled the cinematography as best he could with the Sony HDV Handycam.

By the standards of the period, though, this was becoming something considerably more deliberate. There were lights. There were sets. Shots were being designed rather than simply found. Daryl and Ray were thinking more seriously about where the camera went and what the lighting was doing, and even with the same small camcorder used on the surrounding productions, the footage came away looking noticeably more controlled.

Ray also made a deliberate choice not to render the film in conventional black and white. Instead, the image was pushed toward a cold blue tint, echoing the graphic treatment that had inspired the project.

Parker sits a little apart from the other Dollars & Donuts films being made around it. There’s no sprawling ensemble, no elaborate mythology to connect, and relatively little interest in turning the situation into chaos. Most of the movie is two people in a room, with Parker asking questions and Lynn realizing that the man she helped betray is standing in front of her again.

That restraint was part of the experiment. Ray was reaching toward the hard-boiled crime stories he loved, while Daryl was beginning to discover how much could change simply by treating lighting, composition, and color as part of the storytelling rather than problems to solve after the actors arrived. The equipment hadn’t changed much, but the intention had.