BOLD ANTE
Tran Quoc Bao digs deep into Seattle’s past for Bookie
By Erin Cawley-Morse
On the set of Bookie at the Mirabeau Room
A nightclub perfumed with sultry jazz; a gritty, seamy alley out back—setting is everything in Tran Quoc Bao’s Bookie, a short film noir set in 1963 Seattle. The piece follows a gambling bookie as he collects bets, and eventually decides to make a high-stakes wager of his own on a beautiful waitress down on her luck.
Tran, director and screenwriter at Seattle production company Persistence of Vision Films, assembled the cast and crew from a mix of West coast talent, including leads Ken Quitugua from San Francisco and Angela Adto from Seattle.
The seven-day production included on-location interior and alley shots at the Mirabeau Room in Queen Anne. Local jazz talents Bernadette Bascom and Geoffrey Simmons, who both appear in the piece, recorded cuts tailored to the movie, a rare luxury for an indie short on a tight budget.
SIFF will be Bookie’s Seattle premiere; the piece screened recently at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Best Short prize.
On Screen (OS): As you did research for the film, what did you learn about Seattle at this time in history?
Tran Quoc Bao (TQB): The movie is set in Seattle in the 1960s, and the research I did showed Seattle to be incredibly culturally and ethnically diverse at that time, even during a time period where many other places weren’t. Jazz clubs congregated around 12th and Jackson in the International District, bars that had blacks, whites, Filipinos, and Asians, all in the same place, listening to music and drinking. In the movie you see a lot of different races in the bar, because that was how it was. If we had set it in another city, it wouldn’t have been believable, but 1963 Seattle was actually like that.
We searched the city for a bar that had kept that old look, and found the Mirabeau Room.
Ken Quitugua and Angela Adto
OS: The film noir aesthetic lends so much to this piece. How did you achieve that using digital video equipment?
TQB: It was all done in-camera. Our approach was to create the 60s period aesthetic by trying to do what a crew would have done at that time. We received a Panasonic digital camera grant, and were able to use 35mm prime lenses on the camera to give us the focus and depth of field we needed. Our Director of Photography [Shaun Mayor] is old school in the sense that he wants to get all the “look” he can achieve through the camera itself—choosing to manipulate light instead of pixels. A lot of filmmakers will say, “fix it in post”, and rely heavily on color correction and digital filters. But the actual physics of working with light is something a computer can’t replicate. The way we worked was a lot more old-fashioned.
OS: The two fight scenes in the alley bookend the piece. Talk about the process of choreographing and shooting those scenes.
TQB: I’d been fortunate to work with the men who played the two henchmen [Sam Looc and Aaron Toney] and Ken [Quitugua, Bookie’s title character] in the past. They’re part of a stunt collective group called Zero Gravity and have done a substantial body of work over the years. Their experience is impeccable. Combine that with the fact that we’ve worked together before, and we have an understanding of what needs to be fixed without even saying a word to each other. There’s an intuitive understanding there.
OS: Based on your experience, what do you think is the most important thing for a director to bring to a set?
TQB: I would say, to have done their homework. If anyone knows the script better than I do, that’s a problem. In that case, what am I there for? You have to work the material so you really understand it, and so that you’re able to give direction to any department. Even if you wrote the script, that doesn’t mean you totally understand it. There are certain elements you see as a screenwriter, but the director has a different eye. You really have to switch hats from writer to director, because there’s a different way of looking at the script as a director. How exactly are the actors going to be blocked? That doesn’t come up during the writing.
Director Tran Quoc Bao
CREW BOX
Writer & Director: Tran Quoc Bao
Producer: Nick Risinger
Co-producer: Michael Velasquez
Director of Photography: Shaun Mayor
Music Supervisor: Johnny Horn
