The couch I’m sprawled out on as I write these words reminds me of an afternoon I spent at Goodwill in 2009 with my dear friends Maria and Tom.

 

Maria Victoria Bloch-Bauer Altmann – the woman Tom and I cared for up until the day she left us in February – was a multi-millionaire heiress who grew up in one of the most cultured and influential families in Austria at the turn of the 20th century… yet, on a bright June day in Los Angeles she was ambling around the Goodwill on 8th and La Brea as if she were one of those lucky kids chosen to visit Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

 

At one point she became enchanted with a sweater listed at a buck fifty. She looked at the price tag, suddenly widened her eyes, and turned to me and asked eagerly, “Do you think this is right?” I nodded, and she exclaimed, “I’ve seen it all!” Then she flung it over her shoulder and was off to the next item, a table lamp… “This is just fabulous! Do you need a lamp, My Love?” I stood back a couple feet trailing her, fielding friendly smiles from customers and employees who looked at me as if to say, “Grandma’s first time, huh?” I kept thinking to myself, if only they knew who this woman was.

 

As I snatched items away from her like a mother would a child, I reminded her we were here to find a couch for my new apartment in Hollywood. “Of course, Mein Schatz, a couch.” So we found a surprisingly clean and comfortable one for $50. Boy, she couldn’t stop talking about what a deal we got. Forget about Michael Jackson leaving planet earth that week, this $50 couch from Goodwill was the biggest news to hit Southern California in years. “Mein Geliebtes (she had an endless supply of German nicknames for me)… get Margie on the phone, I want to tell her about this fabulous new store I discovered.” So I dialed her daughter in Hawaii and, always finding this quite amusing, I handed an iPhone to a 94-year-old. After hearing about her adventure, Margie said…

 

 

As if the rain gods were waiting for us to be on our way, it began to pour buckets five minutes into our drive. I looked anxiously in my rear view at my poor baby sitting in the back of Tom’s pick-up truck, getting royally soaked. I made a face at Tom, who threw up his arms. It was too late to do anything about it.

When we arrived we lugged it through my door, and if you hadn’t known we just bought it you’d have thought we fished it out of a lake. I fetched my tiny, plastic fan I got at Walgreens, propped it on a thick atlas on the floor and pointed it at the couch, and the three of us sat on my bed in silence staring at the David of fans slinging its pathetic little stones of cold air at the Goliath of couches, which just sat there with its arms folded, dripping. Maria looked at me, I looked at Tom, and the three of us howled with laughter. When I got home that evening it was as dry as Steven Wright. It seemed to defy science, and only added more character to an already memorable afternoon.

It was all part of the pilot episode for my forthcoming sitcom, “Two Guys, a Girl, and a Goodwill Couch.”
 

So last week while I was sitting on that couch taking a break from writing, I decided to click play on a song from the indie rock band, Guided by Voices. As a GBV song always does, it forced me to contemplate my unrequited and somewhat unexplainable obsession with them. Why am I so in love with a band that sounds like they record their albums in a basement?

Because as ‘crappily-recorded’ as most of their work is, frontman Robert Pollard, a former 4th grade schoolteacher from Ohio, and lead guitarist Tobin Sprout, a lo-fi indie rock virtuoso, have given us some of the most unique and haunting songs in rock n’ roll history. With more than 16 albums recorded between 1983 and 2004, they wrote as many catchy hooks as the Beatles, gave us as much diversity as Stanley Kubrick, and graced us with as much whimsy as Oscar Wilde.

 

With many musicians today thinking big studios and expensive guitars are what make albums great, GBV proves that a great song is a great song. A single GBV track at its full potential, to me, has more substance and character than the entire careers of bands like the Foo Fighters and Nickelback, who may as well just release one song, because they all sound exactly the same.

 

Which leads me to films. We all know many big studio pictures tend to lack depth, but I’m also seeing a bad trend in indies, which, let’s face it, are the ones we look towards to be deep. Many independent films look stunning to the eye… but they leave that all-important heart out to dry. I see far too many indie trailers with a poignant song forced into it, and then I plunk down the ten bucks to see the film, and I feel like I’ve been sold a bill of goods. Forcing such a song into a trailer that can’t deliver on that power is like putting someone else’s picture on your Match.com profile.

 

It’s a troubling new trend, frankly… the indie films that ‘look and smell and walk’ like indie films are ‘supposed’ to look and smell and walk, seem to be the ones that get into the prominent festivals and receive all the attention. For some reason festival judges or the ‘powers that be’ are wooed by something that looks just how it’s supposed to look. They want them to be different, yet exactly the same as every other one before it. This philosophy is comforting for them, because there are no risks involved. Whether the film speaks to your heart or has any genuine story or character development, becomes irrelevant. It looked beautiful. And you’re dubbed a hater if you were ultimately unmoved.
.

 

This obsession with how it looks over how it feels, is pretentious, and most earnest, blue-collar filmmakers who are out there making quality films with quality stories aren’t invited to this party of pretension thrown by insiders who have taken it upon themselves to decide what audiences will be moved by. It seems this snooty and out-of-touch cross-section of the indie filmmaking community has taken over, showing no signs of leaving. It’s a real bummer. I hope this will change, but it won’t. As many in history have learned the hard way, you can’t change a culture, all you can do is amass a support group and together figure out how to navigate through it.

 

Even Picasso painted some duds. I’m sure Einstein threw out a stupid idea every now and then. At various point in our own careers we’re going to create art from which people will feel nothing. But just because you have a rich uncle or access to nice equipment – or even sign a gazillion-dollar picture deal with Paramount – doesn’t automatically mean you should be making films. I don’t care if you make money with your work. That doesn’t excite me. What excites me is if you create a project because you have an authentic story to tell, and have the guts to tell it. And that’s your number one priority, indie filmmakers, to tell a rich story. Hands down. The second priority, no matter what, is to get unbelievable actors, and never settle for less. The third should be to get a kick-ass DP. The fourth? Get a sound person you know will give you quality sound without having to worry about it. These four ingredients are all you need to shoot an independent film that makes people feel.

 

And once in a while one comes along that had a lighting guy too.

 

Gregor is an actor, writer and producer living in Los Angeles. He is starring in the forthcoming feature, Goodbye Promise, acting in a new webseries entitled Urban Jungle Dating Dilemmas, and in pre-production on a script he co-wrote and will star in with Andrea Shreeman, called, It’s a Good Day to Die. He also wrote his first book, I Just Met a Girl Named Maria, about his unlikely and epic romance with the aforementioned Maria Altmann.