Likely the most anticipated local film to play at the Seattle International Film Festival this year is not actually a film at all. It’s a comedy web-series called Rocketmen, from director Webster Crowell and producer and co-star Alycia Delmore, and it’s about the Department of Municipal Rocketry, a fictitious Works Progress Administration jobs program that has inexplicably passed through the federal budget largely undetected since the end of the Cold War and its workers mostly just dawn rockets on their back and wear uniforms and reassure civilians that if there was a Communist attack, they would be ready.
Rocketmen has been several years in the making, and it’s debuting at SIFF Thursday night with its seven short episodes shown in sequence, ranging in length from about 5 to 12 minutes each (and ending up at 66 minutes altogether).
It’s all great fun, and the series itself is very funny. The idea of a New Deal-era program sneaking its way through the federal budget, past its point of relevance, but continuing to put uniformed men with rockets on their backs to work was a hilarious idea to me. It was delightful to see that the execution was as funny as the premise. Thus far, Rocketmen: The Series is the SIFF entry that has given me the most pleasure. There are plenty of laughs throughout the series, and the cast is populated with familiar faces from the Seattle arts community. It also explores unemployment and the government’s role in keeping what is basically a Keynesian program in existence while it has outlived its purpose.
Webster Crowell was the first winner of The Stranger‘s Genius Award for film and Alycia Delmore is an actor and producer, probably best known for starring in Lynn Shelton’s Humpday. I met them both for a very lively, and fun, interview at a quiet University District lounge earlier this week.
When I saw you were playing SIFF, I had known about the project for a few years, but wasn’t sure if you had turned it into a movie or if you were going to edit it so that it would play as a feature-length movie or if you were going to play each episode successively.
Alycia: Yeah, well we shot it and intended it to be a series and SIFF asked us to cut it into movie length basically so it would screen all as a movie. We had at one point toyed with the idea of taking out the title sequences, but the title sequences are great and there’s a lot of storytelling embedded in them. I just don’t think it would be the same without them. We decided to just leave that in and try to just leave a little cliffhanger in. It was really built for that.
Web: One thing about that format is that everything changes constantly, but it’s boring if that’s actual adventure and every 10 minutes, you have somebody who he’s rescuing. The serial format becomes, “The story was going here and now it’s going to change.” You never know exactly where it’s going, but it’s still going forward. It gives you at least a hint of that feeling of, “I’m going to watch and there’s going to be a cliffhanger,” so you still have a pacing sense built around a moment of waiting around to find out what’s going to happen next.
Alycia: Because SIFF doesn’t program episodics, when we talked to them about programming this and Beth (Barrett, interim creative director for SIFF) is so wonderful and I’m so glad she’s running that festival right now. When I emailed her to say, “Hey I was going to apply to the festival and then I realized we have an episodic and you don’t program episodics. Is this a lost cause? What do you think?”
She said, “I’ve been following “Rocketmen” for several years so why don’t you send it my way? Let’s see.” Then she wrote me back a few days later and she was like, “This is great. We’d love to program this.” It needs to fit into a feature-length slot you can edit it accordingly. That’s fine. SIFF didn’t tell us too much about how we should go about doing that so I feel like this was the way that that would work for us. They were like, “Great!”
Is there still a plan to release it as a web series?
Alycia: Yeah, we wanted to do a premiere at a festival, in some ways just to give all the actors and crew who worked on it the chance to have a big launch. There’s something very anticlimactic about just putting it on YouTube and then telling people to go look at it there. This gave us a good buildup and we’re really trying to still figure out exactly what we’re going to do after this, if we’re going to try to shop it around to some online networks that might do a one-month premiere of it or something like that before we just stick it online to live forever. This felt like a good way to celebrate the work that everybody had put into it for such a long period of time.
We’re talking with our executive producer. I was really fortunate, Mel Eslyn who is a giant in the producing world and just has a million more years of experience than I do with all of this, came on as the executive producer essentially to sort of mentor me through the process of producing.
She’s been very helpful in talking through options in terms of shopping the series around as a potential show to some online networks. I know that we’re limited in that we’re not a traditional, each episode isn’t 22 minutes long, we’re not a traditional TV show length. We’re not a traditional web series length. The episodes also really expand and contract. Some of them are five minutes. Most of them, I think our longest is 12 minutes. It just worked best for the story that we were trying to tell, but it’s not as commercial. I care less and less about that as time goes on.
I just feel like the thing that we made is exactly the thing that it is supposed to be, so if it finds a home somewhere that will provide a higher viewership, that would be so great. We’re going to shop it around to some networks. I’m really encouraging Web to apply and travel to other film festivals with it because I think it’s just a good showcase of his work. Then after that, we’ll put it online somewhere where we think it’ll be most visible and then just kind of let it live in the world, like sending a kid off to college. We’ll just let it go and say bye. I think we’ve still got a few months. We’re trying to figure that out after our premiere.
SIFF Opening Night Red Carpet, photo by Elizabeth Crook.
Before I turned on the tape recorder, you were telling me about your SIFF Opening Night experience…can I ask about that again? It really is a great story.
Alycia: Sure, yeah. Ray Tagavilla, Ben Lawrence, Christopher Deitz, Ian Fraser, and Web all put on their jackets and rockets. Britta Johnson, our editor, came with us as well and we hit the red carpet like a shock of rocketmen.
It was pretty great. We walked up and may have inadvertently cut in line, for which I will forever be a little bit embarrassed, but we walked up and got a cry of, “Oh no! Oh my! What’s going on? What’s that? I think those are rocketmen!” It sort of rippled through the crowd and there’s applause. I distinctly remember applause and some hooting and hollering. It was kind of the most amazing red carpet I have ever been to in my life.
Web: Then we got left at the red carpet and got called back a second time –
Alycia: To do more pictures, yeah. It doesn’t hurt that we have an exceptionally handsome group of actors so that’s always a lovely thing, just a bunch of really handsome men wearing jackets and rockets does not hurt anyone in terms of a photo op.
Web: That’s how we got zoomed to the head of every line.
Alycia: It was great. It was really fun and just a night to remember.
At the after party, we had abandoned our rockets at that point because they’re heavy, but I think that the rocketmen were approached for several photo shoots with random strangers. A lot of people came up to us and said, “Who are you?” We said, “We’re the rocketmen.” “I thought they were the rocketmen. I saw them over there and I said I bet those are rocketmen.” It was really fun. It was just great. I felt like I was chaperoning around some pretty major celebrities.
Web: All of us were looking for the bar before I got pulled away to a conversation and there was a moment of watching people part because a bunch of people in uniform walked in. It’s still eerie to me. We’re like, “It’s because we’re dressed like this.” People back away and assume that you are important because there’s more than one of you and you’re wearing a uniform. You’re doing something official.
Alycia: It’s very fun.
That also would be some great viral marketing for when it’s ready. How long have you been working on this project?
Alycia: I think for Web and I and for Britta too, our editor, we’ve been pretty enmeshed in the project since we shot it, well since we started working on it in 2012. We shot the pilot in April of 2013. We shot the bulk of the series in October of 2013. Then we had to take a break because –
Web: Someone got pregnant.
Alycia: I was five months pregnant when we shot the bulk of the series. Then we had to wait until I was not pregnant anymore to shoot a few scenes. Then we waited about eight months to shoot the rest of it in April of 2014. Then we were in post (production) for two years. All of our actors went away from the project and kept saying, “That’s going to come out at some point, right?” I think that there is a fear when you’re working on smaller projects that sometimes things just die. Sometimes things get in the edit and –
Web: Especially if there’s effects involved and even more so when there’s animation involved.
Alycia: Then you just run into budgetary constraints and there are times … I think unfortunately this has happened a few times in Seattle where someone’s just quit a project after so many people have donated their time to it. Really for those actors, the only payoff is for that project to be launched at some point so they have something for their reel, so they have something to show people.
We were always going to finish it. We had the resources. It was really just time because it was just Web and Britta and I chipping away at it between day jobs to finally get it together and to finally send it out into the world. Here we are, long time coming.
It was just a really funny movie because it was based on a premise that I found hilarious.
Alycia: That’s fantastic. I’m always happy to hear that. I would chock that up to 70 percent the writing, 20 percent the actors, and 10 percent the editing because I really think that Britta nailed some comedy in there that we didn’t necessarily have. I mean, we had the pieces to it, but she put the timing together in a few key places that I think saved a joke.
Web: I hate to break it down to percent, but yeah. I’m super proud of the cast and a lot of these people really got the method of the jokes. We got what was funny about the absurdity of the situations. I mean that’s one of the fun things when we were pitching it was we always –
Alycia: People would kind of go, “Wait, what?”
Web: Because people believed the premise, which was how it got started. If you tell someone with this straight face, “I work for the Department of Municipal Rocketry. Nobody ever notices us because we’re not on street level,” people wait a beat to see if you’re joking or not. It’s just plausible enough where they don’t want to sound foolish and laugh.
Alycia: Yeah, it’s also the reaction. Web had this experience well before the series came because the Rocketmen started as kind of an art project, where they would show up to public spaces, a group of 10 or 12 of them dressed like rocketmen and just kind of gauge the reaction of the crowd. Everyone looks very official in the rockets and uniforms.
Web: Yeah, between the rockets and uniforms and then in close quarters, people compulsively touch rockets in crowds to a disturbing degree. When they realized they’re heavy, there’s a calculation of, “If that was fake, it would be plastic.” People take them very seriously, at coat check and otherwise.
Alycia: The ladies at coat check were amazing. It was two older women who could not for the life of them figure out if they should give us one token to collect our rockets at the end of the night of if they should give us five. They just couldn’t. I mean, how do you store rockets at coat check? It’s probably a dilemma they have not faced before. They were very good sports.
Did you check the rockets at the coat check?
Alycia: We had to. We walked in the door and someone said, “You need to go to coat check.”
I just made myself laugh thinking about what if you went back to coat check and said, “I’m pretty sure we checked six rockets.”
Alycia: (laughs) Where did my last rocket go?
How did the idea for a Works Progress Administration jobs program that was the rocketmen come about?
Web: When it was its first iteration as a weird art project, the idea was always that it was the last surviving jobs program from the WPA, the trick being my bias as a filmmaker was that I didn’t ever want to make an action movie out of it. I could never figure out what the crux of the story would be if it was going to be a film. I had really put it away and then the recession hit me in a big way. As I was loading rockets out of my workplace back into my apartment and joking to myself that I could really use a WPA jobs program, it hit me that that was a much more relevant story idea. People are still arguing about what the government should be doing right now.
Something clicked that not only is this a relevant story to what we’re still talking about, but it was also some things fell into place as to what that narrative should look like. Once in place, I had all the characters and everything in the back of my mind as to how these people would operate. It just needed a foil to go forward as far as having a narrative that wasn’t a boring adventure movie and just a bunch of people flying around and saving people because Hollywood does that movie a dozen times a month. I’m not going to compete with that.
Let me ask about the cast. How did you get the actors that were on board? I thought everyone was great and there was a lot of people that I recognize from Seattle. The guys in “Awesome,” I think were in the film.
Alycia: Yeah, there’s two band members from “Awesome.” There’s Basil Harris, who I think was one of the first people that you approached about being in it and Evan Mosher, who’s also a gentleman of an actor. Web had brought most of … I think four or five of the cast were on board when I came on board. Ben Lawrence, the original rocket man. Chris Deitz was close in there too. He’s our secret weapon. We call him our secret weapon, and Basil. Then I came on, joined as a producer.
I think together we brought in Ray Tagavilla and Ian Fraser, who’s somebody that I had actually gone to undergrad with. Then we found Connor Marx, who’s our Benny. Then we brought in Amey René who is a casting director in Seattle who helped us fill in the entire rest of the cast. There are a couple of other people that Web had reached out to, like Ink and Owning. They were people that Web had known for a long time and kind of wrote for, which was very cool. Amey helped us fill in a lot of the other gaps, which was incredible. She found Gabriel (Sedgemore), Rodrigo, the Venezuelan rocketman who shows up. Just a dreamy, beautiful man. Anyway –
You were drawing on your experience in the community. I was drawing on my experience. Then Amey was able to cast a much wider net and to bring in a lot of people that neither of us had even met before, which was very cool to fill in some key roles, which is great.
I love seeing Doctors Ink and Owning (Sierra Nelson and Rachel Kessler). I’ve been to dozens of shows where they were at, from Typing Explosion and…
Web: The Vis a Vis Society. Typing Explosion was one of my core, strange theater favorites. I just adored them. They were doing Typing Explosion right at the same time the rocketmen were randomly showing up places and asking if people were needing help with anything.
On a crude level, they were the feminine version of our masculine version of these strange people that belong in some other decade that have arrived fully costumed to do something that doesn’t fit anymore. For very thematic reasons, I always liked what they did and felt like I wanted to figure out a way to pull them in a little bit and marry those two worlds.
With this being a project that you guys were working on for a long amount of time or for a few years, how did it change from when you guys first conceived and when Alycia first came on board?
Web: We didn’t change it all that much.
Alycia: No, but there were some pretty key things that came up with that that we went, “We did not think about that as an issue. We should potentially address this eventually.”
Web: Yeah, screening things that aren’t a completely streamlined narrative is a lesson that I have learned in the past, that what you think is a very obvious plot point does not always read the same way to everybody.
My theory of making anything is you go in expecting it to be perfect and knowing you will fail. You have to live with both of those things and I’m not always elated with the outcome of everything that I make. I watch it and I’m always, even for the things that are completely, strangely changed from what was written, there are also things that were written that grew and became stranger and more wonderful.
Alycia: It was fun though. We had a good time. We weren’t getting paid so yes, we really did have fun making it. It absolutely was both a labor of love and also just a ridiculous amount of fun. I mean, not every day. We were on a rooftop a lot and so as you may know from existing in Seattle that the weather changes pretty frequently here. We had days where it was 85 degrees and those are vinyl uniforms and those poor dudes were just sweating their faces off. Then we had days where it was 45 degrees and just pissing rain all over.
Web: In the city with no lightning, we had two lightning strikes. People are wearing metal rockets, so everything stops.
Alycia: Yeah, you’ve got a boom mike and you’ve got all this equipment and you’ve got light bounces and things like that. You just pull everything off the roof because that becomes a safety concern.
Web: It’s never easy, but we knew when we went in that we were pushing the bounds of what you could pull off on a budget.
I probably have taken up much of your evening, but can you guys … Is there anything you guys want people to know about while the tape recorder is running or anything that I didn’t ask about?
Alycia: I think one thing that I would just love to give a little tiny shout out for was we were part of The Washington Film Works Innovation Lab funding assistance and we would never have made this without their help. We applied for that and were granted it in 2013. Because of the money that we were able to get back from that, we were able to finish this project, not to get super preachy, but they are feeding lifeblood and resources into the Seattle film community in a way that no one else is capable of doing. I am so fearful that we’re going to lose that in this legislative session, so call your legislators and tell them to vote for the incentive. That’s my pitch. Sorry, I hope that’s not too preachy.
I feel like this project is such a great representation of so much of the talent in Seattle. I think overall we had almost 90 people work on this project between actors and crew, which is just a insane amount of people, not even to mention the musicians who donated music and so many people just came out of the woodwork for this. It was such a labor of love, a nation lended themselves to make this thing. I hope that people come watch it.
Web: The only thing I think I could even add to that is just my amazement coming from it mostly as an animator because the last time … One of the reasons I stubbornly became an animator was that when I moved to Seattle, the community was very small. Stepping back into live filmmaking in 2013 was a very different world and being surrounded by people who really knew what they were doing and who were amazing to work with was jaw-dropping for me. I hope that community has room to keep growing because they’re all people I would like to work with again.
Alycia: The talent is certainly there.
{ROCKETMEN makes its world premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival on Thursday, May 25, at the Egyptian Theater at 7:00 PM, and plays at Shoreline Community College on Sunday, May 28, at 3:30 PM, and on Monday, June 5, at 4:00 PM at SIFF Cinema Uptown.}
(Featured photo credit: Bronwen Houck Photography, featuring [L-R] Conner Marx and Basil Harris.)
