Brooke Smith as Dawn
|
The only difference from the ‘actual’ Series 7 show is that Minahan focuses mainly on two of the six contenders rather than on all of them. The two are Dawn (Brooke Smith), who is the reigning champion; and Jeff (Glenn Fitzgerald), a bi-sexual artist and pacifist who, by a bizarre quirk of the random-selection procedures used to choose the contenders, was once Dawn’s high-school sweetheart.
Dawn has moved on since then. This is how she is introduced in the very first scene of the movie
EXT. STREET - ESTANCIA NEW MEXICO - NOON
The camera follows an eight-months pregnant woman, DAWN. She walks purposefully down a dusty street and into a Dairy Mart.
INT. DAIRY MART - CONTINUOUS
Dawn enters and shoots a man standing in the express line. Point-blank in the chest. He falls to the ground and she fires at him repeatedly until he stops moving. She kicks the pistol out of his hand, picks it up and pockets it. She turns to the clerk.
DAWN
You got any bean dip?
Being contenders on the same series (“I love the title Series 7,” says Minahan. “It sets a tone that’s menacing, sexy, mysterious. What came before? What happens next? Stay tuned…”), Dawn and Jeff are supposed to be trying to kill one another. But they enter into a pact which briefly makes them the audience’s heroes, rebelling against the rules of the show. But only briefly: the viewers are far too fickle, too addicted to The Contenders, to accept anything so radical.
| “Brooke became obsessed with Cops - she watched it all the time, and would call me and say, ‘You won’t believe this…’”
|
Series 7: The Contenders was shot on a punishing six-pages-a-day schedule in November and December of 1999 (with a break for Thanksgiving through which, says Minahan, he slept) in the director’s hometown of Danbury, Connecticut. To maintain the feeling of a TV show, Minahan used crew members who, like him, had worked on TV shows but had since moved on to features - like director of photography Randy Drummond, who cut his camera teeth on America’s Most Wanted but has since shot Welcome to the Dollhouse.
“I treated Randy as one of the actors,” says Minahan. “I said, ‘What would you do in this situation?’ That’s the way we chose and designed our shots and blocked out a scene: ‘If someone has a gun in the room, how do you behave? If you think there’s danger, what would you do?’ I got him to work more from instinct.”
|
