Brandt Johnson made a movie documenting Ellen Jovin's nationwide human outreach through the Grammar Table, even thought he'd never made a full-length movie before. He shares what it takes to make a movie and what you do with it once you finally have it.
Brandt Johnson made a movie documenting Ellen Jovin's nationwide human outreach through the Grammar Table, even thought he'd never made a full-length movie before. He shares what it takes to make a movie and what you do with it once you finally have it.
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MIGNON:
I know. Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. I'm here with Ellen Jovin and Brandt Johnson from the "Grammar Table" book and movie. This is our bonus segment, so if you missed the main segment, you can still find that in your feed. We talked about the Grammar Table project, and now it's a movie, and so Brant, I would just love to hear more about how you get to this point, and you've never made a feature film before, and you say, "I'm gonna make a movie from this project that my wife is doing."
What do you have to do next? Like, how does that even work?
BRANDT: First thing you have to do is to have a willing subject. And that was Ellen. And she was game. And at the potential risk of messing up what she was doing with these just live interactions with people. But so that, we decided to go ahead with that. And the technology was a big one to figure out what to shoot with, what camera, how to pick up sound, where to put the cameras. I was shooting with two or three cameras at a time on my own and with a lav mic on Ellen, a table mic, and a lav mic on me. So several audio sources were going into a different sound recorder. There was a lot.
The cognitive load was significant, to the extent of my — actually, I mentioned you earlier — when you're not pressing the record button from time to time. That's the one thing that has to happen before you can record. So that was the first step: figuring out, testing, trying all the gear, and seeing what I could do by myself because Ellen and I were just going to be doing these travels on our own.
So I needed to be able to do it by myself.
ELLEN: Which I think, by the way, is insane. It's insane for one person to do everything that he did. Like, I can't even believe what he did. He's the film equivalent of a one-man band.
MIGNON: Yeah. And traveling with all that equipment would be a challenge, too.
BRANDT: Yes, I was very happy about this little case that is secure and waterproof, and you can drop it, and it had important stuff in it. I really liked that case.
ELLEN: Oh my gosh. He gets so excited about his technology.
BRANDT: It's true. Oh, and the stuff, Mignon, we were driving across Michigan, and I realized I needed some little doodad. Technology is something. So we stopped into Best Buy, and I had my camera with me to test out whatever I was gonna get.
We went in, and I got what I needed to get, left, and continued our drive across Michigan. Some hours into the drive, somehow it dawned on me that I had left my camera in the Best Buy, and this was the main camera for the whole operation. It was late in the day, so they were closed, and we had more hours to go to arrive at our destination.
So we finished the trip. I had a very restless night, got up early in the morning, and frantically called Best Buy. The security person had actually seen the camera and put it in a locker. So I drove back all the way across Michigan, picked it up that morning, and back — that was too scary. That was a lot for my heart.
ELLEN: It was a pretty bad moment.
MIGNON: I can imagine.
BRANDT: So keeping track of the stuff —
MIGNON: Wow, I was imagining you'd out of batteries or something.
BRANDT: Right? No. Yeah. So having all this stuff, carrying it around, but keeping track of it is also an important thing.
MIGNON: Yeah. Was it harder when you would fly, or was it easier because you had it all packed up?
BRANDT: Easier, but in some ways. In some ways easier. So we did fly to Alaska, and we did fly to Hawaii, and —
ELLEN: Would have been difficult without the plane.
BRANDT: That's right. So it made it a little easier. And I was very happy about my flying case also, that had all its little tidy compartments for everything.
And so that was kind of fun.
ELLEN: Seriously, we only flew to, we only flew to California besides that, everything else was driving.
MIGNON: You drove to, like, the West Coast? The South?
ELLEN: We drove everywhere. And we don't — we're New Yorkers — so we don't have a car. So we would rent one. I totally want a grammar mobile.
MIGNON: Wild. Did you rent an RV or just a car?
ELLEN: Car, but it had to be full size. It had to have a pretty big trunk.
MIGNON: You could have a grammar mobile. When I was in high school, we had, our pep squad had a rally mobile, and it was like, I can't even imagine. In retrospect, it was incredibly dangerous and possibly illegal. But the father of one of our members, he just bought this truck, and it was like a van. It was like a work van, and we painted the side of it and said "Rally Van," and we would just pile in the back without seatbelts or anything, and we would go to football games. It was super fun. In retrospect, super dangerous.
ELLEN: Totally dangerous. But I also feel that anything that had grammar on the side of it would have … the risk would go up dramatically that someone would graffiti it.
MIGNON: Yeah, true. You could invite people to write graffiti on it. It could have a whole graffiti vibe.
ELLEN: That's true.
BRANDT: We could do that. We could do that. One other technology thing, Mignon, for me, which was significant, was keeping up with the footage because I would shoot a lot each day, and we would be off to somewhere else. So we'd get done with the day, and my sort of managing the media — downloading it, tagging it, keeping it so it didn't become a giant mountain — was a big task also. So that was a big thing for most of my evenings.
MIGNON: I could imagine file management and timecode management would be huge challenge.
BRANDT: Yes. Yes.
ELLEN: The movie was a lot more work for Brandt than the book was for me, for sure.
MIGNON: Yeah. Video is just a lot of work. Yeah. But worth it. It's a different experience and, I think. Well, you tell me. Worth it?
BRANDT: Absolutely. And so, with COVID, we were grounded for two years and seven months. During that time, I just did editing. I edited and worked on the film that entire time. Ellen worked on her book during that time. So that was a time that, even though we weren't able to be out on the road, we were able to get a lot of good creative work done.
ELLEN: I did miss it, though. It's weird to have started this project. I realized, later I realized, I began it in late 2018. And then by the beginning of 2020, that was it. And so if I like, it's almost like when I think about in retrospect, the months were disappearing where I could actually do what we did.
So it's amazing that we got it in before we got too far into 2020. That wasn't a lot of time, and it does interrupt the momentum too. There's something like, I love being out there. So it was, obviously, it was a very trivial thing in the larger trauma of COVID, but it was sad suddenly not to be able to do this thing that I was really loving so much that felt like the community that it create for me, for others, like it's, I think that face-to-face communication — people really need it.
And they get too little of it now that we're online so much. And, I think it's, just, it's really critical to our hearts and our mental health to talk to actual human beings, even if we're introverts.
That wasn't pointed. I wasn't directing that at you. I'm just saying like some people say, "I don't want to talk to people," but we do need some contact.
We need some human contact.
MIGNON: I love to talk to people. I love to have talked to people. And that's actually one thing I love about doing these interviews is that it forces me to talk to people, which I'm, every time I get done with an interview, I go into my kitchen, and I'm like, "That was amazing. I loved that. I talked to the most fascinating people today."
And I am curious: So you've made, so you, again, so you've made this movie, but you've never done this before. So then how do you get it so that people watch it? How do you get it out in the world?
BRANDT: That is a right-now in the world of documentary film, perhaps in particular, there is a big change in that very question. So how do you distribute something? Just in the last few years, the landscape has changed dramatically from a more standard model, where you submit to a film festival and get seen by distributors, and sell it out of a film festival.
That's happening much, much less. And an alternative approach of direct distribution, of reaching communities that care about your film and will appreciate it and want to have screenings, want their community members to be able to see it, and bringing it directly to the people. It is something that, for this film in particular, feels really appropriate in the spirit of what the Grammar Table is.
So we — that's what the Grammar Table was. So as it happens, this wasn't the plan initially. We thought perhaps we'll just do this sort of traditional route, and going the direct route really is, it feels thematically appropriate. Ellen was saying she had missed being out on the road and so forth, and so we're going back on the road.
We're taking the film all over the country, so it's very exciting. So the road trip, the grammar road trip continues.
MIGNON: The band is back together.
BRANDT: That's right.
MIGNON: Wonderful. That's so great. Thanks for sharing that. So to wrap up, we ask our guests to share their book recommendations. What books have you loved? Would you tell a friend, "Oh, you've got to read this?"
BRANDT: One for me that comes to mind is "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius.
ELLEN: We read it about the same time. I think we shared it when we read it.
BRANDT: I think we did. And then I picked it up again not long ago. It's the kind of book you can pick up over and over again. I find it just really moving and inspirational, reaching across time to someone who just felt really in touch with humanity and what it is to be a good person. And I find it really inspirational and moving.
MIGNON: Cool. Cool. What else?
ELLEN: Okay. Mine are a little — I have two, and they're a little more recent. One is from 2011, "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader" by Anne Fadiman. I just absolutely loved that book, and really, she's just such a word nerd. Then more recently, I read — I’m just making sure I’m getting the title correct here.
Curtis Chin, "Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant," which I read in 24 hours. No, it's a nonfiction book, totally fun and interesting and moving, very moving.
MIGNON: So is it really about growing up in a Chinese restaurant?
ELLEN: Yep. Yep. Detroit area. And we've spent a lot of time in Michigan with the Grammar Table and otherwise. So, I liked that part of it too.
MIGNON: Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing your story and your books with us today. Tell people again where they can find you.
BRANDT: rebelwithaclaus.com.
MIGNON: Wonderful. Thank you so much.
ELLEN: Thank you for having us on. It's great to talk to Grammar Girl.
MIGNON: It's always—
BRANDT: It was wonderful. Thank you so much.