The Snoop Sisters
Local filmmaker Laurie Agard discusses
Frog and Wombat, her indie kids’ movie about two young
would-be sleuths
By Jimmy Aquino
Santa Cruz has had an intriguing history
as a location for filmmaking. In the silent era, it was the Northern
California equivalent of Hollywood. These days, whenever directors
want to shoot scenes at a beach town, they frequently film in
Santa Cruz, possibly the mother of all beach towns.
Surf City turns up in The Lost Boys
and Sudden Impact, as well as Mystery Science Theater
3000-friendly movies like the 1978 Brooke Shields pinball
turkey Tilt. The gorgeous town has also been used by independent
directors with connections to UC Santa Cruz. The campus figures
prominently in 1996’s Glory Daze, a comedy about UCSC
students that starred a then-unknown Ben Affleck and was written
and directed by UCSC alum Rich Wilkes. The most recent feature
film shot in Surf City was Frog and Wombat, an indie kids’
movie co-produced, written and directed by local filmmaker Laurie
Agard, who studied video under the UCSC Extension program.
Made with a mostly local cast and crew,
Agard's film is about two friends nicknamed Frog (Katie Stuart)
and Wombat (Emily Lipoma) who play detective when one of them
suspects their school’s new principal (Ronny Cox) is a murderer.
Although the town in the film is not intended to be Santa Cruz,
Frog and Wombat are seen hanging out at the Pontiac Grill restaurant
and snooping around Pacific Avenue.
Frog and Wombat premiered at Santa Cruz’s Nickelodeon Theater
this past summer and was held over for weeks. In this Primer
interview that was also heard in August on KZSC 88.1 FM’s
A Fistful of Soundtracks (Saturdays, 12 p.m.) Agard
talks about her mystery/comedy for kids, which recently won the
"Best Kids' Feature" award at the Rhode Island International
Film Festival.
Jimmy Aquino:
Are the characters based on people you knew in your childhood?
Laurie Agard:
Boy, probably yes and no. I think everything anybody writes is
based on something that they know, nobody in particular. But it
was certainly a time in my life when things were really fun and
also scary and painful.
JA:
Were you more like Frog or more like Wombat or more like a little
bit of both?
LA:
People ask that a lot. It probably depends on the day. Every once
in a while, I feel like Frog and every once in a while, I feel
like Wombat. I think that was true as a kid too.
JA:
Do you think kids make better detectives than adults? If, say,
Philip Marlowe was a kid or if V.I. Warshawski was a kid, do you
think they would have solved their own cases much faster because
they would have been less skeptical about things and more able
to use their imaginations?
LA:
That’s a good question. Yeah, you’re certainly less
censored as a kid, and you allow yourself to have a lot more open
options and more open doors. A lot more could be possible.
JA:
What do you think Frog and Wombat will grow up to become? What
sort of career do you think Frog would have as an adult?
LA:
Frog will probably continue with the arts. She has a personality
[in which she] needs to express herself a lot. She writes skits,
makes costumes, dances and sings. There’s definitely something
about her that has to be continually exploring things artistically,
whereas Wombat is very aware of the rules and boundaries that
her parents, the community or society set for her, and she stays
within them and gets her contentment from doing the right thing
based on what her parents might think.
JA:
In the movie, Wombat’s from a conservative family. Her father’s
a minister.
LA:
So that certainly has an effect on her, [while Frog] is not really
aware of other people’s approval.
JA:
Her mother’s kind of free-spirited too, and she’s played
by Lindsay Wagner — the Bionic Woman.
LA:
The Bionic Woman. Lindsay added a lot to the role because when
we were first trying to cast Frog’s mom, we really wanted
somebody who has that sort of artistic spirit, which Lindsay is
in real life. Also, people really associate Lindsay with being
a strong person, obviously the Bionic Woman. Frog needed a bionic
mom.
Lindsay brought in a whole bunch of
Haagen-Daas ice-cream bars one day, and she handed them out to
people. She was late to one of the sets. I was sitting with one
of the producers, and we were watching her run slowly, with her
hair blowing in the wind [while carrying] the ice-cream bars,
and one of the producers started going, "Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh,"
making the bionic sound. [Laughs]
JA:
Now the scene with Frog and her friend Francesca eating peanut
butter off their toes — you know what, I’m gonna tell
you this — at the screening I saw, a group of old ladies
walked out during the scene.
LA:
[Laughs] It certainly is one of those [scenes] not for the timid.
It always gets a reaction.
JA:
Was that unscripted?
LA:
No, it was scripted, and it was well-rehearsed also. In fact,
when we had the kids in for auditions, we made sure they were
limber enough to put their toes in their mouths. It’s part
of what you get with doing an independent film. We really wanted
to show kids uncensored. I think a lot of the major films and
studios portray kids in one way, and you don’t necessarily
get to see the really weird, offbeat stuff that kids do when they’re
up in an attic or all alone. I guess eating peanut butter off
your toes is one of them.
JA:
So after they stopped shooting, did they spit out the peanut butter
or anything like that?
LA:
Actually, as a joke, we put it on the craft services table for
lunch. They had the Handi-Wipes and everything nearby. It was
very clean.
JA:
How do the major films portray kids?
LA:
Not all of them [have been unrealistic]; certainly, there have
been some good ones. My opinion is when they make a "family
film," there’s generally one kind of plot that they
follow, and that’s dumb adults and kids [running around]
with a kind of comical violence and a false sweetness. It doesn’t
really let them be imaginative. I don’t think [these films]
portray them realistically. That was something we really tried
to avoid in the movie.
JA:
Where did you grow up? Was it a lot like the suburbs in Frog
and Wombat?
LA:
I grew up in Durango, Colorado. We didn’t live in the suburbs.
We lived in a nice small community, but I think part of what the
suburbs lend now today in the ’90s is the safety that small
towns had in the ’60s and ’70s. Also, today, there’s
a whole kind of life that exists out in the suburbs, a boring
kind of safe feeling that you don’t necessarily get in the
inner city. We wanted to explore what it would be like if you
have this amazing little artistic kid with all this imagination
living in a boring suburb, and how does one cope with that.
JA:
Now I know some of the crew are connected to UCSC. Who are they?
LA:
Steve Marino, who was our videographer. Steve helps me with casting.
He’s helped with everything. He’s somebody I used to
write with working at SCO. Steve also helped us make a lot of
our trailers. He’s a UCSC graduate. Michelle Chappel wrote
all but one of our songs and performed them on the soundtrack.
She used to teach at UCSC. I believe she was awarded "Most
Inspirational Teacher" by her students. I know, for a fact,
she’s an incredibly inspirational person. She’s got
a real talent. She has a new CD coming out, Infinity + 1, Man.
That’s going to be released in September. It’s going
to have a lot of the songs in Frog and Wombat on it. It’s
a great album. She’s one of my favorite singer/songwriters,
and I was very lucky to have met her and have her do the songs
for the movie.
JA:
What was it about Santa Cruz that made you decide to use it for
the location shooting?
LA:
I live here. It was very easy, and because I live here, there
were a lot of places where I had driven around and said, "Well,
that would be great. That would work." We actually, in some
instances, had to work a little bit harder because we were in
Santa Cruz, trying to keep all the Californian and ocean-type
architecture and scenery out of the movie. We really wanted to
make it look like Anywhere, America or maybe a little bit more
Midwestern. Before we had completely committed ourselves, we started
getting a lot of support from community businesses, and we found
an amazing crew right here in Santa Cruz.
JA:
So that’s how you funded the movie. You didn’t fund
it through credit cards like Robert Townsend did with Hollywood
Shuffle?
LA:
Well, we funded most of the movie through investors and businesses,
but quite a lot of it ended up on our credit cards. We’re
fortunate that we had sold it to a lot of countries, and it’s
off our credit cards. You get to the point towards the end of
the movie when you say, "Gosh, if you just had this much
more, how much that would add to the movie," and it’s
really hard at that point to not spend more. Everybody warns everybody
throughout film school, "Postproduction is gonna be really
expensive," and nobody can really understand that until they’re
right in that place. Gosh, one more dissolve, one more song, another
month of editing and it just keeps adding up.
JA:
Are you surprised at how the film was held over at the Nickelodeon?
This film was originally just going to play for one week.
LA:
Exactly. It’s been a pleasant surprise and really rewarding.
We have several people back east who want to show the film, and
[it’s being shown in] San Jose and Los Gatos right now. We
had zero advertising budget, and we came out during The Parent
Trap and another giant kids’ movie. We thought it would
be their week, and we had such a good response, it stayed longer.
For more info on Frog and Wombat, check out the Frog and
Wombat site at http://www.frogandwombat.com.
© 1999 Jim Aquino