La Musica de The Oak Park Story January 29, 2010

Camilo Landau, composer and music supervisor, The Oak Park Story

One thing that I’ve always enjoyed about moviemaking is incorporating pictures with music and this was especially true for The Oak Park Story. Because of its story about Latino and Cambodian tenants banding together, I was able to include tunes by both Asian American and Latino artists, including some homegrown Oakland musicians.

I was ably aided by the film’s music supervisor and composer Camilo Landau, who was a student of mine when I taught a high school film class at the School of the Arts (SOTA) in San Francisco back in the nineties. I’d asked for music recs from my friend and fellow filmmaker Gustavo Vasquez and he mentioned Camilo, who’d scored Gustavo’s most recent movie, Que Viva La Lucha (Wrestling in Tijuana). Of course I remembered Camilo from SOTA and was happy to find that he’d grown up to become a successful musician and composer, with his combo Carne Cruda as well as as a session player for many local recordings. Camilo gave me a big stack of CDs and steered me toward appropriate tunes for the film. An added bonus was that Camilo now lives in Oakland and was able to suggest several other Oakland-based musicians to consider. Of the multitude of tracks he suggested I picked songs from Carne Cruda (Anarcho-Syndicalism) and Fuga (Boulevard Internacional), as well as some of Camilo’s own original compositions, all of which appear on The Oak Park Story’s soundtrack.

King of Khmer rap Prach

Through other acquaintances I was able to get in touch with Long Beach-based Cambodian American rapper Prach, who sent me some tracks to preview from his latest CD release. Prach’s an excellent composer and producer as well as an outstanding rapper and I was able to include two of his songs in the Oak Park soundtrack. I also downloaded Ulysses, the latest release from San Francisco folk-rocker Goh Nakamura, and from that I picked Telemachus, an instrumental track that ended up on the soundtrack.

I had a great time choosing the songs for the movie and I think they really enhance the film and make it pop. Because the subject matter was so intercultural it gave me a huge range of music to select from–it was also fun trying to find tunes that were Oakland-centric, too, and that reflected community activism and the film’s theme of empowerment and self-determination. Most of all I just liked working on the interplay between sound and image, which to me is one of the most subtle and pleasurable aspects of the filmmaking process.

World Premiere: The Oak Park Story, Mar. 14 & 15 January 24, 2010

Save the date! The Oak Park Story will have its world premiere as part of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival on Sun. March 14 at 2p and Mon. March 15 at 7p. It will be screening alongside Curtis Choy’s documentary Manilatown Is In The Heart, which is about the late great Pinoy poet Al Robles.

Tickets will be available starting Feb. 9 at the SFIAFF website.

A brief glimpse of the movie January 13, 2010

To whet your appetite, here’s  a short clip from the The Oak Park Story (below). We’re in the final throes of post-production right now—dropping in archival footage and photographs, color correction, audio design, and so forth. The clip below is from a 45-minute edit of the film, but the festival edit is 22 minutes, so things will be a little different than what’s in this sample, but it should give you a good sense of the story and the characters.

We’ve also got some killer opening credits courtesy of Idle Hands Studio, so that will also be added into the final edit. All in all I think it will be a great little movie,and it will tell an amazing story of ordinary people standing up for themselves against exploitation and greed.

More in a little while on the film’s world premiere!