Filmmaker gets back in the game
Back in the 1980s, Carlo Caldana — then going by the name of Carl — rode the wave of the nascent independent filmmaking scene. A Swiss immigrant from the Lake Geneva town of Vevey, he settled in San Francisco after deciding that while Los Angeles was great for someone who wanted to work in the film industry, Northern California with its small community of filmmakers and the supportive Film Arts Foundation was a better fit for a more personal filmmaker. He made two features, “Is It Heaven yet?” (1984) and “Chivalrous Deeds of a Nincompoop” (1988).
“It was a time where, for some reason, you could make a small personal film and find an audience. There was a growing interest in those personal, little, cheapo movies,” Caldana, 64, reminisces on a recent morning at the Mission District’s Cafe La Boheme, where he’s come to talk about the San Francisco-set “Smile Again, Jenny Lee,” his first film in nearly three decades.
“It was really a great time. That didn’t last long. By the end of the ’80s, more commercial movies came about. It seemed like everybody was jumping on the independent filmmaking wire.”
As a youth, Caldana had a hard time deciding whether music, the theater or writing was his calling. When he realized that he could pour all of his interests into filmmaking, that became his passion. When the bottom dropped out of low-budget indies in the late 1980s, Caldana turned to writing novels with the idea that the books would somehow lead him back to making movies.
Among Caldana’s books were two comic mysteries, “The Amesbury Legacy” and “The Wallenstein Testament,” about a man, Edmund Amesbury, who has lost his memory but who believes he is a lost descendant of the king of France. “Smile Again, Jenny Lee” was supposed to be the third novel in that series, but Caldana decided to make it a film instead when he became captivated by Jenny, an acerbic tennis pro whose career is left in ruins after someone pulls a Tonya Harding number on her, crushing her leg with a lead pipe.
“As I developed the story line, the young woman’s story became more and more interesting and her story became more and more personal to me: the tennis player who could no longer play the sport that she loved — as she says in the film, ‘It’s my life; it’s all that I have’ — that was me as a filmmaker, that frustration,” says Caldana.
“As I wrote the novel, I would often sit at my piano to play some music to put me in the mood, in the specific atmosphere of a chapter or scene,” he adds. “Then little by little, the music became such a part of the story I was visualizing and I thought, ‘I’ve got to make a movie out of this.’ ”
Caldana plays the genial, soft-spoken amnesiac — no longer Edmund Amesbury, but a new character named Charles Landale — who teams with Jenny (San Jose theater actor Monique Hafen) to help her find her long-lost father, a key component in her against-all-odds plan to mount a comeback. Though told by everyone, most especially her doctor, that she will never play pro tennis again, Jenny nevertheless refuses to entertain retirement as a possibility.
“That’s how I felt as a filmmaker,” says Caldana. “That’s all I lived for. I dreamed about it. That’s all I could think about. When you’re passionate about something, it becomes your life. If affects your relationships with other people.”
Making “Smile Again, Jenny Lee” was in many ways a daunting proposition. On a low budget, Caldana himself had to do much of the work normally farmed out to other people. Those chores included finding and securing nearly 100 locations and dealing with the bureaucracy of movie permits — Caldana filmed guerrilla-style without permits in the 1980s and was surprised to discover four separate bodies to deal with in San Francisco alone, including the San Francisco Film Commission, Rec and Park, the Presidio and the National Park Service (for shooting at the beach). He also had to approach local businesses — including the Fairmont Hotel, where he was able to film in both the Tonga Room and the glass elevator — about using their locations.
It was daunting work on top of his duties as director, writer, actor, producer, composer and editor. And now, after a run at film festivals, where “Smile Again, Jenny Lee” won several awards, he is distributing the film himself, so that hard work continues. But Caldana is back, exactly where he wants to be.
“I needed to make this film. I really felt like I needed to get it out of my system,” he says. “I do it, because filmmaking is my life.”