Of Strip Clubs and Hash Stashes

Director Mike Dolan on set (Photo by Sandy Carson)

The most jaded pessimist would be hard-pressed to concoct a locale more depressing than the parking lot of a strip club at 8am on a Tuesday, but the cast and crew of Dance With the One seemed almost grateful last Tuesday morning to be at the parking lot of Sugar's, near Highland Mall. Dance With the One is the first movie made by the University of Texas Film Institute, a nonprofit in the College of Communication, and the crew is made up almost entirely of UT students. One of the film's producers, Bryan Sebok, says Dance With the One has an "ultralow budget," so when the manager at Sugar's told the crew that they could shoot scenes in the parking lot as long as they weren't there when the club was open, they leapt at the opportunity.

UTFI exists to give UT film students a chance to work on a film shoot that is longer and more difficult than the typical three- or four-day student-film shoot; Dance With the One is planned as a 22-day shoot. "We're trying to teach them that when you get into 22-day shoots, you need a lot more planning; you need to be aware that we may shoot a scene on day one and then shoot the second half of that film on day 15," says Glen Moorman, the film's first assistant director, who is one of the only crew members who isn't associated with UT. "It's just like running a 400 [meter dash], but it never ends," says the film's director, former actor Mike Dolan.

The lead actor, Gabriel Luna, plays Nate, whose mother died of a heroin overdose and whose father is a "grief-stricken psychedelic cowboy," as Joshua Smith Henderson, a graduate student at UT's Michener Center for Writers (who co-wrote the script with Jon Marc Smith), puts it. "This kid Nate has kind of fallen into taking care of his family, and ... he's got trouble," Henderson says. In need of some quick cash, Nate decides to hedge his bets and potentially make a lot of money by guarding a mother lode of hash. In the scene shot last Tuesday, Nate's love interest, Nikki – played by Xochitl Romero – and Nate are looking for a man they suspect has stolen something they need. They find his truck, and as you might expect in any movie that features a young man who probably shouldn't be guarding someone else's hash, they begin to rifle through property that doesn't belong to them. "This is where the film takes a certain Nancy Drew detour," Dolan explained before shooting the scene. "But it only lasts as long as it takes to say 'Nancy Drew.'"

The Sugar's locale may give the impression that Dance With the One is raunchier than it actually is. Although the film's producers expect it to get an "R" rating because of its language, Henderson and Smith's script went through a far more involved vetting process than most first-time screenwriters experience. "I have a feeling that if it were a Hollywood production, we would have gotten a check, and they would have said goodbye," Henderson says. "Every scene, every word got a lot of scrutiny, and we had to change a lot of things, and that process was great. They don't let you do that very often on a first movie."