In the fall of 2003, two Austin high school teachers stole time to dream up a movie project with the only time they could find: 6 a.m., before the first school bell rang. Their plan? To realistically explore the world of teachers from the inside out – all of the struggles, successes, humor and absurdities inherent in the profession. The result is CHALK, a feature film that, along with receiving festival accolades and a current national run in theaters, may just help serve as a zeitgeist for meaningful school reform conversation in an idealistic world (or alternate reality). P.o.V. Editor Christian Raymond had an “after-school filmmaker-teacher meeting” with director/writer/producer Mike Akel and writer/producer/actor Chris Mass.
Christian Raymond: I remember way back in the day at Travis High discussing your movie when it was just a gleam in your eye. You weren’t developing it conventionally by writing a script.
Mr. Lowery (Troy Schremmer) experiences first day jitters in front of his Harrison HS history class in a scene from CHALK.Mike Akel: Right, we - meaning Chris and I - had done another film in 2000, BUTCHER’S 15. And that one was very similar. We had an outline, a sort-of beginning, middle, end. We had characters, and we knew where the characters were going to go. So we expounded on that with CHALK.
We had about a 90-page document, but it was really just scenes. So we started off with the four main characters, Chris being one of them, and we just developed mainly the characters. That’s kind of where I find myself going: not really starting with the plot, with these types of films at least, and starting with the characters and giving them dimension. What are they about? What do they want? What do they struggle with?
And then from those characters, we sorted things out. Our premise was easy: it’s about new teachers; it covers one school year. That made it really easy to add the skeleton of a plot, and just kind of go from there. So, we came up with scenes. What would happen with the teachers in the beginning of the year? What would happen with these teachers in the middle of the year when it’s starting to get tiresome? And then, by the end, how are these teachers unfolding? We call it “descriptive improv.” We have an outline, we have the scene, and then we have an emotional objective for each scene that we direct the actors with as we’re going forward.
CR: It’s interesting. I have a name for that too. I call it an “Improv Script” which has a backbone and the structure with basic situations set up. Then the character has freedom to explore their character within certain parameters. Chris, it sounds like you and Mike go way back before CHALK.
CM: Mike and I grew up together. After making BUTCHER’S 15, we both had to make money, so we ended up teaching. Then, when it was time to do another project we thought, “You know? Let’s pull on our ideas that we’ve been discussing.” We kicked around some other stuff before we said, “Yeah, this has never been captured – the real day-to-day teaching.” The everyday life, if you will. That’s how we ended up with CHALK, and we went forward with that.
CR: Could you pick a specific scene—it can be any scene—and break down how it went during the production with the improv style and how it fit into the bigger structure?
(SPOILER ALERT)
CM: I know one. It’s a controversial one, but I think it’s good. It was good for the film because there’s a scene in the film where Mr. Lowry’s class is out of control. He’s dealing with one student in the back, and then the class is getting loud and he’s trying to discipline a student in the back. Then all of a sudden you hear it getting louder and louder, and one African American female student calls another African American female student the “N” word. I don’t know if everybody catches it because there’s so much going on, but we intentionally planned that. For me, I think as a white male teaching in the classroom, it was a culture shock for me to hear. So, in the film, the actor is thrown on his heels and has to react, and when the happens, you really don’t have a canned answer.
CR: I’ve been there; I know exactly what you mean.
CM: So we thought that it would be interesting to capture that and throw this sort of fish-out-of-water Mr. Lowry—brand-new teacher—how does he handle that? So he goes over; he tries to break it up. And all we did was tell the student that cusses at the other girl – her name’s Meeka, she was a student of mine – “Hey, I want you to get really pissed off her.” That was kind of her motivation. She was friends with the other girl, too, so they had some stuff to build on. And we told the teacher—the actor, Troy Schremmer—what we were going to do and just said, “Break it up, and go until we say quit.”
We let the actors lead the scene, with the camera and boom following rather than having a technical set-up – “Hit this spot, here’s the light.” We let the actor lead, so it feels more like a real doc. They’re really reacting; the camera’s really shaking a little bit. So that’s what was nice about that scene—we probably shot it three or four times and whittled it down.
CR: So how involved were the students in the movie, as far as development? Were they mostly acting, or did they help with some production behind the scenes, too?
CM: We had at least six or seven that were pretty regular, and we had three student PAs that were there every day—I mean, big time. They would have been paid PAs on a—you know. Sir Pous – let’s go ahead and give him some props. And Daniel—what was Daniel’s last name? Oh shoot, I can’t remember Daniel’s last name all of a sudden. But they were great. We would alternate them. There was a scene, The Spelling Hornet, where the two kids that facilitate it—the emcees—actually helped come up with the words, with Mr. Lowry. We really let them lead on it, and we just kind of steered the scene.
CR: Those scenes—the spelling bee and the teacher of the year debate—are great, because they helped so much, from a momentum standpoint, and also with creating a slightly heightened reality that gave the whole film another dimension, in a way—just when it needed it.
CM: Thank you; we thought so, too. We thought, “Let’s give it a little bit of an inflation, and some sort of an event, but not, you know, ‘the football game.’” We wanted to do something a little different.
CR: I know the film’s played festivals; how have high-schoolers responded? Obviously, the teachers have responded—you can see how teachers and adults are responding to it—and it seems like it’s authentically captured the high school experience, but what about from the other side—from the teenagers’ perspective?
Mr. Stroope (Chris Mass) gets a bit hot under the collar in his Harrison High class in a scene from CHALK, which Mass also co-wrote.MA: It’s weird, because I had a group teaching—juniors and seniors—and I didn’t want to show freshmen. Freshmen want, like, HOSTEL 2, or THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, so I wasn’t too comfortable showing them. But I had a mixture with some high school students—some really good students of mine, juniors and seniors, and I showed them the film, and they were really receptive. And we’ve heard some great reports that, especially in certain schools where THE OFFICE would be popular, they really dig it. It’s really their sort of humor. It just depends on the school, but we’ve heard some good stuff, like, “Man, I need to be a better student.”
CR: That’s cool. I know that length of the production was about 18 days, but what was the budget of the movie?
CM: We started off with $10,000 to get us through pre-production and production. We bought a camera, rental equipment, paying our DP a little bit of money, flying three of our actors down from New York, putting them up, food, catering. And so that was great; it was huge. After that, of course—basically you can say it’s definitely under $500,000.
CR: I really liked the side interviews and the video diaries. From a character-deepening standpoint, over what timeframe were those shot? Because I imagine they probably weren’t part of the 18-day production schedule. Or were they?
MA: Our plan in production was after each day, let’s say Tuesday and Thursday, we would have video diary day, and we would go with two actors one day and two actors the next. And we wanted them tired.
But man, it worked in reverse. I was so tired, the crew was too, so it was really hard to put much creative energy behind it. And so we shot them, but they weren’t really that well done, and so what we did was—I guess it was about six or seven months later, maybe eight months—we went to New York, and we found some things we wanted to reshoot, or actually add some scenes, and those—we reshot. We did the video diaries and made them look better, and then we did the interviews with the black backdrop. Both to give a little more dimension. And then, of course, we did Chris, of course, here in Austin.
CR: Mr. Lowry, as a character, has the greatest dramatic arc, and it’s his character trajectory which leads to the final defining moment of the film where he decides, “Do I come back to teach next year or not?” The decision he makes seems inevitable, as far as what you’ve set up and what the movie is about. Was there ever a discussion of that going in a different direction?
MA: Oh yeah. Our actor was great. He would battle on this too, like, would the doc crew actually watch him sign it? Does this seem unbelievable or not? You know, there was one time when we were like, “Let’s film all the teachers,” and this is where you catch yourself doing the ol’ derivative filmmaking thing, where you’re like, “Oh, I’ve seen this before. Where are they now? Here’s Mr. Struff as a lifeguard in the summer.
CR: The AMERICAN PIE ending.
MA: Right. It’s just like, “No!” And you can tell audiences, everywhere we go there’s always someone in the crowd who’s like, “Well, did he sign it or not?” You know? And that’s the whole point; we really don’t want to answer it for the audience. Because, especially for us as teachers, every year, every summer, we were like, “I don’t know if I’m going back.” I really needed to think about it, because I cared about the job enough to know that if I go again, I’m gonna go full force. So, I think that if anything, it’s a hard thing because in one sense you want to satisfy your audience but leaving it open ended to a certain degree really allows for more conversation. We’re realizing that this piece doesn’t really give a lot of answers, but it really gets people talking about education and the state of the retention.
CM: And I think part of it was that when we shot certain scenes towards the end—the lunch scene, and then when we shoot him in that final—it’s like, “How are we going to have this? Is he packing up?” You pack up a little bit whether you’re coming back or not, anyway. It’s funny—the material you get, you’re really subject to. If we had had something else, we might have done something, but journeying along the way and discovering the Lowry character as we shot it, it was kind of really using the material that you had, and this was the ending that really made the most sense.
CR: Right. What were some of the subplots that emerged later during editing? It sounds like several became more prominent.
MA: Do you have any, Chris, off the top of your head? I know the one main one that was easy from the beginning was the teacher debate. Since the one character wants to be teacher of the year, that was easy with Chris’s character.
CM: Also the romance, I think.
MA: Yeah, there you go.
MA: You know Janelle Schremmer, who plays Coach Webb, and Troy Schremmer, who plays Mr. Lowery, are married in real life. You’d catch scenes of them talking normally in certain situations but then in the editing room, you start piecing these things: what if there’s a little romance?
CR: When [Mr. Lowery and Coach Webb] are dancing together, you think it’s her having this dream but it’s him, which initially is completely out of character. That was a really smart choice.
MA: Yeah, and I thought the way they set it up where she’s checking the doors and then all of a sudden—BOOM— he pops up, and he’s been sleeping. So yeah, that was something that they filmed on that last day as a bonus, you know, just to be fun and goofy.
CM: And you know, Mike saw it and said, “Yeah, this would kind of weave this whole journey together.” And, of course, you know with some test screenings we got some things: “Why don’t we have a wedding at the end?”
CR: Laughing. 
Coach Webb (Janelle Schremmer) shows her physical education students and alternative form of exercise in a scene from CHALK.MA: Noooo! We were like, “I do not want a wedding at the end.”
CR: Did you make a lot of changes from rough-cut screenings?
MA: We had one song that was a little heavier than we wanted at the end and it really set the tone… I really liked the song, but it was just too heavy.
We have these little PSAs that would pop up like video announcements, too. They really took you out of the film. The dream sequences were already borderline, but these were like little short films: “Please Do Not Harm or Injure the Sub.” They’re real funny. They’re nice little short pieces but they just didn’t fit in. So those got cut out. There were a few other scenes. Things got whittled. I’m really thankful.
MA: [Lawrence Wright] came on board, pretty quickly after the film was done. He saw it, loved it. He was like a mentor. He was our story advisor. He was so awesome. He was shrewd as a serpent, man. He was like, “you gotta cut these things out.” And I didn’t take everything he said, but he was fabulous. He just won the Pulitzer Prize, so I was like “yeah!”
MA: So he and his wife helped host the screening of it at the Austin Studios screening room.
CR: So what’s next for you guys? Are you going to make the jump to Los Angeles or are you going to stay local?
MA: Well, right now I have two things kind of on the horizon, One is we’re developing a film for Universal and it’s similar to CHALK and it’s about Little League Baseball. It’s great. It’s like a behind-the-scenes look at the parents, coaches and kids of Little League Baseball. And it’s a doc, faux doc style.
CR: What’s the production company?
MA: Larger Than Life. Gary Ross—who wrote SEABISCUIT. So we’re with his company and he’s got a really good track record. We’re sort of in the final phases, a lot of hoops to jump through, but it’s going really well.
The other project is CHALK as a television show. We’re moving that forward too, so we’ll see what happens there. So in terms of moving, right now, being the creators we can – at least at this point- stay here. If television were to develop, we would really push hard to stay here, you know?
CR: Yes, that would be the best of both worlds. Traditionally T.V. writers feel the Hollywood tractor beam.
MA: It would be huge if we could stay.
CR: Back to teaching. All three of us have been teachers in public school settings. As guys who’ve been in the trenches, what do you think can be done to help teacher retention?
MA: Chris and I have a number of opinions and of course, we don’t have all the answers.
Traveling with the film for a year and talking with teachers, people feel they’re babysitting more than teaching. And I think that right there is the deflator. The teacher is not motivated by money. Money and a good salary are nice, but everyone knows what they’re getting into when they sign up to teach. So it’s not about the money so much as it is to have a classroom where you have control.
You need to have administration that gives you a discipline system that you can actually enforce. And I think that’s another thing—I felt like my hands were tied, I didn’t know what I could do, as a new teacher with so many students. Again, I had amazing students, it was the most satisfying job I’ve had alongside of making films. But it’s really hard when you’re disrespected over and over and over and you can’t really do anything about it. That’s why teachers are leaving. Now I’m a believer in team teaching, I haven’t seen it done, but if there’s going to be 30 kids in a classroom you have two teachers. Raise money for that.
CM: I really saw it last year. I had a first year teacher and I mentored her. She was great, really capable.
CR: You taught at Lanier?
CM: Yes, I taught at Lanier High School. She was a new teacher, they just threw her out in the portables, she had four different classes, and 3-4 different preps.
And it was basically the worst of the worst with 3-4 different preps and it consumes your whole life. And even though I did my best to mentor her, I’m one guy trying to save a teacher. You know that is just a great example of why teachers head to the suburbs or head out of the classroom in general.
The first three years are really just an incubator stage. They’re not going to come in like MR. HOLLAND’S OPUS. But that’s what they’re sold. That’s one reason we’re actually taking a portion of the profits and we’re gonna give it back to teachers and that’ll help with retention and training and that sort of thing.
We’re hooking up with TeachersCount.org and we’re giving them a portion of the profits and we’re kind of starting a fund to keep it local to keep some of that initial push of mentoring and training and shielding, if you will, to just keep teachers there. You hear stories all the time of teachers who if they can make it past a year or two they turn out to teach for 20 years but so many – like a had a lady I know really well. I didn’t even know she was a teacher but her first year was horrific and by chance they moved so she found another job and it turned out to be decent and she stayed for 20-something years. You know? But she was ready to just be like “I am done, I’ll do something else—it’s not worth it.” Those initial years are tough, so if you can help teachers get through that you can say, “Man, I’ve found my stride and my calling.”
CR: Also, it’s not fair to the students to have first year teachers all the time. They’re being sold short, too.
MA: That’s such a great point. We’ve done some research. $2.6 billion … a waste of money is spent on re-training teachers because of retention.
CR: Geeze.
MA: Principals—I don’t know what the study is there, but at least here it’s really hard to keep the principals. These are your leaders, the tone setters for the school and when that’s changing? The teachers are just fending for themselves, you know.
Last year at my school—which is a tougher school—we had half of our teachers quit or moved on to like the suburbs because of the situation. And Lanier is not a tough school or anything. And it’s not so much the support from administration—it’s just dealing with some of these kids that just don’t have the parental involvement, which is so key. That’s why we take a stab at it in the movie without being preachy because it starts at home. That can be a hot button issue when people think oh, the teachers are just like a parent. But no, they’re not. You know? That stuff starts at home and you have that missing and show up at school you’re not dealing with a learning style, you’re dealing with some deeper core stuff that sends teachers in droves off to where there is more support, more involvement.
CR: That’s true. For a teacher to get beyond the behavioral issues it’s such a monumental task, it really is.
MA: Yeah, if you take that situation and then you take the testing and the administration and the paperwork and the hassles --- and then you realize the reason you got into teaching in the first place was to connect to the kids—it’s a random thing and you’re spending all your time doing other stuff. You compound all that and it was not as tough for me to take a jump from the classroom. I mean obviously getting to work in film is a dream but dealing with freshmen specifically, which is a whole other beast, I’m not getting what I got into teaching for—I’m not getting that feedback.
One thing we’re working on—we’re in talks doing a TV show based on the film and we’re really excited about that because we can bring up some of these issues and take harder looks at different issues.
Photos by Steven Schaefer/Someday Soon Prods.
