The Making of "hooking up"

When Roland Tec decided to try his hand at filmmaking, he wanted to start with a short subject as a means of getting his feet wet in the medium. He had often been fascinated by language, particularly the use of cliche in everyday conversation and one night walking home through his neighborhood in Boston, it occured to him that there might be certain universal chunks of polite conversation that at any given time, in any given city, could be taking place in several different homes. As he looked up at the lit windows along Tremont Street in Boston's South End, he imagined the scenario of "hooking up" -- several gay male couples, home from the clubs with a trick, going through the routine points of conversation that have been said and will be said thousands of times. The type of dialogue where content is overshadowed by context.

So Mr. Tec sat down at his desk and wrote the 15pp. script and then set out to cast and shoot what would be his very first exercise in filmmaking. Since the whole project would have to be done entirely on a volunteer basis, the writer/director-turned-producer spent many hours on the phone coordinating around people's schedules. And by October of 1994, nearly four months after he began, Tec had shot all the footage that would go into "hooking up." With the help of local editor, Jonathan Sahula, then working at CF Video in Watertown, they edited the project down to a tight thirteen minutes, adding music that Tec composed during the graveyard shift in the Brandeis Electro Accoustic Music Studio, where he was a teaching fellow for Eric Chasalow's course on Electronic Music Composition.

By March of 1995, the editing was complete and Roland Tec's close friend Willis Emmons hosted a gathering of about fifty friends and associates to view the finished product. The results were astonishing. The crowd roared with laughter, responding to the universal themes touched on in the brief study of the one-night stand and its awkwardness. Friends encouraged Tec to submit the film to film festivals, which he did, and within a few months, he was travelling with "hooking up" to festivals throughout the country and abroad. It was the success of "hooking up" that gave Tec the courage to pursue the goal of making a feature length film as well as his introduction to some of the first investors in "All the Rage."

"Hooking Up" is available for festival screenings (16mm film format) exclusively from Pinkplot.