“Feel free to bring your own rotten fruits and vegetables to hurl at us,” Christian Agypt, producer of The FP, joked in an email before The FP’s New Orleans screening. FP actress Rachel Robinson Agypt warned that she did the movie because when she read the script, it was too cleverly dumb not to do. Vince Mancini at FilmDrunk.com described the movie as being “like watching sheer genius and utter retardation tongue kiss for 82 minutes.”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm3p0aNrOQA[/youtube]
On Saturday night, the audience in The Prytania turned out to be the exact kind of people who appreciate The FP’s fast pace, its absurd setting, and its characters’ complete bastardization of the English language. The FP submerges you in a dystopic not-so-far-off future, where rival gangs battle settle their differences through Beat Beat Revelation (which is exactly like Dance Dance Revolution, except it’s played in a grungy warehouse instead of a suburban living room). Main character JTRO (Jason Trost), the film’s version of Everyman who has no discernible personality, competes for power over Frazier Park against his nemesis L Dubba E. (Lee Valmassy). Failure is not an option. If JTRO doesn’t win, there will be no alcohol in the FP. With no alcohol in the FP, there will be no more bums. With no more bums, there will be no one left to feed the ducks at the pond. Furthermore, every drinker in town will have to turn to drugs, which will make the residents even crazier than they already are. To raise the stakes, JTRO becomes involved with the town beauty/bicycle Stacey (Caitlyn Folley), who can’t decide between JTRO and L Dubba E. Finally, JTRO’s older brother BTRO died on the battlefield (well, a Beat Beat Revelation dance-pad) and JTRO must fight in his honor.
The FP is a family effort. Some families make home videos; the Trost family and their friends made a film about idiots in a post-apocolyptic future battling each other at Dance Dance Revolution. The film was conceived by Jason Trost, who first wrote it as a short eight years ago. His older brother Brandon Trost saw its demented potential as a B-movie flick satirizing ’80s fight films. The movie references Rocky III, Rocky IV, The Karate Kid, The Warriors, Commando, Rambo, and Streetfighter: The Movie. The characters Stacey, JTRO and KC/DC also satirize the three main characters in 8 Mile, complete with a scene of JTRO clutching a grimy bathroom sink and staring at himself in a mirror. Brandon Trost is now in New Orleans working as the cinematographer for The Apocalypse (tentative title), a movie written by Seth Rogen and featuring an ensemble of well-known comedians and actors (James Franco, Jonah Hill, Aziz Anzari, Danny McBride).
The brothers developed the script, which was written phonetically in The FP’s bizarre slang. Beyond making up words and abandoning syntax, the characters constantly use their limited language skills to illustrate that their white lower-middle-class suburbia lives are really, really hard. They insist that they are telling the truth, “for reals.” They proclaim their loyalty to their gang by repeating, “We roll togetha, we die togetha.” Meanwhile, their surroundings are laughably not hard.
After the script and its weird lexicon was complete, the family and their friends took on several roles as cast and crew. Their sister Sarah designed the costumes and their father Ron did special effects and executive-produced. Finally, the Trosts were joined by friends George Holdcroft and Christian Agypt for the musical direction and production respectively.
Agypt, who is now based in New Orleans, took on such roles as driving the cast and crew from Los Angeles to Frazier Park every day. He negotiated with the real natives of Frazier Park while the movie struggled to shoot on its shoestring budget, describing it as “a family film” to convince the FP’s inhabitants to let the movie film. Agypt is currently working on Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming flick, Django Unchained, as assistant production coordinator.
George Holdcroft composed and recorded the music for the film, which according to Brandon Trost has music in 81 of its 83 minutes. Holdcroft sang every word heard on the score, including the female parts. It took him a year, which probably felt like a decade to Holdcroft, who couldn’t stand techno—the main music of choice for the movie’s scenes.The soundtrack is available on iTunes.
Finally, Sarah Trost created all of The FP’s costumes. Her deliberate aesthetic combines thrift store finds, old ski clothes, and headgear in a way that screams, This is post-apocalyptic America on drugs. It is doubtful that anyone in Hollywood today has embraced snowboard gear the way that Sarah Trost has.
In the years between the film’s completion and its SXSW premire in 2011, it seemed like this movie might just be a weird inside joke for the Trosts and their friends who worked on it—an inside joke with gratuitous blowjob scenes. But Drafthouse Films recently picked it up and released it last March. In the past year, the film has been shown in over 20 markets. The FP doesn’t drag and each scene moves logically to the next, though the world that the characters live in is logistically baffling. The moviemakers clearly know this movie is a joke, but nobody’s told the characters. The audience gets to be in on the joke while the characters sincerely try to win Beat Beat Revelation like it’s the Civil War. Yes, they really compare their gang rivalry to the Civil War. Like they say, shit’s tough in the FP, bitch.
The FP is available on Netflix.
