North End exposure

Behind the Ciotas' 'seat-of-the-pants' indie debut

by Bill Rodriguez

When their project began three years ago, Frank and Joseph Ciota may have felt like the Marx Brothers, but these days they're feeling a lot more like the Cohen brothers.

Their independent film The North End looks a lot more polished than its miniscule budget would have promised. It appears to have captivated Boston, even if you subtract the population of that hardcore ethnic Italian neighborhood. Originally slated for a single week in June at a Showcase Cinema screen at the Copley Place multiplex, it stayed a month longer; one week it attracted more than 70,000 moviegoers, a box office record there for a little indie.

And that meant competing with a big green lizard.

"When we opened in Boston we were next to Godzilla and other Hollywood movies," said its director, Frank Ciota, in a phone interview. "We were putting up our little posters next to their 15-foot displays."

The Boston success wouldn't have happened without another Italian neighborhood independent, Federal Hill, paving the way. The connection with the Michael Corrente film isn't the usual one of genre influence but rather a matter that has become even more important for a film's success these days: cold business savvy. Corrente was the first young filmmaker to talk Showcase into giving him a shot. Local Rhode Island interest flourished. The precedent worked so well, getting the gritty feature national distribution, that the movie chain thought they'd try it again with the Ciotas' film.

Every year hundreds of films are shot in this country, independent of studio backing, and get no domestic distribution at all.

"The hardest thing about making a film like this with no money is, `Who's going to see it when you're all done?' " said Ciota.

Unlike when David Mamet shot The Spanish Prisoner and tied up streets in Boston's North End for a couple of weeks, location work by the Ciotas was low-key to the point of invisibility.

"When we started putting up posters [in the North End] that the film was going to be playing, no one even knew that we had shot a film down here," Ciota said. "And it's the kind of neighborhood where if you do anything, people will know about it."

That insularity plays a big part in The North End and its sense of both menace and warm community. On the one hand, there's rabid bigotry -- expressed against Moroccan immigrants -- and a schizoid attitude toward women. (One character says that you never raise a hand against a woman -- unless she's your wife or sister: then it's a family matter. In the most barbed line of the movie, he adds, "It's in the Bible like that. I'm sure.") An aura of potential violence pervades the film, and some quiet scenes throb and crackle with pent-up rage. Yet the most sinister character is not Italian, and an ironic sense of honor keeps coming up with the expression, "Do the handsome thing." The catch phrase may very well join the "not for nothin' " of Federal Hill and the "fuggedaboudit" of Donnie Brasco in the glossary of Italian-American pop sociology.

The Ciotas grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts., after which Frank, 34, went to nearby Harvard and Joe, 40, to Colby, in Maine. Before their recent mutual career change, Joe was a freelance journalist writing for several Italian magazines. (They now are working on a script about him being the first American to coach American football for Italian players.) Before Frank quit his job to go to a six-month film program at NYU, for five years he was press secretary for politician Joe Malone, who is now the treasurer of Massachusetts. Taking a follow-up program at the film school, he made a short film that Joe penned. That led to a gig as low-ranked production assistant on Martin Scorsese's Casino, where he briefly met Frank Vincent, the mob-actor character in The North End. (Vincent, who gets stabbed in a car trunk in GoodFellas, is also featured in Federal Hill.)

Although his brother is the writer, by now Frank could write a book on making a movie on a shoestring budget. Shot in 16mm, it cost only $150,000 to have something to screen.

Location costs? Zip. "The apartment that we filmed in was the apartment that we lived in."

Location logistics? No hassles for blocking traffic: their parents run a suburban flower shop, so the brothers borrowed their truck, filled it with their equipment, and double parked to make it look like a delivery.

"It was a really small crew and all first-time actors," Frank said. "We saved a ton of money."

There were never more than nine crew members on the set at any time, which is smaller than the catering and snack staff on may films. Speaking of food . . . .

"We didn't pay for any catering, because friends own restaurants and they just fed us," he said. Frank now lives in the North End, although Joe has moved from there to Nahant.

"We have one kid who did all original music for the film. I think it's great music," he declared. "He did it for next to nothing because he wanted to do the music for a film."

The 25 days of shooting were spread over eight months. Every time they scraped together another $10,000, he said, they would film more scenes, such as the four days with Vincent. To finesse the change of seasons, the camera was pointed up at the sky a lot, Frank noted.

One attempt to save money ended up costing them more. The documentary video clips in The North End, with residents describing the sometimes violent local norms, played a larger part in their original concept. "Originally we were going to fill 30 minutes of the film with video. So we were actually going to shoot two-thirds of a feature and do the rest on video," Frank explained.

However, life didn't manage to imitate art sufficiently.

"It ended up that the video interviews were really bad," he said, "because we couldn't get people to say what we wanted them to say."

So they scripted what they needed, and the video segments ended up being more like five minutes of the movie, he estimated.

Surprise, surprise!! Welcome to the unpredictable world of movie magic.

"It was like seat-of-the-pants from day one," Frank said.

Fortunately, some of the surprises are quite pleasant.

The North End opens at the Showcase Cinemas in Seekonk on Friday, July 31.