Fresh off wrapping his third feature, the locally-filmed Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, the Smithtown West 2008 graduate-turned-rising voice in independent cinema plugs a more minimalistic enterprise that’s already scored major stamps of certified approval.
“Taormina has taken the problem of having to look at the same thing every day and turned it into an aesthetic — staring at, and listening to, ordinary sights to the point where they become eerie and unfamiliar,” the New York Times wrote in its review of Happer’s Comet last Thursday, ahead of the film’s domestic premiere at Brooklyn’s BAM Theater. “[the film]… has a distinct way of viewing the world.”
Clocking in at just 62 minutes, the David Lynch, Richard Linklater and Bill Forsyth-inspired director still jampacks into it much ado about something that just about all of us can relate to— especially when recalling our collective cabin fever of globally paranoid proportions during March 2020. In fact, this is actually when Happer’s Comet was shot, Taormina creatively relishing in the opportunity to make his friends and family come to life as unlikely film stars in a moving mosaic of nocturnal longing. Some are roller-skaters, some are dancers, some are liberated, and some are still waiting.
Is the film about depression? We do seem to exclusively follow the pathos taken by those susceptible to daylight overwhelm who wait until the wee hours of the night to truly express themselves.
Perhaps it is, as simply marketed— about the general concept of alienation. One of the moviegoers in attendance at the BAM premiere even proposed it could be about post-apocalyptic, post-human, literal alienation… the dialogue-deprived walking wounded emoting what they consider human behavior, or remember it to be.
The beauty in experimentation: there doesn’t have to be an end-all, be-all interpretation. The film is what you make of it.
Taormina himself is one to generously offer Q & A discussions, including after Happer’s Comet’s domestic premiere on June 15. Moderated by actor/producer on Taormina’s upcoming Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, Michael Cera, the Superbad star commended his friend for being the only person he knew shooting during this time, and how he accomplished so much with so little. They agreed that silence – and then promptly, the sound that follows — are the foremost weapons in the film’s arsenal.
Ubiquitously heralded as someone who lifts up everyone around him to be their best creative and overall selves, Happer’s Comet in many ways embodies the man incarnate. He rallies the stagnant masses, represented by the film’s tertiary players, and inspires them to step up — or skate out — and do something about their plight, just as he did by seeing the pandemic, and raising it an arthouse flick for the ages.
Whereas the film’s bookends send reviewers instantly to Blue Velvet, one could also argue Happer’s Comet is about what’s going on with everyone else in the town of Twin Peaks when something cataclysmically tragic, but oh-so necessary is happening to one of their own. The film seems bleaker than audiences anticipate and what Taormina originally intended, culminating akin to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) in a profound music outro just as angelic as the best of the Lynchian crescendo catalog. But the twisted reality here is that everyone we spent all film rooting for must now retreat back to their waking lives— where daily dread is, and where Taormina’s camera isn’t. They had become the heroes of stories never deemed tellable until they met his lens, a tragedy in its own right.
Those who fire-walked with Tyler on his second feature outing, and first of two exciting Smithtown-set features, are equally excited by its ambition. Doing something rife with influence yet wholly original meant signing up to work with passionate individuals who jumped at the chance to insert more of themselves into the film than another director may have allowed.
“Because of how Ty was constructing the story, he was very collaborative with the actors. Getting to work with him so intimately back in my hometown was such a special experience,” said Happer’s Comet actor Jax Terry, of Smithtown, who’d later collaborate with Taormina on Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point. “Some scenes were even shot in my own childhood bedroom! Seeing that up on a big screen was so full circle for me and once in a lifetime level of cool.”
“Making any movie is a challenge and Happer’s Comet was certainly not short on its list of upheavals,” said Happer’s Comet producer Calogero Carucci (Smithtown West, Class of 2013), whose Long Island Gus — currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video — The Messenger spotlit last month. “We were shooting on a practically non-existent budget, but had received many favors from local businesses whom Tyler and I frequented growing up in Smithtown… the locations were familiar and less intimidating as a result.”
An exciting independent filmmaker himself, Carucci revealed that despite not growing up together — Taormina is 33, Carucci, 27 — he and Taormina “share a similar sense of empathy for the world we were brought up around.” Both Happer’s Comet and Long Island Gus are the products of essentially two-man crews that really don’t seem like it when you absorb how far ahead of the curve each is, and how cool the film’s directors are under pressure of “stealing” shots and cutting them into a moving picture that can elicit a feelings frenzy from viewers across several generations.
Taormina scripts out his work, but with something of this ilk, relying on improvisation was key— instrumental to both bringing naturalism out of his “street cast” hires, and letting self-tape auditioners rock where they previously would have rolled.
“Happer’s was the only thing I submitted for during that stage of the lockdown. I remember being a little intimidated when I got there. Within 10 minutes I was comfortable enough to feel like I was with an old friend,” said Brendan “Crash” Burt, of East Meadow. Crash was a standout of the ensemble, with his foreboding 5-minute sequence as an auto body shop worker memorable enough to be selected as the NY Times’ featured image for its review.
A highlight of his emotive turn sees Crash responding to a morally-contemplative needle-drop by dropping to the floor to give his audience 20 (although it was upwards of 200 push-ups for his director, Crash jokingly revealed to The Messenger).
“I remember meeting with Ty that night. We talked about what was going on in the scene. I remember even then he had a visual of the Johnnie Frierson song. We may have listened to it two or three times. Then, as we shot, he was singing it. It was like he had a remote control that ran my face the first time we met.”
Despite his pride in blindly watching what became of his one-day-of-work performance for the first time at the Brooklyn BAM premiere of Happer’s Comet last week, Crash humbly assigns most of the credit his director’s way. “I think the push-ups might have been my idea, but that was my only contribution. When I saw the film, I was sucker-punched with all kinds of emotions that had nothing to do with the part I played. I think when I heard there was no dialogue, part of my brain didn’t prepare for the audio (sound design), which is in my opinion the star of the whole film.”
“The sound design on a cornfield makeout session gets in way closer than movies normally do,” Ben Kenigsberg of the NY Times wrote of small-crew, barrel-connecting big swing’s penultimate sequence.
And yet it’s not played to over-intrusion. Taormina welcomes you into his brain with each cinematic offering, and, in turn, remains unshakeable from yours long after you’ve borne witness to what kinetic energies he can produce, with or without a budget.
“I have a 7-year–old daughter. She is without question the coolest thing I have ever seen,” Crash said, discussing his and Shannon’s love for a trampoline he bought her, and how he encourages her to “pay close attention to sounds” while at play. “..if you accept it all as part of the orchestra, it can be a really good song. My interpretation of Happers Comet, on first view, is that it is the spirit and the movement that turns those sounds into music.”
Back on his “conductor,” Crash conclusively summarized: “The guy has touched my life in ways that most people in this biz don’t get to experience. Having done three films with him now, I have since had the privilege of meeting Tyler’s parents and some of his childhood friends— all of whom are remarkable people. He has a tireless work ethic that desires, and inspires everybody to succeed… a man that has vision that is gifted beyond what I am able to comprehend. I probably have tattoos older than this guy, yet I see him as a soul that has seen a lot more than mine.”
Such is the beauty of cinema. It allows you to plunge into universes that may exist elsewhere, or that came long before you, and you subsequently leave with a new experience that’s now undeniably become a part of you in the process.
It was the success of shooting Happer’s Comet in Smithtown that convinced Taormina the terrain of his suburban upbringing could welcome an even bigger, and dare we say it broader undertaking still very much laced with Taormina/Omnes Films DNA— where unique sensibilities and capabilities meet the virtues of whimsy, weariness, unrest and resets.
On the same day the NY Times released their “We Live By Night”-entitled review of Happer’s Comet, Deadline reported the remainder of the A-list talent cast alongside Michael Cera’s in Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point. The Messenger broke Cera being cast in Taormina’s upcoming holiday comedy shot in Smithtown, Holbrook and Selden back in January.
Elsie Fisher (Barry), Maria Dizzia (Orange is the New Black), Francesca Scorsese (We Are Who We Are), Ben Shenkman (Billions), Sawyer Spielberg (Masters of the Air), Gregg Turkington (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania) and newcomer Matilda Fleming will also star. According to Deadline and IMDb, producers alongside Taormina, Carucci and Cera include Kevin Anton and Eric Berger (the film’s co-writers), David Croley Broyles, Craig Butta, Michael Jeffrey Davis, Jeremy Gardner, Joseph Lipsey IV, Krista Minto, Brock Pierce, David Sabot, Jason Stone and Duncan Sullivan.
While anticipation for Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point continues to grow during post-production, you can catch Taormina and Omnes Films’ Los Angeles-shot debut feature Ham on Rye (2019) on Amazon Prime for only $1.99.
Happer’s Comet – nominated for several awards internationally, including the Caligari Film Award at the 2022 Berlin International Film Festival – will see its Long Island Premiere take place on Thursday, June 29, at 7:30 p.m. at the non-profit community theater Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington (located at 423 Park Avenue). Taormina will partake in a Q & A session immediately afterward. Tickets are available at cinemaartscentre.org—- $15 for guests and $10 for members.
Here, you can join Taormina and more of his local Long Island band of filmmaking warriors on the rise as they celebrate Happer’s Comet, a concise splice of past-life/fever-dreamed oddity that only could have been made possible from the community that raised them up offering their contributions. They did so during a time when everyone would have completely understood if they elected to pass in favor of precautionarily staying within their quarantine confines.
“This movie was made during the COVID lockdown period. I returned home to Smithtown and worked closely with my friends and family to make this dream come to life,” Taormina told The Messenger. “It is a movie about the hard time we faced in isolation and creating the movie, during that period of isolation, was a means of survival.”
Three years later, we’ve made it to the other side. But it’s good to reflect, and not reject, what gave us the strength to carry on in the first place.
