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THE GENESIS

In early 1999, director Brian Flemming got the idea to shoot a movie about an assassination. "I wanted to make a movie that recalled the feeling that I imagine must have been present during the '60s and early '70s, when every time you turned around the course of history seemed to be changing due to an assassination," says Flemming. "And then it hit me that if that were to happen in 1999, given the political and economic climate, it might not be left-leaning political leaders who were the victims. It might actually be the reverse-a class war."

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates seemed to be a likely first target in this class war, and Flemming says he spent some time thinking about the ethics of making such a choice. "The idea excited me but also gave me pause, so I spent some time asking myself, 'Should I really do this?' Ultimately I couldn't articulate a single sound reason not to do it. And in my experience, when something seems scary but you can't articulate a good reason against it, you're probably just being a wimp."

So Flemming recruited his actor friend David James, who became the film's co-producer and star, and the two set out to create a documentary-style film about the assassination of Bill Gates.

"Neither one of us had any negative feelings at all about Bill Gates," says Flemming, "and the movie is not really about him. The idea of using his murder to launch a story about class, race and police corruption is what really excited me. I think if Bill Gates saw the movie, he wouldn't necessarily dislike it."

(A Microsoft spokesperson has told reporters that Bill Gates feels it is "very disappointing that a movie maker would do something like this.")

RESEARCH

Flemming and James pored over books and videos and websites on assassinations ranging from Lincoln to John F. Kennedy to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to John Lennon. They also studied the conspiracy communities that have grown out of many of these assassinations, especially the JFK murder. In 1999, the two filmmakers went to "November in Dallas"-an annual research conference still being attended by hundreds on each anniversary of Kennedy's death-and interviewed authors, group leaders and researchers who have devoted their lives to the study of that assassination.

"In these communities there are people who live up to the stereotype with their unflinching belief that their theory is the only plausible one," says James. "But then there were others whose views were more objective. They believe that the research is doing some good for the world. I actually became a bit of an assassination researcher myself. It's so easy to get hooked once you start. I didn't become much of a conspiracy buff, but I was fascinated by how consistently law enforcement agencies screw up on these major historical events. That's the major source of fuel for the conspiracy fires-the cops are always giving people good reason to be suspicious."

Much of the assassination research has made it into NOTHING SO STRANGE in slightly altered form. For example, the character of Julia Serrano is based on a real-life woman named Sandra Serrano, who in 1968 claimed she heard people running away from the scene of the Robert Kennedy assassination saying, "We shot him." Just as they do to the fictional Julia in NOTHING SO STRANGE, the LAPD coerced a change in her statement out of Sandra Serrano, because her claim did not fit the Sirhan-acted-alone official scenario. "We got a copy of the tape of that 1968 interrogation from the California State Archives," says Flemming. "It's so abusive that I had to pull back from it for our interrogation scene. If I had staged what the LAPD actually did, nobody would have bought it."

(Many character names in NOTHING SO STRANGE are taken from figures in historical events. For example, alleged Gates assassin "Alek Hidell" is an alias used by Lee Harvey Oswald. The young police officer "Jacob Powell"-who kills Hidell-is a combination of Oswald-assassin Jack Ruby's real first name and the last name of Lawrence Powell, the rookie LAPD officer who struck the most vicious blows on Rodney King.)

Flemming and James also drew on experience with activist groups in Los Angeles to help guide the cast toward realism in scenes with Citizens for Truth, the activist group around which NOTHING SO STRANGE centers. "In real life, some people show up to meetings just to hear themselves talk, and there are also some genuinely insane people who latch onto groups such as these," James says. "But what can you do? Many activist groups feel obligated to welcome all comers."

THE FILMING

Over the course of two years, director/cinematographer Brian Flemming shot over 70 hours of DV footage to create the 80-minute film. The high shooting ratio was due to the style of shooting, which was as close as Flemming and the cast could get to a real documentary style.

"As much as possible, I tried to simply set up a situation and let it play out," says Flemming. "Our goal, which we reminded ourselves of often, was '100% veracity.' We would shoot a three-hour Citizens for Truth meeting even if I only needed a one-minute scene for the film. I found that the actors worked best when they could forget about what they were trying to do for the film and simply let themselves get drawn into the action of the scene. Fortunately, I quickly discovered that I didn't need to contrive any conflict at all to get the action the movie needed-if you put twelve people in a room and tell them to reach a common goal, they will find all sorts of ways to naturally disagree with each other. The shooting worked best when I simply shut up and let human nature do what it does."

THE CAST

For the cast, the shooting method was unusual. There was no script, and input from the director usually amounted to no more than an e-mail the morning of shooting telling them what they were to try to do in that day's scene. Often they would show up at the location and the camera would already be rolling. They would participate in the scene, then go back home, all without ever hearing "action" or "cut" or having a conversation with anybody outside the world of the film.

The cast is a mix of trained actors and non-actors. "I'd like to think that you can't tell who is who," says Flemming. "The group's lawyer is a real lawyer [Michael Malak, playing "Patrick Flaherty"]. But the guy who plays Mark Andersen [Mark Daniel Cade] is a veteran actor who you can see in Sprite commercials. And a lot of the other performers were actually cast out of an extras agency and did not have acting aspirations at all."

Flemming and co-producer James chose some of the cast by throwing a party and inviting everyone they knew who might be right for the project. With Flemming filming, they went around to each person and engaged them in conversations on political topics. Later, they watched the tape, and, James says, "whoever didn't look like they were acting got cast."

But casting the role of group co-leader Debra Meagher was more difficult. Nobody quite had the qualities Flemming and James were looking for until they tried out a journalist named Laurie Pike. (Flemming and Pike met in 1997 when Pike, then a host for Sundance Channel, did a segment on Flemming's alternative festival, Slumdance.) "The extent of my acting experience was working as a TV reporter and pretending I cared about some of the stories I was assigned," says Pike, who worked for a year as an on-air reporter for KTTV (Fox 11 News) in Los Angeles. "But this was different than acting, because I was given a job to do in each scene, and while I was doing it, it was real to me."

"REALITY HACKING"

"Some people in the media are calling it 'reality hacking,'" says Flemming, "but for me it was just a way to get some great production value on a very low budget."

What Flemming is referring to here is the production's habit of going to real events in Los Angeles and staging their scenes there-without anyone else present knowing that's what they were doing. Flemming, posing as a TV cameraman ("I tried to act as arrogant as possible," he says), went to two Los Angeles Police Commission meetings and filmed David James stepping up to the public microphone and protesting the Commission's handling of the Bill Gates assassination. "Well, actually," says James, "for those meetings Brian wrote speeches for me that could be interpreted as being about the Gates assassination or about the Commission's lax handling of the LAPD Rampart scandal, which was unfolding at that time. The crowd really got into what I was saying. It felt pretty good to be able to voice my true feelings about Rampart while at the same time get a good scene for the film."

But the cast got more explicit when they took over the official protest stage at the 2000 Democratic National Convention (for which the group "Citizens for Truth" got a legit permit from the LAPD). Their amplified voices echoed throughout the area outside Staples Center as they protested Gil Garcetti's handling of the Bill Gates murder. After their protest, an L.A. Times reporter asked the cast what it was exactly that they were protesting. The cast offered firm "no comments," and the next day a small item appeared in the Times about a group of protesters displaying "broken spectacles" who were "apparently mad about something."

BEYOND THE FILM

Even before shooting began, Flemming, James and executive producer Brian Clark realized they were creating a world that could play out beyond the confines of a feature film. So GMD Studios, Clark's company, began creating a complex universe on the Web, which Clark details in his own notes to follow...