So on the festival front, I got a chance to see a unique and twisted little film called Be My Oswald (check it out at www.bemyoswald.com) and let me tell you, it’s a real head-trip. The film is about a militant vegetarian (played by Katha Cato) and her plan to assassinate Santa during the Thanksgiving Day Parade much to the surprise of her clueless socialite accomplice (played by Jeannie Noth) who finds she must stop the deranged woman at all costs. (Think Shallow Grave meets Reservoir Dogs with a hint of David Lynch – wow!) Don and Katha Cato are the husband and wife team behind the flick and they had some very interesting stories to tell. Not only have they been married for over twenty years, but their dedication to the film was almost as long – as in many years long. The film was made while they were both working full time jobs and putting two kids through college. (Forget an award, they two should be given a medal!) But with their new cinematic baby out and about, I sat down to talk with Producer/Director Don Cato and his wife Katha, who pulled double duty producing and acting, to discuss the origin of the film, their various money saving solutions and their advice to independent filmmakers.

(213): As a writer, where did this idea come from?

Don Cato: The original idea came from as the result of the two of us going to see a friend’s play and we thought you know what, let’s do something that someone else wrote. So this play was about a woman who wants to shoot the President of the United States; so we bought the play and the rights and we were gonna go write for it…

Katha Cato: …we were gonna film it as is…

DC: …and I went, you know, I can’t do it. I can’t do it; I don’t care about shooting the President. I mean the Day of the Jackal as far as an assassin film, they don’t get much better.

KC: We needed something that we thought would really sustain us.

DC: Literally, it’s one of those moments you just can’t explain, other then to say shit…Santa Claus! It was like it has to be something so big, so outrageous but at first you giggle – you giggle when you hear our slug line! (Slug line – Militant vegetarian conspires to assassinate Santa Claus)

(213): Having seen the film, I’m curious, what is Don’s personal opinion of Santa Claus?

DC: What’s very interesting; it’s a reoccurring theme in a number of art pieces I’ve done over the last thirty years. Obviously there’s something deep in the back of my mind that’s got something about Santa Claus!

(213): How did you obtain some of the locations on a low-budget scale?

DC: The very beginning, the first shot was a real money shot, which was in front of the Plaza hotel and we stole it, we plain flat out stole it! Now my DP was a former New York City Police Officer and we lashed the camera to the car and we crept by and kept circling and circling until we got it.

KC: It was quite early; it was like five-thirty in the morning, so there was very little traffic and very few people. But they did come out and kind of look at us and they finally went to Don and they asked him what he was doing and he said we were shooting a student film. And they looked at his (grey) hair and he said “Well, graduate program!”

(213): It looked like you shot in two different formats, what did you actually use?

DC: We got it in several formats. The beginning in 1998, we thought we could handle this whole thing in 16mm and then things changed; that becomes very expensive. Had we shot in 16mm that would have eaten up our money, we would have never finished. So I had to make an artistic decision – the beginning needs to be film. The background, while you’re in the room, becomes abstract and in the foreground the characters are very cleanly defined – that’s all been shot in PAL. And the reason we chose PAL was because HD was too expensive and too crisp. And PAL was somewhere in between and it gave us 16 x 9.

(213): How would you describe your directorial style?

DC: I never thought about other styles, I was just looking for how’s the most interesting way to capture this moment.

(213): You’re dialogue seemed at times very David Mamet-esk, was that in your mind when you wrote the film?

DC: No, but I like repetitions of those kinds. I feel that it’s part of their relationship and there is this rhythm thing going in with the two of them.

(213): Katha, I got a flash of Miranda Richardson from The Crying Game from your work, how did you find your character?

KC: She’s very complex and I found it very, very frustrating. She just has one objective – she’s got to shoot the guy and get to the window. And so it became simple in some ways that she’s so single-minded; I kept thinking that if he cut off this characters head and put it on the ground, she would be like with her jaw trying to east the carpet to get there.

(213): Having picked up a camera and made a movie, would you recommend in today’s day and age for other filmmakers to do the same?

KC: If you’re a storyteller, you have to tell stories.

DC: If you’re passionate, you gotta do it.

(213): Any other wild projects that you would love to do in the future?

DC: I have a few – one of them is called Kill Roy. It’s about a guardian angel, a driver, picks up a hitchhiker who is bent on suicide. It’s a wild ride!

(213): I don’t think originality will ever be a problem for you guys!

The hits just keep on coming! Next time hear about a live reading of one of the screenplays that I’m in competition with (hey, always size up the other guy!) and read about my knockin’ tour of Toronto with a couple of nice friends and one very ubercool Portuguese gal…

When Don Cato. M.L.A. ’76, and Katha Cato, M.F.A. ’84, first began showing their independently produced, award-winning film Be My Oswald in November, Katha would wince at one point in the movie each time she saw it. The two main characters, known only as “A” and “B,” step from the dark hallway of a decrepit commercial building in New York City and into a ramshackle room. To the casual observer, A’s appearance doesn’t change, but Katha couldn ‘t help but focus on the glaring discrepancy between the two scenes: in the hallway A’s stubby ponyt ail barely reaches her neck then, as the film cuts to an interior shot of the room, a lengthy ponytail touches the top of her shoulder blades. Ugh.

The problem was that the hallway sequence was filmed two-and-a-half years before the scenes in the room. That’s what happens when you selffinance a movie and make it over the course of nine years, shooting like crazy for as long as you can whenever enough money had been saved to film. Don, who wrote the script and coproduced Be My Oswald with Katha, directed it while Katha starred as B. All the while both worked fulltime day jobs- Don with a financial publishing company, Katha as a program director with a social service agency – and they put their two daughters through college. Making a movie from “paycheck to paycheck,” as Don describes it, is as unconventional as the movie itself.

The film begins when A, a disgruntled and naive socialite. answers B’s newspaper personal ad seeking a collaborator with whom to make a statement of some sort about the commercialized debauchery that Christmas has become. The socialite believes they are going to stage some sort of peaceful protest during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but B, whose militancy is nearly as staunch as her vegetarianism, has different plans – plans that involve a high-powered rifle, a national television audience, and Santa Claus, fat and jolly, waving from the throne atop his parade float.

When B’s plot becomes clear to A, she decides to stop it, and the two wage a battle of wills while their Thanksgiving Day brunch is being catered by a marijuana-puffing grandma. Unconventional, indeed.

Don and Katha owe much of their approach as filmmakers to their time at the UO. The M.L.A. after Don’s name stands for master of landscape architecture, a degree Don insists has been invaluable throughout his long career – more than thirty-five films – in cinema. He believes strongly in a film’s relationship to its setting. “When your story meshes with the environment. you’re closer to having something that works,” he says. Katha, who has put on acting workshops in New York, was earning her UO degree in theater arts when Don cast her in one of his early films.

After Be My Oswalds principal photography wrapped in 2002, the Gatos saved for a year to cover postproduction costs. which included subtle special effects (for example, parade balloons float by the room’s sixth floor window) and an original soundtrack. “We wanted to use a Queen song. but the band wanted $50,000 for North American rights alone!” Don says. All tallied, the film took nine years, more than seventy-five cast and crew members, a $250,000 self-financed budget. Then the Gatos faced the next step: selling the film.

They have run their movie through the film festival gauntlet, screening it in a number of venues in their home city of New York, as well as in Los Angeles and on the UO campus. Audience response has been overwhelmingly positive. “One or two people have passionately hated it, which I love,” Katha explains, “because they’re so, ‘You can’t take on Santa; you just can’t do it, That’s the point. We’re not anti-Christmas; the film isn’t against anything. It’s just a work of art that examines two characters’ positions, one of whom wants to know, ‘Is Santa what Christmas is really about?'”

At the fourth annual Queens International Film Festival, the judges responded in an appropriately unconventional manner by awarding the film, which Katha calls a dark comedy, the award for best drama.

“I was dumbstruck,” Don says. “I don’t even remember what I said when I got up to make my speech. We had no clue we were going to win because we didn’t even know we were going to be nominated.”

A few weeks later, the Gatos won the Founder’s Choice Award for best feature at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival.

The awards have been gratifying, Katha says, and they have allowed her to look past the film’s few short comings. “Because if the audience doesn’t buy in, you have bigger problems than your ponytail.”

-Matt Tiffany

By Matt Tiffany | Published November 2, 2006

In a few weeks, families will stuff their faces with turkey and mashed potatoes before settling down to a long winter’s tryptophan-induced nap, and Santa Claus will make his grand entrance during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. Wallets will open, Tickle Me Elmos will be snatched off store shelves in a riotous frenzy, and commercialism will roar its mighty, terrible roar. The Christmas season will begin.

Unless, that is, the events of “Be My Oswald,” an independent movie from University alumni Don and Katha Cato, come to fruition. Don, who has made more than 35 indie films, wrote, produced and directed “Oswald,” while Katha produced and stars as “B,” a militant vegetarian determined to assassinate Santa and save the world from the commercialized Christmas it has created. To do this, B recruits “A” (played by Jeannie Noth), a clueless socialite aclivist who wants to take a stand that defies her family status. As Santa’s grand entrance approaches, the stakes are raised, and A and B find themselves plitted against each other.

“It’s a very dark comedy,” Katha said. “It’s a story of what happens when you take on this myth, and what happens when two people come against each other and someone has to win and someone has to lose.”

It is fitting that the premise of the film – taking on an icon as big and Jolly as Kris Kringle – is sllghtly off-kilter because the movie’s production is anything but a bowl full of jelly. Where most independent movies are filmed in a number of weeks or even days, Katha said, “Be My Oswald” took nine years.

The Catos, who live in New York City, saw a play in the mid-90s that inspired them. Don, already an award-winning filmmaker, stripped the play down until it was bare: two women from different worlds first united in a common cause and then pitted against each other. From there; he rebuilt the story around the idea of taking on the most sacred of America’s corportie holidays, and, six months later, the script for the film was completed.

Santa: This dark comedy is no typical, cheery Christmas movie

Because the Catos did not have much backing from outside sources, they produced the movie “paycheck to paycheck.” Don works for Institutional Investor, a financial publishing company, and he teaches directing at the New York Digital Film Academy, while Katha is the 21st Century Community Learning Center program director for Henry Street Settlement, a social service organization in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

The couple would save their money, Katha said, and when they reached certain goals, “We would shoot like crazy for as long and as late as we could.” In addition to pulling together the almost $250,000 it cost them to make the movie, the Catos put two daughters, Victoria and Jessica, through college.

At times, the movie became a family affair. In one instance, the Catos didn’t have a permit to reserve a public phone on the street that they needed for a scene, so Jessica talked on it all day to save it for when it was needed.

Another time, one of Jessica’s friends asked her what she was doing later that day. “We’re going to shoot my mom,” she said. It was a pivotal day of filming, indeed.

Filming took about four years. Don said. “Anything that gets it made, is what’s typical of indie film production.”

Taking long breaks between shooting was difficult, Katha said , and the loyalty of the cast was atypical for a film. “Anytime we had to shoot,” Katha said, “A had to get her hair cut and dyed like she had it two years before when we’d last filmed.”

After principal photography ended in 2002, the Catos saved for a year to cover post-production costs, which included subtle special effects, quality sound work (which many films lack), and a paycheck to everyone involved.

“We own this film,” Katha said. “In many indie films, nobody is paid.”

Audience response from the various festivals the Catos have screened “Be My Oswald” has been overwhelmingly positive. “Ninety seven percent of people would recommend it to their friends,” Katha said. “One or two people have passionately hated it, which I love, because they’re so, ‘You can’t take on Santa; you just can’ t do it.’ … That’s the point,” Katha said.

And despite the somewhat unorthodox, drawn-out filmmaking process, the Catos produced a movie that “has all the attributes of a regular, actual motion picture, except it’s modest,” Don said. “As a filmmaker, as a director, I say, ‘ It works.’ The rest of it is left up to the judgment of the audience.”

“If you’re an artist, you should be an artist. You can do it and pay your bills, and write your thank-you notes and work on your garden and your laundry. It doesn’t matter if anyone ever sees it, you have to do it,” Katha said. “If you start with a compelling idea. then that’s all you need.”

The University played no small part in the Cato’s development as filmmakers. Don obtained his master’s in landscape architecture here, while Katha got her MFA in theater arts. While the smooth transition from landscape architect to filmmaker may seem odd, Don insists it’s not. A large portion of his filmmaking belief is the film’s relationship to its setting. “When your story meshes with the environment, you’re closer to having something that works,” he said.

Visiting artists, filmmakers and directors are a regular part of the University’s effort to bring professionals to campus to share their experiences and lessons, said Ken O’Connell, a professor emeritus in the Department of Art, in an e-mail interview.

“We are excited not only because (Don and Katha Cato) are successful and interesting people, but, because they are alumni, we celebrate their connection to the UO as part of their development process,” O’Connell said.

“Students benefit greatly when a person who was once a student like them ventured off into the complex and very difficult world of movies and film and found a path that worked for them ,” O’Connell said. The students learn that they too can have ideas and, with determination, explore them and carry them through into finished work, he said.

The Catos will screen their film Friday at 8 p.m. in 110 Willamette Hall. Additionally, the departments of art, landscape architecture and theatre arts will co-sponsor a lecture in 100 Willamette Hall tonight. Don and Katha will discuss “Independent Film Directing,” show excerpts from their films, and share their experiences in creating, acting, producing and distributing films, according to a news release. A Q&A session will follow Friday’s screening.