Gor Kirakosian: Big Story in a Small City
by Paul Chaderjian
GLENDALE, Calif. – Like all filmmakers, Gor Kirakosian has to control the choreography inside each frame. At 30 frames per second, the discipline of controlling every detail captured with the lens of a high-definition camera sometimes spills out of the frame and into real life.
At one of Glendale’s most popular Armenian hangouts, the all-American Conrad’s diner where we meet for our second interview, Kirakosian tells the aging Vietnamese waitress that he wants a green salad, finely chopped and evenly tossed with ranch dressing. “You really know what you want,” she says, and she’s right; Kirakosian wants to make people laugh.
How a salad is tossed to please the palate of a comedy filmmaker may seem like a trivial detail to ponder, but making his first feature, Big Story in a Small City, Kirakosian has had to think about the most hard-to-please audiences by being precise about everything, including directing the waitress during an interview to publicize the movie.
"Big Story in a Small City is about our city, the city of Yerevan,” say the 25-year-old director. “It’s about the people who live in the city and how do they relate to each other. But there is a tragic storyline in the movie about a funeral, and how people come together and try to solve an unexpected problem.”
Kirakosian’s Armenian-language movie, which will be screened at the Glendale Public Library’s Central Branch Auditorium this month, is based on a true story. Call it a comedy of errors, a Harold and Maude moment of musical coffins, but the story made such impression on the young Kirakosian, that he and his father sat down to write a script about it. “This family’s uncle died in real life,” he says, “and when they brought the body home for a viewing, they found out that they brought the wrong corpse.”
Casting a corpse can be a problem, and lying down for the job in the most professional horizontal and sometimes vertical positions inside a coffin, is the comedic genius, actor, entertainment and Armenia Fund Telethon host Hrant Tokhatyan. The award-winning actor has been a staple of mainstream Armenian and diasporan stage, television and movies, and he outdoes himself playing a dead guy. His role as Grigor, the talkative neighbor who is crushed to death by a falling piano, takes on a life of its own after ivory and strings do him in.
In two different caskets - one expensive and one average, in two different suits - one European chic, the other most likely mass produced in Turkey or Thailand, the corpses belong to two very different families. The only tell-tale signs of the mistake is that one corpse is tattooed and scarred and the second one has neither. How to tear away the open caskets from the living rooms of the respective families in mourning long enough for a body switch is the punch line of this black comedy.
“We shot the whole film in 28 days in Yerevan,” says Kirakosian, “but the whole process of the film took three years. When we finished the script, worked hard to make sure we had a polished script, then we did six months of pre-production before we shot the film. Me and my art director, we had this big book with the whole storyboard [a sequential drawing of each shot in the movie].”
Kirakosian finished editing the film last summer and held its premier on June 8th at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. The film the opened for public viewing on September 15 at the Cinema Moscow in Yerevan, where it was expected to play for a maximum of two weeks. The two weeks turned into 35 continues days of three daily screenings. More than 20 thousand film fans saw the film, breaking records at the Cinema Moscow for being the longest running Armenian film.
To make the movie a popular draw, Executive Producer Vic Grigorian relied on Kirakosian’s polished script, word-of-mouth publicity and star power. Headlining the movie are a who’s who of Armenia’s popular actors. Vahagn Simonyan, better known as Poncho, landed the role of the aspiring Shakespearian thespian, Uncle Hamlet, who asks “to be or not to be, is that a question?” Other players include Khoren Levonian, the grandson of actor Khoren Abrahamian, honored as USSR’s People’s Artist, and even Armenia TV’s children’s Yo Yo Show host and star Levon Harutyunyan is in the film playing a clumsy and goofy police officer named Saroyan.
Nune, Madonna’s Reaction and the Festival Circuit
Kirakosian made a name of himself a few years ago when singer Nune gave him a shot at making a few of her music videos from her “International Album.” His father Garo, a choreographer and dance instructor, had helped produce Nune’s concert at the Kodak in 2002. The relationship and trust between Nune and Kirakosian’s father gave him a shot at making videos for the singer’s Russian, French and Persian songs. He also directed Sara Babayan's “Adana” music video and his young brother Mihran's "Just Like That" debut rap video.
“My dad was the creator of the Arayee Dance Show,” says Gor during our first interview on the set of Hotline, a show broadcast on Dish Network channel 905 on the Armenian Reporter’s affiliate television station Armenia TV. “My dad worked in the Armenian Dramatic Theatre as a movement director. In 1992, we decided to move to the US. After that he had a dance group called the Garo Dance Show. When we grew up and started doing stuff, he stopped doing choreography and dancing and started working with us, and we started doing the Demq television show and my brother started doing his stuff.”
Empowered by their father’s talent, passion for the arts and years of experience, 25-year-old Gor and his 21-year-old brother have done more to date than most artists can dream of doing in their entire careers. Mihran’s agility, talent to move, uncanny ability to learn and create choreography, handsome features and magnetic charisma have put him on the biggest stages in the world. As a teenager, he danced with Nune in 2002 and has spent the past three years touring the world with Madonna. Mihran is also a regular presence in the Queen of Pop’s music videos, and has danced with the biggest acts in the world including Brittany Spears, Kyle Manogue and Ricky Martin.
On live television, I ask him if his brother’s relationship with the Material Girl will mean that Madonna would make an appearance in his future projects. “One day maybe,” he says. “But first I have to prove myself. I have to prove to them that I can do something great when they give me a chance. My brother is friends with them and works with them, but he does not have that kind of power.”
Mihran’s influence with Madonna was able to get the royal Madge (Madonna’s British nickname) and her filmmaker husband Guy Ritchie to watch Big Story in a Small City. What did she think, I ask. She said it was very funny, he says. “Me and Guy Ritchie talked about the film. The most interesting thing that he said was he said, ‘I really liked it, and there was a lot of things that I would like to steal from it.’ I said, you should, because all the things that you see, I stole it from you. He said, ‘everything you stole from me, I probably stole it from somebody else.’”
Who else do you dream of working with one day, I ask. He says he dreams of working with Angelina Jolie. “One of my dreams is to make a film and then go to a theater in a city I’ve never been and watch that movie. That shot may come in the months ahead, since Kirakosian has submitted his film, now with English subtitles, to forty different film festivals in cities like Nashville, Miami and Phoenix.
“I got into the Nazareth International Film Festival in Israel a few months ago,” says Kirakosian. “We got into that, didn't win anything but participated.” The biggest coup would be being accepted to Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. “When a film wins awards at festivals,” says Kirakosian, “the price of the film becomes higher. Now, I believe the film will command the lowest price possible, so the goal is trying to find a distributor and find that door to put an Armenian film into the foreign section of Blockbuster.”
First Takes and Family Support
“I hear stories about filmmakers saying they were eight and their father gave them an 8mm camera,” says Kirakosian, but that is now how he got started. “I was like 16 in high school, and there was a telecommunications class that I took accidentally. We were shooting 15 minute campus news. By doing that I learned editing, camera and telling stories.”
Kirakosian says he found news production tedious and not creative enough. While still in high school, he signed up for film production classes at Los Angeles City College. When he graduated high school, he finished the film program at LACC and transferred to the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he finished his undergraduate program last May. Big Story in a Small City was his senior project.
“When I was 18-years-old,” says Kirakosian, “me and my friends decided to do a TV show. We got a chance to use cameras and editing equipment, so we decided to do a comedy show.” The show called Tu Demq Ess (translated loosely to ‘you’re really somethin’’) premiered on New Year’s Day, 2001. After a few shows, the name of the program changed to the Demq Show. Made up of comedic sketches and stand-up comedy, the cast parodied Armenian life and was awarded “Best Entertainment Show” at the annual Armenian Music Awards. “After that,” says Kirakosian, “we decided to make the TV show into a stage shows. We sold out the Alex Theatre in Glendale for seven nights.”
The first Demq stage show was called the Armenian Demq Awards, and it was a parody of Armenian music awards. There were no sacred cows, no holds barred and no punches held back, and the audience loved it. “The second show was called Demq TV,” says Kirakosian, and this production parodied the inexhaustible cache, the smelly cesspool of Armenian shows filling airtime on several cable channels in Glendale.
Coming Attractions & Gratitude
And the laughs will continue when Kirakosian and his team take on Armenian telethons. “We are doing another show in April or May called the Demq Telethon, where we do a parody of the Armenian Telethon. There will be kids coming in to present their checks, singers lip-synching, old people talking endlessly. We’ll do a show. When we are sold out, we'll do another show.”
Kirakosian attributes his success to his family and close friends, who support him and work with him at any cost. “I'm very thankful that I have a family that's next to me all the time,” he says, “like my father, who pushes me to do big things, great things. You have to have somebody like that. One of the most important things is to have a team behind you, to help you, to believe in you. It's like my dad, my art director, my composer, co-writer. When they hear I am trying to do something, everybody gets together and helps me to do it without thinking about money or getting paid.”
Film projects take several years to complete and having a tribe of people behind him who understand the importance of the work is key to the filmmaker. “It's very hard to work on one project for a long time,” says Kirakosian. “You have to push yourself and understand what you're making is something important. When you finish it, you understand that it's something that came out of you. Like for me, when they say is your movie good, I cannot say if my movie is good or bad. For me it's good, because it's like my child. Your child cannot be bad. That's the whole idea.”
Kirakosian’s next two children will be bilingual films, half-Armenian and half-English. He plans to shoot the films in Armenia again, because he says it’s twenty times cheaper to shoot there than in the US. “The first story is about an American teenager, who accidentally finds himself in one of villages in Armenia, and the villagers think he's a Turkish spy.” Kirakosian calls this new project a comedy and a love story, because the American teen falls in love with an Armenian villager.
Kirakosian second project in development is scheduled to shoot in early 2008. “It’s about three characters who work in a circus. They decide to rob a casino in Armenia to get the money they need to keep the circus from closing down.” Sounds like a lot of fun, a lot to control and films that will surely make audiences and the Madge herself laugh out loud.
(The End... roll credits)
