Pondering the Multitudinous Laundromat with The Bleacher directors Nicole Daddona and Adam Wilder

A laundromat is one of those beautiful urban spaces that serves as a true window into humanity. The only uniting factor for those inside is utility: like the subway, it provides a service outside of demographic distinctions, even socioeconomic ones. You can be paying exorbitant rent in places like New York and LA, and still not have laundry access in your building. The laundromat provides a cross-section of a neighborhood.

One of the beautiful things about living in a dense city is being thrust up against all the strange characters who constitute it. To have to smell their armpits, literally and figuratively. To stand back and observe, like an anthropologist, the ways in which people interact or go about a solitary existence in public. It leads one to fantasize and to wonder about the personalities of these people outside of this perfunctory space, their hobbies, their relationships. It’s possible in a large city to for years do your laundry next to a famous opera singer, a particle physicist, or a murderer, and never know.  

Filmmakers Nicole Daddano and Adam Wilder brought these ponderings to life in their animated short film The Bleacher, which had its premiere at Sundance this year and played in the Midnight Shorts program at SXSW. The Bleacher plops the viewer as a voyeur in a dark and gritty world, centered around a laundromat where one of the regulars has some very dirty laundry to do indeed. It stars Kate Miucci, delivering a glorious and unrecognizable rasp, and has the feel of early 90s music videos MTV might play in the wee hours. I sat down with Nicole and Adam to discuss all the strange turns the film takes and shifting from live action to animation.

Hyperreal Film Club (HFC): The idea behind your film seems, at first glance, very clear and simple: where do our missing socks go? But I'm very interested in the path that people's ideas take as they kind of ratchet up the insanity. I'd love to know what the process was in starting with that simple idea and ending up with the film we have.

Nicole: We live in Los Angeles, and we would go to this local laundromat a lot. And there was a woman who would always come into the laundromat, and she wore head to toe black leather and had bright red hair and carried a black umbrella. And we were just fascinated by her and we wanted to know her story. And so we started actually recording little snippets of audio at the laundromat. Especially her because she was so interesting. And so a lot of the dialogue in the film comes from things she actually said. We changed her voice and, you know, changed her. We don't know her real name. 

HFC: Where did the dolphin come from? Or is it a dolphin? It’s a dolphin-like creature.

Nicole: It’s like a dolphin-man. I don't really know what inspired the dolphin, exactly. 

Adam: I think maybe we heard some interviews at the time about Jennifer Coolidge and how she's obsessed with dolphins. And we found that to be fascinating, because we love Jennifer. I think dolphins were just a topic at that moment [when we wrote it]. There was that Reddit interview–

Nicole: Yeah, there was this guy who was having an affair with a dolphin. He worked in an aquarium. We were like, “This is the craziest story I've ever heard. We have to do something with this.”

HFC: The animation has an aesthetic that reminds me very much of early VR. There’s something very gritty and 90s MTV about it. Can you talk about the aesthetic choices you made for this because obviously, with animation, it's a completely blank slate; you can go in any direction. 

Nicole: Originally, we wanted to do this as stop motion, but the budget didn't allow for it. So we had to figure out how to do it in a way that had that essence but also would be in our budget. We found this wonderful animator Barney Abraham, on Instagram actually, and reached out to him and we developed the look together. We told him we wanted it to look like clay, and he even put little finger prints on the figures. If you see close up stills, you can see that. It's really cool. It's awesome. He did such a great job.

 HFC: In working with an animator, you’re translating your ideas and handing the reins, temporarily, to another artist. I want to know if there's anything that surprised you about what he did that brought something different to the project that you didn't expect.

Nicole: Well, it's interesting, because he's originally from England, and I guess laundromats are quite different in England than they are here. We were used to dumpy, run down LA laundromats, and we had to keep asking him, “Can you make it grosser?” He kept making it so nice, and we had to be like, “No, no, no, the machines are broken and there’s  graffiti, it’s not a pretty place.” And also the look of the dolphin man ended up different from what we’d envisioned. We originally wanted him to be inspired by a young John Travolta, with bright blue eyes. But it came out so scary. I’m scared of the dolphin. It works. It worked better than a handsome face would have. 

HFC: Kate Meucci plays the role of Rita the Bleacher. How did you work with her to create that character? I know you're working with real life inspiration, but what did you do together to take it from the real laundromat lady to Rita? Were there any choices that she made that took it in a different direction and surprised you?

Nicole: I think Kate was the best person to play that role. She nailed it. Immediately. She was so jacked to do it. And it's such a weird role. We kind of found the voice together with her.

Adam: We would do a voice and we would send it back to her. And she would tweak it and we went back and forth. At the time, she had a one year old, and you could hear the baby in the background in her studio while she’s doing this unhinged voice, and the song.

HFC: Because you're working with real life and observational dialogue with these people who populate the laundromat, even though you're in this bizarro world, these characters are immediately recognizable. I feel like I've known this woman, I've heard this woman's voice. I know who she is. I've seen her around. I feel like she’s a very New York character: these people who just talk and for whom everything is external. It’s very familiar and endearing.  What kind of feedback do you get on her and on these characters?

Nicole: I think she's definitely a New York transplant in LA, for sure. My whole family's from New Jersey, and so is Adam’s. We love those characters. That definitely came through with her. And people really are drawn to her and end up rooting for her.

Adam: They want to know what her life is like beyond bleach and laundry. What sort of relationships she has, how does she brush her hair in the morning? People keep asking these weird questions like, “How does she sleep? Does she sleep with her eyes open and just leave the glasses on?” And if we were to ever make a feature film with this, it would revolve around her relationship with the sun, and how that affects her psyche.

HFC: When you create any piece of art and put it out into the world, it's out there for people to ingest independent of you, and your ideas of what it’s about. Have you experienced interpretations that felt totally left field? 

Nicole: We’ve definitely had people come up with theories.

Adam: I mean, somebody came up to me and said, “Is this about your mother?” 

Nicole: Some people have asked if she is the dolphin. Is she? I don't know.. Usually, with our writing and our projects, we know all the layers, but this was very mysterious, even to us.

HFC: There is the obvious question of who is the dolphin to her? His function is clear, but who is he? What is he? Why? And there doesn't have to be an answer. Sometimes the art you make is a mystery to you. 

Nicole: Maybe at the end of the day, we’re all the dolphin [laughs]. We all have a little dolphin in us. It's kind of like chaos. We all can incite horrible things if we want to, or good things. So it's kind of like Bob from Twin Peaks. It's a little bit of that. 

HFC: And it is about female rage, too. And suppression that bubbles up into rage. And he's granting her permission to embrace the rage.

Nicole: He is definitely telling her to embrace the rage.

HFC: I think that draws you to root for her, because everyone's experienced that. And then we have the backstory of her domesticity.

Nicole: Yeah, that’s her breaking point. It's her villain origin story. I’m ready to make her a franchise.

Adam: I think we made this film at a time in our lives when we were a little delusional, but I think that's sometimes how you make the best art. Not overthinking things. Just kind of going with it. And I mean, to be delusional is to just be human.

Nicole: Everything's a delusion till it’s a reality. This place where we're sitting was once someone's delusion. 

Adam: But it's true. And there is no art without delusion, without becoming obsessed with the delusion.

HFC: What was new and specific to making The Bleacher that was different from your past work?

Nicole: I think the animated element was probably the most jarring thing. I've done GIF animation; we developed an animated series with Adult Swim. But to actually make a full animated project was very new to us. It was cool to depart from live action and tell a story through a different medium. It was really fun to just experiment with. 

Adam: It was different in the sense that we did not have to rely on help from a crew, per se. It was mostly the three of us: Barney, Nicole, and myself. We were kind of a one-man band unit for a while, then eventually we got help in post-production with sound design and refining the animation. We're also usually the producers of our own work, but this time we had our producer, Zeus. And Zeus really guided us to success. 

HFC:  I have a question about the editing process. With live action, there are multiple takes, and you have coverage of all the angles, and you have far more footage than you could ever use, and there’s also so much footage that it’s possible to cut several very different films out of it. But with animation, you're fabricating everything from scratch. Do you feel like that gives you more freedom or do you have to be much more meticulous?

Nicole: You have to be super meticulous with the storyboard and animatics ahead of time. You can't do a reshoot or anything. But there is some room in the edit. Adam looked at a lot of things and was like, “Let's cut this. We don't need that.” You know, we only need to see her swing the door open. It was originally going to be 12 minutes and we got it down to 8.

Adam: In live action, you can always add to the edit. With animation, you can only cut down. In the past, we could gather resources and go shoot an extra day to make it right or redo a scene. But with The Bleacher, it was like, that's it, we are locked into what we have. But that’s where the creative part of editing animation comes about. If we're locked to something, and we don't like it, how do we make that work? A lot of that came through sound design.

Nicole: Yeah, that was its own layer of editing. The sound really built out the world to be even bigger than it was visually. But also with the editing of animation, you can't just cut freely, you have to re-render the whole thing. It's very time consuming. It was such a great learning process. Working in animation was so cool.

Adam: Also very humbling. We were lucky because we didn’t have much of a budget, but we did have time. 

HFC: What was the process of getting the film funded?

Nicole: We were so fortunate to have our producer come on. We've self-funded everything up until this point, so to have that support was so, so special. We actually went to the Frontiers Cannes Film Market with a project and that's where we met Zeus. 

Adam: He really helped find us the funding to continue making this project. He believed in us. We had limited funds, but an endless imagination. Sometimes you get lucky, and you find the right producer. And other times you just keep going until you do find the right producer.  And he was able to guide us to the finish line and hold our hands when we thought, “No, we're not going to finish this, we have no money.” He was like, “Don't worry, I got you, I will find a way to get you the additional funding to complete your movie. But you have to love what you're making.” And a couple years later we’re [at Sundance and SXSW]. The path to that for The Bleacher was patience, hard work, and believing in ourselves on this one.

HFC: I think it can be hard to want to persist in filmmaking because it is such an uphill battle. And like you said you have to believe in your delusion, and that it's good. Because no matter how strange or not mainstream it is, there's somebody out there who loves your delusion. They're out there. 

Nicole: Yeah. And I feel like, at least for me,  when I lived in LA, it was a lot of comparing culture and a lot of, “Is what I'm doing gonna be popular?” But as soon as we started turning inwards, into what was authentic to us, that's when actual success started to happen. I think that's the biggest thing. Lean into whatever makes you excited. Lean into your weirdness. And just know that there's other people who will like that. 

HFC: What's next for you? 

Adam: We're working on a rock opera, which we'll be shooting next month. It will be the first installment of what could potentially be a feature. It’s genre, and it’s a lot of fun and Nicole is actually going to be starring in it.

Nicole: It will be a feature, this is the first part. 

Adam: We have other things in the works. And The Bleacher feature.

Nicole: We’re excited to go bigger.