Mark Tomov’s world is different from yours, but you can find it easily enough. It’s right there next to David Lynch’s, oozing a bright 1950s cool that turns down hallways and into dark corners.
This Missoula-based filmmaker has, for decades, toiled away in the film industry, quietly making and planning pulpy, interesting films you really should see.
Tomov’s latest is Double Nickel, a 16-minute meal at the fictional Hideaway Cafe, where we meet hip cats, bad guys, a mysterious waitress, and something probably not human stashed in the back. The setting looks a lot like a certain closed Chinese restaurant in Missoula, where it was shot last summer with some heavy hitters.
See it at the Montana Film Festival as part of Shorts Block I Oct. 12, 5:30 p.m., and as the companion to Blood for Dust on Oct. 13, 8:15 p.m. Both showings will conclude with a Q&A with producer and editor Alexander Kouroupos and director of photography John Nilles.
For this film, Tomov, who grew up in California and has been in Missoula seven years, snagged Gillian Todd, New Yorker by way of Missoula, to play waitress Loretta. She delivers as the lead while wearing a uniform nod to the Double R, except Loretta’s also wearing fishnets, tattoos and a lot more badassery than most of those ladies pouring coffee in Twin Peaks. When tough guys Jeff Medley and Michael Spears show up–we learn in the credits they’re “Minko” and “Fante”—to have a chat with Gillian/Loretta, it’s on.
Tomov’s direction is all camera sweeps, honky-tonk, and scene-setting until this pivotal diner-booth convo, where it stops to linger on the talents of the three principals: Todd delivers a slow and intentional script across from Missoula’s favorite character actor (Medley, who’s great in this), and Spears, who got his start in 1990 as a kid in Dances With Wolves and more recently showed up in the second season of Reservation Dogs (he’s Daniel’s dad, Danny, talking to Bear on the roof). In Double Nickel, Spears’ bolo-tied hombre is the bad-cop criminal to Medley’s good one. It’s a fun dynamic playing out when Medley’s character orders an ornery Spears a lemonade (‘’No ice”) after finding out that, like a lot of places in Montana, “we don’t serve hard liquor.” The audience figures out quickly enough that drinks aren’t the point. They’re here to negotiate a deal gone wrong: Loretta set them up and now she’ll have to deal with whatever’s lurking in that back room.
As the three make their way into semi-darkness, we get Lynchian clues—buzzy electric pulses, a fabulous soundtrack from music director John Wicks (also now a Missoula guy and the former drummer for Fitz and the Tantrums), and a dim light source traced to a retro TV. Things in that room are not right. As the camera pans, keep your eye out for who’s in an office chair in front of the static-filled TV—that’ll be key to you working out the twist at the end.
The Pulp reached out to Tomov to tell us more.
I have given it a go for this piece, but how would you describe this film? I honestly can’t wait for your answer!
I’ve been selling Double Nickel as a mix-and-shake of rockabilly noir and horror films from the 1970s. Sub-genres are my kind of flavor: films that fit into multiple pockets, but somehow taste good when mixed together. Crime, horror and westerns being my personal favorites. I tried to slide them all into Double Nickel, with the hope of cooking up something that I would want to see as a viewer. It might sound like a weird mix tape, but the influences I had for this film were P.T. Anderson’s Hard Eight, Fallen Angel (from 1945), The Killers (from 1946), The Exorcist, Twin Peaks, Donnie Darko…and of course, Pulp Fiction.
Your films have a look and a vibe. It’s more than just retro and pulp, right? What else should people see of yours?
I think style is made up of a few ingredients. Experience, influence, and imagination. You roll those three into the fold and you have yourself your own personal Frankenstein. Since I was young, I’ve watched more films than you can imagine. I dived deep into world cinema when I was in high school. I started to watch films that an average kid my age would lose their patience with. I idolized Claude Chabrol and Samuel Fuller, Jacques Tourneur and Seijun Suzuki. All those years of collecting art from storytellers around the globe has shaped the style of films I wish to make. I love long takes. I LOVE the dolly. And I love cinematic choreography. When the characters and the camera are dancing around the set together, the technique is better than any CGI effect I’ve ever seen. Robert Altman taught me that. Always move the camera and cut as little as possible. Cinematic language is so important to subtext. In Double Nickel, every camera move, every lens choice, is motivated by subtext. There’s a reason Gillian’s character is introduced with a 35mm lens as opposed to a 58mm. We kept her at a distance until her single close-up at the table—all motivated by subtext. I’m an analog boy living in a digital world. I love handwriting my ideas as opposed to typing on a word processor. I love putting on a record as opposed to downloading the track digitally. A filmmaker friend once said to me, “I think you’re making movies for a different era.” My earlier work doesn’t really reflect the storyteller I am now. I was style over substance when I was young. The look of the project was more important to me than the actors I cast. I think Double Nickel is the rebirth of me as a storyteller searching for deeper metaphors than I had in the past. I think the best reflection of the current of my thoughts would be a book I wrote a couple years ago, Lost Ambition is a Crime. They sell it at Fact and Fiction and Shakespeare and Co. here in town … and also on Amazon.
Are you complimented or offended by comparisons to David Lynch? I feel like you two have the same mom.
I would be so lucky to even be mentioned in the same sentence as David Lynch. I’ve worshiped that man since I saw Blue Velvet back in high school too many years ago. The poster for that film is hanging in my office now. I can honestly say Lynch’s films have changed the way I approach telling a story. His films take place at anywhere, and in no time. There’re props on characters’ desks that are from the 1950s, but there’s a cell phone in someone’s hands in the next frame. You’re disoriented by where you are in the timeline of what is presented to you, by the way of strange characters, props, and set design. Lynch loves a strange world, and I definitely do, too. He has such artistic integrity, he’s in a genre all to his own. I should go to jail for how much I’ve stolen from him over the years. I hope to one day live up to the dreams, and the nightmares, Lynch painted on film someday. Fingers crossed. 😉 Side note: Gillian’s outfit is directly stolen from the waitresses’ wardrobe from the Double R diner in Twin Peaks (side note from The Pulp: Knew it!).
What’s your Missoula story? And how is it to be here as a filmmaker who’s been at this … 20 years or so? Is that right?
I’ve been obsessed with film as long as I can remember. I’ll always cite watching the making of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” on VHS at 8 years old. After the music video ended, there was a 45-minute making-of featurette. Watching John Landis gliding around on a crane with a camera hit me like a harpoon. I probably watched the making of that music video more than 100 times. I was obsessed with what they were creating. And like so many kids who discovered film as their passion, I found my father’s VHS camera at 10 years old, and my friends and I recreated all of our favorite movies in my parents’ backyard. I moved to Missoula in 2017 with my wife, Lara Tomov, who’s also a filmmaker. She was raised in Stevensville. When it came down to having a baby, Los Angeles didn’t seem like a good fit for the mini-human we wished to raise. So after multiple trips to Montana, through all the seasons, we made the call and bought a house in Missoula, kind of on impulse. Back in Los Angeles, I had become a huge sellout to the industry, working on reality TV shows to pay off a film I made called, The Midnight Eye, in my mid-20s. The film was way too ambitious. It was a supernatural crime noir that I didn’t have the budget to pull off. I tried to mix Goodfellas and Close Encounters… and it worked. I swear, it did. But the post effects were monumental. I pumped way too much of my own money into it, only to leave it unfinished while I chased the money to pay it off on other people’s sets. To be honest, I swore I would never make another short film again. Mostly due to the fact that they offer no return on investment, and everyone just asks you the same damn question: “Why didn’t you just make a feature for that money?” My answer is simple. I don’t want to make “walk-and-talk”’” movies. Mumblecore stuff is not my style. I wouldn’t know how to tone it down. I’m into action and empathy, violence and sex—all the things that make a film, and life for that matter, entertaining. Unfortunately, all those ingredients cost more money than my pockets can hold. I’ve been trying to get funding together for more than a few feature films I wrote over the last seven years. After a deal went south recently, I decided to break my promise and make another short film … but with a more calculated approach than I had done in the past. I hope Double Nickel leads to the funding for a feature film next year. That’s the ultimate goal here, to make a bigger film.
Why do people need to get tickets and get involved with the Montana Film Festival? How is it different from other fests?
Supporting the Montana Film Festival goes hand in hand with supporting the film industry in Montana. If you’re available October 12th to15th, you should dance your way into the doorway of the Roxy for a screening or two, or as many as you can swing. There’s so much homegrown talent here in Montana, as well as so many creative artists waiting to connect. It would be a crime to miss out on it. A short film block is much like a curated mixtape, in that you sample so many windows of perspective you would otherwise miss out on. It’s very humbling to go into something blind and discover how someone else sees the world. The Montana Film Festival always felt like a family affair, ever since my first time attending in 2017. I remember after the screening of The Ballad of Lefty Brown, I was invited to their after party. I didn’t know anyone there, but they treated me like I worked on their film. It was wild. I never had such an inviting experience walking in as a total outsider. They slid me into the fold like I belonged the whole time. You won’t find that shit at Sundance.
This film has a great setting. I feel like the Hideaway Cafe is both real (and maybe somewhere we have been in Missoula?) and in your imagination.
The idea for the Hideaway came from a Johnny Burnette song we didn’t use for the opening of the film. Burnette mentions this little place called the Hideaway cafe, and it always stood out to me in my head. It sounded like a place where some gangsters would go to talk some gangster shit, to steal a line from Tarantino. We shot the film at the Triple Dragon on Broadway, which is that closed down Chinese restaurant attached to the Red Lion. We lucked out big time with that set. The owner really let us do our thing in there. It was awesome.
Who’s the old guy who loses his beer to Michael Spears?
That man’s name is James P. Harte. I was looking to do that cliched western entrance where the killers come in and disturb the peace. I had an image of Ernest Hemingway writing drunk at a table on an old typewriter. James was our key set PA, and just so happened to look exactly like Ernest Hemingway. You couldn’t ask for a happier accident! Plus, James is a film noir nut like me, so it was awesome to go back and forth in between takes with a person who went deep into the obscure, like I did. I remember laughing our asses off when James ran away from his table after Michael’s encounter.
Also, what was it like to work with Spears, Jeff Medley, Gillian Todd, John Wicks? Dish!
I got lucky in so many ways with the cast and crew. I feel like we assembled a team of all-stars, and everyone was into the vibe we were rolling with. I saw Gillian in a short film earlier this year and was blown away. She was so alluring in that film, that she kind of became Loretta in my head. She grew up here in Missoula, but currently lives in New York. Jeff Medley is a local legend. I’ve seen him in so many projects over the years here in town. He’s always captivating to watch on screen. And in person, he’s a huge teddy bear, just a sweetheart of a human being. And the same goes for Michael Spears. That man looks intimidating in person, but goddamn what a kind-hearted soul. We got really lucky with casting him, and it all kind of fell into place a week before we shot. I owe it to Jeri Rafter for that casting connection. I met John Wicks at Freestone Climbing gym back in the winter. We were both wearing the same Clash shirt. When we shook hands after the coincidence, we started talking and starting jiving. I told him I have a movie I’m writing and it would be cool if he did the score. He was so chill about it, I can’t believe it actually happened. I owe a big deal to this project getting off the ground to John Nilles, who wrote and directed Saving for the Day, and was also our DP [director of photography] and producer. Nilles was the filmmaker I met when I first moved to town in 2017. We talked about doing something together for a while. In March, I called him about a short I had, and it rolled out pretty fast from there. I will say, the crew we assembled here in town was so professional and creative. Double Nickel was my favorite set experience … and I’ve been working freelance in the film industry since 2005. That says a lot.
What’s next for you?
I’m trying to get funding together for a feature film I wrote called The Fortune Teller, which we hope to shoot in the summer of 2024. Like Double Nickel, it will fall into a similar genre blender, with the same stylistic approach. I love crime and the supernatural. I think they taste great together. Nilles and I want to blast two features a year here in town, starting next year. The ideas are pulpy and entertaining, and fairly cheap to produce. We’re not trying to make Avatar, but little $250-$350K features that we could sell to foreign and domestic markets, and streaming platforms. I have eight screenplays in my drawer that need to see daylight soon. Hopefully, Double Nickel will roll those dice to the hard eight, and we’ll get to dream up another nightmare to share with you all next year. Fingers crossed, baby!
