THE MAKING OF DUAL MANIA

Strickland, with Patterson and Ellington, collects the script and behind-the-scenes materials from his independent film in this companion work.

Independent filmmaking takes a ton of determination, but the author had no idea how hard it would be when he set out to produce his first feature, Dual Mania. Strickland wrote the movie in 1992 and started shooting it in 1996, only for the film to become literally lost during the conforming process. It wasn’t until 17 years later that he finally recovered his movie, which was officially released in 2021—over two decades after it was made. This text includes the entire Dual Mania screenplay, storyboards, documents and photographs related to the production of the movie, recollections of the casting director (and Strickland’s wife), Cat Ellington, and Strickland’s “Director’s Film Journal,” written primarily over the course of 1997, when the filmmaker was battling budget problems and crew defections while struggling to complete what he colorfully describes as “a straight up cold, chiller-thriller, brutal, sensuous, in-your-face, raw, monster-fest that is gonna shake up the neurotic, college-tinted reality of a lot of the film buyers and festival-goers.” The director’s profanity-laden journal entries make for a fun read; his personality leaps off the page as he laments Hollywood’s limiting expectations when it comes to Black films, outlines plans to stretch his resources as far as possible, and grapples with the difficulties of making an independent movie in Chicago. Entertaining as they are, the entries fill only about 25 pages, and they do not cover the most interesting part of the story: the loss of the film and its miraculous recovery and eventual release. This book will really only be of interest to those who have seen the movie (which, if the script is any indication, bears checking out, particularly for fans of 1990s independent cinema). While an intriguing document, this work can only really be regarded as supplemental to the film itself.

An intriguing if narrowly focused look into the indie filmmaking process.