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JULY 19, 2007 Artspace, July 20-Sept. 15 Melissa Friedling McCabe “All of my films have references to other films in them," says Melissa Friedling, whose contribution to “50,000 Beds" is an homage to Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller that will be presented at New Haven's Artspace. Friedling is a specialist in avant-garde and experimental film. In addition to being a filmmaker, she teaches production, film history and criticism at the New School University in Manhattan and, starting this fall, at Pratt. Her own work is marvelously quirky, as evidenced by the 14 clips she has archived on her website, slouchproductions.net, which is soon to include McCabe, the film commissioned by Chris Doyle's project. In 2000, she was a Fulbright Scholar teaching a course on adaptation at a Catholic University in Portugal when she first saw Altman's Western classic and became intrigued with the opening scene, when Warren Beatty, a stranger to the Pacific Northwest mining town, enters the saloon and engages the local prospectors in a high-stakes poker game. It was Altman's nuances-the muddled dialogue, the weirdness of the all-male milieu-that stayed with her, and that she endeavors to emulate in what she calls her "Altman supplement." Friedling reproduces that first scene shot for shot, but instead of prospectors, the manly space she creates is a hotel business suite populated with Greenwich hedgefund managers. It's a provocative substitution. "They're mysterious characters who earn billions of dollars. Like the prospectors in Altman's movie, they've built this town of Greenwich into something it wasn't before," she explains. Not to mention, "they're affecting the art market in a profound way," she adds. Friedling credits the 12 actors she hired, along with a crew of about a half-dozen colleagues and former students, with being able to pull off a complicated task in a short time period under circumstances that were less than ideal. There was no time to rehearse, Friedling says, but she asked her actors to watch the original film and to do some reading about hedge-funders like Daniel Seth Loeb. "The actors got it," she says. "They gave these wonderfully interesting performances." Because they remained faithful to the script, Friedling was able to dub in snatches of dialogue from the original film, and mix those sounds with production sounds from her shoot. She also incorporates strands of Leonard Cohen's "The Stranger," part of the original soundtrack to the movie. The sound montage she achieves helps convey the sense that something's not quite right about what's taking place in this hotel room. Cramming that many people and that much film equipment into a hotel suite was a feat in itself. That and the almost-all-male entourage contributed to the weirdness of the shoot. "I always had this feeling like we were doing something wrong," Friedling laughs. "I told them, 'Don't ask for me at the front desk.' But of course they all did." Given the limitations of the assignment, McCabe is a very polished and compelling five and a half minutes of cinema.