Party USA is in some ways Jared Sprouse’s nightmare scenario.
The writer-director has plenty of experience in the service industry, and used his story of trouble at a patriotic party store to critique a heartless capitalism that creates a crabs-in-a-barrel dynamic between working people. The film follows Taylor (Law & Order: Organized Crime star Ainsley Seiger) as she tries to get time off to attend her father’s sudden funeral. A fight with her manager soon takes a terrible turn.
“I had to ask for a month off from work to shoot this film,” Sprouse notes, “which is ironic as it’s about a woman who’s trying to get her shift covered. Thankfully my boss is a little nicer than Taylor’s. But the film is essentially a nightmarish version of my own life.”
Shooting on a low budget to avoid waiting for any permission from big-pocketed studios, Sprouse relied on easily accessible locations. And came across a nice upside: “It is, of course, cheaper to film locations that characters who are poor spend time in.”
Ahead of the film’s screening at the El Paso Film Festival on Saturday, we asked Sprouse about keeping costs down, trying to re-align America’s divisions, and learning filmmaking techniques from YouTube.
Jared Sprouse on Party USA
MovieMaker: As you show this around the country, has anyone gotten worked up at the image of an American flag being used to sop up blood?
Jared Sprouse: It’s interesting, when I was shooting that scene I was sure that some people would be angry about it, but I’ve gotten so many laughs and guffaws when the flag is used to sop up blood. Except in France… they were a bit shocked.
A lot of people have enjoyed the contrast with the veterans’ funeral sequence right after as well. Which does highlight the way our country treats those at the lowest rungs of the totem pole. I also think, because I highlight how we’ve almost devalued the meaning of the American flag in the film by commercializing it within our culture, it’s not seen as an affront on our country, but rather a commentary on how fascism has spoiled our unique brand of patriotism.
MovieMaker: How did you become a filmmaker?
Jared Sprouse: I had always been a writer — I wrote short stories as a child — but I’ve been making films since I was 14. This is pretty weird but I remember watching the “Red Vs Blue” YouTube series by Rooster Teeth around that age, and thought I could do the same. So I wrote a script, voiced the characters and acted the whole thing out in the game.
I made my own ripoff, but it was great because I learned about coverage, editing and everything digitally. I just got really technical, learning After Effects, watching Freddie Wong and Indie Mogul, essentially learning the entire technical side from YouTube. I was a bit of a computer geek so the tech side came naturally.
Then I enrolled at UNCSA and used that technical knowledge to foster my artistic voice and improve my storytelling. After graduating, I produced indie projects on the side, including some music videos and, most notably, the indie horror film Where’s Rose.
MovieMaker: Your Instagram bio notes that in addition to making films, you “tell people where the bathroom is for a living.” What’s that mean? I know you drew on your experiences with minimum wage jobs to make this.
Jared Sprouse: Haha, that is kinda my inside joke. I’m not independently wealthy or connected to many industry folks, so after school it was extremely difficult for me to find full time work in the industry. I had some odd jobs but nothing stuck. I eventually realized that nobody hires a director from set anyways so I ended up getting a steady job at a fine-dining steakhouse in Atlanta and worked my way up the ladder there. I just continued working on my own films on the side. I’m essentially the Maitre D/Manager there now, So while I was writing, prepping, and editing the film, I was working 45 hours a week there.
Whenever people come up to ask me a question in the restaurant, it’s always, “Where’s the bathroom?” So I’ve probably told hundreds of thousands of people where the toilets are to fund a good chunk of this film.
MovieMaker: There seems to be a lot going on with this film metaphorically, including in the way working-class white, Latino and Black people get pitted against each other. Am I reading too much into it?
Jared Sprouse: No, that is very purposeful. I want to highlight that It’s those at the top that really try to make working-class people think that the reason they’re struggling to get ahead is their fellow neighbors. They want a dog-eat-dog world where the only way to get ahead is to trample upon those even less fortunate than yourself, oftentimes rewarding that behavior.
In particular they demonize people of color and immigrants as the reason you can’t get a better job… meanwhile they’re the ones doling out pennies and profiting — immensely — off our labor. I’m appalled in particular by the treatment of immigrants as they are often working jobs that (white) Americans are usually unwilling to, yet we are actively trying to make this a hostile country for them to be in. Which comes from the very top of the federal level, unfortunately. Who do they think are building their houses, cooking their meals and cleaning their rooms?
It’s also usually women who are valued less in the workplace. Jobs that are typically described as “feminine,” we don’t attribute as much value to, and underpay — like teachers, hospitality and caretakers. But of course all of those roles were deemed “essential” during Covid.
I thought that ascribing my customer service to a fictional workplace called “Party USA” was the perfect way to encapsulate those ideals but not hit people over the head with “preachy” messaging about the state of the country. I wanted to create a dialogue between working-class people who don’t agree with me politically, rather than alienate them. I think it needs to be the 99% vs the 1%, not Red vs Blue.
MovieMaker: You did a lot of smart things to keep costs down without harming the drama. Like having a character hear and react to some dramatic events instead of showing them, when she’s in the trunk. Can you talk about how you did this on a tight budget?
Jared Sprouse: That is one of my favorite sequences in the whole film, and was the last part I wrote. When I realized I needed to do a car chase in the writing process, I instantly got bored writing it, which means the audience would be bored seeing it. I’m obsessed with perspective in writing.
Suspense is all a mix of what the audience knows and what the characters know. Maybe I just love Hitchcock too much. So I thought it would be much more suspenseful if we are helpless with our protagonist in the trunk of the car. Hearing a car-crash, hearing a fight… and then hearing a single gunshot go off. It creates the moment of “Who’s dead? Am I saved? What’s going to happen next?”
What the audience imagines is so much more suspenseful than whatever action scene I could have shot. And all I had to do was put my lead actress in a trunk and get her reacting to the situation. It’s not only cheaper, it’s a thousand times more effective than a silly car chase.
Also, thankfully I had produced three microbudget features prior all struggled/failed to some degree, so I had a really good idea of what worked, and more importantly, what didn’t. When I set out to write this, I designed the whole film so I wouldn’t have to wait for permission. But I also didn’t want it to feel “small.” I’ve seen too many one-location, four-actor films that are suffocating.
While the party store location is the primary one, we never stay there in the film for more than a few scenes at a time. They’re always leaving to the mom’s house, in the car, the lake, et cetera. All the other locations are cheap as well.
MovieMaker: How did you enlist your terrific leads, particularly Ainsley Seiger?
Jared Sprouse: Ainsley was a stroke of luck. But I knew the whole film kinda hinged on that character. I wrote it thinking there has to be an actress I know who is from a small Southern town who can be a bit bossy, fulfill a masculine role and also be a bit funny. I knew of her because we very briefly crossed paths in college at UNCSA. After writing it I knew she was kinda perfect for it, but she had no idea who I was and was busy shooting dozens of episodes of Law and Order. So I DM’d her on Instagram and waited.
Several weeks later she wrote back to send her the script, so I did. She wrote back an hour later gushing about it and was head over heels with it. From there it was just figuring out her schedule with the show so we could make it work. Took about a year to prep and figure out her schedule from there. Patience is key.
Here are more details on the El Paso Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. And you can read more of our film festival coverage here.
Main image: Ainsley Seiger in Party USA, courtesy of the filmmaker.
