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I'm Short, Not Stupid Presents: 'A Piece of the Bottom'

This short is a vicious portrait of a greedy man whose attempts to pervert the storied traditions of fishing start a turf war where the youngest generation must confront the true price they’re willing to pay for lobster.

Next time you sit down to have a delicious lobster and you crack the crustacean’s shell and dip its bits in butter, think about how it got on your plate. I’m not speaking abstractly, but rather about the fishing community that caught it. Maine, home of the tastiest lobsters, also has some of the strictest rules and regulations regarding the capture of these clawed creatures. Lobstering is a family-held tradition passed down through generations, and each successive wave learns the trade and secret fishing spots and soon inherits the ocean itself. The belief is that those families have the most at stake and are the most interested in keeping the business alive. However, the community has rarely been portrayed on film or in mainstream media. After visiting Maine and reading about the old-world mafia law some of these lobstermen live by, Floyd Russ couldn’t resist making a film portraying both the beauty and brutality of the culture in A Piece of the Bottom.

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The groups presented in this film verge on incestuous. Family is central to them, and their old ideas and unwritten laws drive their livelihoods and the local economy. Full of embittered rivalry, this Maine-based fishing narrative paints a portrait of a community that seems out-of-time, surviving in an anarchistic world. Modern laws don’t hold weight with these crews. Unfortunately, for the Garrett Lisbon (JJ Condon), the young boy at the center of the story, his father Bernie (Sean Weil) has gone off the deep end. Bernie believes his own twisted sense of masculinity should be replicated and championed. He’s all this is what a real worker’s dick looks like and I’m going to beat you up, you pussy. Granted, this is a world of respect only being reciprocated when deserved, but his teenage son has the misfortune of being raised by a total dick bag, so life’s kind of tough for him. When a young drifter named Abe played wonderfully by Leo Fitzpatrick (Kids, The Wire) joins their crew as an extra hand, the father’s power trip goes to new levels of nastiness when his sanctimonious talk is questioned. There’s blood, fire, cursing, porn, and guns—quite a few things you might not have associated with seafood. It takes fishing to a whole new level of excitement. The film is a vicious portrait of a greedy man whose attempts to pervert the storied traditions start a turf war where the youngest generation must confront the true price they’re willing to pay for lobster.

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We’re excited to world premiere A Piece of the Bottom here and further down, check out my interview with the filmmaker Floyd Russ below.

VICE: How did A Piece of the Bottom come about? 
Floyd Russ: My best friends parents retired in Maine a couple years ago and I have another good friend from Maine who happened to live ten minutes from there. We were like, Wow, it’s so gorgeous up there; we need to shoot something. We started thinking about what the plot would be and that it’s a huge lobster community. Besides lobster being my favorite food, I thought it was interesting that they’d never really been filmed before.

How do you go from a nice gorgeous setting with tasty lobsters to a mean-spirited story of bitter rivalry?
While researching we discovered there was a big shooting on Matinicus Island where one lobster boat owner—on open sea—shot his rival's lobster boat and killed one person and injured another and  went to jail for six months. It was like lobster mafia law, because it’s on this shitty little island, so that’s what we loosely based it on.

Do you think there is lobster mafia law?
Well, when we started telling locals about what our script was about and that we wanted to include this rivalry, every person we talked to was like, "Oh, I fucking hate the guy down the road.” They’ve gotten in bar fights, drawn guns and shit, but no one’s died in the stories we’ve personally heard. But definitely a lot of property damage, hundreds and thousands of dollars of it. There are intense family rivalries there. But coming up with a story and validating it with research was the most important thing.

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Are the people nice? You make them out to be pretty mean.
Oh yeah, I mean once we committed to our lobster guy, he gave us a free boat—that’s the one we shot on—and he went out with us on the water. However, when we approached another guy to use his house for shooting who ended up being his rival, he told us to get off his property and he refused to work with us. These people are still hard-working, common sense people. I don’t think they’ll get to the point where they will be hurting or killing anyone unless it’s a really isolated and intense situation like what happened on that island.

Yeah, so they’re common sense, but they love property damage and playing pranks?
It’s not so much “pranks,” but they’ll cut lines. Lobster buoys are attached to traps and if you cut the line, you basically have ruined that trap. They can’t get them up anymore and they’re just left in the ocean. It’s shitty for everybody, but they still do that.

It’s shitty for the lobsters rotting in the cages too.
Well, our guy told us a story where he took a forklift and picked up a crate of a bunch of cement blocks and put it on another dude’s boat so that the guy’s boat was useless. That guy was then forced to get another pitchfork, bring it there, and unload it. It took him a couple days and cost him thousands. That’s a prank. It costs a lot of money to do it and it’s really expensive for the other guy. These guy’s live in the middle of nowhere, I mean they’re just a few hours away from Boston, but they don’t really go there. They just have a lot of time on their hands when they’re not working.

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So what’s the lobster industry like out there? Are people having trouble working?
It’s crazy. It’s not unionized, not privatized. The entire lobster industry in Maine is mom and pop. The lobster licenses take around 10 to 20 years to get, so it’s all hereditary. Our guy had one son and two daughters and his son is already in line to get his lobster license. By the time he turns 21 he’ll have his lobster license. He will only get one because his dad has one. If you went there and tried to apply for one as an outsider, you probably wouldn’t even get in. There’s a cap amount of licenses and besides that, only a certain amount of fertile areas. If you try to step in on them, people would be like “what the fuck are you doing, I’ve been fishing here for 20 years.” Maybe you’d say, “You don’t own the water,” which they don’t technically, but that’s the unsaid law.

Your film is about that too—“owning” the water or, as your title says, a piece of the bottom.
It’s not a porno title. [Laughs]

Squatter’s rights! Squat her right.
Yeah, well the ocean is part of nature and I don’t think that should be owned by anybody. But at the same time, they have a right to make a living and it’s not like these guys are making millions of dollars. They’re middle class.

Does that bother them? They could make more, but they choose to respect the water.
There are legal rules that Maine has which dictates certain things you can’t do and they’re keen to keep those rules in place. In the movie, there’s a scene where he has a female lobster and it has all of the eggs on it and the rule is that you need to throw it back into the water. Every lobstermen abides by that rule, because that’s a female that will bear other lobsters. There are a smaller percentage of female lobsters so they need to keep them alive and they mark them with a V in the tail so other lobstermen will know straightaway it’s a female. When we were filming, the fisherman refused to cut a V into a male and throw it back because that would mislead other fisherman. So, we had to wait until we caught one. It’s amazing how conscientious these dudes were because they smelled like shit and we were paying them with beer.

Do you think VICE commenters are going to conscientious towards your film or are they going to rail on your actor’s fishing techniques?
They’ll probably be like “that rope is not tied to anything.” Or on an early edit, people thought the kid and drifter were gay lovers because they have a lot of deep looks at each other.

They do boat into the sunset together…
Abe (Leo Fitzpatrick) is in a tough position, because he obviously owes the other crew a favor. Like the mother said, “you’re family, but not blood” and he’s told to kill the whole family. However, he feels for the kid because he’s being abused and shouldn’t be held victim because he’s the next generation. He thinks you don’t have to be like your parents. But like we said before, most of the time in that industry, you will turn because that’s how the culture works with getting the license and having the claim to the ocean. That’s a lot of shit to squeeze into 14 minutes.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.