Joe Caballero is getting his first taste of Hollywood thanks to his debut documentary “The Meat Tricks,” premiering at two California film festivals.
A former Marine turned actor and producer, Caballero first caught acting fever while in California in 1992. He made the move back to his hometown of Woodridge, Ill. and began taking acting and improvisation classes. From there, Caballero had small roles in “Primal Fear” and “Home Alone 3” before making the big step to director and producer.
For Caballero, the idea for the film came naturally: he went out looking for a job, discovered an unknown job field to many Americans and made a documentary based on his time there.
In the opening of “The Meat Tricks,” Caballero interviews with Chicago’s Pride, Inc. – a home delivery meat service company. Within weeks he becomes the top-selling rookie and within three months is paired with top veteran Christopher Hines for the annual Masters Tournament, a two-man team competition to see who can sell the most meat door-to-door in one week.
Caballero and Hines travel to Florida with 144 cases of meat and attempt to break the one-week record of 121 cases of meat sold. On average, a two-man team sells roughly 50 cases of meat per week. The documentary follows the two men as they enter the homes of different American families and demonstrates what the two will do to win the competition and cash prize.
The only scripted piece in the film is the opening scene between Caballero and Hines. “The rest was pretty easy to put together [in the sense of improvisation],” he said.
One difficult task for both Caballero and Hines, however, was filming the project. While one man was being filmed, the other would have to do the filming, which made for a daunting task near the end. “I would do most of the directing and photographing work myself, and Chris would be on camera,” Caballero said. “It was hard; we were doing the work of about 6 or 7 people.”
In post-production, Hines and Caballero had roughly 30 hours of footage to sift through. Hines, making his producing debut on this film, took the initial 30 hours and edited it down to nearly three hours of footage. Unfortunately that was still too long so Caballero took the three hours and pared it down to the final 90-minute documentary.
The name of the film, which came from Hines, resembles that of “The Matrix.” “The Meat Tricks” was chosen because “everything’s connected,” Caballero said. Everything from Caballero’s interview to the families opening their doors and allowing people to see a true interaction between two people gives a sense of interactions that people exhibit day-to-day.
The documentary has been accepted at two California film festivals. It will premiere at the Oxnard Independent Film Festival (previously known as the Channel Islands Indie Film Festival), in Oxnard, CA. during the weekends of Sept. 16-18 and 22-25, then screen at the Westwood International Film Festival in Westwood, CA, which runs Sept. 30 – Oct. 14.
After the two film festivals, Caballero plans to shoot a follow-up film to “The Meat Tricks” titled “The Blair Meat Project,” which consists of “going to every Blair Street in America to sell meat.” He also has another documentary currently in the works that was filmed in Mexico and explores both the poverty and the lifestyle of the Hispanic culture.
Caballero would like to steer away from documentaries after the two are made, however, and explore his options with screenplays. He has two screenplays he has been working on and would like to put into production.
Caballero is excited to see how the film festivals change his career and the options that come his way. “I feel blessed for the opportunities we [he and Hines] have been given.”
