Brent Green’s feature film Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then is a 70-minute film based on the life of the eccentric figure Leonard Wood. “When his wife was diagnosed with cancer, he decided that he could make their house into this healing machine that would cure her,” Green tells us. “It didn’t work; she died. But he kept frantically building the house for the next 20 years until one day he fell off the roof and had to go into a nursing home.”

The house, which looked relatively normal on the outside, was a chaotic maze inside. “His living room was next to his bedroom, and his bedroom started half-way up the doorway of the living room. He had a laundry room with 23-foot vaulted ceilings. Every window was painted a different color, just on and on.”

Green built a full-size replica of the house as a set, but fictionalized the storyline a bit. “In the film, Leonard and Mary meet in a car crash, where Leonard goes flying through his windshield, then through Mary’s windshield. He lands in the passenger seat of Mary’s car and they drive off…When people don’t laugh at that, it always worries me.” How did Green get an actor to fly through a couple of windshields? Easy, he shot the movie in stop-motion, using real people and giant wooden characters.

Green made his film as a way of acknowledging Leonard and other off-beat characters who often go unnoticed. “We completely ignore these people who make our society interesting. Leonard was making this really wonderful thing, but he was completely ignored for, like, Glenn Beck.” Now that he’s made Gravity, is Green one of those people who make society interesting? “Oh, I did even before the film,” he laughs. The film will screen with live narration, music and sound effects at 9:45 p.m. Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday. Frenetic Theater, 5102 Navigation. For information, visit www.cinemartsociety.org. $12. The film will also screen as part of an exhibit with the same name at DiverseWorks featuring a structure created by Green inspired by the house in the film. Noon to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. Through December 9. DiverseWorks, 1117 East Freeway. For information, call 713-223-8346 or visit www.diverseworks.org. Free.

Mondays-Saturdays, 12-6 p.m. Starts: Nov. 5. Continues through Dec. 9, 2010

This article appears in Nov 11-17, 2010.