Quit your griping and start your typing: Or, the future of art and storytelling and stuff

As both an independent filmmaker and a punster, it's tempting to refer to the recent July 4th holiday as Independent's Day. But this year, for me at least, the label fits.

As I've mentioned before, I often attend events at Visual Studies Workshop, particularly their screenings of old 16mm short films. Their most recent screening was July 5, and had an Independence Day theme.

I'd been in kind of a creative rut recently. I still wanted to complete the books I was trying to write, but I was wondering if my heart was still in it, or what I would do with these books when they were done. I still considered myself a filmmaker at heart, but the complexities of low-budget moviemaking are not to be treated lightly and I wasn't sure if I was quite ready yet to re-enter those waters.

Anyway, at the VSW event, I inquired about a two-day course they'd announced for that weekend called “Performing Books”. I wasn't sure what this course was about, but it seemed to have something to do with combining elements of literature with elements of film/video and live performance. It seemed like it might offer a way to bridge these two worlds in which I was trying to rekindle my interest.

I hadn't had a weekend completely to myself in a long while, and I was looking forward to spending the holiday weekend catching up on things and trying to get back into my writing. I wasn't sure I wanted to give up 16 of those hours. But my gut feeling was that I should take this course.

And I'm glad I did, because it rekindled my creativity. The teacher, Tate Shaw, showed some different types of unconventional books that artists have made, and also showed some videos of various artists who had combined live readings with multimedia. A few of these were by people I knew of – Marina Abramović (the subject of The Artist Is Present, a documentary that was shown at the local High Falls Film Festival), Laurie Andersen, and of course Crispin Glover – while others were new to me.

I didn't “get” absolutely all of the work being shown, and some of it was the kind of stuff that my college-age self would have sneered at as pretentious and boring. But years after college ended, as a working adult studying this stuff by choice, I now appreciate why less accessible forms of art exist. The whole point of it is to challenge you, to make you think, to see things from a different angle. Even if you don't “like” it, it's good for you in a way. And it made me excited about my own work again, because it caused me to think of new ideas and new approaches.

The timing of this class was perfect. It was a case of one door opening when another closed.

Because some time earlier that week, I happened to vist the sci-fi website io9 for some reason. I have a love-hate relationship with that website – there's some fun and interesting stuff there, including science news and some good articles about writing ... but also some snarky junk, especially in the user comments. Anyway, one of the headlines was “When is the right time to finally give up on a series?”

My patience with nerd negativity had been declining for several years now, but against my better judgment I clicked on this link. As someone who was trying to write a book series, I thought I might get some insight into what elements make a series work, and what mistakes cause the audience to lose interest.

But when I read the page, I saw no insights into the art or craft of storytelling, or appreciation for the challenges of doing it well. All I saw was one fan grievance after another, as nerd after angry nerd listed a series they hated and the moment they gave up on it, and how as a result they now hated Stephen King or Orson Scott Card or whoever.

The one halfway thoughtful comment I saw was from someone named Rob Bricken, writing under the handle of Superman villain “mxyzptlk”:

“Maybe a better question is why we persist in keeping up with stories that have long ago made us question "Why am I keeping up with this?" ... maybe completism is a geek flaw — we're continuously drawn back to a flawed storylines [sic] because they tap into our weakness for identifying flaws, and that coupled with our completist tendencies make for craptastic bait we have a harder time ignoring than taking.”

I would have liked to take that observation as something constructive – that fans have the perfectionist mind of an engineer or programmer, and have an instinct for spotting bugs. More cynically, though, it seemed to indicate that these people just like to complain and criticize.

And that was the moment when I finally realized that this was not the audience I wanted to reach out to. This was not the community I wanted to be part of. Not when there are other communities of artists and DIY-ers and even some 'normal' people with minds more open than they get credit for.

Prior to that, I'd been thinking about why I originally wanted to make movies, and why I was so passionate about science fiction and fantasy when I was younger. Cinema was something that entertained and excited people ... and if it didn't, that just inspired the restless and creative souls to want to create their own original visions and put them on screen. At the same time, the sci-fi fan community seemed to be a haven of smart and friendly people in an otherwise brutish world.

But something seems to have gone sour. It's weird because I don't think fans have ever had it better. The biggest TV shows in the world right now seem to be Doctor Who and Game of Thrones, and maybe Sherlock. Every halfway decent drama on TV nowadays, genre or otherwise, has gone the Lost / Babylon 5 route of epic story arcs that span multiple seasons. Every tentpole studio movie seems to be based on an established franchise and marketed to the Comic-Con audience.

So I don't completely get where this growing anger is coming from. However, I do get the sense that Hollywood isn't liked right now. The studios seem to be putting more and more eggs into fewer and fewer baskets, trying to please everyone and instead pleasing no one. Their losing strategy in the last couple years has been as follows:

• Instead of ever making an original movie, just buy an obscure property whose core audience is very small, but also very vocal and determined to create bad publicity
• Hire an auteur director who will want to put his own original stamp on the property, thus alienating the aforementioned core audience
• Spend so much money on the film that it will have to be an all-time blockbuster just to break even
• Produce a really generic marketing campaign that doesn't tell you what the story or premise is, or why you should see the film, instead relying on the obscure brand to sell itself
• Generate nothing but apathy or hostility from the fans (who don't like auteurs), the critics (who don't want to see an auteur wasting his talents on a remake of something), and the general public (who don't know what this thing is or why they should care)

A similar formula admittedly worked for the Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but recent attempts to duplicate those successes have grown ever more futile.

There also might be a class resentment of some kind. I never fully appreciated how deeply Hollywood directors and actors are hated right now until the recent backlash against Zach Braff. If you somehow haven't heard, the former sitcom actor recently decided to fund a follow-up to his cult film Garden State by raising money from fans on the Internet (“crowdfunding” as da kidz call it nowadays). From the bitter backlash he received in some quarters, you'd think Braff was some pampered Tudor who bathed in a diamond-encrusted bathtub full of champagne and baby seals' blood, while raping orphaned migrant workers at the same time.

Most of the criticism of Braff I've seen essentially boils down to “Braff is in the Hollywood system, and therefore all-powerful and evil! He already has all the power and influence required to get a movie green-lighted and distributed by the studios!”

A cooler, calmer head might point out that if Steven freaking Spielberg has trouble making the movies he wants (his recent Lincoln apparently came within a hair's breadth of being made for cable TV instead), then maybe creative clout isn't that easy to come by in the studio system anymore. Nearly every name director who's been a major influence in my lifetime, from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderberg and Kevin Smith, has been in the press recently bemoaning the difficulty of getting their movies made and/or announcing their imminent or eventual retirement from filmmaking.

In the midst of all this chaos and frustration, maybe it's time to ask: If Hollywood cinema is really that much of a dinosaur, then why are we still so obsessed with it anyway? We have video cameras, which are better than ever. We have computers. We have the Internet. What's wrong with just making something on a smaller scale, something you truly believe in, instead of trying to compete with the Goliaths? Do you just want to complain, or do you want to be part of the solution?

I can think of at least one person out there who might have the answer. There's a website called CrochetMe.com which, about five years ago, discussed the DIY movement and online distribution with a guy who crochets but also makes web videos. Here's something the guy said:

“I mean, let's face it, in the media there are now eight companies. ... Everything is becoming consolidated, so where there used to be lots of variety, there are now, like, ten giants and tons of tiny little villagers. And yeah, the villagers are going to start making their own stuff because the materials will be available to all of them, and we can't all just do things the way the giants want, because it does seep something out of your soul. I think it's absolutely true on every level of art that this is the worst of times and, like some guy might have said once, the best of times. ... we are now in a situation where everybody can do what they do. ... I will always give them credit for trying to find a way to steal Christmas, but this time they might not be able to. There's always been an independent side to the industry. And for this particular medium, I think it's going to be a lot harder for them to crush it.  .

“[A]t the end of the day right now, you can create something; what you can't usually do is make a fortune off of it. But ... it's not about, "... I'm going to be [a] millionaire without enjoying the process and the product." Ultimately, the artistic expression can't be squelched; it's just they'll try to cut off any avenues for that expression to be, shall we say, monetized in a realistic fashion. Like I'm saying, the sort of people who understand the DIY mentality are more about the doing than the having. So I think that ultimately, my advice is what my advice always is: Make stuff. ... Right now, because of digital technology, you can make crafty little movies, you can make crafty little things that go up for millions of people to see. ... It is no longer the time of sitting around and thinking about doing something.”

It's been five years since the guy gave that interview, and he's since been busy making other stuff but he probably still feels the same. And it seems to me that if that guy wants to crochet and do web videos as well as make Hollywood blockbusters ... and if Crispin Glover wants be a spoken word artist in between Hollywood comedies ... and if Zach Braff wants to crowdfund an indie film … and if George Lucas wants to retire and make experimental films in his garage … and if Ethan Hawke wants to do whatever it is he does … then what the hell is stopping the rest of us?

So I think the smart people are gonna be the ones who stop bellyaching about what Hollywood does, and how mainstream pop culture does this and doesn't do that, and are willing to embrace new technologies and new opportunities, and actually show people how it should be done.

And it doesn't even have to be a traditional movie. That used to be the dream – make a full-length movie and show it in a conventional theater to a live audience. But if that medium is dying (as it seems to be), there are other ways of telling a story. You can make a web series. You can write books. You can be like the folks I learned about last weekend, and find ways to combine existing media into something new.

I think J to the W was right. These are the worst of times and, “like some guy might have said once,” the best of times.

A journey through maturity

It's been an eventful month. I guess it sort of started at the end of May, when filmmaker/fundraiser Tom Malloy spoke at the monthly Rochester Movie Maker's meeting. Malloy identified 7 common mistakes that filmmakers make, which I'll share with you here:

1. Not firing a pissed-off crewmember. Especially if he's the DP (director of photography), who sets the tone of the shoot.

2. Being too cheap on food. You should have a great craft service table, not just pizza. A Hollywood shoot pays people a meal penalty when they don't get lunch. (I would add to this an unwritten rule I learned somewhere, probably in film school: if you're not paying people then you definitely have to feed them.)

3. Making decisions too quickly, without thinking them through. He seemed to be talking specifically about deciding who to have on your crew. When hiring someone, you should get references.

4. Not focusing enough on the actors and their performances. You can fix technical mistakes in post, but not acting mistakes. Sound is more important than picture.

5. Giving control to someone who can shut you off in a heartbeat.

6. Not buying swag. He said that T-shirts, hats, etc. are good things to give your team, especially if they're not being paid well. (In the interest of balance, I should say that I've heard other people say the opposite, that it's money wasted promoting the film to people who already know about it.)

7. Not having a vision or taking charge. You don't have to be a dictator or asshole, but you need to know where you're going. You need to have a vision so that people will believe in you and respect you.

Some of these things I've already learned, either through experience or from being told by someone else, but it's still advice worth hearing.

He then ended with an anecdote which basically had the following moral: You need to have the fire and the willingness to not listen to people who discourage you.

That's a good lesson too, and one which I personally have found harder to follow with age. As you get older, and farther away from the world of high school and college, you can end up being less and less in touch with other people who share your goals and priorities, making it more of a challenge to keep the flame alive.

I've been thinking a lot about these things because I recently reached a landmark birthday, one that makes you take stock of your life. As it happened, the 1982 classic Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was playing at the George Eastman House around the same time, which seemed fitting since that's a movie where Kirk finds himself having a birthday and thinking about getting older. So I decided to invite some friends to have a birthday dinner with me and then go see it.

I haven't watched much old-school Star Trek in a while, so seeing this movie on the big screen again made me realize something. If you were a nerdy kid in the 80s who was into books and creativity, and alienated from the world of sports, then Star Trek was practically your only exposure to grown-up virtues like teamwork, leadership, courage, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. Most other sci-fi tends to be about nonconformists heroically bucking the system altogether, either by escaping it or by overthrowing it. And while that can be a good message when you're an adolescent trying to find your identity and escape peer pressure, it doesn't always apply so well to the working world of adulthood, where you are much more interdependent on other people.

That same weekend, the Visual Studies Workshop had a big sale, which included tons and tons of books on art and philosophy and so on, for dirt cheap. I picked up a fair bit of esoteric and psychedelic reading material, to refuel the creative side of my brain.

When I was in college, the 60s generation still cast a long shadow. There was still a lot of emphasis on being innovative and irreverent, and marching to your own drummer. While that generation had become sour and snobby and censorious by the time I was growing up, I still respected their original emphasis on optimism and creative freedom. And I used to think that sci-fi, as a genre, was part of that, because that was the genre where you could make your own rules and create your own world.

As my generation has come of age and taken over the culture, I've sensed a growing emphasis on hostility and cynicism. It's as if people can't think of any way to make themselves feel important except by resenting and criticizing anyone who's actually made something of themselves. The idea that the role of creative people is to be a punching bag for less creative people doesn't sit well with me. My generation's attitude seems to be that life is just one long struggle to climb back into the womb. The few tentpole movies that aren't just nostalgic reboots of an existing franchise tend to be about the world being destroyed. There's a sense that the past is more comforting than the future.

But if you can manage to escape from people who have that mindset, and look at what the next generation are up to, there seems to be much more friendliness and sociability and willingness to make connections. I know that musician Amanda Palmer had a gig not that long ago where she let fans sign her naked body. I find it hard to fathom having that kind of trust in strangers. I'm much more used to having to have my guard up.

Rightly or wrongly, I guess I learned a different life lesson, from my peers and from the generation before us. I learned that you can expect other people to try to stomp you down, and that you will survive only if you stick to your guns and don't worry about what other people think. But I'm feeling like that lesson has outlived its usefulness.

A lot of the experiences and influences I've had in recent years have led me down the path of satire, of wanting to tell stories that protest and point out what's wrong. But with the modern wealth of entertainment options, people are much more likely to filter out anything that doesn't speak to their existing tastes or values.

People want to be entertained, and that's not a dirty word. But being an artist isn't a dirty word either.

That's the twin challenge I'm facing when trying to write these damn novels. I'm trying to get back to the wildness and freedom and craziness that meant so much to me when I first became a writer and a filmmaker. At the same time, I'm also trying to brush up on my understanding of what a story needs in order to truly click with an audience. Is there enough action? Is there enough humor? Is there enough character? Does it have that deeper level that makes something truly loved, not just briefly fashionable?

There are times when it barely seems worth the struggle, and then there are times when unexpected rewards occur. This past month, to my great surprise, I won a Most Distinguished Member Award from the Buffalo Movie-Video Makers group for my work as writer-director-producer of Saberfrog and co-producer of another feature, Bury My Heart With Tonawanda. The latter film, from writer-producer Adrian Esposito, has a heartwarming message of growth and acceptance and forgiveness, which has moved audiences to tears at screening after packed screening, most recently at the Memorial Art Gallery this past Thursday.

One of my past influences, cult filmmaker David Cronenberg, once said that he makes films in order to find out why he made them. Cronenberg is one of the less heartwarming filmmakers I can think of, but he makes a good point. Art is a journey, which takes the artists – and the people they invite to join them – to unexpected destinations.

So that's the trick – to stay open to new emotions and experiences as much as possible, even when other people seem more skeptical. It may get harder as you get older, but it is worth the effort.

Back in the saddle

Yikes, I didn't post at all in June, and almost missed July as well.

The reason I've been radio silent for the past two months is that I've had a lot to process. I've been busy with various things at work and in my personal life, and I didn't really have the time or energy to devote to Saberfrog.

There have been several times that I saw or thought of something that I wanted to blog about, but never got around to it. One was this IndieWire article about film schools which is actually a response to two other articles on the subject; one in the New York Times, the other a snarky rejoinder from Gawker.

Back in my day (he says in a grizzled 1890's prospector voice) going to film school was about the only way to get access to the equipment necessary to make a movie. There were, however, many inspirational success stories of people who made something cheap and crude and simple which got picked up for widespread distribution.

With the Miramax-era gold rush now long gone, and the tools for production and self-distribution available to pretty much anyone with a credit card and Internet access, I'm not quite sure what the allure of film school is to the current generation of students. Perhaps, in spite of all the hype about social media, having an actual real-world community of peers and mentors is still desirable, especially if you're a young person trying to find your place in the world, and your own voice as an artist.

Speaking of real-world communities, I get tired of being expected to do absolutely everything online, without any contact with an actual human. One of the great things about living in the 1990s was that there were bookstores and video stores that seemed to carry everything. Even if you had alternative or esoteric tastes, you had the luxury of being able to walk into a store, see the thing you wanted, and go home with it immediately. I felt that, if it was on a shelf for sale, it meant there were other people buying the same thing. It meant you weren't the only person who liked Red Dwarf or whatever – or even if you were, it meant there was a store that catered to you.

And there was a chance that the clerk might be just enough of a quasi-Tarantino to notice what you were buying and be able to have a conversation with you about it. In a previous post I complained about a Borders clerk who hassled me for buying a Colin Baker episode of Doctor Who. But I have to give her credit for caring.

Alas, those halcyon days of Media Play, CompUSA, Blockbuster and Borders are over. Well, there's still at least one Blockbuster in Rochester, but the two Borders outlets are now closing for good. I have many happy memories of these places. At the Borders in Henrietta, authors gave talks and book signings. A writers' group I belonged to met at the cafe there. The Borders in Victor had a cafe that was a pleasant place to sit and get work done.

Not that long ago, people really cared about real places and real human interaction. You could buy things online if you wanted, through Amazon or eBay or what have you, but the real world was still considered valuable and important and cool. Roger Ebert once declared that video-on-demand would never replace video stores because people would still want to go to a real store; he drew a comparison to Starbucks, which he said wasn't just selling coffee, but also a trip away from the office. But I think a generational shift has finally happened, and folks who grew up taking the Internet for granted don't have any such attachment to physical spaces. Many nerds seem happy to live their lives solely online, but I'm one nerd who doesn't like to become withdrawn from the world.

Some real-world experiences live on, though. Two weeks ago, the Echo Park Film Center in LA visited the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester as part of their cross-country journey showing experimental films in arty venues across the land. It was fun to see oddball short films in an outdoor setting, not a privilege I've had in a while. Most of the films were made by students, and the closing act was The Sound We See, a 25-minute black-and-white film depicting a day in Los Angeles, with each minute representing a different hour (and made by different people if I remember right).

While I always like to attend the rare underground film event at VSW, I don't think I was quite in the right mood that day. However, I appreciated it a lot more in hindsight. It somehow restored my faith in off-Hollywood filmmaking. The presenters were fun and enthusiastic, and The Sound We See (which I bought the DVD of) was surprisingly entertaining and had a great soundtrack.

As someone who grew up on oddball classroom films as well as the strange little animations that populated Sesame Street, I always had a little bit of a soft spot for experimental films, but this fondness was squashed by militant film professors (and classmates) who felt that there should only be experimental films. An aspect of the 1990s that I don't miss is the amount of negativity and hostility in the arts. It was a time of defeatism and deadening political correctness, and art wasn't considered any good unless it had the single message that the Republicans were plotting to kill us all. And yet the black-clad Eeyores of that time somehow claimed to embody the spirit of the 1960s, an era when the arts were colorful and energetic and fun, an era regarded even by those with qualms about its politics as a golden age for movies and music.

Fortunately, the Echo Park event was much truer to that spirit. The films they showed, while not all equally great, seemed to be made by people with genuine joy in what they were doing, and none of the films were so long that they taxed my patience (another common sin in experimental films). After spending far too much time online in the company of shrill, angry Internet nerds who hate movies, the Echo Park event was a reminder that there are still people who genuinely love filmmaking.

Also, I recently took an Adobe Flash class to brush up on my skills. Years ago, after being fed up with the irrationality and subjectivity of the arts, I dove into the world of programming and software development. It was satisfying to be in a world where things were true or false, where code either worked or it didn't. As I geared up to make Saberfrog, though, all my old irrational filmmaking passions came roaring back, and programming lost its appeal. Now I'm regaining those technical skills, and it is immensely satisfying. I feel like my old self again.

And where is Saberfrog these days? Well, it got another film festival rejection. I missed a few other festival deadlines I really wanted to meet, but I just wasn't up for it at the time. I do have some fun ideas for promoting the film and its universe, as well as a follow-up project using some of the same elements. I've just been too busy and burnt out to do anything about it. But I'm starting to feel on top of things again.

In just two months it'll be the one-year anniversary of the film's first public screening, so I should think about getting a proper DVD release together. Saberfrog needs to complete the journey I blindly began in 2006.

Back to that film-school article in the Times, I like the comment from the school dean who describes the current students' attitude as “I’m going to make a career that probably doesn’t even exist right now”. That attitude, while shockingly naïve, is also inspiring and optimistic. Being young means having that kind of confidence and fearlessness. The challenge, as an artist, is to hold onto some – if not all – of that attitude even after you've supposedly learned better.

A busy month

It's been almost a month since I posted a blog entry, which is a reflection of how busy I've been.

The big news is still that Saberfrog will be showing at the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival on April 10 at 1 pm at Market Arcade Film & Arts Center, 639 Main St (little plug there).

But I've been having other film-related adventures as well.

On the last weekend of February, I took part in a 72-hour filmmaking contest. On Thursday, February 24, each team who signed up was assigned a short list of story elements, and given 72 hours – until Sunday, February 27 at 6 pm – to write, film and edit a short film containing those story elements. Mike Boas and Mike Russo were co-directing an entry, and Mike Boas asked me to be cinematographer. We brainstormed a story, then the Mikes wrote a script on Friday and we spent eight hours shooting the film on Saturday. Mike Boas edited the footage and delivered the finished product in time to meet the deadline.

That Sunday I watched the Oscars. Although the show was rather dull, at least the get-off-the-stage music was classier this year.

The following weekend I traveled to New York City to attend DIY Days, a conference for independent filmmakers and other self-starting media artists. It was not only a learning experience, but also reinvigorating to be able to network with filmmakers outside the Rochester/Buffalo area.

On Monday, March 7, the 72-hour films were screened to the public at the Little Theater. I was very pleased at how our film, Unmasked, turned out. The other films were quite clever and funny as well. Two days later we rewatched the film at a Rochester Film Lab meeting, where I was complimented on the cinematography. I'd never considered lighting or camerawork to be my strongest point as a filmmaker, but being a DP on a short film directed by someone else was a less daunting prospect than being DP for your own feature-length film. I was able to concentrate more on making each shot look good, instead of just rushing to get through several pages of feature material in just a few hours. People thought I must have shot Unmasked with a newer camera than the one I used for Saberfrog, which I took as a compliment.

At the same meeting, I showed a film I'd worked on for a 24-hour filmmaking contest some years earlier. (I was in NYC for my ten-year college anniversary that year, and my old college friend Greg recruited me to join him in the contest. I was the writer, co-star and editor of that film, and still managed to attend the anniversary event!) I also showed Sweaters Over Plaid and a Kitty Cat, the RIT short film that cast me in a scenery-chewing lead performance.

That weekend I hung out with some college friends I hadn't seen in a while, then went to another showing of old educational films at Visual Studies Workshop. These were rather serious films about alcoholism and drug addiction, and although interesting from a historical perspective they lacked the gonzo weirdness of some previous shows. I also saw a show of short films at the Little, including films by Rochester native Matt Ehlers. Matt was in attendance for the screening, although he had to leave before it was over and so I didn't get the chance to catch up with him.

Since then I haven't had time to do much film-related, apart from giving a friend some input on the editing of her short film. A large project at work has been keeping me busy, but once it's done I intend to devote more time and energy to promoting Saberfrog.

The Beast Pageant and other Rochester films

The day after my premiere screening of Saberfrog at The Cinema, another Rochester-produced film made its debut at the George Eastman House. That film was The Beast Pageant, a surreal feature by Eastman House employees Jon Moses (who also starred) and Albert Birney. It looked amazing from the online trailer, but unfortunately the debut screening conflicted with rehearsal for an RIT student film I was in (more on that later) and I had to miss it. Fortunately, the film was scheduled to be shown again this past Friday at the Little Theater.

I was fully intending to be out of town this past Friday. The organizers of the only film festival to accept my previous feature now had a film of their own playing at another film festival in Ottawa, and I was planning to go there to support them, but a second chance to see The Beast Pageant was a tempting alternative. When the workload at my day job prevented me from traveling on Friday anyway, it meant I could see The Beast Pageant after all.

Since there were two showings, I was able to attend the later show and still go see another movie – Beyond Gotham, a documentary about upstate New York's hip hop scene that was playing at the Baobab Cultural Center. (That there were two locally made independent films to choose from that night seems like a healthy sign for the future of filmmaking in Rochester.)

Beyond Gotham was a low-tech production covering the hip hop scenes in Kingston (the director's hometown), Albany, and most of all Rochester. I'm neither a pop music expert nor a great judge of documentaries, and though I enjoyed the film well enough I found the director himself far more inspiring. Going by the handle of “Juse”, he explained that hip hop wasn't just music, but a grassroots, DIY movement and lifestyle that was being embraced by artists of every ethnicity, across the country and around the world. It made me feel that independent filmmaking was also, in a sense, hip hop.

Then it was on to The Beast Pageant. It was a very hirsute audience I saw the film with, and unusually for a Rochester film event there was almost no one there that I knew personally; it was good to know that there was a large indie/art crowd in Rochester beyond the tight community I usually interact with.

To sum up this movie as best as I can, a guy named Abraham works at a fish processing plant, and comes home every day to a lonely apartment where his only roommate is a giant machine with two talking-head personalities: a droning-voiced woman who provides companionship, and a bearded man who offers him instant access to consumer goods. One day Abraham develops a parasitic twin – a tiny singing cowboy (presumably representing Abraham's repressed soul) who grows out of his stomach. After this happens, Abraham leaves the grim nameless city he lives in and ends up in an outdoor realm, where even stranger things happen.

A rarity among low-budget indie films today, The Beast Pageant was shot on black-and-white 16mm stock, using a Bolex camera that was (according to the film's website) salvaged from a dumpster. This film looks and sounds amazing. The handmade sets, props and costumes are detailed and imaginative, and the music and sound design are simply incredible. The film was entirely post-dubbed (and the minimalist dialogue and slow line readings seemed designed to facilitate this), but this gave the filmmakers full reign to create an entirely new, layered soundtrack that is absolutely striking. A minotaur-like creature who appears late in the film is made genuinely fearsome by the thundering soundtrack created for it, and the computer's disjointed female voice saying “Welllcomme hoooome Aaaabraahaaammm” still echoes in my head days after seeing the film.

In the post-screening Q&A, the directors said they were influenced by Terry Gilliam and Jan Svankmajer. While I can see both of those influences in the film, I was surprised they didn't mention David Lynch's Eraserhead, which The Beast Pageant was reminding me of even before the weird crying baby showed up; there seemed to be parallels not only in the general theme (urban factory worker dreams of escape) but in the moody black-and-white photography and the attention to sound design. However, The Beast Pageant is much more whimsical and comedic.

Even at 74 minutes the film is a bit slow at times (the early scenes establishing Abraham's dull job seemed to go on longer than necessary), and I found it jarring any time a clearly produced-on-video image (such as the goofy animated commercials viewed by Abraham on his computer) intruded on the grainy 16mm mood that otherwise predominated. Despite these quibbles, The Beast Pageant is a unique achievement. Birney and Moses could have made a straightforward genre film or a small-scale drama, but instead chose to make something bold and bizarre. Definitely check this one out if it screens near you.


My weekend of Rochester indie cinema didn't end on Friday, though. The next day I went to RIT to see student films being screened, including the one I'd starred in. I didn't stay for the entire program, but I stayed long enough to see a good variety of movies – some clearly trying to look like Hollywood productions, and some following their own strange mutant path.

Sweaters Over Plaid and A Kitty Cat (formerly titled Jerry And His Cat, a title I personally liked better) went over well with the audience. While the character of Jerry was nerdy and unflattering, I'd taken a page from my friend John Karyus' book and fully embraced the role as a chance to make a fool of myself on-camera. The resulting performance got laughs, and even applause at one point.

A film I enjoyed even more, though, was Thr33 Men & A Zombie, a doofusy fake sitcom about college dudes putting up with a zombie roommate, intercut with cheesy fake commercials for nonexistent shows and products. While the faculty seemed to find the film lowbrow and foolish, to me this was exactly the kind of warped slacker comedy that embodied the spirit of RIT student filmmaking. (I also liked its synopsis in the program book: “Two people who have nothing in common said they both kinda liked it.” Even better, though, was the synopsis for a film I didn't stick around to see: “This is my thesis. There are many like it but this one is mine.”


I had just enough time to get a quick dinner before going to Visual Studies Workshop for another show of weird and wonderful old 16mm films from the proverbial vault. This month's selection of films had a “drug” theme, and organizer Dan Varenka provided appropriately themed snacks – brownies, red-and-blue candy, donut holes with powdered sugar, and little bags of potato chips.

Two films stood out for their star power. Stand Up For Yourself: Peer Pressure and Drugs (1987) got a surprised laugh from the audience by starring an uncredited but unmistakable Cuba Gooding Jr. I'm 90 percent certain that Cirroc Lofton (the kid who played Jake Sisko on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) was also in the film. After this, The Perfect Drug Film (1971) lived up to its title by starring Beau Bridges as a suspiciously mellow host.


The day after that, Sunday, I went to Buffalo to hang out with my peeps at the Buffalo Video-Movie Makers group. I also booked another Buffalo-area showing of Saberfrog – this time at The Screening Room (3131 Sheridan Drive in Amherst) on Wednesday, December 8th at 7:30 pm. Admission is $6 unless you worked on the damn thing, then it's free!

16mm awesomeness in three cities

When I was a kid, we used to watch short films in class, generally prefaced by a title card that said “from the Reynolds Collection of the Rochester Public Library” or words to that effect. Many of these were educational films of the sort so often parodied in commercials and comedy shows. But some were just … odd. They may have been comedies, or art films, or animations, or various combinations thereof, but the purpose of showing these films in class seems elusive in hindsight.

The most famous of these was Hardware Wars, which had a decent afterlife on cable and video, but many of the others are now obscure. Some I can still kind of remember if I think about it enough, while others have largely faded from my memory.

These kinds of films showed up not only in class, but in more public settings as well. The Rochester Museum and Science Center's Eisenhardt Auditorium had weekend shows of kid's movies (I remember seeing animated films based on the Paddington Bear books and Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat). A robotic-dinosaur exhibit that came to the RMSC in the mid-80s was accompanied, in one room, by a set of dinosaur-related films, including Will Vinton's famous Siskel-and-Ebert parody Dinosaur and a more realistic stop-motion film from the National Film Board of Canada. (I – or, more likely, my mom – actually videotaped these films from the audience with our giant camcorder, back in the days when no one thought to object to such behavior; maybe I can still find that tape if I dig through enough boxes.) When my family traveled to Toronto to see the Ontario Science Center, my favorite “exhibit” was a small booth that showed the stream-of-consciousness clay-animated film Clay, Or The Origin of Species.

I can remember when a local library branch put on a little animation festival in a room upstairs. The films themselves included Jiri Trnka's stop-motion film The Hand, in which a stop-motion puppet is relentlessly pursued by a marauding human hand; an art-film parody called The Critic, in which the voice of Mel Brooks heckles an abstract film in humorous proto-MST3K fashion; and a Disney adaptation of Peter and the Wolf. There were two other films whose titles are unknown to me – a time-lapse movie of a building under construction, which I guess counts as an animated film; and a film about an urban family attending a funeral, seen from the point of view of the youngest family, and depicted in a constantly flowing art style that was probably created using finger paint. [Update: I've since seen the latter film again: it's The Street by Caroline Leaf.] Those are the five I can still remember, over a quarter-century later; whatever other films might have been in the program are now long-forgotten by me.

The 70s and (early to mid-)80s must have been the boom time for such things; back then, you would still see obscure short films padding out the running time between movies on cable, and of course Sesame Street and The Electric Company had their share of whimsical, borderline-experimental animation. Yet I seldom seemed to meet people from other areas who had similar memories of seeing oddball animated films in class or elsewhere. This left me wondering if the Rochester area – or perhaps my grade school in particular – was somehow unique in exposing its students to oddball short films that seemed to come from nowhere. Even as the home video boom made movies more accessible, and the Internet made it easier to dig up information on even the most esoteric topics, these obscure 70s/80s films seemed to drift into the dreamlike haze of fading childhood memories.

But these films had a huge impact on me as a kid. They always looked handmade; anyone who owned a home movie camera with single-frame capabilities could theoretically make one. The fact that these films were made by no one you'd ever heard of, and shown in environments other than regular movie theaters, must have also intrigued my young brain somehow. I credit these unsung films with inspiring me to make my own films.

Some time in the late 90s/early 2000s, the Rochester library donated its 16mm film collection to the Visual Studies Workshop, a school/art gallery (associated with SUNY Brockport) which also played host to the occasional underground film event. Yet except for a single multimedia show early on (in which old industrial films were played as background), the VSW never seemed to do anything with that vast and mysterious collection for years afterward.

My interest in “ephemeral” films (as I guess they're called now) was rekindled a couple years ago when Skip Elsheimer, manager of the AV Geeks film collection, came to town to put on a show at the George Eastman House. Lo and behold, here were exactly the sorts of weird and wonderful films I saw as a kid, even if the particular titles were new to me – such as Shake Hands With Danger, a workplace-safety industrial film whose title song has become an Internet phenomenon; and Malakapalakadoo, Skip Too, a truly bizarre clay animation intended to encourage children to use their imaginations. When I later went to the AV Geeks website and browsed their list of films, I found titles that I did recall from back in the day, such as The Wave (a film about students forming a paramilitary clique) and an adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. I slept better at night knowing that films like these were still out there, still remembered, and still loved.

Why am I writing about all this now? Well, such is the revival that these films are enjoying that I have been able see such films as they were meant to be seen – on 16mm in an alternative venue – in three different cities over a seven-day period, without even realizing it until later.


BUFFALO

The adventure began on Sunday, October 10, when I went to Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo to see a show of experimental animation that was being presented as part of the Buffalo Film Festival. Squeaky's website explained that this was actually a traveling animation show, separate from the Buffalo festival, and co-managed by Larry Cuba, who did the computer-animated Death Star plans for the original Star Wars. Cuba would be at the event in person, and showing three of his own experimental films from the 1970s/80s.

That the event had such low attendance is a measure of how far the arty world and the geek world have drifted apart from each other. This was a free event, and the equation of “free event” plus “guy who did special effects for Star Wars” probably could have draw every fan within a 200-mile radius if only that audience had heard of the event and/or had any taste for abstract animation. It's too bad because, in my brain, the two worlds still seem linked somehow. George Lucas' background was in experimental filmmaking before he went down the Power-Of-Myth road, and to me there's not really a big difference between an abstract 1970s computer animation and, say, Pong or Asteroids; it's all pioneering stuff from the early days of digital imagery.

I'd lost my appetite for purely abstract films after being force-fed too much of it in college, but I still dig the 70s ones, partly because they have a certain innocence to them (with none of the anger or pretentiousness that seemed to take over in later years) and partly because they tend to have groovy soundtracks. Cuba's three films, and some other old-school animations that he also screened, were an enjoyable blast from the past.


TORONTO

A mere five days later – on Friday – I decided to hoof it to Toronto for an evening to catch a film screening or two. I'd received Facebook notices about a couple different screenings going on that evening. One was a film festival event, and I thought it might be a good opportunity to network and spread the word about Saberfrog. The other was the regular Friday-night screening at Trash Palace, an industrial building (apparently used as a small press during the week) that screens 16mm films on Friday night. It was the latter that I ended up attending.

I'd been to Trash Palace once before, for the same reason – there were a couple different screenings I wanted to go to in Toronto, but Trash Palace was the only one I could make it in time for. Last time they were presenting what was supposedly a show of rare early student films from people like Tim Burton, Brad Bird and John Lasseter – a bit misleading, as these turned out to be live-action student films made by someone else, but gave minor credit (art direction or “Thanks to”) to Lasseter et al. Nonetheless, I got a taste of the Trash Palace experience and enjoyed it immensely, especially since other people brought their own 16mm student work to screen, which meant films I knew I would not have heard of and would never see again.

This time, the main event was a 1970s crime flick called Puppet on a String. The best way I can think of to describe this film is to say that it was like a blaxploitation film with an all-white cast. The film took place in Amsterdam, the main character was an American born in Holland (played by an actor with a Dutch-sounding name), and the cast seemed to generally be Brits (particularly the hero's obligatory you're-not-playing-by-the-rules superior), yet the film was full of Shaft-style badass music and fight scenes, including a rather impressive motorboat chase through the streets of Amsterdam.

The film was preceded by some pretty cool 1970s kung-fu trailers, with titles like The Chinese Professionals, Triple Iron, Black Dragon, and Black Samurai (those last two may have been the same film under two different titles).


ROCHESTER

I returned home to Rochester, and attended a 16mm screening the very next day at Visual Studies Workshop. Yes, VSW has finally begun unleashing its sweet collection of celluloid obscurity onto the public.

This was the second of what promises to be a monthly show at VSW; the first had had a specifically education/classroom theme, whereas this one was entitled “There Is No Reality” and was devoted to some of the more surreal and out-there films in the collection. Yeah.

The films included two Norman McLaren animations about moving lines (not quite as dull as it sounds, and actually quite hypnotic); the music video for the Dr. Demento-approved novelty song “Fish Heads”; and Help! My Snowman's Burning Down, a Richard Lester-esque film about a guy sitting in a bathtub on a New York pier and having various Magritte-like adventures.

Two of the films in the program were slightly familiar to me: K9000: A Space Oddity, a goofy animation about a dog who's captured by scientists (or whoever they are) and sent into space in a rocket ship to encounter a bunch of weird crap; and Why Me?, a National Film Board of Canada cartoon about the stages of acceptance faced by the terminally ill. Stills from both of these had been featured in the late-70s edition of Kit Laybourne's The Animation Book, which was a bible to me as a teenager; in fact, that book used storyboards and other development materials from Why Me? as examples. This was actually the second time I'd seen Why Me?, though I can't remember if I saw it in college or on cable TV.

The finale of the program, a 1970 film called Hello Mustache, was far more obscure; in fact, the guy curating the show said that he had been able to find out almost nothing about the film, “except that we have a copy.” This was a black-and-white, dialogue-heavy film about a hippie male (complete with poncho and brimmed hat) and a square female. Well, supposedly square, since she's wearing an outfit I didn't know was ever considered ordinary – a loud necktie with dress shirt, a vertically striped miniskirt, and white go-go boots. (I quite liked that look, though, and hope that it comes back; it didn't hurt that the actress wearing it was extremely cute.)

Both characters were Jewish New Yorkers, and it seemed like the film was trying to be a surreal/whimsical look at relationships in an Annie Hall-esque manner, but somehow ended up less like Woody Allen and more like David Lynch. This was partly due to the shadowy black—and-white photography, and partly due to the sheer strangeness of the dialogue. The opening scene of the film was just a black screen (with a small, moving white blob that may or may not have been just a scratch on the print) accompanied by a lengthy offscreen phone conversation between the two leads; I thought at first that the entire film would be like this. The ending of the film is equally memorable – the lead actress standing in the doorway of her apartment, at the end of a dimly hit hallway, forlornly calling the hippie – “Alan … Aaaaalaaaaan...” – like a mythical siren.

The sexual themes in both Hello Mustache and Help! My Snowman's Burning Down made me realize that there must be even more strange films in the Rochester library's collection than the ones I saw in class as a kid. Somehow I'd always assumed the films in that collection were all educational or otherwise kid-friendly, simply because those were the ones I would have seen. But clearly there are even deeper waters to be explored.

The enigma of Hello Mustache was as fascinating as the movie: Who made it, and why? Was this a theater piece that someone decided to commit to celluloid? Was this a student film, or funded by a grant? Did these people ever make any other movies? Where are they now, and are they even still alive? How did the Rochester library come to possess a copy – was it donated, or did they purchase it, and in either case how did the library come to know about the film in the first place? Was any of this at all unusual for the time, or was 16mm filmmaking (complete with optical sound) as common back then as, say, YouTube postings today? So many tantalizing mysteries.

The other great thing about seeing 60s/70s curiosities like Hello Mustache and K9000: A Space Oddity is that it reminded me why I was attracted to filmmaking in the first place. Nowadays, it seems, both Hollywood and the audience (now narrowly defined as the ComiCon audience only) seem to have mutually concluded that any new movie must now be based on something you already know before you even set foot in the theater – it must be a remake of a movie you've already seen, or a novel you've already read ... or a comic book, or a video game, or an old TV show … and must contain absolutely no artistic, creative or personal stamp.

But twenty, thirty, forty years ago, it was the opposite. Film was the medium where anything was possible.