Film: Going Amateur to Pro

Star Wars was made by someone who’d been a teenager in a dusty, sunbaked nowhere town, whose ambition led him to become a famous director. Star Wars, in fact, is about a kid in the middle of a dusty, sunbaked nowhere town, led on a path to become a warrior hero. Steven Spielberg’s new, semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans is about a kid whose ambition and a succession of 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm cameras leads him on a path from obscurity to world-conquering moviemaking stardom.

For any aspiring film director, getting a start in making a living is still the same old story, a fight for love and glory. Is there still a path that stretches from a lone kid using a camera to big-time filmmaking? There is. But it’s tricky, chancy, full of unfair obstacles and unexpected lucky breaks—it always was, and always will be.

There’s no direct path from amateur to pro, yet at one time, almost every professional filmmaker was once someone with a home movie camera and a shoebox full of small reels of film. (Later, of course, it would be a home video camcorder and a shoebox of tapes.) Some were ambitious enough to make their own three-minute imitation movies or TV shows. Most of them were simple, silent slapstick, a kid’s version of Mad Magazine parodies.

If an amateur made a really clever short film, there was a chance of attracting pro interest, maybe even a job interview at, say, an ad agency or a small production company. A college friend of mine got noticed by filming a dog at the beach, catching a Frisbee in slow motion to the music of “The Ride of the Valkyries”. That’s what film students do. They show their abilities by making short films with settings and themes scaled back to what they can handle.

But some amateur filmmakers just can’t help themselves. Like Steven Spielberg’s stand-in, teenage Sammy Fabelman, they want to make feature length films or something close to it, not knowing or really caring that there’s no market for them afterwards. There’s something about feature length, telling a complete story in roughly 80 to 180 minutes, that feels right. Their films don’t lead directly to jobs, but they are a satisfying hobby for their young creators that teach vital storytelling skills. So maybe they lead indirectly to making that professional leap.

Over the years, the technologies of the movies changed; images became digital; and distribution is done over the internet now, not by physically shipping cans of film. Today’s filmless digital “film” making has cut production costs of low budget movies greatly. They allow people to finance their own jump from promising to proven, either with their own money or with a small group of backers.

Some are trying to reach a family-friendly audience, like the actual family behind the gentle comedy My Bad Dad, which features the only-once-in-a-lifetime, total un-self-consciousness of child actors. For about $90,000, they made on honest-to-goodness professional feature film, better than plenty of comparable made-for-TV movies on Hallmark or the Disney Channel.

Let’s stipulate that a hundred grand is, by almost anyone’s standards, a lot of money. But being able to make credible, saleable feature films with a hundred grand lowers the drawbridge to a lot of people. And even in today’s market upheavals, they are saleable at realistic prices to outlets like Tubi, Pluto TV, and Freevee.

One of the more ambitious recent examples was released right before the pandemic, The Challenger Disaster, a 2019 film with a cast of mostly modestly known actors, but headed by Dean Cain, who loves to work and seems to have a soft spot for regional filmmakers making a leap to national access.

Others in this circa-$100,000 club, like this year’s The Bride in a Box, explore suspense and scary themes without bloodshed or coarseness. The filmmakers caution that being “clean” doesn’t mean that their thriller is suitable for all ages; they consider it to be too intense for under-10s. That’s fair, and smart; know your target audience and know its comfort zone.

Not everyone who picks up a camera expects to make a Hollywood career out of it. There are contests and screenings for amateur and experimental films, some of them supported by art collectors, who consider these non-commercial works as folk art.

A side note: I’ve long been tempted to do a post about a swanky Manhattan party in 1996, held at the palatial Manhattan apartment of Jill Sackler, one of the heirs to the Sackler fortune--you know, Purdue Pharmaceuticals--because she was sponsoring one of our AFI film shows in the East Village, a tribute to amateur and experimental filmmakers. This was one of AFI’s occasional gestures towards flyover country.

After the show, the audience was whisked away uptown to Jill’s place, in our rented fleet of limousines. The whole evening was about as upper crust, old money New York as I’d ever see in my life. The Sacklers were friends with other arts patrons who gave to independent filmmakers, funders like San Francisco’s George Gund and the Annenberg family of Palm Springs. The Annenbergs, well represented at Jill’s dinner party, were once GOP royalty. I was so naive back then that I was astonished that allegedly rock-ribbed Republicans partied down too. Like a slow-to-catch-on detective in a 1940s movie, I seemed to be the last one to realize what a superficial act it all was.

There was a contrast between the good intentions of sponsoring a contest to discover film talent in the middle of the country, and the eventual effects on the middle of the country of Purdue Pharmaceuticals’ promising new product line for that spring of 1996, a synthetic opioid called Oxycontin.

In the climax of Futureworld, (allegedly) skeptical, new generation journalist Peter Fonda confronts slimy establishment corporate type Arthur Hill, who specialized in playing slimy establishment corporate types. Fonda reveals what he’s learned: that these new, post-Westworld human recreations are so realistic, they’re going to take over. But instead of being shocked, Hill just smiles.

Now it’s Fonda’s turn to be shocked. “You mean...you’re in on it?” And Hill laughs his cynical upper class laugh. “Of course I’m in on it”.

If there’s one phrase that encapsulates my experience with this social and economic class, it’s his haughty delivery of “Of course I’m in on it”.