Jodom in the News
You Never Forget Your First Time
By Mike Amato - Jun 12, 2002
They say that the film festival ritual is a lot like dating. Well, okay, maybe it's just me who says that, and let's face it. I think that everything is like dating. Still, there is a lot of rejection involved, and a lot of looking for love in all the wrong places. When you do finally find the one that might be right for you, you have to get their attention, get them interested in you, and jump through hoops in order to get them into bed. And even after all that, chances are you'll end up taking a cold shower, instead of lying next to a warm body. For those who've been through it before, it can be a simultaneously frustrating and exhilarating experience. But the highs and lows are even more acute for people like me. You see, until recently, I was a virgin.
I had been close before, getting all the way to second base. Our first film, "Kilroy Was Here" was nominated in a couple of categories at last year's Rewind Video Awards. But I was caught off guard, like the ugly girl at the dance who says "no" to the best looking boy in the school because she's afraid he's just having her on. And since we were filming during the weekend of Camp Rewind, I was unable to attend.
Determined to be deflowered the second time around, we asked for advice. People who knew told us that in order to be sired, we would need to throw ourselves at as many film festivals as possible, in hopes that one of them might find us desirable. So we submitted our movie, a mystery/suspense feature entitled "After Midnight", to every film festival with a twinkle in its eye. Or, at least, every one we could find that would accept VHS or DVD formats.
Submission seems like such a dirty word. And to cheapen it further, submission costs money. You need to ship your tapes. You need to pay an entry fee. You need to pull together press kits with posters and bios and head shots and bribe money (just kidding), and incur more shipping charges. And if you get selected, you have to pay your own travel expenses. Heck, at least when you pay for sex, you're assured of getting something out of the investment.
Anyway, once we submitted to a vast array of potential suitors, we sat waiting by the phone anxiously, our fragile, psyches hanging in the balance. There was the part of us that was afraid we'd get selected by multiple festivals and go broke trying to attend them all (picture Quasimodo worrying that he hadn't bought enough condoms). There was the other part of us that just prayed that our tapes didn't get returned with a "don't quit your day job" sticky-noted to them. Our ego wrestled with our self-loathing for weeks. Kudos. Defilement. Glory. Humiliation. She's my daughter. She's my sister. You get the idea.
And then, on April 21st, the phone finally rang. We received official notification that After Midnight had been selected as one of five Best Feature nominees for the deadCenter FilmFestival at the University of Central Oklahoma. Our hearts soared. Our throats lumped. Our pants got a little damp. Our nipples... Huh?
Central Oklahoma? The deadCenter Film Festival?
Suddenly, our desire to nail just about any film festival with a third leg was replaced by a feeling that maybe we should have set the bar a little higher. No offense to the fine people who live there, but how many Hollywood Studios were going to send a "scout" to Central Oklahoma, to a film festival that sounds more like a tribute to roadkill than a celebration of film? What, was Peoria overbooked? What about Cannes? Telluride? Sundance? What were the chances we were going to experience a Schwabb's Drug Store discovery moment in Central Oklahoma?
Still, the more we found out about the deadCenter Film Festival, the more impressed we were. The campus location was pleasant and the event seemed well-organized. Dinner with the Mayor! Press Conferences! Sponsorships by the Independent Film Channel and Cox Communications! After Parties! It sounded like a real Hollywood event, but without the hair plugs and the arrogance.
Of course, until you actually went to the film festival, you really didn't know what you were getting into. Would your pride and joy be shown at a luxurious hotel ampitheatre, or the back wall of someone's garage? Would your audience be a couple hundred people, or a couple dozen? Would you be hobnobbing with Gary Sinise, or Gary Coleman? We were on a blind date, and all we knew so far was that she had a nice personality.
But would she put out? I mean, at this level, when we say it's an honor just to be nominated, we aren't just kidding. Heck, we were ecstatic that people were actually paying to see our film (they just weren't paying us)! Still, when you factor in all the expenses, effort, forfeited vacation days and rigmarole you have to go through just to get here, you'd obviously like to win. All that crap about not caring is what you say IN CASE you don't win. Secretly, you'd much rather be Hansel than Derek Zoolander.
Unfortunately, you have no idea what the competition is like. Your low-budget, poorly lit, sound-impaired epic could be the cream of the crop, or it could end up being a cautionary tale of celluloid dreams run amok. All you know is that one of the other nominated films, a local entry entitled "Sam and Janet", seems to be featured prominently in the schedule for some reason, on the same night, at the same time, that your movie is showing. And you just saw a note on the festival's website that says "this festival is a celebration of all the talented artists coming out of Oklahoma", and you're a Yankee from Massachusetts. These are not good signs. Your blind date has just told you that she still has feelings for her old boyfriend.
Well, you're never going to get laid if you don't leave your apartment. So I decided to mosey Out West, all by my lonesome. I scheduled an early morning flight in order to allow enough time to check-in, get changed, and get to the awards ceremony. But due to a day-long comedy of errors and delays, I didn't get to the restaurant until two hours after the awards show had started. As I pulled up, I saw a host of filmmakers streaming out of the restaurant.
I had missed the whole event. The date of my life, and I had stood her up. Tired and bedraggled at this point, I had to know if she had waited for me or left with someone else. It was the latter. "Sam and Janet", a romantic comedy made by a man who turns out to be something of a local celebrity, walked away with the best feature prize. In fact, despite the fact that only a dozen or so films out of the 80-plus shown were from Oklahoma, many of the award-winning films had ties to that state. Well, they did say that it was a celebration of Oklahoma filmmakers...
Maybe it's just that I'd been travelling for over 13 hours. Maybe it's because I realized that the fact that I wasn't from Oklahoma really had nothing to do with not winning. Maybe it's because I discovered that most of the entries, while independent films, were not amateur films like ours. Whatever the reason, I wasn't as disappointed as I thought I'd be. I just trudged back to the hotel, mumbling to myself over and over again that it was an honor just to be nominated.
The Press Conference was at 8 AM the next morning. Getting up early was just what I wanted to do after a day like the one I'd just had. But I had missed the first big schmooze, so I couldn't miss this one.
I discovered two things. First, and this may come as a shock to some of you, filmmakers like to sleep late. I was one of only 5 or 6 groups represented at the conference. Second, the press had completely snubbed us to cover the dedication of a new dome on the Capitol Building, a dome which I'm told no one in OKC even wanted. They had dumped us for another girl, and she wasn't even that attractive.
As we waited for the press horde that wasn't coming, I sat between two other filmmakers. One of them, an Oklahoman in his late thirties, told me he was the cinematographer for the "best documentary" winner, "If I Could". It's a sequel to a CBS documentary made 20 years ago about troubled teens and a program designed to help them. One of those teens had now grown up and corrected the course of her life, only to encounter similar problems with her own son.
The other man, in his early twenties, was named John. He had written/directed/produced/edited a short entitled "Cemetery Love", which includes an underwater love scene between two widows who meet at the graves of their deceased husbands, where one of them is in the process of digging up his arm! Talk about your unconventional plots. Let's see Hollywood do that story!
I spent my afternoon trying to drum up attendance for our movie, knowing that we were competing against the 1st prizewinner for eyeballs. I went on campus and distributed movie posters with the date, place and time of the showing. I donated $20 to a local carwash funding drive in exchange for their agreement to pass out our flyers to their customers. I placed posters in strategic positions all over the campus. I brought my laptop with the trailer for the movie loaded on it and showed it to anyone who would watch.
That night, our film, in one of the secondary theatres apparently reserved for "lesser" submissions, showed to about a dozen indifferent people. As far as I can tell, this was the norm for most of the festival's movies that night (or at least the ones in our building). I sold a whopping total of two tapes, and exchanged several more with other filmmakers.
The upshot is that I flew 2000 miles, spent over $700 in various expenses and fees, blew my weekend, didn't win a thing, and showed our labor of love to 12 people, most of whom could have cared less. Not exactly money well spent.
And yet, like John Cusack in "The Sure Thing", I discovered something. I'd been pursuing my all-important "first lay" so hard that I had almost missed the girl of my dreams, who was standing right in front of me.
I thought back to the conversations I had had with some of my peers earlier in the day, and it slowly dawned on me. THIS was why I had traveled all those miles. It isn't an honor to be nominated. The real honor is to sit beside other filmmakers and hear their war stories. To compare notes and ideas. To exchange contact info. To hear the passion and pride with which others describe their creations. This is what it was really all about.
You see, each of us has found our one true love. A love strong enough to get us out of bed at 5 AM for an early shoot, or back to bed at 4 AM, after a late-night one. Strong enough to keep us up late at night for months on end, staring at a 17" monitor as our film clip slowly renders. Strong enough to allow us to endure insults and bad reviews from people who will never film a minute of footage. You see, our movies may not be the best ones ever made, but we'd made them just the same. They were our own creations. And we are fortunate enough to be able to say those three little words that too few people ever get to utter in their lifetimes.
I'm a filmmaker.
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