Film festival provides buzz for student works

The film industry is a vibrating amphetamine-high world reeling with phone calling, deal making and networking. Just getting a foot in Hollywood’s constantly rotating door often requires a lot of resourcefulness, ingenuity and luck. And maneuvering successfully through the industry itself is a constant crapshoot such that even the most intelligent and talented people occasionally find themselves going for broke, going broke, and booted back out into the alleys. Naturally, every leg-up, every connection, every scrap of publicity and tinny of buzz is of great importance to up-and-coming filmmakers.

So the annual UCLA Festival, held at the James Bridges Theater which showcases work from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in a host of areas, comes as a great opportunity for student filmmakers to strut their stuff center stage.

However, while anyone in the School of Theater, Film and Television, who completes a 30-minute film, can have it shown at the James Bridges Theater, only the creme de la creme of the films, elected in a two-tier process by a jury of 20 students followed by a panel of industry professionals, are eligible for the Spotlight Awards. The Spotlight Awards, held at the Directors Guild, is targeted primarily for industry insiders in the hopes of generating buzz and future job prospects.

“The Spotlight evening is a night when we try to present our face to the film industry,” said Hal Ackerman, a UCLA screenwriting professor and chairman of the Festival 2002 Committee. “The careers of Alexander Payne (“Election”), Brad Silberling (“City of Angels”) and Gina Prince-Blythewood (“Love and Basketball”) have been advanced through the Spotlights.”

Another part of the Festival is the Screenwriter’s Showcase night where excerpts from six student screenplays, selected by a host of producers, agents and others in the industry, are performed at the Geffen Playhouse.

“There have been quite a few screenplay sales that have come from people seeing those productions,” Ackerman said.

Unfortunately, most of the public will not have the opportunity to see either the Spotlight Awards or the Screenwriter’s Showcase, both of which are largely invitation-only events. Nevertheless, the films screened at the James Bridges Theater, the majority of films that make up the $45,000 festival, are open to the public. It is a rare opportunity to see the diverse output, ranging from documentaries to animation and dramas to comedies, that the student body had slathered blood, sweat and tears for. And any amount of exposure helps for the student filmmakers. Filmmaking seems to operate as a step-up process in which the previous film, and any generated buzz, paves the way for the next one.

“I got a Student Academy Award for my first film at UCLA,” said writer-director and recent master of fine art’s degree recipient Robin Larsen. Larsen’s surreal and dark comedic film, “Out of Habit,” where a vindictive nun attempts to kill her milkman, will be screened at the Festival.

“I was able to go to a lot of people who ordinarily wouldn’t have the nerve to help, or who wouldn’t be interested in returning my phone call, so having that prestige definitely benefited me,” Larsen continued.

Larsen, whose background lies in theater acting and directing, was able to creatively “schmooze” most of her equipment, either discounted or for free, including the normally ultra-expensive 35mm film stock she shot from when she scavenged the unwanted remains of sitcom shoots. “We got 95% off of our camera package at Panavision,” Larsen continued. “People look at (“Out of Habit”) and ask how much I spent but I got a lot for free.”

Money, or the complete lack of, is a major issue for most of the filmmakers, many who must juggle classes and other responsibilities in a perilous balance wedged between their filmmaking duties, which include scrounging for funds in the form of grants. Due to the general budgetary constraints, from pre-production where the crew and equipment are assembled through post-production where sound is mixed in and shots are edited, filming becomes a laborious endeavor in which creativity and patience must prevail over going ballistic.

This is not always the case, however. For Gil Kenan, whose animated Spotlight Award winning film with creeping German expressionist overtones “The Lark,” the real cost of his film was time.

“I literally finished this the day before it was due which was two weeks ago,” Kenan admitted. “I really just did it all on my home computer, I shot it on video, and it cost me less than $400 for the entire movie.”

Kenan seems to be an exception as monetary deficiencies plagued most of the filmmakers, including Grace Lee, writer-director of the Spotlight winning “Barrier Device”, which also took home the Student Academy Award in the narrative competition.

“If I had money, the process would’ve gone a lot quicker,” Lee said. “I did all the post-production like editing and sound design, on top of taking classes and TA-ing.”

But many of the filmmakers are lucky to have professional talent helping them in their cinematic struggling. Lee’s film, in which an ambitious young Ph.D. candidate loses all objectivity when she realizes her subject is her ex’s current girlfriend, has two established actresses in the lead roles: Sandra Oh (“The Red Violin”) and Suzy Nakamura (“The West Wing”) respectively. Similarly, Larsen was able to recruit actor John Astin (the original “Addams Family” series) during a chance encounter at a vegetarian restaurant in which she hesitantly approached him with a script. “He talked my ear off for an hour and took the script, with my notes all over it, and he said he would call me if he liked it or thought it was a good part,” Larsen recalled. A few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, she got the call.

Lee also acknowledges the massive group effort it took to bring her idea into a walking, talking cinematic story.

“The film couldn’t be made if people didn’t volunteer their time and effort,” she said.

All of the student films are packaged with optimism and hope for the opportunity to set a foot in the right direction and charge headlong into the Hollywood’s dangerous, and exhilarating wilderness of celluloid storytelling.

“What we do is try to aid and abet, create the atmosphere that is most conducive to a premiere of a student’s film or, if they’re graduating, a send-off into the world,” said Ackerman. “And anytime anyone has any notoriety or acclaim, it helps.”

Related Program

Keywords

"alexander payne" "brad silberling" "hal ackerman" 

Share This

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Delicious

Permalink