A madman moves through a cornfield at dusk. Lightning flashes every five or ten seconds. The six-inch high corn bends in the wind as the madman makes his way mechanically along one row, chopping out the corn with a hoe. Chop, step, chop, step, chop, step. What depravity causes an otherwise normal-looking guy to chop a single row of corn out of a twenty-acre field in a lightening storm? The diagnosis: he’s a filmmaker. He’s working in the near dark so no one will see his act of vandalism (corn is worth something these days, after all). He’s creating something he calls “shooting alleys.” Not for now, but for August, when the corn is ten or twelve feet high. And not even this August, but August 1st, 2011, when his feature film, ROWS, is scheduled to begin shooting. The 2010 “shooting alleys” are just a rehearsal—a dry run for camera testing, storyboarding, and creating a “teaser” for a web site that does not yet exist. In other words, this madman is in pre-production.
Whatever drives someone to want to make a truly independent feature film, it contains a tinge of madness. It’s a misunderstood, quixotic ordeal more likely to lead to broken marriages, nervous breakdowns, and fractured friendships than to anything resembling profit. And that even with financing in place! Yet indie filmmakers great and small continue to fight the overwhelming odds in the quest to reach the Holy Grail—an audience.
Why do they do it? The psychological motivations could fill countless hours of shrink sessions, if shrinks were in the budget. Art, ego, desire for acceptance, attention, fame, money (however unlikely), obsession, and desperation all play a role. It’s like climbing an Everest of personality dysfunction in a logistical blizzard. But whatever compels these filmmakers, I love them for what they do. And you should too, because without them we are all condemned to propping up the tent poles: you can have fun in the Hollywood big top, but there’ll always be that stubborn odor of elephant shit.
And so here we have a unique opportunity to track the production of a truly independent film from the moment of conception (the script is not yet completed) to the first public screening, and beyond. We’re not talking about EPK filler here, we’re talking about life, and it’s bound to get messy.
— David Warfield
June 6, 2010
