DAY JOB Chronicles, Chapter 3: Getting an indie movie seen is fucking hard
Finally taking a couple weeks off from shooting my second indie/guerrilla/DIY/fuck-me/this-is-a-nightmare/swore-I’d-never-do-this-to-myself-again feature ‘film’ (news on that one coming soon..ish), thought this would be a good time to get back to some long overdue bloggering.
I’m holding off on Chapter 2 (the ‘making of’ portion) of the DAY JOB saga for now because if and when a DVD is released, I think the bonus features will cover how it all went down pretty well. As of right now, due to music licensing & other legal mumbo-jumbo, the DAY JOB DVD is caught up in some red tape. Hopefully agreements with the outside parties involved can be made someday and it'll finally get out into the world, but as of right now, things are uncertain. Another sad reality of being an indie filmmaker who happens to not be independently wealthy.
So, it’s 2015 and my little movie I wrapped shooting in 2010 has still only been seen by a small group of people. In April of 2011, I rented a theater and invited the cast, our families & friends to come check out an early cut. It wasn’t quite audience-ready at the time, but using that night as an impromptu test-screening really helped me spot some of its glaring pacing issues and technical flaws, so I went back in and recut it for the 53rd time.
Then I started submitting the trimmed-down version to film festivals. I knew nothing of how to go about this, but learned early on that the film fest world is every bit as incestuous and sleazy as Hollywood itself, filled with politics, back-scratching and everything else I am absolutely not in this for. It was pretty enlightening (and more than a little bit nauseating) when I slowly figured out how this bullshit game is played. For example, for the “prestigious” festivals like Sundance and Cannes, they demand a world premiere of your film. This means that, if you’re a sucker like me and don’t realize these elitist snobs won’t even watch a film submitted by an unknown without household-name celebrities in the cast, they charge twice as much as most other festivals AND make you wait to not be accepted before you’re allowed to submit elsewhere, to avoid disqualification. Now, if I knew then what I know now, obviously I would’ve saved my money (and about 9 months) and skipped the big festivals and went right for the smaller ones, but instead I wasted money I didn’t have, waited, and of course, was rejected.
All in all, I submitted DAY JOB to probably 25 festivals worldwide, from horror festivals to mainstream to underground to sci-fi/B-movie, anywhere I thought it had a chance. Not only did I spend nearly a year getting one rejection letter after another after another, a handful of these bitch ass festivals didn’t even bother sending a rejection (after taking my money and likely not watching the movie). They’d just post their line-ups and I’d have to scroll through to not see it on the lineup. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I thought DAY JOB deserved to be screened at all or even a third of these festivals, but is an email saying “thanks for submitting, we’re gonna pass” too much to ask? Lazy pricks.
The whole process was pretty gross, and the more I learned about how most of these festivals operate--including the FACT that judges and programmers generally watch about 5 minutes of any film they haven’t heard of before deciding if they’ll bother finishing it--the more I wished I'd saved every dollar I spent on submission fees and used that money to put it out myself or just go make another movie.
But I was stubborn and believed in this weird little movie. I honestly thought film festivals, especially the horror and exploitation type, would want to program something a little ‘out there’ like DAY JOB, something unique that their audiences hadn’t seen 1000 times before. I could not have been more wrong. I’d see the programming lists come out, one after the next, and they all pretty much looked the same. In 2011/2012, True Blood was still pretty popular, so about a third of the lineups would be vampire movies. Shitty, forgettable vampire movies you still haven’t heard of. Zombies were making a big comeback thanks to The Walking Dead, too, so there’d be lots and lots of zombie movies. Shitty, forgettable zombie movies, even worse than the vampire ones. Found-footage was continuing to oversaturate the indie scene (if you want to know my feelings on this particular sub-genre, click here), so a bunch of “Blair Witch Project” rip-offs would be programmed. It really opened my eyes to the reality that film festival world had pretty much adopted Hollywood’s mentality of ‘spoon feed the dummies, show them what they’ve already seen… they like that.’
In the meantime, I’d sent screeners out to numerous horror websites and magazines, and unlike a lot of the festivals, some of them actually watched it, and even more surprising, some pretty damn good reviews started coming in. If interested, below are a few of the less-spoilery ones:
LA Horror, Foul Feast, Dread Central
However, positive reviews aside, it was becoming more and more evident that DAY JOB probably wasn’t going to fit in anywhere, film festival-wise. It was far too ‘horror’ for mainstream festivals, not ‘horror’ enough for horror festivals, too ‘artsy’ for exploitation … I even heard from one horror festival programmer that he thought some of the violence would be too disturbing for their audiences. At a HORROR festival. Fuck me.
After about a year and a half (no joke) having every festival pass, and just when I thought it was dead and ready to be buried, I saw DAY JOB listed on Pollygrind Underground Film Festival’s 2012 program. Unbelievable. Somebody had actually watched my movie and was willing to let their precious, sensitive audience watch it? Took about a day to sink in that I hadn’t imagined it.
Pollygrind was a tiny, truly independent film festival festival run, literally, by one man, Chad Clinton Freeman [after its 5th festival in 2014, Pollygrind is currently on hiatus indefinitely, which is why I say “was”]. The audience was almost exclusively other indie filmmakers, like me, whose work had been shunned by most other festivals. There was a palpable, unspoken camaraderie in the room, watching each others’ work, rooting for each other. No different when I went back in 2014 as a spectator, something really special about this event Chad had created. Most importantly, for me, this was the first time I was watching DAY JOB with strangers. People who wouldn’t be biased to like or dislike the movie based on knowing me or anyone involved. It was pure. And it played just like I had hoped. They laughed where I hoped they would, cringed where I hoped they would, and everyone was a little shell-shocked when it was over (none moreso than my own mother, who showed up even though I warned her that doing so would be a terrible idea … but, like me, she’s stubborn). The fact that Chad had the balls to show this weird ass movie gave me a renewed sense of hope. Maybe there actually could be an audience out there for my oddball brand of ‘horror.’
Then, almost immediately, another film festival took a chance on it, this one in my own hometown. San Francisco IndieFest’s horror festival Another Hole in the Head, one of the longest running American genre festivals decided my sick little movie belonged in their lineup, and it was given the coveted 11 pm slot on their opening weekend. This was truly a beautiful thing.
Like the Pollygrind screening a month before, the Another Hole in the Head screening was a hit. As strange and unpleasant as DAY JOB is, clearly this was the audience I had made it for; the outcasts, the weirdos, the people who’ll go to an 11 pm screening for a movie they’d never heard of on a rainy November night who truly DO want to see something they weren’t expecting.
Easily my fondest memories of this era were from that particular weekend. During the Q & A immediately following the screening, one gentleman asked “What’s wrong with you?,” the next night I was called up onstage during another filmmaker’s Q & A (none other than legendary Canuxploitation director Barry J. Gillis) who, for reasons unknown, insisted on talking about DAY JOB rather than his own film, and in the lobby of the theater (I believe it was the following night) when an audience member came up and asked “are you, like, a nice, well-adjusted person?” Again, further reassurance there was (and is) an audience for movies like this. I mean, a grown man found the movie so convincing and disturbing, he worried I may actually be dangerous. High praise, indeed.
And just as quickly as things had turned around with the incredible screenings and all the positive feedback … the crickets returned.
Aaaand now I’m at the part of this blog where I try to remember if there was a point I was trying to make in writing this. I’m sure there was, and it was probably some ‘hang in there/don’t give up/follow your dreams no matter what’ kind of bullshit, but guess what? I’m hungry.
So, there ya go, kids. Stay away from drugs. Wait, no. Do ALL the drugs. Go nuts. DAY JOB Chronicles, Chapter 4 coming eventually … maybe Chapter 2, as well. We’ll see. Thanks for stopping by. And definitely go check out my short films on Reelhouse if you haven’t already. MUCH appreciated.