Recent weeks have been a sustained series of thrills in the world of “The Retriever”. Just over a month ago I was well over a mile high in Colorado at the Durango Independent Film Festival, just weeks later were screening in our own backyard at the North Hollywood Cinefest, where Barney was deservedly nominated for Best Actor in a Short, and this past weekend our SFX makeup artist Nikki Nina Nguyen and I road tripped out to the Phoenix Film Festival.
Each of this trio of fests was special for reasons that could each fill their own blog post. In Durango, my good friends Christine and Matt were in town with their own short film, “Killed in Action”, and we got to spend several days seeing beautiful sights and breathing mountain air in a community that seemed fully-invested in the festival. And at the end, my friends won the Festival’s Audience Award for Best Short Film – quite an achievement for a somber drama in a field of crowd-pleasing comedies and the like.
North Hollywood was personally special since the NoHo Arts District was the location of my first LA apartment. The Laemmle NoHo movie theater is a tireless champion of independent film and just walking distance away from where I used to live, so it felt like a genuine homecoming. Plus, their expert projection of a 4K DCP made it probably the highest-quality viewing of my film that I may ever enjoy.
Phoenix, on top of being the festival with the highest quality of programming of any I’ve attended, had a profound impact on me and my view of where I am at as a filmmaker. By all available evidence, “The Retriever” was the cheapest, smallest-crewed project there that wasn’t in the student category, and we were scheduled in a block that featured shorts with 5-figure budgets, and Oscar-nominated talents behind the camera. At our first Q&A I had to get over a genuine brain-blanking moment of “How did we get invited here?”
I think we had advantages in both our short length and our scrappy, comedic tone. In a block that featured many weighty projects, we served as an ideal midway palate cleanser. This is significant knowledge in the film festival world – if a programmer is considering your 20-minute short; they’re burdened by knowing that saying “yes” to you might mean saying “no” to 2-3 other shorts they really like (their head of shorts programming confided in me that she faced this exact dilemma), so if you’re going to occupy that much time, you had better hit a home run.
We have two more festival appearances to make this month, at Bare Bones in Oklahoma (where I won’t get to travel), and then a final appearance here in Southern California at Cinema at the Edge in Santa Monica. “The Retriever” has, on a nearly-identical budget, far surpassed “Samantha Gets Back Out There” in its success out there on the circuit; and the more my realistic expectations get shaped by experience, the more proud and impressed I am by what my team and I pulled off. Since my return from Durango I’ve been fired up to get the next short off the ground. I already have a draft, a project I’m calling “The Dinner Scene”; and some loose crewing up and planning have already begun. Each of these three festivals are on my “Definite Yes” list to submit to again, and I think I have a real opportunity to grow with this next one. Now to find the money…(think I’m going to be saying those words for the rest of my life…)