Film festival provides buzz for student works

For By Films "Out of Habit," directed by Robin Larsen, is one of
several films to be featured at UCLA Festival 2002: A Showcase of
Student Work.

By Ryan Joe
daily bruin contributor
[email protected]

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.”