Tag: C. Scott McCoy

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Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks

After a pause caused by the festival itself, here’s the next-to-last installment of Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits, where we count down the winners of the Best of Indie Memphis poll. You can get caught up with part one, part two, and part three.

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011)

Paradise Lost directors Joe Berlinger (left) and Bruce Sinofsky (right) pose with Jason Baldwin (center).

The West Memphis Three case is one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history. But if it weren’t for a couple of struggling directors pitching a true crime documentary to HBO in the early 1990s, Damian Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelly would still be in jail for a crime they didn’t commit. Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger’s came to the Mid South asking, how could three normal teenagers commit such a gruesome crime? But once they got here, they quickly became convinced that the accused were innocent. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders At Robin Hood Hills would prove to be one of the most consequential documentaries ever, and has influenced a generation of works from Serial to True Detective. Berlinger and Sinofsky followed the case for 18 years, and when new DNA evidence came to light, their cameras were there. In 2011, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory had its second public screening at Indie Memphis weeks after the West Memphis Three walked free. When Jason Baldwin walked onstage unannounced at the Q&A, it was one of the most electric moments in Indie Memphis history. Later that year, the film was nominated for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards.

Undefeated (2011)

The same film beat Paradise Lost 3 at both  the Oscars and Indie Memphis’ documentary category that year. Undefeated was directed by Daniel Lindsey and T.J. Martin told the story of the Manassas High School Tigers and their coach Bill Courtney as they attempt to turn around their school’s historic losing streak on the football field. Today, Undefeated remains a sports movie staple.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks

Antenna (2012)

The Memphis punk scene started in January 1978, when the Sex Pistols played at the Taliesyn Ballroom—now the site of the Taco Bell on Union Avenue. A bunch of kids who thought they were the only ones listening to punk rock in Memphis found each other that night. Months later, some of them descended on The Well, a down-on-its-luck country western bar a few blocks from the Taliesyn, on Madison Avenue. In 1981, The Well became Antenna, the most radical music venue in the south. For the next fourteen years, Antenna was a haven for freaks and the home of new music in Memphis. National bands like R.E.M., Black Flag, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Green Day played at Antenna years before they were filling arenas. It was ground zero for Memphis’ alternative creative explosion that flew under the national radar while spawning groups like Panther Burns, Pezz, The Oblivians, The Grifters, and Jay Reatard—just to name a few.

When I was approached by Ross Johnson and John Floyd about making a documentary about Antenna and the music scene that thrived there, I knew it was something the Memphis community sorely needed. But I balked at the opportunity. I worried about the availability of archival footage. Antenna existed before the age when everyone had a cameraphone in their pockets. Would there be tape of bands like The Modifiers playing at Antenna? Turns out, I needn’t have worried. Antenna owner Steve McGehee knows everybody. By the time Antenna premiered at Indie Memphis in 2012, we had amassed more than 100 hours of vintage video, hundreds of still images, and 88 interviews, some of which were three hours long.

It’s difficult for me to talk about Antenna today. After winning the Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize at Indie Memphis 2012, we have tried in vain for years to find finishing funds to pay for the music licensing fees. I am extremely grateful that enough people remembered Antenna to vote it onto the list. Hopefully one day, everyone can see it. Until then, this is the only bit of untold Memphis music history I can share with you:

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (2)

Very Extremely Dangerous (2012)

One of the highlights of Indie Memphis 2017 was Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell proclaiming Friday, November 3 Best of Enemies Day. Director Robert Gordon, who helped originate the project he co-directed with Morgan Neville, has had a long and distinguished career as a writer and director before winning an Emmy for Best of Enemies. In 2012, a film he produced with Irish director Paul Duane made waves at Indie Memphis. Very Extremely Dangerous opens with Gordon and Duane almost getting in a car wreck with their subject Jerry McGill, a 70 year old junkie, criminal, and Memphis musician. McGill had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and he brought along Duane and Gordon’s camera to record his final comeback performance/crime spree. To call Very Extremely Dangerous a harrowing watch is a dramatic understatement, but somehow, McGill comes out of it as a sympathetic character.

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Keep The Lights On (2012)


Memphis-born Ira Sachs has long been one of the most intimate and truthful directors of the indie era. He got his start in the Bluff City before Indie Memphis got rolling with The Delta, an autobiographical coming-of-age story. In 2005, when Hustle & Flow won the audience award at Sundance, Sachs’ film Forty Shades of Blue won the Grand Jury Prize. Keep The Lights On is the story of an extremely dysfunctional relationship between Erik (Thure Lindhardt) and Paul (Zachary Booth), a filmmaker and lawyer living in Sach’s adopted home of New York who can’t help but bring out the worst in each other. Sachs keeps the audience’s expectations vacillating between “I hope these two kids can get it together in the end” and “They need to stay the hell away from each other.” It’s a story about the joys and limits of romantic love.

Keep The Lights On was the first film in a trilogy of sorts from Sachs about trying to stay human while living in New York. 2014’s Love Is Strange stars John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as a pair of longtime partners whose love is finally legal, but who are unexpectedly ripped apart after they finally tie the knot. 2016’s Little Men is a story Sach says was inspired by his Memphis childhood about friendship between kids from different social classes who find their lives disrupted by the creeping gentrification of Brooklyn. Sachs’ work is humane, beautiful to a fault, and absolutely required viewing for Memphis film fans.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (4)

What I Love About Concrete (2013)

Remember when you were in high school and thought, “We should make a movie about our crazy lives!” Well, Alanna Stewart and Katherine Dohan actually did it, and their film is probably much better than yours would have been. The two White Station High Schoolers, with the help of Brett Hanover, created a home grown, magical realist masterpiece—imagine if Pretty In Pink had been written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Morgan Rose Stewart (sister of the director) stars as Molly, a woman who finds herself growing very-not-metaphorical wings in her senior year, just as she is preparing for college and the big essay contest. The practical special effects and handmade animation sequences carry considerable visual punch, but it’s the unmannered acting and wild expanse of it all that elevates What I Love About Concrete to the level of the sublime. The film won at Indie Memphis, and has the distinction of being Commercial Appeal movie writer John Beifuss’ only acting credit.

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“I Wanted To Make A Movie About A Beautiful and Tragic Memphis” (2013)

“I sometimes find it easier to reveal intimate details about myself through art. This is prime example” says Laura Jean Hocking. After spending years locked in a small dark room with me editing Antenna, Hocking wanted to do something completely different. She wrote, produced, and directed this Midtown memoir completely by herself. It is at once a celebration of place, a confession, and a series of visual experiments. Hocking collaborated transatlantically with Memphis expat musician Jimi Enck, who scored the film while living in London.

At the 2017 Indie Memphis festival, Hocking and her co-director Melissa Anderson Sweazy won Best Hometowner Feature and the Audience Award for their documentary Good Grief about kids who have experienced tragedy and the counsellors who help them at the Kemmons Wilson Family Center for Good Grief in Collierville.

I WANTED TO MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT A BEAUTIFUL AND TRAGIC MEMPHIS from oddly buoyant productions on Vimeo.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (6)

Short Term 12 (2013)

By 2013, Indie Memphis’ profile had risen high enough to land the biggest films on the festival circuit. Destin Daniel Cretton’s film Short Term 12, loosely inspired by his time as a counsellor in a group home for troubled teens, swept the Independent Spirit Awards and launched the career of Brie Larson. As one of the biggest vote-getters in the poll, it remains a favorite of Indie Memphis audiences.

It Felt Like Love (2013)

Here’s a little story that tells you what film festival life is like. In 2013, I was on the screening committee for Indie Memphis. We were tasked with finding the eight best features out of the hundreds of applicants that flood into Indie Memphis every year. Late in the season, we had whittled the list down to about a dozen when we noticed that no female directors were represented on the short list. Since it was pretty inconceivable that, in 2013, no women had made and submitted a decent movie, we dug back into the pile of DVDs. At the bottom was It Felt Like Love by Eliza Hitman, and when we popped it into the player, we were absolutely riveted. It was clear that this coming of age film was by far the best thing we had seen that year, and we almost lost it in the shuffle. Later, at the festival, the judges (who are not members of the screening committee) agreed, and It Felt Like Love won 2013’s Best Narrative Feature award.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 4: Football, Swans, and Punks (7)

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Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 1: Machine Gun Babes, The P&H, and Digital Rebels

Thank you to everyone who voted in our Best of Indie Memphis poll! We had many different, varied responses going way back into Indie Memphis’ twenty year history. I had originally wanted to do a top ten list, but there were so many ties that I would have had 18 films in the Hometowner top ten, and five films tied for first place in the general category. So instead, I’ll be doing a chronological countdown of the poll’s top vote-getters, staring from the beginning of the festival and moving to the present day, in a series of blog posts called Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits. Let’s get this party started!

Superstarlet A.D. (1999)

In the beginning, before there was an Indie Memphis or a digital revolution, there was John Michael McCarthy. The renegade punk from Tupelo, Mississippi moved heaven and earth to bring his psychotronic vision to life on film—actual film, not digital video! Superstarlet A.D., which won the festival feature competition in 1999, its second year, is the apotheosis of McCarthy’s 90s filmography. It’s a heady brew of  garage rock (Memphis punk goddess Alicja Trout is one of the stars), grindhouse exploitation, and The Feminine Mystique. McCarthy transformed late 90s urban blight into a post-apocalyptic hellscape populated by tribes of feral women dead set on taking revenge on the men who broke the world.

Today, McCarthy continues to make films and comics, and is a leading force for historical preservation in the Bluff City. His documentary Destroy Memphis depicts the years-long struggle to save the Zippin Pippin from destruction, and he is currently working on a full sized bronze statue of Johnny Cash.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 1: Machine Gun Babes, The P&H, and Digital Rebels

The Poor And Hungry (2000)

Eric Tate, Seth Hagee, and Craig Brewer on the set of The Poor and Hungry.

In 2000, a Barnes & Noble bookstore clerk named Craig Brewer fired a shot heard round the world. Made with money left to him when his father unexpectedly passed away, Brewer’s The Poor and Hungry was named for the P&H Cafe, the midtown beer joint where Brewer wrote. It was not the first time he had tried to make a film, but thanks to the then cutting-edge digital video technology that allowed him to record DVD-quality video and edit on a desktop computer, it was the first time he succeeded. In the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola had said that film would not be a truly democratic medium until a poor girl in Iowa could make one as easily as she could write a book. Brewer was the fulfillment of that prophecy, and his film went on to win awards at not only the Indie Memphis and Nashville Film Festivals, but also the Hollywood Film Festival. Five years later, Brewer brought home Oscar gold to Memphis with Hustle & Flow. Today, he is a writer and director for Empire, one of the most successful shows on television. You Look Like, the comedy game show he is producing, will premiere at Indie Memphis 2017. It was filmed on location at the P&H.

“I think what I’m most proud of, is that there were a lot of filmmakers in town who had their own identity, and their own desire to make films, and they would have probably done it anyway,” says Brewer. “But I do think that they watched The Poor and Hungry, and the swell of excitement around it, and realized that it was more doable than they thought. ‘I know actors just like that in town! I know those locations! I have a better camera than this movie had! I spent more money on lights than this movie had!’ But this movie did a lot with very few tools. At the time, filmmaking was very daunting because of the cost and how hard technically it was to pull off on film. There were a lot of local would-be filmmakers who saw it and thought, ‘It’s time.’”

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Blue Citrus Hearts (2002)

In the Memphis of the early twenty first century, the epicenter of the revolution was the Digital Media Co-Op. Located in the basement of the First Congregational Church on Cooper, the Co-Op was founded by Brandon Hutchinson and Morgan Jon Fox. Fox, a Memphis native and White Station High School grad, had done a stint at a film school in New Hampshire before dropping out and returning to Memphis to find his own way. Members of the Co-Op pooled their resources and shared their knowledge. They learned together, and their experimental short films dominated the Indie Memphis Hometowner category for years. Blue Citrus Hearts was Fox and the Co-Op’s first attempt at a feature film, and it paid off spectacularly. The largely improvised story of young gay and misfit kids trying to cope in a closeted and repressive South combined the unflinching neorealism of Antonioni with the austerity of the Dogma ’95 movement—call it Memphis, Open City. It’s an emotionally wrenching ride. But the big payoff came at the end, where Fox’s camera accidentally captured an actual shooting star above the heads of his characters sharing their first kiss on the roof of the Tennessee Brewery.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 1: Machine Gun Babes, The P&H, and Digital Rebels (4)

Automusik Can Do No Wrong (2004)

Automusik at Sun Studios

One of the people inspired by Craig Brewer and the Media Co-Op was me. I had written my first feature film in 1994, but our attempts to produce it in the pre-digital era had failed. My friend and co-conspirator Steve Stanley, along with Chris Triko, Talbot Fields, and many others, discovered digital video tech and made two films around the turn of the century: Slick Lilly vs. The Grand Canyon and Six Days in the Life of Mims, both of which screened successfully at Indie Memphis. I had acted and crewed on both pictures, and caught the filmmaking bug bad. While Mims was in post production, I was eager to do my own thing. I was a fan of the synth pop parody band Automusik, which was baffling crowds all over Memphis. After one particularly crazed performance, I bought Automusik mastermind Scott Moss a drink at the bar and proposed doing a Spinal Tap-style mockumentary together. We enlisted Pritchard Smith, whose documentary short “$200 On eBay” had won at Indie Memphis the year before, and nine months later we won Best Hometowner Feature at Indie Memphis. Today, we’re still at it. Smith is a director/producer who helped found Vice’s video operation. His documentary The Invaders sold out opening night at Indie Memphis last year. I still believe what I told then-Memphis Flyer Film Editor Chris Herrington in a November, 2004 interview: “Half of the director’s job is to choose the people you want to work with and let them do their job.”

Here’s the most famous sequence from Automusik Can Do No Wrong, in which we recreated the climax of Purple Rain—in German.

AUTOMUSIK CAN DO NO WRONG clip – "The Machine" & "The Hammer Song" from oddly buoyant productions on Vimeo.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 1: Machine Gun Babes, The P&H, and Digital Rebels (5)

Cocaine Cowboys (2006)

As you can read in my Memphis Magazine article on the history of the festival, Indie Memphis was founded as a place for local filmmakers to show their work. In the early days, there was not much content from outside the Memphis metro area. But as the festival matured and expanded, that changed. By the middle of the 00’s, it was the place to go to see cutting-edge films that would never otherwise get a theatrical run in the Bluff City. One of the first films to screen at Indie Memphis that broke out and attracted a wider audience was Billy Corben’s Cocaine Cowboys. Corben’s film was ideal for Indie Memphis. It took a controversial subject matter and dove into it from a regional perspective. Corben is from Miami, and his intricate history of Florida drug smuggling puts heavy emphasis on both the price the city paid and the unexpected ways the era built contemporary Florida. Months after it screened at Indie Memphis, Cocaine Cowboys got a wide distribution and spawned two sequels. Today, it’s a staple on cable TV, and Corben has had a career making ESPN’s documentary series 30 for 30.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 1: Machine Gun Babes, The P&H, and Digital Rebels (3)

Tune in tomorrow for part 2. You can also check out the entire history of Indie Memphis as told through the collected programs in this slideshow set over at Memphis Magazine.

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Indie Memphis Wednesday: Filmmaker Laura Jean Hocking’s Prolific Year

There are several Memphis filmmakers with multiple projects appearing in this year’s Indie Memphis Film Festival. One of the most prolific local filmmakers is Laura Jean Hocking, who boasts involvement in eight different projects screening during the weeklong festival. She co-directed the short narrative film “How To Skin A Cat” and the short documentary film “A.J.”; and created music videos for John Kilzer and Alex Da Ponte. As an editor, she cut the music documentary Verge and the narrative feature Bad, Bad Men. Melissa Anderson Sweazy’s music video “Bluebird”, and did initial assembly on frequent collaborator Sarah Fleming’s “Carbike”. Oddly enough, it all started because of her culinary prowess.

Jamie Harmon

Filmmaker Laura Jean Hocking

It was early 2000s and Laura Jean Hocking was doing craft services and props for her friend’s films. While helping out with her husband C. Scott McCoy’s film Automusik Can Do No Wrong, Hocking wound up peering over the shoulder of The Invaders director Prichard Smith. “I watched Prichard edit, and it just clicked. It was an epiphany,” said Hocking. “And I knew right then and there that I wanted to do this for a living.”

Hocking’s epiphany sparked an insatiable thirst for editing jobs. After she purchased an instruction book for Final Cut Pro, and completed every lesson in it, Hocking set out to edit a feature film she had just finished writing with McCoy. “It was 52 speaking parts, and everyone thought I was out of my mind to tackle that as my first editing project,” recalls Hocking. “After that, I wanted to edit any and every thing.”

Solomon Phillips in Laura Jean Hocking’s video for John Kilzer and Kirk Whalem’s song ‘Until We’re All Free’

More than 15 years later, Hocking pretty much has. She’s also produced, directed, or written countless other films. Two of her Indie Memphis projects in particular showcase Hocking’s ability to tackle subjects that can elicit a wide range of emotional responses.

In “A.J.” a short documentary that introduces audiences to the delicate work of the Kemmons Wilson Center for Good Grief, Hocking, fellow producer/director Melissa Anderson Sweazy, and producer/cinematographer Sarah Fleming decided to focus on an element of grief underexplored in documentaries — recovery. “We see the dark side represented in film plenty,” said Hocking. “We wanted to show how people get out of grief and how they get to the other side of it.”

‘A.J.’

On the flip side, the short film “How to Skin A Cat” demonstrates of Hocking’s ability to transition from the somber to the asinine within a single production year. And if you pressure Hocking enough, she’ll tell you it’s the film that she might love just a tiny bit more than her other film-children this festival, due largely to the ability to pay the actors and crew, thanks to the $7,500 in IndieGrant funds the project received. “Do you know how big that was? To be able to pay our actors?”Hocking asks.

In spite of a rapidly expanding filmography, Hocking has her sights set on the Memphis horizon and the future of Bluff City filmmaking. When people ask if she ever would consider moving to L.A., Hocking’s answer is a flat no.“Why would I want to move to L.A.? Here, I can make a difference,” Hocking notes. “It’s here that I have artistic freedom that isn’t usually given to you by way of a big studio.”

With a location of choice and the support of a close-knit film community, Hocking is poised to continue her constant self-challenge to try all things new in the world of filmmaking. And because her personal belief is to never cease trying new things, we are likely in store for watching a filmmaker whose list of works will continue to push norms. “After all,” Hocking added, “If you’re not learning, you’re dying.”

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Strong Local Offerings Lead Indie Memphis Lineup

Indie Memphis announced its full lineup for the 2016 festival at a bustling preview party at the Rec Room last night. 

Bad, Bad Men,

The most striking feature of the 150-film collection is the strongest presence by local filmmakers since the early-2000s heyday of DIY movies. The Hometowner Competition boasts six feature films, including Old School Pictures’ Bad, Bad Men, a wild comedy of kidnapping and petty revenge by directors Brad Ellis and Allen Gardner, who have racked up several past Indie Memphis wins. Bluff City indie film pioneer Mike McCarthy will debut his first feature-length documentary Destroy Memphis, a strikingly heartfelt film about the fight to save Libertyland and the Zippin Pippen rollercoaster. Four first-time entrants round out the Hometowner competition: Lakethen Mason’s contemporary Memphis music documentary Verge, Kathy Lofton’s healthcare documentary I Am A Caregiver, Flo Gibs look at lesbian and trangender identity Mentality: Girls Like Us, and Madsen Minax’s magical realist tale of lunch ladies and gender confusion Kairos Dirt and the Errant Vacuum. 

‘Silver Elves’


Usually, Hometowner short films comprise a single, popular, programming block; This year, there are enough qualified films to fill four blocks. Sharing the opening night of the festival with the previously announced Memphis documentary The Invaders is a collection of short films produced by recipients of the Indie Grant program, including G.B. Shannon’s family dramedy “Broke Dick Dog”, Sara Fleming’s whimsical tour of Memphis “Carbike”, Morgan Jon Fox’s impressionistic dramatization of the 1998 disappearance of Rhodes student Matthew Pendergrast “Silver Elves”; Indie Grant patron Mark Jones’ “Death$ In A Small Town”, actor/director Joseph Carr’s “Returns”, experimental wizard Ben Siler (working under the name JEBA)’ “On The Sufferings Of The World”, and “How To Skin A Cat”, a road trip comedy by Laura Jean Hocking and yours truly. 

Other standouts in the Hometowner Shorts category include three offerings from Melissa Sweazy: the fairy tale gone dark “Teeth”; “A.J”, a documentary about a teenage boy dealing with grief after a tragic accident, co-directed with Laura Jean Hocking; and “Rundown: The Fight Against Blight In Memphis. Edward Valibus’ soulful dark comedy “Calls From The Unknown”, Nathan Ross Murphy’s “Bluff”, and Kevin Brooks’ “Marcus”, all of which recently competed for the Louisiana Film Prize, will be at the festival, as will Memphis Film Prize winner McGehee Montheith’s “He Coulda Gone Pro”. 

The revived Music Video category features videos from Marco Pave, Star & Micey, Preauxx, The Bo-Keys, Vending Machine, Nots, Caleb Sweazy, Faith Evans Ruch, Marcella & Her Lovers, John Kilzer & Kirk Whalum, Alex duPonte, Alexis Grace, and Zigadoo Moneyclips. 

Internationally acclaimed films on offer include legendary director Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, starring Adam Driver; Manchester By The Sea from Kenneth Lonergan; and Indie Memphis alum Sophia Takal’s Always Shine. Documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson’s spectacular, world-spanning Cameraperson, assembled over the course of her 25 year career, promises to be a big highlight.

Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck in Manchester By The Sea

The full schedule, as well as tickets to individual movies and two levels of festival passes, can be found at the Indie Memphis web site. 

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Action!

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

INT. MEMPHIS – AMURICA – DAY

A sunny January Sunday afternoon at Amurica, the photography studio on Cleveland, with couches and comfy chairs arranged in a circle. Expensive-looking cameras top tripods aimed at the people seated: Savannah Bearden, Erik Morrison, Benjamin Rednour, G.B. Shannon, Ben Siler, Drew Smith, Edward Valibus, Brad Villane, and Billie Worley. Cans of Wiseacre Beer and film scripts are passed around.

Worley tells a joke to the room that can’t be repeated because he said it was off the record before he said it. It’s hysterical on shock value alone. Then Worley returns to his running-gag ribbing of Smith about a line Commercial Appeal film writer John Beifuss wrote about the pair last year for their performances in the short movie Songs in the Key of Death: Worley and Smith are “arguably the best actors in local indie film today.” In Worley’s hands, the compliment becomes alternately a needle to somehow use against Smith, a statement of false modesty, then self-deprecation, and then a triumphant peacock feather.

Justin Fox Burks

(L-R) Ben Siler, G.B. Shannon, Edward Valibus, Joann Self Selvidge

At some point, Valibus steers the group back to the business at hand. This is, after all, work: Though no one in the room is getting paid for it, this is a meeting of the regular gathering the group calls Script Bucket. It’s a combination pitch session, Saturday Night Live-style skit workshop, table reading, screenplay criticism panel, and local film news discussion.

Shannon brought his script for Songs in the Key of Death to one of the first Script Bucket meetings last year. Valibus would ultimately go on to direct the zombie comedy short, co-written and co-produced with Shannon, with cinematography by Morrison and boom operation/sound mixing by Rednour.

“We knew immediately that the starring role was perfect for Worley. There’s a bit of improv in it,” Valibus says. “I did a rewrite of the end of the film, and that gave us a second-half star actor to carry the scene. We brought in Drew Smith, who has great comedic skills.” At this Script Bucket, Valibus tells his collaborators that Songs in the Key of Death has just been accepted into another film festival. That’s five acceptances and zero rejections to date.

It’s good news, but what’s next for these filmmakers? The Script Bucket gathering first considers a script from Valibus about a funeral. The prospective film is cast for a read-through and performed and then dissected. When should this film be set? Modern day or in the 1800s? What’s the history of embalming? What visual gags can be added? Then the group goes through it again with blocking and more embellishments.

Justin Fox Burks

(L-R) Brian Pera, Emmanuel Amido, Morgan Jon Fox, DeAara Lewis

The next script is from Siler about a man in a peculiar, extreme situation. Everyone agrees it could be shot a lot of different ways: Dogville-style? Animated? Start with realism and evolve into something else?

One or two films may come out of Script Bucket sessions this year, but the urgency to finish a project may not hit home until the Indie Memphis deadline is looming later in the year. And there’s no telling what the next Script Bucket might bring: Maybe the next big thing in independent Memphis filmmaking.

In the meantime, Worley has another anecdote, this one involving a local celebrity, which can’t be repeated. He’s working. You never know what will wind up in a film.

INT. MEMPHIS – PLAYHOUSE ON THE SQUARE – INDIE MEMPHIS – NIGHT

Though to an outsider, Script Bucket appears to be the product of a tight-knit troupe of filmmakers, there are actually several different sets of mini-filmmaking communities represented. Morrison, Rednour, and Valibus constitute Corduroy Wednesday Film Company; they’ve worked in the past with Villane, a local TV news producer; Shannon works closely with ace Memphis filmmaker Ryan Earl Parker; Siler is a revered independent filmmaker with institutional memory back to the now defunct Media Co-Op at First Congo; Bearden, Smith, and Worley are acting and filmmaking freelancers who work with many different people. At any given Indie Memphis Film Festival, you’ll see their names and faces numerous times. Bearden produces the fest’s awards show each year and has utilized the talents of Corduroy Wednesday and Siler.

The past few years, some of Memphis’ low-budget film community has been an archipelago of creative islands — indie filmmakers often working independent of each other. DIY sometimes trending to Do It Myself. At its best, however, the isolationism leads to consistent work. Local production companies and filmmaking cliques are like classic Hollywood movie studios writ small, with bankable stars, cohesive visual aesthetics, and recurring subject matter.

Script Bucket is an effort to build bridges between like-minded sorts. Another is an open filmmaker forum that Indie Memphis holds a few days after January’s Script Bucket at Playhouse on the Square’s Theatre Café in Midtown. More than 30 filmmakers, roughly a third of them women, sit at tabletops and direct their attention to Brighid Wheeler, Indie Memphis’ program manager. She’s there to hear what the filmmakers have to say: What do they need? What can Indie Memphis do, or keep doing, to support the artists? Feedback ranges from technical education opportunities and ways for filmmakers to show their works in progress to each other to marketing and business workshops and networking events.

“I got a feeling there were needs that weren’t being met,” says Wheeler. “There’s not always a lot of crossover between groups of filmmakers, so people trying to come into the community have a hard time.”

Justin Fox Burks

Brighid Wheeler

The misnomer is that Indie Memphis is a once-a-year event, when in fact it features year-round programming. Wheeler wants to see that calendar-wide focus reach down to helping the filmmakers make their work. But, she says, “I can’t make decisions for the community when I don’t know what they want to do.”

Indie Memphis executive director Erik Jambor points to yet another asset local film has: Malco. “Not only are we able to work with Malco to present some of our year-round programming at Studio on the Square, but they also make it easy for local filmmakers to book a screen,” Jambor says.

“We feel it’s very important to support the local filmmakers, whether their budget is $5,000 or $500,000,” says Jimmy Tashie, executive at Malco. The theater chain rents out screens for local screenings for a flat fee, which many filmmakers use to raise funds to pay for equipment upgrades and festival entry fees. If the film is strong enough and Malco sees a potential audience, a film may get a weeklong or two-week run, as was the case with the films One Came Home and Memphis Heat. “We want everybody’s dream to come true,” Tashie says.

Tashie is board chairman of the Memphis & Shelby County Film/TV Commission as well, and that organization has considerable skin in the game. Though state incentives and work to lure larger-budget film productions to Memphis dominate the headlines, the commission does a lot to support the homegrown filmmakers.

The commission publishes a production directory so that if a project needs, say, a line producer, grip, or camera operator, they can readily see what Memphis has to offer. Deputy Film Commissioner Sharon Fox O’Guin helps filmmakers cut red tape, secure permits, and find locations.

“What is lacking is money to make the films the filmmakers want to make, pay the crew what they want to pay them, and market the films adequately,” says Film Commissioner Linn Sitler.

As things stand, most local productions aren’t eligible for incentives in the first place: Even if the masters of the state purse strings were of a mind to open them, the entry-level budget for a film to qualify is $200,000, well above what a true indie film is going to spend. The budget of an average Corduroy Wednesday film, Rednour says, “consists of buying the cast and crew food. People are giving you their time on the nights and weekends, and if you can’t pay them, you want to make sure they’re fed, taken care of, and have somewhere to sit and something to drink.”

Without adequate funding to support practitioners, though, there’s been a talent drain in Memphis film. “The film industry is like the music industry in Memphis,” Rednour says. “We have the talent, but the music industry went to Nashville. The film industry went to New Orleans.”

Of the filmmakers who have stayed, most are tied to a day job. “In 16 years of attempting to make films in Memphis, I’ve made a grand total of about $1,000,” says Eric Tate (Piano Man Pictures). So he supplements his bank account, like many filmmakers, with non-filmmaking jobs.

Justin Fox Burks

Laura Jean Hocking and C. Scott McCoy

Sam Bahre (Azbest Films) says, “Memphis’ filmmakers are working retail, waiting tables, and going into debt trying to make their art, but you can only put up with so many rude customers before it’s time to wrap it up.”

Some creatives are fortunate enough to have a job helping others create commercials and corporate projects, either on a freelance basis or working for local professional video, production, and camera companies. There can be a downside to going that route, though, says Chad Allen Barton (Piano Man Pictures). “Most people try to have part-time jobs for a while, but then it turns into a full-time job, and before you know it, they’re not making films anymore.”

“I know a great graphic artist who runs a liquor store,” says Siler. “I know musicians who run a call center. I would argue all they’re missing is a community that values them. Memphis does make fitful steps toward that, but never enough.”

Valibus has been supporting himself through filmmaking for a while, but most of it hasn’t been narrative work. He did a big job recently for Stax Museum, then he filmed a body-shop commercial, then a music video. He’s keeping the lights on, but he’s so busy with what’s in front of him, it’s hard setting up the next shoot.

Morrison works at a local film-equipment company, a great situation for a filmmaker to be in, he says, adding, “I never wanted to be a doctor or lawyer.” Rednour and Bearden work together at a film production company in Memphis; Worley at yet another.

Shannon bristles at the thought that what he’s doing with film is anything short of completely serious, even if it doesn’t pay well and even if he prefers to work in the short film medium. “I’m tired of the question from people in an interview, ‘Is this a hobby?'” Shannon says. “I spend all my time and life and money devoted to this trying to make it work, but yeah, it’s a hobby.”

EXT. MEMPHIS – NIGHT AND DAY

The indie film scene in Memphis is disjointed and collaborative. It hustles for more and is satisfied with the success of flying just under the radar. If you poll a couple dozen filmmakers, you’ll get a couple dozen perspectives. So, that’s what we did. First, here are excerpted characterizations of indie film today:

Sam Bahre (Azbest Films): “It doesn’t matter if you want to be a cameraman or an actor, you’re gonna have to work that (boom) pole like a stripper at some point in your Memphis film career.

Justin Fox Burks

Erik Morrison

“The filmmaking community here is hungry; they want to work. I know a lot of people in this city who spend their week at menial jobs all day and then work crew in all of their spare time for free. This has got to be the capital city of working on film sets for no money.”

Chad Allen Barton (Piano Man Pictures): “It can be absolute insanity to shoot here: Planes, trains, automobiles, dogs, people honking their horns at you, and people coming up to you during a take to ask if they can be in the movie. I’ve had the cops called on me four times. The weather destroys every schedule you make.”

Savannah Bearden (actress, producer): “I love making films in Memphis because there’s still a novelty to it here. Nobody’s really made the rules yet. I lived in L.A. for about five-and-a-half minutes, and hearing people talk about making films out there made me crazy. My old roommate was a director who showed me this completely forgettable four-minute short he’d made — for $80,000. All I could think was: Do you know what you could do in Memphis for that kind of money? In Memphis, you could make a short for $80,000 if you wanted, but why the hell would you? Most of the time, all it takes to make a four-minute short here is lunch and beers. Sometimes just beers. I just never wanted to hustle to make films. Hustling does not come naturally to me. I like that you don’t have to hustle in Memphis.”

Jeremy Benson (Live Animals): “I’ve always thought it was cool that someone can make a movie for no money in Memphis and take that movie to the Hollywood Film Fest and then watch that little movie go all around the world. It shows what a bunch of people who care about something can accomplish with passion alone, ’cause we sure as hell didn’t have any money.”

Justin Fox Burks

Drew Smith

Nick Case (Paper Moon Films): “My first real film job was as a PA on 21 Grams, and I remember the director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, saying he chose Memphis over many other cities including Atlanta and Mexico City, because there is a soul here unlike any other cities.”

Morgan Jon Fox (See filmography, page 20): “I attribute my filmmaking success to the love and care I was shown by the people in this city when I was just a young filmmaker with a heart filled with passion and a crazy dream to make a movie. Other cities would’ve squashed me … chewed me up and spit me out with criticism and demands. People here truly love being involved, collaborating, and seeing other people succeed. I love this. It’s beautiful. I really feel like Memphis knows what it is … flaws and all. There’s truth in those flaws, there’s originality, there’s magic … there’s soul.

Laura Jean Hocking (See filmography, page 20): “Memphis is architecturally interesting and historically lush, and there should be no reason that large-scale productions shouldn’t be choosing us as a location over Georgia and Louisiana.”

DeAara Lewis (Tricks., The Forgotten Ones): “Being a native Memphian, my name traveled faster because the city is not saturated with filmmakers, especially female filmmakers of color.”

C. Scott McCoy (See filmography, page 20): “After my experiences making films, I no longer believe in the auteur theory, that the director is everything. Making a movie is more like being in a band, a complete team effort, even if the director is driving the bus.”

Ryan Earl Parker (See filmography, page 20): “The Memphis filmmaking community is talented, hardworking, and, most importantly, hungry. The drive to create important and artful films is strong here in part because it is so difficult.”

Brian Pera (See filmography, page 20): “Memphis leaves me be and lets me concentrate. I’m able to bring the people I need into town and build films based on what I have, not what I wish I had. The films I make, however ambitious conceptually, are willfully small and intimate in execution. That’s not an accident or a product of deprivation. I like small. I like using available things. Filming in Memphis lends itself to this and is often an asset getting people to come here.”

Joann Self Selvidge (See filmography, page 20): “If you really want to ‘make a living’ by making films, you’ve gotta hustle. Some people throw house parties, some people set up fundraising meetings, some people do crowdfunding, some people work on side projects for clients. Whatever it takes to carve out some time so you can focus on your film and make that vision a reality.”

Justin Fox Burks

Ben Siler (See filmography, page 20): “A person with filmmaking aspirations is Charlie Brown. Making a living telling stories is a football. Capitalism is Lucy. Memphis is a city that’s been devoured by unthinking capitalism. As a result, artists suffer.”

Drew Smith (The Book of Noah, Being Awesome): “My worst experience was [when] I had bought a van from a tow truck driver for $100 for a film I was making. It ran for the first week but broke down in front of Ryan Earl Parker’s house. We still had three or four driving scenes to get, so we taped them with me bouncing and kicking the front bumper while Ryan rolled. Then we abandoned the van and the cops towed it off a month later.”

Ryan Watt (Paper Moon Films): “When you see a film being made in Memphis, you know it is being done for the love of the art and not financial reasons, which creates some really interesting work with a Memphis edge.”

EXT. MEMPHIS – THE FUTURE – MAGIC HOUR

We also polled the artists on what Memphis filmmaking can look like aspirationally and how it can get there, excerpted:

Emmanuel Amido (Orange Mound, Tennessee: America’s Community): “It took me a long time to convince myself to submit my film to Indie Memphis. In 2012, I remember being parked at the light at Cooper and Union, and I was looking in at Indie Memphis, and I thought, I want to be in there one day. But I didn’t have anyone to show me how to enter film festivals.”

Barton: “We need to get more people in Memphis excited about local films. There have been big movements for local food and beer and to support local business, but the arts are lost in that equation.”

Mark Jones (See filmography, page 20): “Memphis could take a step forward in bringing small- and perhaps even larger-budget films to Memphis: Consolidate the empty gates at the airport and open up [a concourse] to filming. To be able to shoot inside an actual airport terminal would be nice for both low and large budget films. Also, neighborhoods around the airport were bought and demolished years ago. There are still some paved streets where the houses once stood. Fake houses and fake buildings could be built on this land. Memphis could literally build a ‘studio back lot’ on the empty land next to the airport.”

McCoy: “We are Tennessee entrepreneurs working to create an export industry, and the state government couldn’t care less about us. But the movie business is hard and it is only getting harder. Hollywood doesn’t know how to save itself in the Internet age. We’re living in an era of unprecedented change. The new ideas about film and video as a medium are going to come from the grassroots.”

David Merrill (Fuel Film Memphis): “We need visionary leadership both behind the camera and in the ‘front office’ of production. We need leaders in the community to provide the educational opportunities for filmmakers to learn the skills they’ll need to effectively tell their stories and get seen in a competitive marketplace.”

Rob Parker (Meanwhile in Memphis: The Sound of a Revolution): “The Memphis filmmaking community can get to the next level simply by more people taking the initiative to make their own films no matter what. With Meanwhile in Memphis, we were not skilled, experienced filmmakers. It was me, a musician, and my co-director, Nan Hackman, a retired schoolteacher with some videography knowledge. But we had a vision to make this documentary and were able to learn what we needed to along the way.”

Pera: “I don’t compare myself to other filmmakers, and I try not to do that to Memphis as a city. I wouldn’t be making films living in some other city. Whatever little bit of magic, miserable or sublime, Memphis has, doesn’t need my idea of perfection projected onto it. Memphis has not only highly competent or skilled crewpeople and performers but also deeply talented ones, people I consider local treasures.”

Marie Pizano (principal of MVP3 Entertainment Group, 2014 presenting sponsor of On Location: Memphis International Film & Music Fest): “I don’t know what everyone else is doing, but this is what I’m going to do for my part: I’m going to film two to three films a year, lower budget but not lower quality. If it takes me years, I’ll do it. That’s how they did it in New Orleans. I’m working with the whole world to help me pull this together right here in Memphis. I’m going to bust down every door I can. I’m going to go walk that walk. There are so many gems here; we’re sitting on a gold mine. And no one listens. So, to hell with this, I’m going to go do it.”

Geoffrey Brent Shrewsbury (17 Inch Cobras, You Better Behave): “I believe whole-heartedly that script is king. Money and, in return, crew, follow good scripts. If Memphis turned out one strong script a year, we’d be on the map. But, as they say, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.”

Melissa Anderson Sweazy (John’s Farm): “We have a ridiculous amount of talent here: brilliant DPs, composers, writers, and actors. We need the funding to put them to work. My wish is for there to be the Memphis equivalent of the Tennessee Arts Commission, where local filmmakers could apply for grants to help defray production costs/festival expenses. Something like the Awesome Foundation, where Memphians could pool resources to donate to local film.”

Rachel M. Taylor (Avarice): “We need to get on board with the idea of self-distribution. It’s going to be the future for independent filmmakers.”

S. Bearden: “I like that the film community here is still relatively untainted by Hollywood and big-time productions. There’s an innocence and sincerity about the community here that doesn’t exist in larger markets, kind of a ‘let’s put on a show, you guys!’ mentality. I hope we never lose that.”

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On the Job

Local filmmaker C. Scott McCoy and his partners in Oddly Buoyant Productions are the only previous winners of the Indie Memphis Film Festival’s Best Hometowner Feature award to have a film up for that same award this year. McCoy & Co. won two years ago for the rock-mockumentary Automusik Can Do No Wrong. Judging by their impressive follow-up, Eat, they should have a good shot again this year.

Directed by McCoy, who co-wrote and edited the film with his partner Laura Jean Hocking, Eat is an ambitious, structurally tight feature that boasts 54 speaking parts and 48 songs from 23 local or regional bands over its 83-minute run time.

The film takes place over a 24-hour period and follows the work and social lives of employees from three different restaurants — an upscale family restaurant, a corporate chain, and a cozy after-hours bar.

“We collected stories, sort of like an oral history,” says McCoy. “It’s lore,” Hocking adds.

“War stories,” McCoy says. “We stitched them together.”

The idea for the movie came from Hocking, a waitress and manager at McEwen’s who’s worked in restaurants for two decades.

“I wanted it to be a love letter to the restaurant industry,” Hocking says. “Tough love. I wanted to give back to waiters and restaurant workers.”

McCoy, a writer and editor by trade, also drew on restaurant experience. “I’m a horrible waiter,” he says. “I’ve been fired from more restaurants that you’ve eaten at in this town. Spaghetti Warehouse, Applebee’s, Alfred’s — walked out of Alfred’s. Got fired from the Belmont. Fired from Boscos. Didn’t get fired from the Pizza Café. Endless.”

McCoy and Hocking say they also drew on the restaurant experience of their cast in a movie that used plenty of improvisation.

“That was something that really helped, but it wasn’t a requirement,” Hocking says. “But it’s not hard to find an actor who’s a waiter.”

One of the standouts in the cast is local musician Amy LaVere, who plays a waitress for the corporate theme restaurant Canape’s (“a bad concept poorly executed,” McCoy says) and delivers a charmingly natural performance.

“She started working in restaurants when she was 13 or 14,” McCoy says of LaVere, “so she had a lot of restaurant anger built up. She’s a really good actress. I think next time we won’t be able to afford her.”

Eat weaves its large cast together with ease. The film’s de-centered narrative is quite a departure from Automusik Can Do No Wrong and will remind viewers of filmmakers such as Richard Linklater (Slacker, which Eat references) and Robert Altman. (McCoy cites Altman’s Short Cuts as a prime influence: “We were throwing an Altman party.”)

“It’s a movie about work,” McCoy says. “You could make it in a steel mill, but it wouldn’t be as interesting because you wouldn’t have the customer interaction. And people don’t make movies about work. But the drama you go through every day just to make a living is something everyone goes through, and those are some of the greatest dramas in people’s lives. It was important to us to do that, to make a movie about everyday experience. We wanted to make it funny, and we wanted to make it real.”

Eat(Hometowner Feature Competition)

Sunday, October 15th, 8:45 p.m.