Marty Lang – Memphis Flyer

If you’re going to be independent, you might as well take advantage of the freedom to be weird. The gleefully bizarre horror comedy Chompy and the Girls lives that philosophy. The film, opening this weekend exclusively at Malco Ridgeway, came to Memphis screens by way of Marty Lang, Assistant Professor of Film & Video at the University of Memphis.

When Chompy and the Girls begins, Jackson (Christy St. John) has decided to hang herself from the ceiling fan in her crappy apartment. When that fails, she changes course and decides to finally contact her biological father Sam (Steve Marvel) who doesn’t know she exists. When they finally meet in a park to try to sort out their relationship, they see a mysterious man stretch his mouth unnaturally wide and swallow a 10-year-old girl (Seneca Paliotta) whole. Then the entity they call Chompy (Reggie Koffman) turns his attention to the newly minted daughter-father team.

Steve Marvel and Christy St. John in *Chompy and the Girls*.

Lang, who began teaching at U of M this year, produced Chompy with director Skye Braband. The Florida State University graduate has been producing, writing, directing, and acting for two decades. “I started off producing because I felt like that was the area of filmmaking that I could learn the fastest,” he says.

He worked with one of his former students, Sarah de Leon, at Chapman University in Orange County, California. “We did a crowdfunding campaign for post-production on a website called Seed and Spark, and we were able to raise about $30,000 to help with our visual effects,” he says. “I had a lot of relationships in California that I was able to use to help us to finish the movie and then, once it was done, I helped find the sales agent who ended up selling the film and getting the distribution deal. And now we’re actually getting it out into the world!”

Christy St. John presses her point as Jackson in *Chompy and the Girls*.

Chompy is driven by a positively feral performance by St. John as a punk rocker and unrepentant drug addict. “She was a real find when when we were casting,” says Lang. “She’s actually going to be on an HBO show that’s coming out pretty soon called The Sex Lives of College Girls. She’s just incredibly talented. That raw sort of anger was something that she brought that really fleshed out the character.”

Lang says he was able to give his students in film producing class a first-hand look at the little known aspect of film production. “We talked a little bit about marketing, and I was able to show the different versions of the poster that we had created for the movie and some of the social media work that we had done to get word out about our crowdfunding campaign,” he says. “As I was teaching the course, we were actually getting offers from distributors for the movie. So I would come into class and I would literally show them the offer sheet. I would take off the name of the distributor and any identifying numbers, and I would literally go through the contracts with the students so that they would know exactly what the terms were.”

On the last day of class, Lang says, “I was able to tell everybody that we had signed the deal on that last class. So it was perfect timing.”

Chompy and the Girls opens Friday, September 3rd at Malco’s Ridgeway Cinema Grill.

Indie Memphis and U of M Present The Debuts: Three of the Best First Films of the Last 15 Years

Film festivals are where most filmmakers get their start. Indeed, finding fresh new voices and seeing radical new visions in a too-often bland and homogeneous filmscape is a big draw for festivals like Indie Memphis. Now, the fest is teaming up with the University of Memphis to bring three first films from directors who went on to do big things.

The Debuts screenings, May 5-6 at the Malco Summer Drive-In, are curated by University of Memphis Department of Communication and Film professor Marty Lang. The first film in the series (May 5th) is one of the most consequential first films of the 21st century. Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy screened at Indie Memphis in 2008. Set in the booming San Francisco of the Aughts, the film stars Wyatt Cenac, who went on The Daily Show fame, and Tracey Higgins, who would later appear in The Twilight Saga, as two young lovers who try to come to terms with their place in the racial and economic hierarchy of their allegedly free and egalitarian city. Jenkins went on to win Best Picture in 2016 for Moonlight; his new historical fantasy project, The Underground Railroad, drops on Amazon Prime on May 14th. The screening will be followed by a discussion led by members of the Memphis Black arts organization The Collective.

Then, on May 6th, a double feature kicks off with the debut film by Jeff Nichols. The Little Rock, Arkansas native is the brother of Lucero’s frontman Ben Nichols. His first film was Shotgun Stories, starring Michael Shannon. The 2007 film is the story of a feud between two sets of Arkansan half-brothers who find themselves in radically different circumstances, despite their blood connection. After the screening, Nichols will speak with Lang about the making of the film, and his subsequent career, which includes the Matthew McConaughey drama Mud and Loving, the story of the Virginia couple whose relationship led to the Supreme Court legalizing interracial marriage.

The second film on May 6th is Sun Don’t Shine by Amy Seimetz. The 2012 film stars Memphis filmmaker and NoBudge founder Kentucker Audley and Kate Lyn Sheil (who later went on to roles in House of Cards and High Maintenance) as a couple on a tense road trip along the Florida Gulf Coast. Seimetz went on to a prodigious acting career, as well as leading the TV series adaptation of Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience and directing one of 2020’s most paranoid films, She Dies Tomorrow. Lang will also interview Seimetz about beginning her career with Sun Don’t Shine.

Tickets to the screenings are available on the Indie Memphis website.