At Open Screen, 10 minutes of fame for all
Aspiring poets and subway guitarists can thank the invention of the open mike for giving their compositions a welcoming ear and public voice.
For the budding or frustrated filmmaker, however, the options for finding an audience are far more limited. Festivals are competitive. Posting short films on the Internet can create buzz, but directors can't easily gauge public reception to their work. Besides, most movie-makers would agree, there's nothing quite like seeing your creation big time, on that soda-stained silver screen in a real movie theater before an actual paying audience.
Open Screen, a monthly feature at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, gives Boston-area directors this very chance -- and a brief taste of Tinseltown's elusive elixir of fame and success.
''It has selfish origins," says co-founder Jeff Stern, 32, of Somerville, a filmmaker and media services technician at Olin College who longed for a place to screen his work. Sitting in a Davis Square cafe with Zak Lee, his friend and fellow graduate of Boston University's film program, Stern describes how the two, with three other BU alumni, adapted the nightclub open mike concept to independent film. A side project of their Roadside Pictures film and video collective (www.roadsidepictures.com), Open Screen began in the fall of 2002 at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge's Inman Square, ran for a year, then resumed at the Coolidge spring 2004, and has been a regular, monthly feature ever since. The next edition is Tuesday.
Would-be Maya Derens, Stan Brakhages, or Farrelly or Coen Brothers bring their babies to the Coolidge every third Tuesday and sign up at 7:15. Any format is welcome -- VHS, MiniDV, DVD, even 16mm and Super 8. As long as the film is 10 minutes or under, Stern and Lee project it in the theater's 45-seat screening Room. At 7:30, the lights dim, popcorn is crunched, candy wrappers crinkle, someone yells, ''Uh, there should be sound!" and the show begins.
What's on screen -- a documentary about a demolition derby, a romance between a hotel clerk and a guest -- won't necessarily be as eye-popping or well-acted as the latest Hollywood or independent release, but the program of a dozen-odd shorts is almost always more interesting.
''Going into this, we had the worry, 'What if these movies [stink]?' " Stern half-jokes. ''Who wants to watch 90 minutes of amateur filmmaking?" But the founders, and audiences, have been continually surprised by the quality. ''We have gotten some very polished work."
Open Screen also gives older work a longer shelf life, says Lee, also 32 and a Somerville resident who teaches film at Fitchburg State and volunteers at Central Productions, a nonprofit supporting local film arts. ''In the film fest circuit, if your film is over two years old, it's dead."
Lee and Stern may be film school buddies, but they don't want Open Screen to become an exclusive venue for the professionally trained. ''I think it's cool we don't have an abundance of film students," says Stern, who then backpedals to make sure he hasn't offended members of his own tribe. ''But it's really perfect for them."
For the Coolidge, the concept is a perfect fit with their mission to support community-based filmmaking. ''I've wanted to do it for a long time," says Clinton McClung, the theater's program director. ''It's the most democratic filmmaking forum I've ever heard of. You don't even have to be a filmmaker. You can show your crazy home movie [if you want.]"
''Closet film makers, unite!" is Open Screen's rallying cry, so it makes sense that autodidacts and hobbyists -- those who, in the words of Roadside Picture's website, ''shot it on DV last night in [their] basement" -- tend to outnumber those serious-minded, ambitious indie directors.
''It's great to be in an atmosphere where other people like you, with jobs and lives and all the other distractions, are producing work and sharing it," says Derek Frank, 30, of Brookline, who helped run Open Screen's original incarnation at the Zeitgeist.
The receptive and egalitarian nature of Open Screen also attracted Sarah Grieco, 33, of Andover, who works for an emergency travel assistance company. Though she's been a choreographer, dancer, and visual artist for most of her life, she has no professional filmmaking education. But that didn't stop Grieco from sharing two movies at Open Screen in the past year, the first ones she ever made. One, ''Hang On Paddy, Hang On!" -- a ''gripping tale of one lonely dog-bear-lamb's desperate crush on Alf" -- was selected for ''The Best of Open Screen," an annual pick-of-the-litter showcase in August of the year's best shorts.
''Movie-making has felt like a rather natural evolution," says Grieco. She attributes some of that shift in her creative life to Open Screen's role as a ''wide-open forum" for cross-disciplinary artists and a source of feedback and community. ''Open Screen's free collaborative, creative environment allows and encourages that sort of interaction. With all those artists in one room, people are bound to start working together."
Evan Monsky's sketch comedy group of four actor/writers and three crew members, Hooray for Funn! (''The extra 'n' is for extra fun"), contributes a film nearly every month. ''[Open Screen] allows you to gauge a reaction from an audience beyond your friends and family, which for us is very uplifting because our friends and families despise us," Monsky, 28, of Cambridge says. ''It has also given us a little fan base and some severely inflated egos."
Humor is by far the most popular genre at Open Screen, followed by drama and experimental. It's easier to script and shoot a convincing satire of cubicle life than tackle a sensitive love story in 10 minutes, especially for those whose comic ironies were shaped by models such as Monty Python and Dilbert.
Monsky's self-described approach -- ''we turned a camera on and started making some stuff" -- may be simple. But the results, like ''Don McDick" and ''Bill Gets Fired," (also on www.hoorayforfunn.com) can out-perform ''Saturday Night Live." ''Jeff and Zak have been great to us, not only giving us the outlet of Open Screen, but supporting everything we've done. Which leads me to believe they're quite delusional."
Stern and Lee announce upcoming themes -- more like prompts than strict requirements. Some directors do follow the suggestions; most don't. For this Tuesday, the theme is ''Make a trailer for a film that will be nominated for a 2007 Academy Award"; for April 18: ''Make a movie using only dialogue drawn from other movies."
One back-of-the-mind concern, but not yet a problem, is the issue of censorship. ''We've definitely had things that are questionable," says Lee. ''But we've never had to censor."
''We don't prescreen [anything]," Stern adds. ''We're open to people pushing the medium." Since the directors are usually present in the audience, any overtly offensive material would likely receive, if not a post-screening dressing-down, at least shame-inducing hooting. ''You have to face the audience."
Another factor that feeds the fear of potential humiliation: size. Boston has a small filmmaking scene, Stern reminds. ''We're pretty much at the epicenter," he deadpans. ''There's a lot of responsibility."
''Yep, we'll be famous soon," says Lee. ''Any day now."
Until then, Open Screen remains one of the few open doors in town.
Globe correspondent Anna Goldsmith contributed. Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.
