Thirsty Thursday

Rejection is at the core of the creative process.
Rejection from peers, rejection from love interests,
rejection from parents, those are all moments that
pull people inward and helps them find some sort of
an outlet. Then comes round two, being rejected all
over again, on a larger scale, as they try to find an
audience for whatever it is they’ve been making.

The documentary Official Rejection follows filmmaker
Scott Storm desperately trying to break into the
film festival circuit with his second feature film Ten ‘til
Noon. Instead of just being a little featurette on the
Ten ‘til Noon DVD about how they shopped the flick
around to various festivals and how it was sold and
whatnot, it ends up being about the trials, tribulations
and politics (a snapshot if you will) of what happens
to the other folks, the people that don’t get into Sundance,
or Cannes, or any of the major film festivals
around the world. It’s a look at playing the smaller,
unheard of festivals where the movies probably aren’t
as good, but are still given that shot at not only finding
an audience, but being able to see the film in its
proper home, the movie theater.

“Festival people are on the fence about this film,”
said Scott Storm, the focus of Official Rejection. “They
either love it or they hate it, they’re either offended
or they’re really into it.”

That’s a fair reaction, too. For every festival they go
to in the film, or try to get their film into, half of them
turn out to be quite shady. Whether it’s the outlandish
fees entrants pay in the hopes of being accepted,
the sad reality that a good deal of flicks not even being
watched past the five minute mark by the festival
screening crew (even if you did send them $120), or
the ill-equipped theaters that organizers don’t seem
to know how to work, it’s a hell of an uphill battle.

One of the film’s most devastating sequences
is thanks to Chicago’s own Indie Fest. After paying
more to enter their movie than with any other festival,
Storm and company find out that if they don’t
sell enough tickets to their screening, they’ll be pulled
from the fest. They can’t promote ticket sales because
there’s no set schedule, so they’re forced to
buy them out of their own pocket. With a dark cloud
already brewing, they travel to Chicago to find that
everyone involved comes off as incompetent and underhanded.
From the zero promotion of any of the
films by the festival coordinators (a local film critic
is interviewed and revealed no press release was put
out to inform local journalists that the event was
even happening), to the inability of the filmmakers to
contact any officials involved to find out what was
going on, to the amazing horror that was the eventual
screening of Storm’s Ten ‘til Noon (which started
hours late and after the majority of the patrons wandered
off), the whole festival was a complete debacle
that completely wasted the teams money and time.

“As far as I know the Indie Fest people haven’t seen
the movie. We haven’t played it in Chicago yet,” said
Paul Osborne, the director of Official Rejection. “I’ve
never spoken to them about it, but everyone talks
about Chicago Indie Fest in the reviews, so if that
guy’s doing any Google searches for his festival, it’s
going to come up.”

“The people who come off as the villains, so to
speak, I don’t tend to seek them out to show them
the movie,” said Osborne. “Don Frank of Tremendous
Fest doesn’t come off the best in the film. He
did ask for a DVD, but even if he wasn’t coming off
poorly, his festival doesn’t screen documentaries,
so I wouldn’t give him one anyway… why invite the
fight?”

Even Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman, known for making
low-budget B Movies like The Toxic Avenger and Sgt.
Kabukiman, N.Y.P.D., who hams it up throughout
his interviews, comes off as kind of a douche bag.
He plays up being outside of the system and just
being another struggling artist competing against
the big guys of Universal and Miramax, while his
street team papers over every single flyer they find
posted during one festival, even going as far as to
laugh at a frustrated filmmaker whose poster they
completely cover right in front of her. He ends
up just being another part of the problem, playing
dirty politics in the name of getting to the top of
the heap.

Though there are many bumps in the road and
tons of assholery throughout, Official Rejection
boils down to a stab at the biggest charlatan of all:
Sundance.

Sundance is by far the biggest festival in the United
States and is draped in the dreams of would be
filmmakers who look at their favorite writers and
directors and how Sundance made them who they
are. Unfortunately, those very same people they
look up to are completely aware that the days of
Sundance actually discovering a true independent
film are over. Even Kevin Smith, whose film Clerks
made his career back in ’94 via Sundance, acknowledges
that if Clerks were made today, in the same
manner of being paid for by himself and friends, it
wouldn’t make it in.

“If Sundance admitted that you really have no shot
submitting your film if you’re really nobody, and that
a lot of their films come in through agents, their
submissions would go down significantly and they
would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. They
would lose sort of the street cred that they have of
being the discovery festival. They would lose a lot
of their sponsors and big ticket movies that come
in… the reason Paramount will take, or HBO will
take a lower budget studio picture that’s got kind of
an indie sensibility, call it an indie and then ‘have it
discovered at the festival’ just because that festival
has that reputation. If that reputation ceases to exist,
that’s a marketing ploy that HBO or Universal or
whoever can no longer use to sell those movies and
that means they have to think outside of the box to
sell an unusual picture… it’s a whole domino effect,
but in the end it works for everybody except for
indie filmmakers and smaller festivals that are actually
playing the independent films that Sundance used
to play and should still be playing if their reputation
were true.”

While the story does have a happy ending in that
they were able to sell the film and get some decent
distribution, the sad fact is that this mindfuck of a circus
awaits everyone making a movie without studio
backing. The weirdest part of the film is that while
we watch the film about trying to get Ten ‘til Noon
shown at fests, the exact same thing is happening
at this very moment as Osborne and Storm try to
screen Official Rejection.

“At Q&A, people say to us ‘wow, you guys went
through a lot,’” said Osborne. “We’re still going
through a lot. We’re doing the same damn thing right
now. It’s hard to watch the movie when you’re going
through the same process right now.”

When everything is said and done, this is a film
for filmmakers, and more importantly, it’s the voice
of them saying “fuck you” to Sundance and to all the
people who work so hard to bring us the same movie
over and over, while locking out the little guys.

Originally published in the Winter ‘09 issue of Ghettoblaster, a quarterly culture and entertainment mag.