When Tobias Seamon got the phone call in mid-May that his five-minute screenplay Amerikan Partizan had been accepted into Albany’s Edwood Film Festival, he was excited and a bit anxious at the same time. “Like any acceptance, it had that ‘Wow’ feeling,” Seamon remembers. “But I also knew I was getting into something, filmmaking, that I had no experience ever doing before.”
Since it was launched in 2000, the Edwood Film Festival has become the Capital Region’s preeminent annual film event. Once a one-night affair on an improvised screen in an Albany bar, this year’s festival will be screened at the Spectrum 8 Theatres over the course of a week, from September 28 through October 4. It will present work in two categories, short films up to 15 minutes, and five-minute mini-films called “microsodes.” Twenty microsodes will be presented, all of them created specifically for the festival and selected by a panel of judges from more than 200 submissions.
The idea for the event dates back to 1999, when a group of wannabe filmmakers were sitting around over beers, talking about how they were going to be the next Truffaut or Spielberg. “It was a motley collection of folks,” says Peter Barnett, the founder of the festival. “Some of us had made films in college, and some of us had only shot vacation films. We set a deadline to make a short film, and in 2000 the pub put up a screen and we showed the 17 films. They were all of varying degrees of awful, but the place was packed, although most people left after the five-minute film showing a character drinking steadily and then projectile vomiting. That’s when it occurred to us that we had better pre-screen these films.”
They named their festival in honor of Ed Wood, the maverick, low-budget director and actor from the 1950s and ’60s. It’s Wood’s eccentric, can-do attitude that guides the festival’s organizers, not the fact that he’s considered by many to be the worst filmmaker of all time. “Ed Wood is the inspiration,” says Barnett. “We know his name conjures amateur filmmaking, which we embody, but we don’t want people to make crap. We want our film festival to be inspired, homegrown moviemaking.”
“Ed Wood,” Barnett continued, “had real love for the movies. Although he had little money and he made his films too quickly, he really tried to make good films.” For the festival, the director’s first and last names were combined to avoid legal difficulties.
The Edwood Film Festival was founded in the pre-digital era, but by 2003, people began getting editing software bundled with their new computers. “The movies started getting very professional looking,” said Barnett, “and we began getting a lot of entries which forced us to get more and more selective. Moviemaking was becoming more accessible, and people were having fun trying it. It was exactly what Francis Ford Coppola said over 20 years ago—that the future of film would be a 14-year-old girl making a movie in Dayton, Ohio.”
After years playing in pubs, last year the festival moved to WAMC’s Linda Norris Auditorium in Albany. “In our first few years, our audience consisted mainly of disaffected youth and struggling artists, but moving to the Linda Norris brought in a more grown-up crowd,” says Barnett. It also brought in a host of technical problems that left audiences waiting in the dark for films that had to be repeatedly restarted, or never started at all. Many in attendance, having lost patience, left before the end of the screenings. “Last year we had quite a few technical problems and WAMC didn’t have any backups for us,” Barnett acknowledges. “It felt like reach-for-the-revolver time, but the Spectrum will be a comfortable place for us. They’ll know how to handle any technical problems that come up.”
It was Keith Pickard, co-owner of the Spectrum, who approached Barnett about moving the festival to his screens. “Keith had seen the passion, the energy, and the creativity of our film festival,” says Barnett, “and even though he didn’t need to traffic into our world, he knew there was something special going on. Now it’s our turn to deliver. When people walk into the Spectrum they’re expecting a show to go on at a certain time. We know we can only play a two-hour show. Some of our past shows were like Grateful Dead concerts that went on and on.”
The Spectrum, long the Capital District’s premier theater for independent film, views Edwood as an extension of its mission. “We wanted to become part of this festival because we saw how it had grown so quickly in the past few years,” says Pickard. “They were outgrowing all the other venues where they had been, and I knew we could be a great asset to them. We see this as another way to support the thriving independent film community in the Capital District.”
The Spectrum’s involvement in this year’s festival goes beyond providing a venue. One Saturday in July, the Spectrum turned its overflow parking lot into a studio back lot for the filming of the microsodes. The original idea had been for all the microsodes to be filmed at the Spectrum, but the artistic compromise involved in restricting filmmakers to a parking lot film set became quickly apparent to everyone involved.
“That was kind of a marketing idea,” Barnett says. “Ultimately, our concept of quality rose above the gimmick. Eighty percent of the work was shot on location around the Capital Region.”
Nevertheless, on that Saturday, the Spectrum back lot buzzed. More than 150 actors, writers, and production people were on hand for the 12-hour marathon, which lasted from five in the morning to five in the afternoon. When the shooting was finished, the raw digital footage was sent to Hollywood to be edited by film industry professionals, some of whom have worked on movies such as Apocalypto, Cast Away, and The Polar Express.
“One of the Hollywood editors is a local guy,” Pickard explains. “He grew up in Averill Park and worked with us for a while at the Spectrum. I told him about this idea and he was very excited to help out. He even got some of his industry friends to join him.”
The Hollywood connection aided the films even before they were shot, by conferring credibility on the filmmakers when it came to working on location. “The minute we started mentioning Hollywood, doors started to open up,” Barnett says. One dramatic example of this occurred when Barnett was scouting a location at the South Albany Airport. Within minutes, he reports, the local police were on the scene interrogating his activity. After Barnett explained what he was doing and that the films were being sent to Hollywood, the officer turned friendly and helped him connect with the owner of an airplane, who donated flight time for a scene in exchange for his son working as a production assistant.
For Pickard, the excitement will be seeing what happens by bringing together artists of varying skill levels. “We’ve got Hollywood editors, some accomplished local actors and filmmakers, and also some real amateurs,” he says. “It’s all very experimental, and I can’t wait to see the finished films.”
Pickard spends quite a bit of time traveling to film festivals around the country. “There are some great film festivals like Toronto, and there are some that are not so good,” he says. “The Edwood Film Festival is one of the better ones because of how it brings out the community. People come to this festival not to see the latest blockbuster, but to see themselves, and they bring their friends and family members. Most of the movies were filmed in the local surroundings. This is a film festival that involves people who have always wanted to be in the film process, and now they can.”
Part of the fun of the festival is the opportunity it offers to be experimental. “The official flag of the Edwood Film Festival is black, which symbolizes anarchy,” says Barnett. “Our festival is all about not doing it Hollywood’s way. Even the Hollywood editors involved want to do this on the quick as a way to purge themselves of all that Hollywood crap.”
Barnett has some big dreams about the future of this film festival. “Short films are becoming everyone’s new plaything,” he says. “Where’s the Cannes Festival for short films? Why can’t Albany become the short-film capital of the industry? We could show the best short films from around the world, and we could have workshops and guest speakers on how to make short films. What we need is a foundation to give us financial support so that we can follow our mission statement to educate people on how to make movies.”
Yet even as the Edwood Film Festival moves in that direction, Barnett worries that it might one day attract only accomplished filmmakers. “I was a kid musician,” he says, “and I loved going into those music stores where you could bang on the drums and you didn’t have to look like a rock star, or talk the logo. I loved those music stores because you felt comfortable. There were other music stores where you were persona non grata, where you couldn’t touch anything because you weren’t cool enough or metal enough or punk enough. That’s the way so many film and arts festivals can be, very cliquey. I don’t want the Edwood to ever be that way. I’m from the school where everybody gets a trophy, and I want this festival to always be very inclusive.”
Taking Edwood to a new level will require money, but Eric Vollweiler, head of the event’s fundraising and business development, admits the organizers didn’t reach this year’s goal of raising $50,000.
“I’m local, having grown up in Burnt Hills,” says Vollweiler, “but I’ve lived in Los Angeles and done a lot of fundraising for film festivals around the country such as the Sundance Film Festival, so I know that it takes time for festivals to grow. This is also a smaller market. In LA and New York, I can get large sums of money from big companies, but here I made phone calls and knocked on doors and got varied sums from mostly smaller places.”
Vollweiler says the passion that surrounds the Edwood Festival recalls tales of Hollywood a century ago, when the industry was raw and dynamic. Such energy was obvious in the eyes of Tobias Seamon in July as he stood behind the camera on the back lot of the Spectrum, watching his production team bring his microsode to life. An interpreter at the Crailo State Historic site in Rensselaer, he identifies himself as “basically, a historian, but I’m also a writer and a poet.” A published novelist, he knew he could write a screenplay, but now he was facing all the complexity of transforming his screenplay into a five-minute film.
Before the filming began, Seamon had spent more than a month working with a team of actors, sound people, and cinematographers. Everyone involved was a volunteer, and they were all genuinely excited to be part of the process. “I’m learning on the fly,” said Seamon the day of the shoot. “I’ve never even owned a film camera. When I’m working with these film people, I keep thinking of Dr. McCoy in “Star Trek,” when he used to say, ‘Damn it, Jim, I’m just a doctor.’ Well, I want to keep telling the actors, ‘Damn it, I’m just a writer.’ ”
He began filming at 5am, and quickly learned why moviemaking is so expensive and time-consuming. “The production team has been great, but the noise has been a problem,” he reported during a break in the work. “We’ll be just about through a great scene and then a plane will fly by overhead and we’ll have to do it all over again. Actors want to know how to say a line or where to stand, and we have to figure out the best place for the camera to be, but it’s such a rush to hear them translate your words through the character. The piece takes on a life of its own. What’s going to be really hard is waiting around till I get to see what the Hollywood editors have done with it. That’s going to be wild, to sit in the Spectrum and watch my movie come up on the big screen.”
As Seamon spoke, Barnett stood in the center of the film lot, gazing around at all the activity. Actors were running around in costumes, sets were being built, and directors were yelling, “Quiet!” As he surveyed the scene, Barnett nodded in approval. “This place is just oozing with creativity,” he said, smiling. “Back in 2000, I never thought we’d ever get to something like this. I keep expecting to see Ed Wood walk by as a director of one of the films. I think he would have really liked this.”
This article appears in September 2007.
