Riding high Jurassic Park-style in a jeep through Custer County in South Dakota during the week of Microcinema Fest 2004, I realized one of the things I’d often sold about the fest, but not really looked at myself, was the huge amount of genuine tourist attractions in the area.  Aside from Mount Rushmore and the badlands, I didn’t know just how many extraordinary attractions there were in the Black Hills.  This year I would see Crazy Horse and the accompanying Native American museum, drive so close to an angry buffalo in Custer State Park that one moviemaker wanted to feed her his lunch and was warned sternly not to, just miss the 1812 Train as it pulled out of the station, and play a round of pirate-themed Mini Golf with 14 people that will go down in my personal history as one of the best times I’ve ever had. These were really great times, and they served as pre-festival highlights during the “camp” part of the week – a section of Microcinema Fest 2004 that I initially believed we, as festival organizers, had really screwed-up.

Microcinema Fest 2004 and “Boot Camp” flyers in a local downtown shop window.

At the start of the week, however, I was rather preoccupied with preparations for the boot camp classes for which people from Rapid City had signed-up, and for which John Oak Dalton and I had agreed to teach.  Last we had heard, only about ten people were going to be our audience for several hours while we attempted to teach lessons about screenwriting, lighting, editing, coming up with no-budget concepts and various makes of video cameras.  In the weeks leading up to the festival, I hadn’t any time to worry about these classes, as promotion of the festival was so last minute.  My time otherwise occupied, once I was on the plane to Denver, I finally found some free moments to compose an outline to follow during my teachings Tuesday and Wednesday at the Dahl Arts Center.  And as I was writing up this outline, channeling some of what I remembered from film school and fusing it with the past seven year’s worth of practical experience, one scary fact occurred to me that really hadn’t yet consciously made itself known – I had never formally taught a classroom of people.

The thought kept becoming more and more prevalent in my mind, and as I was meeting with John Oak Dalton only hours before our first class to compare notes, my newness to teaching was just about all I could think of.  I kept telling myself “I know about moviemaking and I know what I should teach,” but that didn’t seem to take the edge off.  Even John’s seriously laid-back manner and approach to the “boot camp” didn’t calm my nerves. I kept trying to remind myself this was no different than teaching the dozen or so friends I had taught moviemaking tricks to over the years while working with Random Foo Pictures, Jodom Pictures and my own MINDSCAPE PICTURES back in Boston. Also, I’d done a fair amount of formal one-on-one tutelage in some aspects of moviemaking as for a while several ago my evenings were consistently being booked by appointments to teach people how to edit.  Finally, this past year I had two speaking engagements in front of rooms filled with twenty or so eager listeners, one of them at my alma mater, Emerson College.  I should have felt prepared for this.  But still, I didn’t.

Nervous as Yankees Fan walking through Boston’s North End, I took the stage at the Dahl Arts Center and quickly relinquished microphone duties to John Oak Dalton who, with alarming grace and brevity, managed to succinctly introduce himself.  He then handed the mic to me and my voice cracked, a shaking hand gripping the mic and betraying whatever credentials I was trying to impress the dozen or so people in the room with. “It is what it is,” I said to myself, practicing the mantra that would become this year’s festival motto.

Luckily, John’s smart, quick outlining of the principles of screenwriting reawakened the desire in me to talk about this thing I most love (moviemaking - for those of you not keeping up) and soon I was eagerly adding points throughout John’s lecture as he had invited me to do.  By the time he passed the mic to me for a “drill down” about how to come up with strong “no-budget” concepts that people could actually make and complete, I was excited to talk to the audience.  Somewhere around now was when twenty-or-so more students from a local college came in to watch the ending of our lecture and the rest of the program which was to be handled by their own professor, a very informative guy named Jay Roman.  They didn’t faze me a bit.  I was rolling on the topic and having a lot of fun with it.

Both that day and the following day were excellent times for John and I.  People really responded quite well to our teachings, and the course evaluations we were handed at the end of the second day were shockingly praise worthy.  Jay Roman too did very well with the audience, his stream-of-consciousness style both conversational and informative.  But one lad didn’t fare all that well with his marks, and unfortunately he was the lead-in both days for the “boot camp.” While Eddie Yaroch, a Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based writer/director who made a feature-length, 16mm kids film called Class President may have been a nice guy and may have had a number of interesting war stories about bringing his first movie to life, giving him a total of six hours to speak about those war stories was just poor planning on the part of the “boot camp” planners.  Eddie, for his part, made a pretty valiant effort to fill the hours, but by the time he pulled out his moviemaker’s journal and started reading it verbatim to the class, people were starting to nod off.  It was a tough act to follow for John and I, and probably a tough one to recover from for a tired audience.

This scheduling blunder aside, the “boot camps” somewhat captured the spirit of the “roundtables” that I had so wanted to make part of Microcinema Fest 2004.  It was an organized forum for the focused discussion of movie related issues, and though it was mostly a teacher-student dynamic rather than the whole “level playing field” approach that I was pulling for, it was a lot of fun. We decided this needed to be a part of the festival for years to come. During both the first and second day, several of the attending no-budget moviemakers came along and participated in the classes.  Both John and I believed they too got something out of our presentations and that such classes could benefit future Microcinema Fest attendees.

While “boot camp” was a success, my feelings about our annihilation of the “camp” aspect of this festival hung over me like a black cloud all during the first day of the festival.  With only myself, my wife Sheri, John Dalton, Tyler Wilson, Wally Fong and the three No Name Films guys in attendance (Jeremy Neander, Jay Neander and Jon Solita), I started to talk a lot about what we did wrong.  Why weren’t there more people there at the start of things?  Had we, in our efforts to legitimize and widen the profile of the festival, managed to kill what most of us believed was the best part of it?  Without a doubt, the highlight and individuality of the REwind Fest was the social nature of the event, and in previous years people often remarked it’s what would bring them back to Rapid City again and again.  But where were these people this year?

The answer was quite simple: they were still coming – just later in the week.  By last count, there were something along the lines of thirty or so moviemakers planning on attending from Thursday through Sunday, while only a handful signed-up for the full week. This was still somewhat disheartening though, because this year we tried to make the beginning of the week more structured and more fun.  By creating the “boot camp” and the “Chris Hull Bus Trip” we had something for people to do during the day (if they weren’t just there to shoot their own movies, which is something we certainly supported as well) and by arranging affordable lodging at the dorms, we created a really fun atmosphere conducive to sharing and bonding.  My theory?  In past years, while the beginning of the weeks were fun, they were very disorganized, with people often just sitting around and waiting at Linn Productions for someone to make a decision about what everyone was going to do together. Out of this waiting came some great fun, off-the-cuff moviemaking and bonding moments.  But often too, boredom resulted.  Perhaps many people remembered this and elected to stay home?

Also, another theory came to me; one that I believe carried more validity.  This year was the first year the festival’s intention was to exhibit the very best stuff that could be found in Microcinema, not just in the REwind community.  Now by doing this, I believe we upped the average age of those whose work was accepted.  This is partially because more practice creates better work over time (hence, an older moviemaker) and also because the once “young” REwind community who used to attend the full week’s event (originally in their early to mid twenties) were now a bit older.  And whenever you add age, you add responsibility – work, money, significant others, etc.  Suddenly getting a full week off from life to visit Rapid City for a movie festival doesn’t seem very practical.  This realization made all of the festival organizers wonder if maybe the festival needed to be shortened to just a four day event, something which I believe is still being weighed in the minds of all of us.

Regardless of my perceived failure of the festival to attract people for the full week’s program, after the first night of insane mini-golf with those who were in attendance, I started to feel like maybe a small initial turnout was a good thing.  For his part, John Oak Dalton didn’t seem in the least concerned about the turnout at the dorms.  Initially he teamed up with Wally Fong and the three No Name Films guys to become what he called “The Five Deadly Venoms.” After waking up from a very long sleep, Oregon moviemaker Tyler Wilson too joined this group along with Tuesday’s arrival, Miguel Coyula from New York City, to form the newly dubbed “Magnificent Seven.” There was a very real bond forming between the guys at the dorms, and it would continue to strengthen throughout the week as their very different personalities continued to find more and more in common with one another.  On a small scale, exactly what the organizers had hoped would happen was taking place just as it did every year.  People were making friends and creating memories that they would look back on very fondly for the rest of their lives.  To have been able to be a part of this - even if it was for only for a few people initially - made me feel like every headache I had prior to the festival was worth it.

The barbeque and barnside screenings.

So along with the “dorm rats” (another John Dalton-created moniker), Sheri and I were re-joined by fellow MINDSACPE PICTURES peeps Roman Berman and Stacey Monty (who had been visiting a nearby Mammoth fossil site while I was teaching at the Dahl at the start of the week) for the annual Barnside Screenings at “Linn Ranch,” typically a highlight of the festival during which several of the movies not showing as “official festival selections” are projected on the side of… well, y’know… a barn. This year, however, the screenings got a late start thanks to some ridiculously strong wind and cold weather that threatened to cancel this bit of tradition.  Somehow, the weather didn’t stop us from playing an insane game of volleyball that proved (if there was ever any doubt) that moviemakers should never, ever try to prove their athleticism.

Santo and Coyula look to the heavens for deliverence from the volleyball game before the barnside screenings.

Fortunately, the wind abated just enough that we were able to fire up the old LCD projector for the movie Jaimie Bondo, a ridiculous, subtitled and very funny riff on James Bond. No Name Films’ two editions of The Shell Safety Series followed with many laughs and then one of Miguel Coyula’s “lighter” short works was shown, a mock trailer freakishly mixing over-the-top Tarantino-style posturing, wacked-out Hollywood cheese lines, fake critical raves and a bit of David Lynch madness.  Midway though the viewing of one of my latest short movies, a ditty called Apparition Apparent that was probably too serious for the crowd anyway, the threatening rain finally started and we packed it in for the night. Knowing we had to reconvene in the morning at the NAU dorms for Film Commissioner Chris Hull’s bus tour of some of the area’s cool locations, it was probably a good idea to call it an early night.

The “bus trip” ended up being very informal at first, an occurrence that would have had me worried had more people been in attendance. As it turns out, the bus Mr. Hull had reserved for this sojourn was absconded with by another section of the state tourism department. But since only a few of the “dorm rats” were making the trek along with Sheri, Roman, Stacy and I, Roman and Stacey took my now damaged rental car (the victim of my backing into a pole behind the Dahl Arts Center) and Sheri and I climbed into Chris Hull’s giant SUV along with Wally Fong, Miguel Coyula, John Dalton, Jon Solita and Jeremy Neadner.  Before we knew it, we were four wheeling in open jeeps through Custer State Park on dirt roads, spying on buffalo (and videotaping their “movements,” if you will) and taking in some of the most gorgeous views any of us city clickers had ever seen.  There’s no doubt in my mind that all of the moviemakers in attendance were trying to come up with stories that could somehow involve such a rich, beautiful (and free) landscape.  I imagine the phrase “startling views of magnificent vistas” will soon be appearing in reviews of some no-budget work.

The group at Custer State Park

After rolling around Custer and eating what may have been the greatest box lunch ever, (amazing food… seriously), we rushed to get over to a tourist attraction called the 1812 Train for another sight-seeing trip.  Unfortunately, thanks to an uncharacteristically slow driving and mean-streaked local with a penchant for knife-waving (don’t ask), we were unable to get to our destination on time.  Just as we pulled into the parking lot, the 1812 Train started rollicking down the tracks without us.  Fortunately, as a back-up plan we paid a visit to the Crazy Horse monument and the Native American museum situated nearby.  It was an awe-inducing site, this gigantic rock edifice, and even if you don’t necessarily believe in the politics of its construction (like some Rapid residents with whom I spoke), the story of its construction is fascinating.  If you ever get a chance to see this monument (which dwarfs Rushmore) and the Native American museum, I greatly suggest you do so.

Well, after such a full day, one would think the crew were ready to retire for the evening, but it was Thursday already and that meant one thing: the festival was about to kick-off in just a few short hours.  Heading back to Rapid City, I was quiet on the car ride as questions again began to surface in my mind.  They were questions about the quality of the festival and whether we really did enough to put on a good show.  There were concerns about the attendance and whether last year’s audience would return.  And finally, there was rumination about whether or not Richard Hatch was the right man for the job of “festival spokesperson.”

Regardless, I figured we had made our bed and now it was time to lie in it.  “It is as it is,” I repeated to myself.  Nothing was going to change that at this point.

Next up… the screenings, Richard Hatch and the after parties.  A festival gets real.