In limited theatrical release and iTunes on-demand this Friday, you can catch a movie called "Escape From Tomorrow". This little independent film attracted a lot of attention when it premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Why is that? Written and directed by Randy Moore for just under $1 million, the film was shot guerrilla-style in Disney World and Disneyland without obtaining permission from The Walt Disney Company itself, and features a plot that is defiantly off-brand for the family-friendly corporation: it tells the story of a father who has a mental breakdown while on a family vacation, and his happy surroundings quickly distort into a disturbing nightmare of hallucinatory visuals. Many people expected Disney to sue the film to stop it from being released, but with no word from the House Of Mouse, the film is on track for its release this weekend.
What exactly is guerrilla filmmaking? It is a method of independent filmmaking that is defined by a very low budget, a skeleton crew, and using whatever locations/props are readily available without support from a studio. Often it also involves a sporadic shooting schedule consisting of quick shoots in real locations without obtaining any sort of permit or permission. The risk of litigation and/or fines is great, but the end products often have an exhilaratingly realistic feel to them. Here are some examples of films shot guerrilla-style:
Written, directed by and starring Melvin Van Peebles, this guerrilla film tells the story of a black male prostitute on the run from "the man." No studio would finance the film, so Van Peebles secured a $50,000 loan from Bill Cosby and shot it independently over the course of 19 days. He performed all his own stunts (including jumping off a bridge nine times) and even participated in un-simulated sex scenes (he successfully applied for workman's comp through the Directors' Guild for being "hurt on the job" after contracting gonorrhea during one of these scenes). Van Peebles also composed the film's soundtrack, which was subsequently recorded by the then-unknown band Earth, Wind & Fire. With no money to advertise the film, Van Peebles released the soundtrack album early to drum up publicity. Despite an X rating and being initially released in only two theaters in the country, the film went on to gross over $4 million dollars, became required viewing for the Black Panther Party, and is considered largely responsible for the creation of the "blaxploitation" genre.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rD1OzJVoWY[/youtube]
Independently filmed on a budget of $175,000, this is Spike Lee's first feature-length film. Due to budget constraints, they could not do retakes of any scenes -- they had to get it right the first time, lending the film a sense of immediacy. In fact, money was so tight that Lee wouldn't let the cast or crew throw away any soda cans after meal breaks; he would collect them and turn them in for recycling money. A.O. Scott later wrote in The New York Times that "She's Gotta Have It" "ushered in [...] the American independent filmmaking movement" and lauded it for "depicting men and women of color not as pimps and whores, but as intelligent, upscale urbanites." Lee's depiction of Brooklyn as a vibrant cosmopolitan community is often attributed to the sudden influx of artists and musicians that soon began flooding the borough.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfmbvIR_QtA[/youtube]
When now-famous director Robert Rodriguez shot his first film, it was a little Spanish-language action flick intended for the Mexican home video market. He funded the film himself for $7,000 which he raised primarily by volunteering for experimental clinical drug testing. Scenes shot in a local jail featured the jail's real warden and guard in the roles of "warden" and "guard" to save him money on actors and costumes. When local journalists began criticizing his guerrilla techniques, Rodriguez gave them small parts in the film to mollify them. Instead of using a dolly he placed the camera in a wheelchair and rolled it around. instead of buying sound equipment, he shot the film silently and dubbed all the dialogue in post-production. Instead of hiring a film crew, he had the actors not involved in any given scene hold the cameras. The Mexican home video market ended up rejecting the film, and Rodriguez began shopping it to bigger distributors. It ended up playing at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and was picked up by Columbia Pictures for theatrical distribution in the United States. It is now preserved in the Library Of Congress as part of the National Film Registry.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75ra46x7FA4[/youtube]
This film is a first-person documentary chronicling the lives of NYC street booksellers during Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's controversial Quality Of Life campaign, the goal of which was to limit informal economic activities on the streets of the Big Apple. It was shot for a truly minuscule $10,000 raised mostly through the sale of used books at the very stands the film depicts. The documentary was shot, directed and narrated by bookseller Jason Rosette on a household video camera after a chance meeting with and encouragement from Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Michel Negroponte. Due to the film's tiny budget, it took five whole years to get enough footage to create a cohesive story and to find a way to edit the film together. It went on to win the Best Documentary award at the 2000 New York Underground Film Festival.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzhRG06vbGM[/youtube]
Writer/director Oren Peli conceived of this found-footage-style horror movie as a raw, believable experiment in terror. He filmed it in his own home on one video camera over a period of seven days for a budget of $15,000, most of which he claims went to the purchase of the camera and some new furniture. Katie Featherston appears as "Katie" and Micah Sloat appears as "Micah" -- they were both paid $500 for their work. There was no script for the film; instead, the actors were given outlines for each scene and asked to improvise, giving the film a very natural feel. When DreamWorks bought the rights to the film, they intended to remake it with a bigger budget and include the original version only as a DVD extra. But Peli's film ended up testing so well at advanced screenings that they instead released it in all its low-budget glory. It went on to gross over $190 million and spawned three sequels (and counting).
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oEU1ZBYWns[/youtube]
This disturbing not-Disney film had the highest budget of all these films (at just under $1 million), but writer/director Randy Moore also took on the highest level of risk. The Walt Disney Company is notoriously protective of its intellectual property, so extreme measures were taken to ensure the secrecy of the shoot. The film shot for ten days in Disney World and two weeks in Disneyland. The cast and crew dressed as tourists and entered the parks in small groups to avoid attracting attention. All footage was shot on two handheld Canon video cameras in order to blend in with the many families filming home movies. The script was never printed in hardcopy; it was kept on iPhones so the actors would simply look like they were browsing the internet when brushing up before a scene. All scenes were blocked and rehearsed numerous times in hotel rooms before entering the park so they could get the scenes in as few takes as possible. The film was shot in black-and-white because the guerrilla techniques made it impossible to use lighting equipment, which would have made a color film impossible to edit with any sort of continuity. The cast and crew had to wait in line and ride It's A Small World twelve times for one scene. For another scene involving two characters passing on two different monorails, they had to make the trip over and over again for several hours until the timing worked out just right. Sound was captured by taping recorders to the actors' bodies and leaving them on all day long, requiring the sound editors to sift through hours and hours of noise to find the right dialogue. The film was edited in South Korea to keep Disney from finding out about it. When his film was finally completed, Moore submitted it to Sundance with little hope of getting past the festival's corporate sponsors. But when the programming director was "blown away" by the film, he allowed it to be screened, where it played to sold-out showings and was picked up for limited release by the Producers Distribution Agency. Thus far, The Walt Disney Company has remained publicly silent on the matter, probably preferring to ignore the film rather than increase its publicity by suing the filmmaker. They have, however, discreetly acknowledged the film's existence by publishing an entry in their online supplement to "Disney A-To-Z: The Official Encyclopedia" that describes it as, "an independent surrealistic cult film surreptitiously filmed at Walt Disney World and Disneyland."
You can see "Escape From Tomorrow" for yourself beginning Friday at the IFC Center at 323 6th Ave.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nfU_5NWBoE[/youtube]
