Fan Cinema Today

Got an idea, comment, question or a hot tip? Lemme know about it:

The Good News:

I’m starting work on the first ever book about fan films; it’ll be published by Continuum Publishing, and is tentatively titled Homemade Hollywood. The book will explore different aspects of fan flicks, from their rich history, to their sociological impact, to their implications for Big Media in the future. Plus, y’ know, how cool they are and stuff.

There’s been a few books where fan productions were mentioned or, in rare cases, even warranted their own chapter, but fan films have been largely ignored by mainstream media. At best, you’ll stumble across the occasional newspaper article, or a rare, two-minute piece on a morning news show, where the reporter is astounded that people make their own Star Wars movies.

Meanwhile, I’ve been covering fan films for ages, first with articles in magazines, then with Mos Eisley Multiplex, a website I founded in 1998, which was the first site devoted solely to fan films. Between those, library lectures and now Fan Cinema Today, I’ve been following fan film culture for a decade, and lemme tell you, there’s much more to this underground movement than providing fodder for some newscaster to chuckle over before going to an Excedrin ad. Fan films have become such a integral part of fandom and internet culture, that I knew they deserved their own book—and fortunately, Continuum agreed.

Continuum is probably best-known to pop culture fans for 33 1/3, its series of tiny books, each devoted to one landmark music album. I’ve got a few of them: the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique ones, as well as the compilation paperback that came out last year. I keep meaning to pick up the Smiths and GnR titles, too, but I only seem to stumble across them when I have $1.58 in my pocket. Anyway, folks interested in theology and spirituality are probably familiar with the Continuum imprint, too—my mom has an Ark-load of the company’s Thomas Keating books, for instance.

The Bad News:

What this means in the short term, however, is that Fan Cinema Today is going on an extended hiatus, starting today. I can’t write for a living at my day job, write a book on the side, write a blog, do lectures at libraries and raise a family all at the same time; something’s gotta give, and this website is it.

Fan Cinema Today has been a great project so far, and has already accomplished the main goal I set when I started it: proving that there’s enough going on in the fan film world to warrant a five-times-a-week blog. In the two-and-a-half months since I started it, FCT has run more than 46,000 words on fan productions and related topics. I’d be the first to say that’s an insane amount of work, but my wife, Michelle, would beat me to it, having put up with my incessant writing all this time.

The Next Step:

The Fan Cinema Today site will change over the next few months; I plan to use FCT as a place where people who want to get involved with the new book will be able to contact me, pass along their ideas and suggestions about fan films, perhaps answer a survey about fan efforts, or just send me their email address so that I can let ‘em know when the book’s gonna come out. In fact, you can email me now about all that stuff at fancinematoday@aol.com.

I do believe that Fan Cinema Today will return in the future, perhaps in a different format that doesn’t require me staying up ’til 3AM a few times a week to write it. In the meantime, if you have used FCT as a place to find out more about fan films and what to watch, click on the word “Resources” in the menu on the right, and you’ll find plenty of links to fan film sites.

Thanks for reading this announcement this far, thanks for reading FCT over the last few months, and most of all, thanks for reading Homemade Hollywood next year!

–Clive Young

Digg It!

Author Jonathan Lethem is something of a literary badboy, and his new novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet , plays that up a bit, not necessarily with the plot, which follows an L.A. band during the height of early ’90s alterna-rock, but rather with the book’s promotion. According to this article on Wired.com, he’s hellbent on ignoring copyrights, starting with the ones on his own work.

To that end, he’s turning the book into sort-of an open-source franchise: he’s going to give away the film rights, and five years after that movie is made, he’ll make all of the rights to the book and movie public—meaning, as Wired notes, “anyone will be able to create derivative works of the novel and film—they can write new stories featuring the characters, publish a sequel to the novel or turn it into a comic book.” Or presumably make their own fan film.

For those who don’t like to wait—and in an I-want-it-now culture, that’s everyone—you can visit his website, the Promiscuous Materials Project, where the film rights to dozens of his short stories can be bought for a dollar apiece. As he says in the article, “Many filmmakers and dramatists don’t have access to the kinds of money and lawyers that are usually needed to obtain rights, so I wanted to remove that barrier.”

It’s an interesting take on things—by making it cheap enough for anyone to buy rights, why would you want to make an unauthorized fan film of his work? And yet, if you aren’t familiar with his work already, would the low cost make you want to make a film of his work that you would otherwise ignore?

I suppose it’s an interesting way to promote your book, your stories and potenitially get movies made from your stuff. After all, if all this material is just sitting around his office collecting dust, then sure, why not put it up for grabs? The more movies you get made from your stories, the more Big Money interest you generate for your future projects. Studios scap up movie rights for plenty of books before they’re even published; generating some heat for Lethem’s future projects surely can’t hurt when the price for him is to only a buck a shot.

The rule of thumb is that you can’t buy fan flicks, because then you’re making money off someone else’s copyrighted characters. Well, most of the time time. There’s a few professional DVDs that bravely circumvent this taking a different route: They feature characters that everyone knows, but which aren’t copyrighted. Monster Kid Home Movies (The PPS Group) is one of those discs, but all that’s getting ahead of the point, however.

From the 1950s through the 1980s, millions of families had their trusty Super 8 home movie cameras at their side for every trip to Disneyland, the World’s Fair or Sunday dinner at Grandma’s house. For plenty of horror movie-obsessed teens, however, that camera was a portal to another world, as evidenced by the contents of this disc: Dozens of fun, goofy homemade spectacles. Hardly a famous movie monster doesn’t appear here—you get everyone you’d expect, like Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman and others, including a variety of aliens, freaks and last men on Earth.

Are they hokey? Yeah. Are they horrific? Not in the slightest. Still, there’s a lot to be gained from seeing these little epics, admirable as much for the patience and brazen self-belief of their creators as for the finished creations themselves. There’s amazing stuff in here, from clever stop-motion animation of dinosaurs to a prehistoric beast: The Box Monster, a deadly, ferocious animal that, er, is a cardboard box.

As a bonus of sorts, it’s a looooong disc—over two hours! You won’t want to digest it all in one sitting, but if you’re a fan film fan, there’s bound to be something you’ll enjoy in this time capsule before the age of video, CGI and editing on your PC.

The fanzine, Fan Film Quarterly, which has covered the fan film beat since fall, 2005, is going on extended hiatus with the arrival of its current issue (#7), which was released in mid-March. A member of the armed forces, editor-in-chief David Noble is being sent to Iraq for a year.

“I will be shipping out in June for 12 months, and we are halting FFQ operations,” said Noble. “My friends that help me on this are going to enjoy the hiatus since I spearhead the production.”

By Noble’s own admission, the zine has struggled to build an audience since its inception, likely due to the unusual way it must be purchased, and its high price, due to custom publishing arrangments with Lulu.Com, which prints the magazine. The LuLu system is somewhat haywire—if you purchase issues via this link, you have a choice of a B&W printed issue for $10 and a full-color printed issue for $20, but if you buy via this other link, you get a variety of choices, from getting issues in B&W as a $3 download or $8 printed issue, or in color for $4 a download and $13-$16 per printed issue, depending on the page count.

Despite this, its circulation has grown with each issue, and by mixing short articles with a graphic-heavy design, FFQ became a resource to the fan film community. Striving to cover all corners of the fan film world, from superheroes to Sci-Fi to horror and more, every issue could be counted on to provide coverage of various fan films under production, the occasional filmmaker interview and, of course, the zine’s trademark pin-up style montages of babes in superhero costumes.

Although FFQ won’t be producing new issues until Noble’s return, back issues will remain in print for purchase at Lulu. FanCinemaToday wishes Nobel a safe tour of duty overseas, and will forward to issue 8 in the not-too-distant future.