Stop–Hammer Time! Fan Film Event A Success

The big fan film program at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum was a big hit, showing not only some classic flicks and previews of upcoming works, but also attracting a veritable Who’s Who of the Southern California fan film scene.

For those coming in late, here’s the story: The Hammer asked me to come out to L.A., host an evening of fan films and do a book signing for my book, Homemade Hollywood. Oh, and could I get some notable fan filmmakers to show their work too? A few quick emails to Sandy Collora (Batman: Dead End; World’s Finest) and Trey Stokes (the Pink Five trilogy) later, and it was all set up.

Despite a couple of near mishaps—chief among ‘em being that we thought Sandy was a no-show when it turned out he was just sitting in the audience—it all came off without a hitch. I opened it up with 10 minutes of PowerPoint (not as deadly as you might think) on the history and future of fan films, before handing it over to Trey.

Trey, in turn, premiered a trailer for the entire Pink Five trilogy (!) and let slip that with the exclusivity contract with AtomFilms now expired, we might wind up seeing P5 in a different venue or format sometime in the future. That was followed by a trailer for his upcoming web series, Ark.

From there, Sandy came up, intro’d the trailer to his upcoming feature film, Hunter Prey, detailing what motivated him to go out and make it himself without major studio backing, and took a trip back in time by showing his fan film World’s Finest. We moved into a great Q & A from the audience, filled with questions about whether they tried to avoid using CGI, were fan films’ successes due to built-in audiences or their own talent, and are there any non-Sci Fi or fantasy fan films out there (No).

We wrapped up with a book-signing at the Hammer Museum bookstore—where I got to see a real, live hardcover copy of my book for the first time ever. At $85 list price, even I don’t own one, but now that I’ve held a copy in my hands, to quote Gollum, “Me wants it.” I saw more than a few copies getting signed by Trey and Sandy, too, since they’re prominently featured in it.

The evening closed out with an unofficial meeting of the so-called minds at a high-end pizza place across the street, where stories got swapped about everything from behind-the-scenes on Weezer’s “Pork and Beans” video to what the library at Skywalker Ranch is like (sounds cool) to the wild contents of Guillermo del Toro’s mancave. Sandy had to split before we could get a group photo, but here’s the rest of the braintrust we had on hand:

Clockwise from left: Clive Young (Homemade Hollywood book); Trey Stokes (Pink Five trilogy); Matt (posts on TheForce.Net fan film forum as Lank, is a grip); Chad (Sex, Drugs, and Natalie Portman, just finished his feature, Apocalypse, CA, coming soon); Seth (visual FX artist, fan films enthusiast); Ryan Wieber (Ryan vs. Dorkman); Brian (HamillianActor on TFN, The Injured Stormtrooper); Aaron (posts as Neszis, has done a handful of festival baby short films); and Teague Chrystie (Pink Five films, Trey’s Ark project, works as a visual fx artist, and most importantly, provided me with this caption).

Thanks to Darrin Klein at the Hammer for setting up the event; thanks to Trey and Sandy for participating and sharing some of the genius with the rest of us; and thanks to everyone for coming out and having a good time!