All language subtitles for Backyard.Blockbusters.2012.1080p.WEBRip.x264-RARBG

Thunder

In 2003, a new Batman movie
finally appeared on our screens.

Only this time, it was not made by a
movie studio that owned the character.

It was a fan film made by fans
on their own and without permission.

Batman has never been done
really gritty,

that face-to-face two inches
from your nose experience

with this frightening
creature of the night.

And I thought, you know,
let's do a Batman movie.

He was hardly the only one.

Pick any modern entertainment property.

Batman, Superman, Ghostbusters,
Lord of the Rings, Firefly, Doctor Who,

Indiana Jones, Star Trek,
Star Wars, you name it.

If it exists, somebody's made
a fan film of it.

My name's John Hudgens,
and along with my friends,

I have made fan films, too,
several times.

And our films keep getting bigger
and more elaborate.

We started winning awards.

John Hudgens, Sith Apprentice!

We started getting national press
and influencing actual Star Wars products,

and that first one even played at the Cannes Film
Festival at the request of Lucasfilm.

But invariably, when we said
that we were making a fan film,

the general reaction from nonfans was,
a what now?

So what is a fan film?

I'd met a lot of other fan filmmakers over the years
because of our films, so who better to ask?

I'm sure there must be a few good
stories about these things out there,

other people doing the same things we were,
making movies on their own,

playing in someone else's
cinematic universe,

making their own blockbusters
in their backyards.

Some people got a trading card
collection or whatnot.

Some people have a train set.

And I don't mind, it's fine with me
if you think that I'm crazy.

But I got it in me deep inside.
I want to go outside and play.

See I want to go to the movies

out in my backyard now.
God, I want to start now.

Grab a camera and my friends.

And I know I'm going to seem weird
in this bathrobe with a beard

swinging sticks around all day,
but it's just the way I play

for my backyard blockbuster.

Whatever.

Awesome!

On my backyard blockbuster.

They just don't make bad guys
like they used to.

My backyard blockbuster.

Dude.

Oh!

Cut!

So I present you guys with
a Star Wars fan film.

How would you guys like to make a movie?

To me, the definition of a fan film is a movie made by someone
that's incredibly passionate but also very naive

because they're using copyrighted characters in a way
that they can't really capitalize on it.

I don't recall the moment
that I heard that term.

I just remember thinking, oh,
everybody's making their own movies.

And then somewhere along the line,
the fan film crept into it.

If I say we are doing a little
Star Wars light saber fight,

and people go oh, like the Star Wars kid?
It's like Jesus, I hope not.

A true fan film, of course,
is not made to make money,

and especially if you're using
someone's intellectual property.

Then you really can't make money.

The point of a fan film in many cases is to do
something that the lawyers would never allow,

that the studio would never allow, that the people
who own the characters would never allow.

I consider a fan film something that takes place
in the universe of the thing that you're a fan of.

I think of fan films as being
as diverse as possibly could be.

I mean, sometimes people make
fan films as parody.

Sometimes they do it to add on to the story
as realistically as possible,

or they're just trying to do a mashup.

It's such a wide, vast market that you can't put
your finger on, this is the way it should be.

But I think for fan films, that's the reason
they're so successful is it doesn't fit the mold.

You can't have six people in one conversation
all saying this is a way a fan film should be

because you're going to get six
different points of view.

The ones I like best tend to be
the ones that actually make an effort

to tell a story that might have actually
taken place in the canonical universe

and make me think, wow, I'm watching
a new episode, and that's great.

I think when you say fan film, even
a Hollywood movie can be a fan film

because those people like things.

Lord of the Rings is a fan film,
and Peter Jackson can't deny it.

He just got the rights to do it.
That's the only difference.

The word fan film I think didn't really evolve
until after the film TROOPS came out.

Bad droids, bad droids
what you gonna do?

That I think was the first
fan film that said hey,

not only can you make a movie that is in
the same spirit with the same characters,

you can have the same
production value.

TROOPS is filmed on location
with the men of the Imperial Forces.

All suspects are guilty, period.

Otherwise they wouldn't be suspect,
would they?

We had seen the
Star Wars Special Edition.

And somebody said, you know, what would be really
funny is if you crossed COPS with Star Wars.

And you know, we are all laughing.
God, that would be great.

And then there was a silence.

And as we're walking to the parking lot,
I'm going, anybody going to take that?

Everybody said no.
I said, anybody mind if I take that?

And they said no, not at all, so...

I joined the Empire
about six years ago.

I can remember as a kid
watching the holographic images

and being excited about the new
direction that the galaxy was taking.

It was so spot on.
It was so funny.

And it parodied two things.

It parodied Star Wars. It parodied COPS.
It was brilliant.

Excuse me. Excuse me.
You want to come over here, please?

Yeah, I'm talking to you.

TROOPS was spectacular.
It looked like Star Wars,

but it made the troopers
themselves interesting characters.

They weren't spear carriers anymore.
Suddenly they had personalities.

It was the Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern of it,

the idea of there was the part of the movie
you didn't see, the other half of the story,

the fact that some of these other characters
had these lives that weren't in the final film.

Now, we're familiar with this couple.
This is not the first time we've been out here.

So we're going to see if we can
straighten this whole thing out.

What's the problem?

I've had it with him.
He keeps lying to Luke and me.

And now Luke's run off
and hasn't come back.

That's ridiculous.

Hey! I'll talk to you in a second.
Right now I'm talking to your wife, all right?

Okay. Okay.

I never watch COPS anymore because that's all
I can think about. I can just think about TROOPS.

The reason TROOPS exploded like a land mine
was we'd had 10 years off.

Lucasfilm had really let the land go fallow
for like a good 10 years by that point.

When we were shooting this, there were rumors
of the new Star Wars film.

So here we are in the desert.
It's a pretty professional-looking crew.

The only thing that gave us away
was the camera we had.

It was a Sony Hi-8 camera.

So people see storm troopers
walking around of that quality,

and we couldn't convince people
that we were not Star Wars.

You know, these costumes. I was like,
where do these people get this stuff?

It looked like they raided
Lucasfilm archives.

It was before the 501st. People didn't know
how to make their own at the time.

And so yeah, I imagine tapping into people that could
dress in costume like that was a hard thing to do.

The day that
Star Wars Special Edition premiered,

the front page of the
Los Angeles Times

had a picture highlighting
four storm troopers.

Two of them are twins.

They are girls.

You'll see the ones wearing the high heels.
Those are the girls.

When we premiered it
at the Comic-Con, rightly so,

it really wasn't looked on as something big
before it was screened.

That screening of TROOPS,
that was a game changer.

The very first effects shot, you could hear
the reaction of the crowd thinking,

well, it looks like Star Wars,
but I don't remember that shot.

And then the next effects shot
is trooper bikes,

and everybody knows there was
never anything like that there.

So then the audience is like, whoa.

The effects were on a level
that nobody expected.

Like some of those scenes, you go whoa,
that looks like an ILM shot.

That really started the explosion of fan films
was right after Kevin Rubio screened TROOPS.

Chris Gore came to me, and he said hey,
I want to put it on my site,

and there are these other guys
want to put it up, kind of as a mirror.

They run the most popular
Star Wars site on the web.

That was the film that kind of
launched TheForce.Net

and got so many people excited and thinking
about this idea of creating fan films.

Once it got on, it crashed servers.

From what I remember,
it crashed Oprah's server.

It crashed Newsweek's server because they all
were being run by the same company.

And so when you start doing that, people start wondering
what the hell is crashing everything.

And then the story starts floating around.

Wow, it's this movie, and people are waiting 10,
20 hours to download this thing.

We were on dial-up.
It was like 40 megs.

It took like eight hours to download,
and you know, I'm like --

Good times.

TROOPS was probably the first
viral video because, I mean,

the concept didn't even exist at the point
that you could download an entire movie off the Internet.

And once people got a taste of that,
they were like,

I wonder what else I could find
on the Internet?

If you take out porn,
I'm fairly confident saying

it's still one of the
most downloaded pieces ever.

Okey-doke.
Shut the camera off.

The guys that were my troopers
did an offshoot called I.M.P.S.,

which initially was called TROOPS 2,
which I gave my blessing to.

They changed it, I think probably
for the better

because if it had been TROOPS 2, even though I hadn't
been associated with it, people would have associated me with it,

and they would not get the credit
that is deserving of them.

TROOPS has such staying power
in my mind.

It was so visual. It was so clever.
It was brilliant.

Kevin Rubio hit the jackpot
with that one.

Well, we didn't find the droids
we were looking for,

but we did find one
that a kid had reported stolen.

So he and his parents are going to come
down to the detention center and pick it up.

Boy, I bet they'll be happy.

Yep. That's what it's all about.

For me, fan film refers to
a state of mind behind a project.

Well, professionals are people,
and people get to make fan films.

Generally speaking, the fan film is the ultimate
exertion of all amateur forces colliding in one art form.

There are some people out there who are going to
consider a fan film to be a pejorative.

These are the people who feel that anything
that is not professionally made cannot be good.

This, of course,
totally ignores the fact

that there are an awful lot of professionally
made stuff out there that isn't any good.

Any film that gets made,
fan film, short film, whatever,

it's going to have people
that don't like it.

I don't care who you are.

There's people out there that don't like Star Wars,
okay? Go figure that out.

My question is not so much
why are people making the fan films

because I think that desire and that need -
I think that's always been around

because I remember doing it
all the way back to the age of 6

with a Super 8 movie camera
and making Space: 1999 Super 8 movies.

I was really surprised
how far back fan films went.

I figured at best maybe the 1960s when people
started getting Super 8 cameras into their houses.

The further back I looked, I discovered
you had people in the 30s making them.

I joined the Amateur Cinema League.

I would take pictures of our family doing various
things and trying to tell little stories.

But it wasn't until 1936
during the summer, I got the idea,

why don't we, instead of taking
ordinary family pictures,

why don't we make a story about Tarzan

that would be our interpretation,
our version of this great hero?

Of course, I played the role
of Tarzan, naturally.

I made the Tarzan yell.
Aaahhh aaahhh aaaahhh aaaaahhh!

And they looked up, and there I was
up there on the top,

and I flexed my muscles
and beat my chest.

I said oh boy, I am Tarzan.

I think that was probably the high point
as far as I was concerned.

In the case of the earliest one I found,
they made it in September of 1926.

It was these two itinerant filmmakers
walked into Anderson, South Carolina.

They were sort of saying that they were
from the Hal Roach studios.

So hey, we're going to make a movie,
and we're going to audition 200 kids.

Were going to show it
in the local movie theater.

And the local movie theater's more than happy
to be a part of this because everybody went to the movies.

The plot of the movie is based on

two separate Little Rascals movies
that came out that year,

which means they kind of had to
know their Little Rascals

because they were churning those out
eight or nine a year.

And successful people have made these.
Andy Warhol made fan films.

The king of pop art
made a Tarzan fan film

that starred Dennis Hopper
of all people.

In 1964, he made this movie
called Batman Dracula.

It's one of the great lost
Andy Warhol artifacts.

Hugh Hefner made one when he was 16 in his basement
called Return from the Dead,

which was kind of a combination
Frankenstein-Dracula one.

He's like a mad scientist in it.

If you told me that Hugh Hefner was making movies
with coeds in his basement when he was 16,

I wouldn't have thought
it would be a fan film.

A lot of gets into the semantics
of what is a fan film.

Like is Hardware Wars a fan film?

If that is, then Hardware Wars is probably
the earliest fan film I ever saw.

I'm Ernie Fosselius,
official Hollywood Has-Been.

I once made a film
called Hardware Wars.

And then I went into
total obscurity for 30 years.

Hardware Wars, a spectacle
light years ahead of its time.

When that came out, it was just so
over-the-top ridiculous.

It was the type of thing
that you couldn't believe

that someone went through that kind of effort
to make fun of Star Wars.

See incredible celestial battles
ablaze with death-dealing weaponry.

It was the first really true spoof,
fan film, Star Wars type thing.

Hardware Wars is really a satire.

Hardware Wars isn't a fan film.

It's all according to whether you consider
Hardware Wars a fan film or not.

I do.
It was really the first.

I went to see Star Wars
the first week it was out,

and I was already plotting to do this parody
while I was sitting in the theater.

Oh, dear.
I'm going to regret this.

They were professional filmmakers
at the time.

And still, they were just starting out.

We were clueless.

In fact, Hardware Wars
taught me everything I know

about film marketing
and film distribution.

And I say that jokingly,
but not really

because it made over $1 million
in many different markets.

I never saw really much of that profit.

I could use some of that right now because AT&T
has been calling me about the phone bill.

We had weird sales.

The Defense Department bought like
20 copies of Hardware Wars,

and I guess because of the title.
Go figure.

And schools were showing
it in their classroom.

What does that have to do with anything?
What can be taught?

Well, you could teach comedy writing I guess.
But I think it was to shut kids up.

It's like, be good for the first
40 minutes of the class,

and at the end, we'll show you
Hardware Wars.

I vividly remember being at day camp,
and they would show us films.

Not videotapes, films.

They would show us Laurel and Hardy.
And they'd put on Hardware Wars.

I remember Ham Salad,

the mixer flying through space.

I loved it. I thought it was the greatest
thing I'd ever seen.

A lot of the attendant fandom and extended
universe had not really sprung up.

So you could do Chewbacca
as the Cookie Monster,

the girl with the giant donuts
over her ears,

the flying iron like a CHP car.
It just seemed like fun.

The use of household objects as ships,

it reminded you that the
actual special effects
278
00:15:03,000 —-> 00:15:06,000
were themselves put together out of goofy shit
that they found lying around.

I had to go to a lot of flea markets
and pick up steam irons and stuff.

And you know,
it was all very high-tech.

I took a sewing needle
and scratched the laser beams

on the emulsion of the
original film and all that stuff.

They managed to hire the lovely Paul Frees
for their narration.

Experience the expensive,
spine-tingling special effects.

And apparently, well,
from what I heard,

Paul Frees didn't even
remember doing it.

One day the phone rings.

I pick it up, and I hear the
unmistakable voice of Paul Frees.

Is this Ernie?
How did you get my voice?

I was like, oh, don't you remember?

We recorded you in your studio, and it was a swap
for some maintenance for the thing, and --

Oh, never mind. Click.
And that was it.

When I did Hardware Wars,
I expected some legal stuff to happen.

The only thing that happened was I got a letter
from a lawyer at 20th Century Fox saying

we enjoyed your film, but we don't want you to use
the 20th Century Fox logo.

And I wrote back and said, it isn't.
It's 20th Century Foss.

And they kind of laughed, and that was it.
There was no big deal.

I moved to England in 1999.

I think Phantom Menace just came out,
and Lucas was on The Big Breakfast show.

The host asked him,
what's your favorite fan film?

And he said well, it came out a long time ago.
You probably haven't seen it.

Probably don't know about it,
but it is Hardware Wars.

And I went yes! Finally!

Get us out of here!

Take it easy, kid.
It's only a movie.

My favorite line from Hardware Wars has got to be
the last one. You'll laugh --

You'll cry.
You'll kiss four bucks goodbye.

You'll kiss three bucks goodbye.

You'll kiss three bucks goodbye.

You'll kiss six bucks goodbye.

Or was it three back then?
Three bucks. Inflation.

You saw the explosion in the late 70s
and the early 80s of fanzines and fanfiction.

One of the best things about fanfic,
and one of the things that's enjoyable about it,

whether it's in film form
or written form or whatever,

is you are able to mush together
disparate things.

You can do crossovers.

You can do Babylon 5
done as South Park.

That costs you nothing.

You sit down at the typewriter
or the word processor, whatever,

and you just type in, well,
Bruce Wayne got up today,

and you can weave into that
any thread you want.

You are writing for yourself and writing
with characters you know really well.

The fanfiction and
fan film difference

is that if we're making a fan film
based off of a film or a TV show,

it's running kind of the same gamut.

The culture of the modern
United States America is such that

if it's on screen, it is automatically better,
cooler, niftier, more real

than if it's written down
as prose or a comic book.

When there's a new release
of a Star Trek fan film,

all the Star Trek news sites
will pick it up.

If there's a new release of a particular piece
of fanfiction, nobody gives a damn.

If people give more respect
to fan films than to fanfiction,

maybe that's because they think that fan films
would be harder to do, require more effort,

that anybody maybe
could dash off fanfiction.

I think it's the same
if you start to say

what's the difference
in a fan film and an indie,

and people look down on a fan film,
but they don't on an indie, right?

It's all a perceived level
of effort and skill.

Fan films are the
continuation of fanfiction.

Now that people can get themselves
really good video equipment

and really good software to put it all together,
who wouldn't?

It's only in the past few years
when the final piece of the puzzle -

and that is the distribution system -
has come available.

I think video makes it a whole lot easier
than it did with film.

But I think the Internet and the technology
that allows you to bypass the processing

is something that makes that
come more to the forefront.

What makes the Internet great for fan films
is it's instant distribution on a global scale.

That doesn't mean you're going to
get a global audience automatically,

but you are distributed
throughout the known universe.

Anybody with a web browser
can access your video.

Something like YouTube makes it possible
for 5 million people to see your fan film

versus 5,000 who go to a
convention in your local town.

That was kind of the missing
piece of the puzzle

so that more people than
just your little circle

that came to your convention
from a hundred mile radius
could see it.

The delivery media keeps changing.

Babylon Park was shown on VHS tapes
at conventions. Nobody does that anymore.

15 years ago, no one
would have imagined the idea of

watching an entire movie on the Internet
because modems didn't move that fast.

I think all aspects of fandom
have changed through the Internet.

I think the general theme
is it levels the playing field.

Now things get exposure more
based on their true merits,

not because some heavy-budgeted
entity is funding it.

Thou shalt let the Wookiee win.

On the other hand, the Internet is notorious
for having a very high noise-to-signal ratio.

There's a lot more garbage in everything you have to
sift through to get to the real gems.

When you had TROOPS, and it would take you
10 hours to download it,

it damn well better be entertaining.

Now you can download it in 30 seconds,
but still, you've got to hold my attention.

Dramatic Squirrel is hilarious, but I don't want
to see 30 minutes of Dramatic Squirrel.

The democratization of the Internet
is both a good and a bad thing.

There were those filters early on like TheForce.Net
and other websites that picked from the best.

It may be hard to remember,
but for years,

to put a video online
was a pain in the ass.

Back in the day, TheForce.Net Fan Films
was offering two things.

One of them was the exposure that you get by
being hosted on this really popular website.

The other one was just the bandwidth,
the simple ability to get your video on the web.

You didn't have to pay tons and tons
of money to let people see that.

So for a moment, they were literally at the center
of the universe for getting your Star Wars movie seen.

The Formula is 280 megabytes, and we've been
downloaded a few million times.

I couldn't afford that bandwidth.

TFN has given us a place to be able
to distribute and not worry about it.

They foot bill.

TFN, it's also the only place
with a quality assurance.

Long before YouTube,
we're talking about 2000 to 2002,

the only option you had
was TheForce.Net theater.

A huge goal of mine at the time
was to get hosting on TheForce.Net.

That's like the Mecca of fan films.

We knew that there were
other sites out there

that tried to be comprehensive satabases, links to every
fan film that was out there.

We really wanted to be
the cream of the crop.

They gave fan films a place.

TFN is the biggest reason why
fan films are this big of a thing.

I'd found out about TheForce.Net, and I was like,
there's other people here that do this?

I didn't know it was this big and stuff.
It was like this whole community.

I think the community at TFN,

they allowed fan films to be shown
and allowed people to be entertained,

but they also proved to people, the normal,
the average Joe, that you can do it, too.

Another thing that we tried to do maybe
subconsciously was get a real variety of films.

I think the goal was
whatever we put up

we wanted to be a lot different
from the thing we put up previously.

So that way, we really represented the spectrum
of all things that fan filmmakers were doing.

TFN, they were selecting which movies made
it on based on parameters of quality,

and to make sure that
TFN's brand stayed the same

because TFN's brand at that point
was the one-stop shop for fan films.

We had tons of Star Wars films.

We started getting
other kinds of submissions.

And we would always say sorry,
this is a Star Wars fan film site.

We can't host you, even though
we think you're making a great film.

You shall not pass!

This is crazy.

We started to think
that it made more sense

to think of fanfilms.com
as kind of its own entity

that was affiliated with TheForce.Net, but it was really
broader than that. It wasn't just about Star Wars.

As long as it was a fan film,
it was good enough to be on TFN Fan Films.

As time kind of rolled on and YouTube
and Vimeo and those places came about,

as soon as it became
a completely ubiquitous thing

that if you want a video,
put it on YouTube,

it sort of spelled doom for the
aspect of TheForce.Net's vitality

because when you no longer have to go
to TFN first to know which ones are good,

you no longer have any reason
to go anywhere but YouTube.

And that's where we get Chad Vader,
so go YouTube.

But at the time, the balloon deflated.

It didn't pop. It was just like, where's it going?
Where's the air going?

It's going over there.
YouTube. YouTube. YouTube.

When you look back on it, the process of putting
something out there for everyone to see,

it all started right over our heads,
right in that community.

And there was Entertainment Weekly
stories on it.

It was on MSNBC,
and all these things were happening.

The New York Times was talkingabout fan films
and the state of the fan film community.

When you could only go to one place
to really find the good stuff,

in terms of fan films,
that was TheForce.Net.

That was our community.
It was pretty cool.

And then you had the Official Fan Films Network
with AtomFilms.

And it's like whoa,
okay, what's this?

We were looking at
the growth of the Internet.

We were looking at more fan films
being on other sites.

And we said, you know, we should do something
to encourage this, but in an organized way.

Lucas saw that we were running
a business around online videos

and actually paying some attention
to copyright law in the process.

We thought, wouldn't it be cool
to put together a contest with AtomFilms

to honor fan films and encourage
fans to make more films?

The contest that culminated in the summer
of 2002 was a very big deal.

That was Episode II in theaters.

We got hundreds of submissions.

And I believe we had
our biggest crop of all time.

We also had a special
on the SciFi channel that year,

so we were just able to generate
a lot of attention for the fan films.

There was so little
online video at the time

that being on AtomFilms and being promoted
on AtomFilms was away to get a lot of views.

We never struggled to find entries,
but it definitely does fluctuate.

And '02 and '05,
were both big years

due to the presence of the new
Star Wars film in the theaters.

At first, they were really, really hard on
any sort of serious fan film.

They would only allow parody material.

Initially, Lucas was -
and probably to some extent still is -

concerned about serious-minded
attempts to expand on the universe.

You know the lawyer's weigh in.

People concerned about intellectual property
weigh in - nobody had really asked George.

So 2006, I had a chat with him,
and I said fans love doing these things.

And he said, I'm fine with it.

If you can do something that the lawyers
are comfortable with, yeah, fine.

I have no problem with it.

Which is great, because we had had to deny a lot
of people who had entered the contest years prior.

Opening it up allowed us to have
more films entered into the contest.

What Lucasfilm has done
with their contest for fan films

is actually a very healthy
way of dealing with it.

Studios are going to have to
tolerate fan productions

because first of all,
it's good for them.

It means that fans are
keeping the franchise alive

even if the studios are busy
doing other stuff.

.

On some level,
it's all free advertising.

I absolutely think
other studios and entities

should adopt the model
of the Lucas Fan Film Awards.

I think it's brilliant.

If you have these devoted fans,
how much more devoted will they be

when they can create
their own story

and put it online and see that a few hundred
thousand people are watching that as well?

It's all just more adding to the world.

What is great is about that is that George Lucas
actually watches these films and picks out his favorite.

It so much fun just to see
what he's going to pick.

I was surprised.
I was like wow, he picked our film.

That's interesting. All right, George, rock on.
He can take a little ribbing.

Whoa.

This is really exciting.

It was like winning an Oscar or winning
an Emmy or something like that.

Just to have that kind of official
validation is really gratifying.

He came out, and he said, I'd like to give this
fan film award to Matt Sloan and Aaron Yoda.

And he was like, oh, wait, am I reading
that right? Oh, Aaron Yonda.

So how many people can say George Lucas
has made a joke about their name?

The Fan Film Pioneer Award, that was a huge
honor, and it's the greatest trophy.

I joke that it was sort of like
a lifetime achievement award.

There was a very sort of delayed reaction.

It didn't say was the best. It didn't say it was
the most fanlike. It was just the first one.

That alone is pretty good recognition.

And besides, it's a pretty cool looking trophy.
So I'm happy with it.

We plan to keep it going as long as it continues
to generate this kind of response

and as long as
Lucasfilm will have us.

I sort of hate the idea that they stopped
doing the fan film contest.

It's too bad that they couldn't do it
just one season more.

I will spread my wings
one season more.

When we first started
watching fan films,

most of the fan films
that you saw at the time

were all Star Wars
or a few superhero properties,

but there were very few
Star Trek fan films.

With Star Trek, there's so many books and movies
and TV series, it had covered a lot of ground.

I don't think a lot of people were as inspired
to try and create their own vision of it initially.

It's a lot more difficult
to pick up with Star Trek.

You need the sets.
You need the costumes.

You can't just be like out in the field
somewhere shooting dinosaurs with your phasers.

I remember reading about people doing filmed
episodes in the late 70s and early 80s.

I had seen a fan film clear back in '74
or '75 that had been done on Super 8 film.

I think they used Lego blocks
for the control panels on the bridge.

For the time period, it was a marvel.

In a lot of ways, it was a
greater technical achievement

than what people are doing now because it was
so much harder to achieve it.

It was just fans doing
a knockoff here and there.

They were mostly parodies at that time.

Prepare to beam down.
Ensign Expendable, report to the bridge.

I work with a lot of people that are very familiar with Trek.
Occasionally, we still refer to Ensign Expendable.

Sure, 300 years ago,
our ancestors may have exercised

their God-given right to maim and kill
whoever stood in their way.

I have one thing to say in our defense.

We got better.

One of the things I think is the funniest bit
is Weasley had taken apart the transporter, so --

Due to transporter difficulties,

we've decided to jump
to the planet's surface.

Enterprise, down and safe.

Boy, do our ankles hurt.

Captain, look!
Ensign Expendable!

Years later, to see a new
Star Trek parody

which is basically Star Trek
meets The Flintstones,

and the transporter there
is basically a lever

that opens a hole,
and they fall to the planet.

Look around.
See what you can find.

Yes, sir.

Yeah, if any thing's going to happen
to him, let it happen somewhere else.

Right.

Whoever came up with the idea of mixing
Star Trek and The Flintstones

was pretty creative I thought.

Sprock, does our insurance cover this?

The thing that's great about Stone Trek,
it has its own voice.

It's not just trying to mirror things
in sort of that fan-wanky way

that a lot of fan productions
try to do.

And I think that's the mark
of a really great fan film.

There's no one here, Mr. Sprock.

That because I killed them all.
Bwoo ha ha ha ha ha.

Zoinks.

Mother.

The idea of actually
doing something substantial,

I mean that was one of the things I think
that caught the attention of the press.

When Starship Exeter came out,
it caught my attention, certainly,

because I really wanted to see,
what could fans pull off?

The recreation of the sets,
the costumes - Exeter got it right.

Star Trek didn't have to be, These are
the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

With the debut of Deep Space Nine,
the dam broke,

and all the sudden, pretty much anything
in the Star Trek universe was fair game.

And I think that made it
a little easier for people to figure,

okay, we can do the Starship Farragut
or some other odd thing.

One of the cutest things was
the Farragut people jumping in

and doing Filmation-style animation
like the Star Trek animated

and got Lou Scheimer's
post-retirement blessing.

In the newspaper article I read
about the Starship Exeter,

it made a mention of
a couple of other fan films,

and one of them was
Hidden Frontier.

Hidden Frontier was an offshoot
of the USS Angeles Star Trek club.

We've done basically a seven-year series
with a total of 50 episodes.

Largely produced with the same
cast and crew over seven years,

which is a phenomenal thing
in fan films.

Once you forgive the visual, they have a really
unique take on the whole look of it.

I was very impressed by the - not so much the
production value because that wasn't there,

but I was very impressed
by some of the actors,

the dedication to the story, and the fact
that no matter what adversity --

I mean, they shot these things in a bedroom -
God bless them - in front of a green screen.

The Hidden Frontier here in L.A., they had
green screen, kept their production simple,

but the storytelling and the characters have been
going on for years and years and years.

Regardless of the visual
look of a project, look at Hidden Frontier.

They've been going for seven years,

and they've been pumping out stories and stories
and stories. That's their strength.

Hidden Frontier proved to me that it could
be done with some class.

As much as possible, we've tried to follow
the original credo of Gene Roddenberry

in making social commentary
in our episodes.

We've handled things like drug addiction,
clinical depression.

I still couldn't protect
the life of one little girl,

my little girl.

We were one of the first series
to introduce gay characters

as regulars and not
treat them as stereotypes.

I'd heard that there was a show that was
dealing with gay characters,

and I really wanted to see that.

We split up a long time ago.
We just didn't know it.

It was one of the things that had been a
big issue with Next Generation.

A lot of the gay characters had either been
kind of given the shaft

or had been written out.

I feel that that's one
of our greatest achievements,

was normalizing portrayals of gays
because they are ordinary people,

and portraying them as anything else
does them a disservice.

You have time for dinner?
We have a lot of catching up to do.

I'd like that.

They made it just normal.

It's not like their whole point.

Their whole point is
to make really great Trek,

and then, oh, well, if there happens to be
some gay people in there, great.

We've been on
Good Morning America.

We were featured on the front page
of the Los Angeles Times.

I produced or wrote all
or parts of 13 of their episodes

and then ran into James Cawley,
who was a Hidden Frontier fan.

And James, of course, is the executive
producer of New Voyages.

James Cawley, a professional
Elvis impersonator

who had built full-size replicas of all the
Star Trek sets in upstate New York

and had started shooting his own Star Trek
episodes and putting them on the Internet

and getting an audience of millions
of people around the world.

To me, Star Trek was, is,
and always will be

the original Enterprise
with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

I always wanted to see more
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

That was what Star Trek was.

I thought, well, I've seen
six Batmans, five Supermans,

I don't know how many
James Bonds now,

and I always felt in my heart,
you know, I love William Shatner,

but who's to say somebody else
can't do it and do it better?

Maybe not me, but there's a bunch of actors
out there, certainly, that could give it a good go.

Klingon vessel, this is Captain James T. Kirk
of the Starship Enterprise.

I've known James since
before he began this,

and it was always his goal
to get together and play Star Trek.

He had some bridge sections,
nowhere near complete,

but some stuff we could sit
and flip switches on

and go Yes, Captain
and play around.

I felt the original series was the only series
that never got it's just rewards.

It didn't go seven years.
It didn't even go its full five years.

So I wanted to complete
that five-year mission.

It's not the fourth season.
It's the fan season,

and the fan season will always go on.

He and Jack Marshall got the idea of
actually doing an episode.

Mr. Spock, any readings?

Nothing yet, sir.
We are still too far out.

New Voyages was kind of
a lightning rod

because you had a lot
of fans saying how dare you.

How dare you play
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy?

It was a gamble, and of course,
we've had detractors.

But I think that we see a lot more posts
saying I was ready to bash you guys,

and then they watch it,
and they get sucked into it,

and suddenly they began to accept the characters
as the original series characters.

And when it finally came out,
it definitely got a mixed reception

because clearly, it was
a work of passion,

but maybe it didn't quite reach
what they were hoping to achieve.

It was a proof of concept.

We proved that we could do what we did.

And then In Harm's Way, the second episode,
was where it really ballooned.

In Harm's Way takes three
of the best classic Star Treks

and finds a way to make
those three stories meld

into what I thought was
an incredibly creative use

that really did justice
to all three of them.

Even though it was fairly crude by the
standards of the later episodes,

I watched that one going,
that felt like Trek.

We put the first episode online,
and we were noticed within hours.

The episode was brought in by some people
that worked on Enterprise,

and it was viewed at the studio.

And they had a very important
meeting about it and contacted us,

and there were some tense moments.

We thought they were going
to shut us down.

Keep us out of reach, DeSalle.

That was my plan, sir.

Thankfully, they saw what
we were trying to do as fans.

They basically said,
here's a couple of rules.

No profit --
No profit at all.

And no sales of the DVDs.
No DVD sales.

Proper documentation and recognition
of Paramount's properties.

The biggest one was
don't make money, guys.

That puts you - pardon the pun -
in harm's way.

Then the lawyers perceive it as a threat.
It could damage the franchise.

So don't break those rules, and we're going
to politely look this way.

We're just kind of going to let you
do your own thing.

Status report, Mr. Scott.

Everything's ready, Captain.

Well done, Scottie.

The fact that a lot of
the original series actors

and a lot of the original series
writers are involved

just does nothing but lend credence
to what they're doing.

I looked at the first film.

I found it wanting in many ways,
but I also saw the potential.

I had a friend John Kerrigan
who did one.

He suggested that
I might show an interest

if I had a say in what
the story would be about.

I really - I didn't take it seriously because
I thought he's never going to do this kind of thing.

He's aged 25 years in one day.

So I contacted Dorothy Fontana,
and she loved the idea.

With her writing it, there was no question
to me that I would involved.

I blame Dorothy Fontana.

She called me and said I want you to
take a call from this fellow named James Cawley.

He's got a production facility,
and he shooting Star Trek for the Internet.

And I said you're crazy.
You're kidding.

She said take the call.

I think what makes it work is it feels
like episodes of the original Trek.

The last few especially, and the one directed by
Marc Scott Zicree and written by Michael Reaves and Marc,

could have easily been
a classic episode.

It's not a fan film.
It's Star Trek.

It looks and feels like
the original series.

Range, Mr. Sulu?

29 million kilometers, Captain.

We've drifted well within
the Romulan neutral zone.

Walter Koenig mentioned that he was
about to star in an episode

of Star Trek: New Voyages,
and I was fascinated by this.

And he mentioned that they were getting an audience
equivalent of what Enterprise was getting.

I sat down with Walt, and I said
tell me everything about this.

Marc Zicree had been
trying to get in touch with us.

He referred to it to me
as Sulu the Barbarian.

Sulu ends up wounded on an alien planet
and raising a family,

all in the wink of an eye
on the Enterprise.

You will stand down now, sir,

and see, I believe,
that you know us.

Captain Kirk.

I called up George and said
they're interested in you,

and I had a lot of fun,
and I think you will, too.

Shouldn't you send me candy
and flowers first?

I do not understand.

No, I didn't think you would.

We're rapidly getting to the point
where a lot of these are -

they're not really fan films, but they're not
full-scale union jobs, so you can't call them that.

I don't think World Enough and Time
is a fan film at all.

I think of it as the same as all the network
shows I do. I made what I wanted to make.

World Enough and Time
was nominated for the Hugo award,

and there was a desire to have it nominated
for the Nebula Award.

Getting nominated for
the Hugo and the Nebula,

the two top awards
in science fiction,

no Internet or independent project
has ever been nominated for either award.

When we were nominated for a Hugo,
I thought, this is nuts.

And then for the Nebula to come out of nowhere,
and there was some controversy about that.

I have no problem
with it being up for Hugo.

I do have a problem with
the fact that it was up for Nebula.

The Nebulas are about professional writing.

My issue with World Enough and Time
getting a Nebula nomination

had absolutely nothing to do
with World Enough and Time.

It had to do with the SFWA bylaws
which specifically stated

for the best script category that it had
to be for a professional production.

Whether somebody was paid for it or not, pro, fan,
what we're seeing is that these are malleable categories.

By definition, a fan film
is not a professional production.

It can't be a professional production.

If it was a professional production, CBS and
CBS Paramount would bring it to a halt.

I spoke out and thought, you know what, it really probably
shouldn't be because it is a fan-based production,

and we have certain guidelines because of CBS
that we have to follow,

and I don't want us to be perceived
as anything other than what we are.

This might be one of those rare times when we actually
get out of a tight spot with some breathing room.

But it's pretty professional.

It is very professional.

When we're on the set, we're working.

I don't call it work.

If you want - you got to work -
you can be a part of that.

What a cool thing.

People from all over the
world basically coming here

like being drawn to the mountain
from Close Encounters

for a reason no one really understands,
but they're brought here.

It's just really fun to be able to, as adults,
play like you're 10 years old again.

It's fulfilling a dream. I think it's,
oh, my God, I've always wanted to do this.

He always calls it Star Trek Camp,
and they go play.

They have baseball dream camp where people go and
pretend to be a big league baseball player.

Well, this is kind like that
for Star Trek fans.

People from all over who came together
and cooperate and share something in love.

That's very inspiring.

This is all these people coming together
from all over the world.

They live together.
They eat together.

They don't sleep together
because we don't sleep.

It's midnight.
We're just getting started.

The fascinating thing is that more
people were downloading New Voyages

than were watching Enterprise,
the then current Star Trek series.

Our episodes are downloaded by
upwards of 30 million people.

Star Trek: Enterprise was being viewed by
3 million people, and Paramount knows that.

I think, clearly, New Voyages
had some influence on J.J. Abrams.

And when Paramount approached him and said hey,
what do you think of rebooting the Star Trek franchise,

well, clearly, you just go back to what
made it popular to begin with.

I think New Voyages was a
necessary step to convince people

that the public would get behind somebody other
than William Shatner being Captain James Kirk.

I had J.J. Abrams tell me
that we showed them the way.

We proved that other people could step
into the shoes of these iconic characters

because until we did it,
it was taboo.

James Cawley, the driving force
behind New Voyages,

has a bit part in Star Trek 2009.

J.J. Abrams saw
World Enough and Time,

and that convinced him to
bring James into the new films.

I was pretty shocked and humbled when
he asked me to come into the set.

For him to ask me to
stick around and be fitted

and have a small part in the
movie was really amazing.

Certainly unexpected,
but it was really fun.

Would you care to join
the mission team?

The defining moment for me
that cemented what we were doing

was the day Walter Koenig appeared in
old-age makeup on the bridge as Chekov,

when he went to leave his station,
and he turned around, and he call me Captain.

Permission to return
to my quarters, Captain.

For me, that cemented everything.

We were embraced by
an original series actor

who validated everything
that we were doing.

The sky was the limit after that.

There was no going back.
There was only going forward.

You know, the legal questions around fan films
are definitely not going to go away.

Anyone that is using a character that they don't
have the rights to to make a fan film

is not going to be able to do anything legally
with it other than show it off to their friends.

What's the worst that's
going to happen?

We're not going to get put in jail. We're not going
to be creatively ostracized from the Internet.

The worst that could happen is that they
would say stop doing that.

We had this James Bond fan film that had been
sitting on a shelf for 30 years.

Then Stuart, who still had it, puts it
on YouTube, and it starts to get a following.

The next thing you know,
MGM shuts it down.

I can't imagine how they could be
threatened by that, but yet they were.

People have this misconception that fan films
are not illegal if you don't try to sell them,

which is wrong because
they are illegal just period,

the fact that you've made them, it's an infringement
of copyright and intellectual property.

I suppose this gets into the question
of copyright and so on,

but I think always there's been
an open season for parody.

One of the upsides of parody is that it's
protected under fair use, under U.S. copyright law.

It's very, very obvious to me and to a lot of people
who were working on these legal questions

that fan films are
definitely fair use.

People need to learn a little more about fair
use before they start like waving it around.

There's a lot that goes on
with fair use.

It's not just that you're
not making money off it.

Fair use is not a bright line.

Fair use is on a case-by-case basis, and it's
analysis of all of these factors and then some.

Well obviously, the companies who
own the characters in the series

have to protect their copyrights
and their trademarks.

One of the big differences between copyright and
trademark issues, both of which play into this,

is that trademark has this
affirmative duty to police.

Early on I was hearing from a lot of studio
executives, well, we're shutting these guys down.

I was like, really?

There's some really good stuff out there.
You might want to take a look at this.

I think I heard something about a Stargate
fan film being shut down.

Those guys made a Stargate film, and then they,
as I recall, they were practically just daring MGM.

We're going to sell these things, and
just making so much noise about it.

In the end it was like no surprise at all that
they kind of got, you know, oh, okay.

Most of these that we're talking
about, there's no revenue stream.

Basically, it's for the fans
by the fans.

It only helps encourage and build momentum and
keep the momentum going for certain franchises.

It's a really tricky line to draw.

And I sympathize with the
corporations who own these things

because typically, if you let a trademark
go too far, it becomes public domain,

and obviously, Lucas and
Paramount and Fox

do not want their characters, things they put
money into, to become public domain.

I think that there are ways of
dealing with that that maybe are

going to have to take the place
of the public domain,

which no longer really exists, or at least
not for modern properties.

We can't, like, take your movie,
put it in a theater, charge tickets,

take that cash,
and put it in our pockets.

We screen only for places
that are nonprofit

where the revenue is funneled
back into organizations

that go to support film education
for youths or for charity.

The Can't Stop the Serenity guys produces large amounts
of money for charity every year.

We kind of went all right, why don't we take that
and then just extend it to a fan film.

We called Fox, we called Universal.

We said we're using new ships, new crew, continuing
it in an area that nobody's ever seen before.

What is your objection on this?

And they couldn't find an area
where we fit.

And they were like, well, as long as
you're not making money, have fun.

Got in touch with Joss
through his assistant.

Got an email back, said
Joss says you have his blessing

and he thinks it's cool, and
he's excited to see the project.

So we did it all 501 nonprofit.

We have five charities that
we went ahead and selected.

And all of the proceeds from any of
our DVDs or sales or whatever

get split evenly between those five charities.

Ultimately, if we can continue this, hopefully it
changes the way studios look at fan films.

The question is whether the people
who control the intellectual property

are going to let you continue to play or whether
they're going to try to shut you down every time.

We've opted to not only let people play
but to encourage people to play.

It should be the example.

It should be what Paramount and Fox and Warner
Bros., certainly, and all these others should follow suit.

Whether they will, tough question.

I think overall, Lucasfilm and folks like that
who find ways to embrace the fan films

get the better press
because, of course, you hear,

Warners shut down that guy's
Superman film,

and it was really good,
and that's terrible.

Whereas, Lucas gives you prizes.

It's really easy
to hate Warner Bros.

It's easy to go, you're a
bajillion-dollar company.

F.U. I want to make
my own Batman movie.

I would say to studios that fear
film fans, just chill out.

Most of them suck,
so you have nothing to worry about.

It's just some guys having fun
in the backyard. More power to them.

What's going to happen
from a copyright perspective

when you can't tell the difference between what's
made at home and what's made by a studio?

They're not going to significantly replace
the original product, and if they do,

well, then then maybe the studios should be
worrying about that, and it's a separate question.

We've seen fan films
that have risen to the level

where they're nearly as good
as the original movie.

Batman: Dead End really showed
that you could make

a serious Batman movie
that's bad ass like the comic books.

Batman was something that I felt
at that time needed to be done differently.

At that point, the Batman films had sort of
ground to a halt. They'd become just ludicrous.

It doesn't have to be Batman with nipples
and big stars playing terrible cameos.

Or the gratuitous ass shot as he gets dressed,
you know, because that's not Batman.

It looks like anything you'd pay to buy a
ticket to go see. It was phenomenal.

To me, it was the best incarnation
of Batman we'd seen

that was really right out
of the comic books.

It wasn't comic-booky
in a pop sense.

That sort of realistic look to Batman
in terms of the gray - the suit.

It came out of Alex Ross'
head essentially.

That had never been done before,
buff guy in a cotton cloth costume.

It was the first one that really
caught people's imagination

after a long time
that wasn't Star Wars.

And it kind of broke the mindset that almost all
fan films at the time were somehow Lucasfilm related.

Got this really great dark,
gritty story with Batman and Joker,

who's actually played by
Andrew Koenig, Walter's son.

Andrew Koenig, Boner from
Growing Pains, is the Joker

who delivered, years before
Heath Ledger would, a great Joker.

That's why you'll never
kill me, Bats.

You made me...
Daddy.

His Joker makeup is still
the very best Joker makeup

that's ever been put
onto film in my opinion.

I like Heath Ledger's a lot, but
I prefer the more sardonic Joker.

Can't take a little joke?

Just like the most bent
psycho you can imagine,

and then you throw Alien
and Predator in the mix?

Ha ha ha ha!

Spoiler: Alien and Predator.

You're interested, I know.
I was interested, too.

Ahhh!

I know a lot of the hard-core
Batman fans out there

don't like the fact that the
alien and the predator was in it,

but I always reference the comics and say
hey, look, they made comics about it.

It's not like I just pulled it
out of thin air.

It was a huge hit at
San Diego Comic-Con.

Batman: Dead End is going to open
the masquerade and the lights go down,

and all of a sudden, you hear
and everybody gets real quiet.

When you see Batman on the building
and everyone

and I could hear people
whispering and talking.

What is this?
What? Is this real?

By the time the film starts to unfold, you couldn't
even hear the film because everybody was going so nuts.

5,000 people, no joke, throng.

Play it again! They start showing the trailers
Dad, show the Batman thing again!

People are yelling, screaming.
We got mobbed.

We went back to our
hotel room that night,

and they had already posted a report
of it on Ain't It Cool News.

Word spread all over the Internet real quick,
but you couldn't see it.

Ain't It Cool News offered the ability to see it.
The entire Internet went nuts.

Batman: Dead End got more press that summer
than Underworld, than any of those movies.

Again, not taking away from
what those movies are,

but Dead End got more than
all of them put together.

Look at that quote
in Wizard magazine.

It's the hottest movie of the summer,
but you can't see it in a theater.

I was not as big a big fan of World's Finest,
which was Sandy's followup.

World's Finest was something
that we didn't plan on doing.

It was more of a thing where
I felt obligated to the fans.

The World's Finest was
a great little movie.

They looked better than professional
films had looked for a long time.

World's Finest,
beautiful productions.

They look exactly like movie trailers
for movies I want to see.

I really wish that it was a full production
instead of just a little vignette.

The very next year, there were protests
from some of the comic book companies

that they did not want their
characters used in fan films,

and so their weight was used to basically
keep fan films out of Comic-Con.

I think it's a pretty obvious conclusion that
Warner Bros. just saw Dead End

and went whoa, whoa, whoa.
I don't want to be competing with fans.

Everything was great while
you guys were shooting on video,

but you guys start using the
tools that we use to make it

and get a guy that looks that
good doing it, that's not cool.

I don't know if DC Comics was ever scared.
They're DC Comics.

I don't think that
one person's fan film

is going to rattle
their cages too much.

It was well done, but I think
you could look and go

well, that's not going to be
easily replicable at that time.

That guy spent $35,000.

DC coming and stomping all over it,
and that's their prerogative.

And I can understand how corporations get
nervous because they have a product.

They have to protect their license.
I get it.

But by my lights, it's overkill.

And there's also Predator in there.
Who owned the Predator?

They can't turn around and go hey, this is a great
movie if it's got somebody else's copyright in it.

So it's a legal thicket.

There is a balance point.
It's not like copyright will cease to exist.

It's not like making art for
profit will somehow stop

because if everyone is making
their movies for free,

then who's going to pay for
the next Batman movie?

For the record, and you know,
you can put this in the movie,

there were executives, people
way up the ladder in Warner Bros.

that said, hey, a dark
Batman film can work.

The studio probably did come and look and go,
this guy did this for $30,000

and look at all this press
that he's gotten.

I think it probably did
influence him in some capacity.

I don't think it did,
but I don't doubt that

there were people watching it at Warner
and thinking, man, we got to step up the game.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Christopher Nolan
or those guys stole anything from me, whatever.

Nobody stole anything. Look at all the great
artists that have drawn him.

You are contributing to the
mythos of the character.

You're bringing new angles of how to look at it,
like Miller and all these guys have done,

like I feel I've done.

Everybody sits around and
talks crap with their pals about

like, hey man, if I was going to make a
Star Trek movie or a Spiderman movie,

you know what I would do?
I would do --

And people like Dan Poole did it.

Spiderman!

I have your girlfriend here, Spiderman!

That's it, Pumpkin Boy!

This video was in no way intended
for a mass audience.

It was intended for two people to see:
James Cameron and Stan Lee.

Who, me? I've got a date.
See ya.

Damn! She must be one happy lady.

In 1992, I found out James Cameron
had the rights to do the Spiderman movie.

I did a tease of all the stunts and
then had, like, here's the complete film.

All I wanted to do was some action.

I just wanted to get myself thrown
around, bust through some stuff,

and just show some swinging,
and just impress Cameron.

I would just kill to
work with that guy.

I would literally kill someone in order
to get on that film, and it was almost myself.

I didn't have a penny.

I was working part-time,
so I had money,

but it was money going toward 14 titles
a month at Comic Book Kingdom.

It wasn't enough to finance any kind of
50-minute live-action Spiderman video

with a Green Goblin that throws
pumpkin bombs that blow up,

and Spidey swings around a building.
That's nuts, man.

I sit here now as a grown man and go,
I got away with a lot of good stuff.

Oh, really?

Here he is in this
Spiderman costume

wearing cotton gloves, swinging
four stories above a building

on a rope with a mask on
where he can barely see.

Every time I see it, I'm like, that guy's about
to become a big red spot on the sidewalk.

But it is more legitimate than any of the
Sony movies because you know there's no net.

There was no way that I could do it
without swinging around a building.

I had no green screen or chromakey.

I just thought, I'll find the lowest point of a
building that looks high, and I will tie the rope off.

I tied it off to
the fourth story there.

That's a new lamp post.
Glad it wasn't there then.

Actually, I wish it had been there. I would have stepped
on the top of it. That would've been really cool.

I go up Sunday morning,
mask on, cotton gloves.

I put a bunch of knots in the rope.

Thank God, Tim McFarland came along and put knots all over
the rope so Ihad an excuse to hang onto something.

I remember seeing stills from it.

And I remember there was some video clip somewhere online,
but never seen it in its entirety.

It was years until I finally saw it.

And when I did, my jaw just kind of hit
the floor and bounced across the room.

I don't like this.

I don't like this at all.

Now, is he a great actor? No.

Will he tell you that he did
a terrible job of acting? Yeah.

He mostly blames it on his hair,
and I'll go with that.

He has really kick-ass
Peter Parker hair.

I met Stan Lee for
the first time in Baltimore.

I tell him I'm making a
live-action Spiderman video.

This was 1991, so now he'd
be like, oh sure, a fan film.

Back then, he was like,
you're what?

I said, oh, yeah, we've got
a Green Goblin costume.

We're throwing pumpkin bombs,
and I want to make him proud.

Stan Lee looked at me, and he said,
son, you already are.

Dan was at the Comic-Con -
I think it was 2000 -

and resigned to the fact that he wasn't
going to be able to direct Spiderman,

but he had this tape for Stan Lee.

And he would be hanging
with us occasionally,

and I swear to you, 30 seconds after he left,
Stan would walk by.

This happened like four times
throughout the Con.

It was just tragically funny.

Finally, it was at that Comic-Con, having met Dan
and then getting to see the epic film, it's amazing.

I couldn't believe that anybody
could be that bananas.

It's like, okay, yeah,
I'll hang on the top of a car

as you go speeding down the
street and doing 90-degree turns.

In that respect, Dan Poole beats
everybody else hands down.

It's an amazing thing.

A lot of people only define fan films as films
that take place in the Star Wars universe.

The ones that have probably gotten
the most notoriety have been

Broken Allegiance, Revelations,
Pink Five, Ryan vs. Dorkman,

Jedi Hunter, and TROOPS.
And Duality.

Somewhere fairly early on, I saw the infamous
Duality, which is a very impressive film I thought.

It was probably the first
serious one that I saw.

If you know the chronology, you can see
the shift that Duality created.

The thing about Duality is that
it was purely green screen.

And green screen at the time was
still kind of this new technology,

even though studios in the
industry had been using it.

The common man had not quite
gotten there yet.

They were the first that really proved that
you can take your camcorder and make a movie,

not just a home movie, and not just some fun
thing to show at parties or whatever.

Duality is where it's like,
this is where you go pro.

If you lay this out on an Excel spreadsheet and
just go, that's a lightsaber fight, that's a -

several of them are just
lightsaber fights.

The big joke on TheForce.Net board is like
two dudes with a lightsaber in the forest.

Personally, I like that because you know what
you're going to get. I want a lightsaber fight.

Ryan vs. Dorkman, I thought absolutely
one of the best choreographed battles ever.

Ryan vs. Dorkman was created
as an entry to the first

lightsaber choreography competition
on TheForce.Net's fan films forum.

We had been like rivals
on the message boards.

It's such a shame for Michael Scott that
he is so immortalized as the Dorkman.

Sort of jokingly, we had said, it
would be funny if we got together

and had a fight between
Ryan and Dorkman

because it's this rivalry
on the forums.

I was really intrigued by the
idea that these two people

who didn't live in the same place
could collaborate on a fan film.

We had never met or
anything like that.

In fact, you lived in Los Angeles
and I was up in San Jose.

So 2003, had the contest.
We got hosted on TheForce.Net.

Went by like that for years until 2006,
and then YouTube came around.

And YouTube has this power
to make things explode.

We went to put it on YouTube,
and it was already there.

And then we became the featured video on the
front page of YouTube, and we stayed there for like a week.

And that's when our popularity
really exploded.

Once we saw how popular Ryan vs.
Dorkman had been getting again,

we were getting all these e-mails, people
saying they wanted to see more, and we thought,

well, now is the time to make something
in the same spirit as the first one,

just better in every way
that we possibly can.

Ahhh!

The choreography and the fighting
and the effects were just stunning.

And then I show them to people.

I'm like, you got to check this out,
and they're sitting there like, who made this?

And that's what's great, when someone
can sit there and watch it and be like,

how did they do that?

It's more impressing sometimes
than what you see in big movies.

It's always fun to see the debate when
people go well, they don't have a story.

Is like well, so what.
They're what they are.

They're these beautiful
choreographed pieces,

a little bit calculated as a showcase,
as a local weekend dude kind of a piece

because they had this popularity and this notoriety,
and they decided to capitalize on it,

and I can't blame them because I've done
exactly the same thing. And they did it really well.

Several of them are just raising
the bar in terms of effects.

Revelations had beautiful,
beautiful effects.

Revelations was a labor of love or love
of labor, however you want to look at it.

Shane and I had been watching movies on TFN,
and we thought, that looks like a lot of fun.

We'd like to make one.

We would be driving in the car commuting
to work, talking about ideas,

and one idea she said, that
between Episodes III and IV,

what did happen to the Jedi
during the purge?

And see to it that the
transfer of power is complete.

Star Wars: Revelations
is 40-minute, epic.

Darth Vader's in it.
There's character drama.

There's Jedi.
There's rebels.

There's everything you'd want
in a Star Wars movie.

Of course, Revelations with their
effects, that was amazing.

I couldn't believe people could
create that on their own.

Revelations was obviously a big leap
forward in a lot of ways for fan films.

Just the effects in it, in all honesty, it looked
just like it was going to be Episode III or something.

When we'd approach people and say
hey, do you want to be in the movie,

I think the idea was filming
would take less than a year.

And we thought that it wouldn't
be that big a deal.

We would shoot maybe, you know,
over the course of a weekend,

like most fan films,
in somebody's backyard.

Not with Shane.

This was a three-year process.

Anybody who's made film,
it is probably the hardest,

most difficult thing you could
possibly do other than childbirth,

and I wouldn't know about that,
but I'm sure it's very hard.

Shane and I are among
the very few people

that either of us knows
who have been crazy enough

to do a Star Wars fan film
on that big a scale,

and so we recognize
each other's pain.

The very first shoot, I was in a rock quarry
about, I don't know, 100 feet in the ground,

and I had coordinated about 60 people on location,
storm troopers and extras and the crew.

And the next thing I know,
it's just an enormous production

with 200 people from around the world coordinating
all together into one effort.

You look at something like Revelations,

and the production values on that
were starting to approach the original.

The acting didn't
approach the original.

There were many comments where they bashed
the casting of women in the lead roles.

It was almost like they were so
offended that there were women,

that it should have been men in the
lead roles for a Star Wars fan film.

That's another thing that burns me up.

People go, Revelations, well, lots of money.
This guy must be rich.

No, I'm not.
I'm in debt.

I spent $20,000 making Revelations.
That's a lot of money for me.

He says 20 grand, but there
are so many incidentals

that we paid for out-of-pocket
on top of that 20 grand.

For good or for worse,
Revelations is my first film.

I am very proud of that despite all its weaknesses
and ugly hairs and moles and issues and problems.

It was like your first child. It's very dear
to your heart. I'll never forget it.

The serious fan films
always are just so serious.

They have lightsabers, and I challenge you.
Vwoom Vwoom.

And no one cracks a smile
or makes a joke,

which was very integral to
the original Star Wars films.

Most of the comedy fan films are crossovers of one kind
or another. There's so many Star Wars meets X.

Crikey!

Jedi Hunter, is obviously,
is a Star Wars meets X.

And I'm not saying that just because you're
in the room, but it helps.

But Jedi Hunter is a well-made
film, and it takes that concept

and it runs with it as far as
it can be run with.

Whoa, look at that! Launching straight up
between my legs, the little devil.

I was just laughing hysterically
with that one.

It was just an idea I had never thought of.
I really loved seeing that.

That's why I think the fact that
so much of the stuff is done humorously,

you can really find those
absurd truths of Star Wars.

There have been so many.
There's just tons of them out there.

The Pink Five series
is just incredible.

Hi. I'm Stacy. I mean, Pink Five
or whatever. Standing by.

Luke always struck me as a valley dude.

So if there's valley dudes in Star Wars,
where are the valley girls?

Surely there must have been
at least one.

You know, this is so cool.

I mean they almost never let me fly, but like today,
they said that everybody gets to.

It does seem really ridiculous, the attack on
the Death Star, the more you think of it.

And if you really are putting any available
person who could remotely fly,

who knows what you'd end up with?

Lock X-foils in attack position.

X-foils.
That's this one, right?

Oh!

Man, I hope nobody saw that.

Some friends of mine had this
blue screen stage,

and they were doing this
Top Gun demo,

and they had this fighter pilot helmet,
and they had this jumpsuit.

Really, Pink Five is just an excuse to do
some blue screen testing of my own.

Trey lied to me.

He said Pink Five was never supposed to see
the light of day. It was a test.

I called Amy up. We'd been working
together already making videos.

And I said, oh, I got this thing I want to shoot,
and we spent a couple hours shooting it.

Hey, are they shooting at us now?

This sucks. Nobody said anything
about them shooting at us.

I didn't know how to pronounce
words in the script like Tatooine.

I didn't know what the
basketball reference was.

Like, the bad guys live
in that basketball, right?

If you accept the absurdity of a valley
girl in space, it actually worked.

And it was just beautiful to look at.
And she was great.

Of course, I was just thinking,
did he just rip me off

with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern,
but I know he didn't.

I submitted it to Atomfilms
and I-Film on the same day.

Got an email back from I-Film sometime later
saying we have chosen your film.

We're going to run it.

What they didn't say was that they were going
to run it as their pick of the day,

the day the Attack of the Clones opened.

I told some people, hey,
our little film's up,

and I saw the hit counter
get up to seven.

I'm like, oh boy,
seven people watched it.

And then an hour later it was at 3,000, and I
couldn't understand. How'd that happened?

Luke, Leia, Chewy.

Hi, it's me, Stacy.

Stacy?

Pink Five is one of the most popular Star Wars
fan films on i-Film.

It freaked me out when I first heard that Pink Five
had been seen by half a million people.

It went like wild fire from those
portal websites to TheForce.Net.

Everyone loved Pink Five
because it's funny.

And much like TROOPS,
it shines a light

on the implicit between-the-scenes
moments that you find out

based on this movie, though implied,
are not the case.

Newsflash!
He is totally crushing on me.

Meanwhile, I never heard anything
back from Atomfilms at all.

Several months later after
the first contest was over,

I got an email from Megan O'Neill at Atomfilms that
said hey, I just moved into my new office,

and there was this box of tapes. There's one
with your name on it.

I think it's great.
I'd love to run it.

By that time, they'd announced
that the second year was coming up.

I said well, can I just be in
this year's contest then?

Finally.

Never really thought that the George Lucas
Award was anywhere near a possibility,

mostly because the year before, he'd picked
Christmas Tauntauns. How do you handicap that?

It seems like about as different a film as you
could have, so never really saw that happening.

I love Pink Five. We gave these movies awards
because they were great.

Whoa.

I did these programs where I show
groups of fan films at libraries.

Whenever I'd put on Pink Five, all the women
in the audience immediately go,

because this is just --
look how stupid women are.

Look how sleazy it is.
Just sexist crap.

And then by the end of those
five minutes, they love her.

And then they watch the sequel
and the other sequel,

and they get progressively
more grandiose.

Amy and I had decided we absolutely know
we will not do sequels to that.

That's the one thing we
were sure about.

And then we get this e-mail from Lucasfilm
that had exactly the effect it was intended to,

which was to kind of make us go,
well, I guess we could do a sequel.

It is not my fault.

I just followed the new kid who was apparently
also text messaging during the briefing,

but the point is, I'm not an idiot.

Artoo!

Am not.

Artoo!

Am not!

It's got the humor.
It's got the very attractive character,

not just physically, but she's
an interesting, fun woman.

The one thing that Amy and I both
were very strong about is

we're not going to go back and do another five minutes
sitting in the snow speeder on Hoth.

Duh.
Am I missing something?

That would be the reason to
not do a sequel.

That would be wearing out the welcome,
and it would definitely ruin it.

I am so sure.

So we said, well, if we're going to do another one,
we need to start going in a new direction.

Early, you are.

Oh, sick.

Hmmm?
Hm.

Strikes Back had a Yoda, a puppet
Yoda made by actual puppet guys.

It really came down to Yoda.

It had to be a Yoda piece, and if we didn't
have a good Yoda, it wasn't worth doing.

You don't have a phone?

Nope. No phone.
Too expensive.

Pink Five Strikes Back, I'd never had such
a great time working on a film.

And it was all people that just
wanted to work on it and have fun.

Even as rough around the edges as
it was, it turned out to be popular.

And that year, we won the Audience Choice
Award, so we went two for two with that one.

So that's when I think the whole legacy of
Pink Five began to sort of take shape.

Wow.
I bet that is a really long story.

Hmmm.
Totally.

The real problem was,
if we do the second one,

that pretty much was going to obligate us
to do a Return of after that.

So we were definitely signing on
for a pretty big job.

When it continued on, it kind of lost its spirit
of what the first one was,

but I still can't stop watching.

And the production value got
bigger and better,

and now, I can't tell the difference between the real movie
and their movie other than it's Stacy.

The writing of that script was
a constant, ongoing process.

Oh, this is a great scene.
We'll never actually do it,

but let's go ahead and write it because we'll never
get someone to play the emperor.

Oh, God, let's talk moisturizer.

I have no interest in moisturizer.

Yeah, I can see that.
1294
01:08:52:000 --> 01:08:56,000
We'll never get a Threepio costume. We'll never get a
Darth Vader or be able to do a scene like this.

You're doing really well.

We'll never actually go to the
redwoods and do a scene like that.

But we wrote it anyway with the intent
that we would always go back

and just pull the scenes right back out again,
and the thing would be much more manageable.

And what happened instead was
it went the other direction.

Why you got to be all up
in my grill about it?

I will get all up in your grill
anytime I choose.

Hey, guys, I was napping.

It is, as far as I know,
the only fan film created property,

in this case, character, to have been
formally adapted into the canon.

What?
What?

Oh, but don't tell anybody that I
told you guys. Okay?

Okay.

Yeah, I was introduced to Timothy Zahn,
the Star Wars novelist, and he said

I'm going to put Stacy in a novel
if I can, and then did.

It's a hand wave to all the fan filmmakers.

That was the one I thought would kind of epitomize
for me the fun people are having with Star Wars.

Whatever.
Yes, I see.

Whatever works for you.

You have fans making dolls and
all kinds of cool arts and crafts.

She shows up on an official
Star Wars trading card.

There were always these odd little,
you know, she sort of kept recurring,

becoming more and more intertwined
with Star Wars.

And the first time I saw someone at a convention
in costume, it was at one of the panels we did,

and standing out front waiting in
line was a girl in a Pink Five costume.

I actually just came to a stop and just stared
at her in a very creepy way.

I couldn't quite grasp that I was looking at someone
who had come to a convention dressed as Pink Five.

There's something about Stacy
that people relate to,

maybe because you know that's,
on some level, how you would be.

In the movies, from the necessity
of moving the plot forward,

everybody's always concerned with
what's right in front of them,

but she's kind of concerned with
just about anything but.

It's not that she's dumb.

She just is sort of oblivious to the
fact that other stuff is happening.

She's really sort of in Stacy world.

Where's little frog guy?

Hmm?
Oh, uh, he has gone to meet Luke.

You better tell him I need a ride.

Luke must not know that you're here.
You would be a distraction.

A big distraction.

I get asked rather a lot,
so you going to do the prequels

with Stacy or Stacy's mom
or something like that?

When the Pink Five trilogy is done with that last
chapter, it does pretty cleanly say that's it.

Stacy's tale has been told,
and we're moving on now.

I think I'm over it.

There's a life to that character that
really is beyond all of us now.

A lot of people, for better or worse, picture that
somewhere in the Star Wars universe,

Stacy really is in there somewhere.

And I don't have any problem with that at all.

I think of her there, too.

Hey, base one? My little robot guy's
head got blown off. Is that bad?

To me, fan films are a
good training ground,

and it's a great place to hone skills as
a filmmaker with characters you're familiar with.

You can be creative becauseat the end of the day,
you've kind of studied them.

You've studied them for years.

That's how you learn how to do something.

Painters learn how to paint by
imitating the great masters,

and you learn how to make movies by imitating
George Lucas or Spielberg or whoever it is.

This is one of the hardest industries in the world
because everybody thinks they can do it.

And everybody can't.

Any time you watch somebody do what they love
and they're pouring their heart into it,

whether it's good or not, there's
just an inherent respect there

that you have to have for that as a filmmaker
because we're all brothers in that respect.

I find that with fan films,
there's a level of dedication,

of passion and love that is a
real rarity in entertainment.

I think the people that are making fan films
do love the world of the films.

They want to be closer to it.
They want to participate with it.

Hollywood's not letting them in, so they're home
in Iowa or Texas or New Hampshire,

and they get their friends together,
and they make these films.

It's totally about imagination.

And a lot of it probably has to do
with sort of like being a kid again.

We all like to get out of ourselves occasionally
and feel that we can have other experiences,

and I think that's what fan films
enable people to do.

They find somebody interesting and exciting and say
okay, we'll do our own take on this particular character.

The fantasy world lets you do that.

Kids don't go out in the back and pretend that
they're playing Kramer vs. Kramer.

You've never seen any fan films
about Lawrence of Arabia.

At least not yet.
That might be a good idea.

It's so easy to imagine yourself in Luke
Skywalker's shoes or Captain Kirk's shoes.

In some ways, I think it's easier to imagine
yourself in a completely different setting

than it might be to imagine yourself
in a true-to-life drama.

They're not creating universes.

Star Trek created a universe.
Star Wars created a universe.

You can find yourself in these worlds
because the worlds are so vast.

There is a world out there
where you are the rogue,

you are the hero,
you are the woman kicking ass.

Something like Grey's Anatomy doesn't
engender itself to participation.

I don't imagine people want to
get around and go like, hey,

let's pretend like we slept with each other, pretend
to get married and not get married, and all this stuff.

I'm revealing that I know too much
about Grey's Anatomy right now.

You're not going to see a lot of Grey's Anatomy.
You're not going to see a lot of ER.

It would be interesting if you did.

I think the closest I ever saw to
that was Law & Order: Gotham City,

which was a really great idea except that
they should've done Batman and Twin Peaks

because they lived in the
middle of nowhere.

When you create a whole world from scratch,
as you do when you create a Star Trek or a Star Wars,

you get people who really get
enthusiastic,

whereas it's hard to find the guy to say, oh,
we all love I Love Lucy. You do the sets.

Excuse me, no. I want to -
the only part you love is being Lucy.

If it's I Love Lucy, you're not going to get
excited about dressing up like Ricky or Lucy.

It's way more fun to dress up
like Darth Vader.

You have to react when I choke you.

Seeing myself on film, portraying
a part that I would never

have an opportunity to do for
Lucasfilm or anybody else,

but I was able to do it and
have a little fun with it.

The one thing that I feel is that everybody does
this out of an insane passion for filmmaking.

You love the subject material that you've picked,
and you just want to make a movie.

You're driven to be a part of something
really special, and that's what this is all about.

That's what filmmaking is all about.

My favorite fan film?
Wow, there are a lot of good ones.

Reign of the Fallen. I thought that
one had beautiful cinematography.

It was really nice to see
a more dramatic films.

Do you really think you could
sneak into my home without me knowing?

One of my favorite films, it was George
at a bar, and Jar Jar walks in,

and it sounds like a punchline
to a joke, and it was.

It's control-sa, alt-sa, delete-sa.

Chad Vader is a great series,
and I know Lucasfilm feels the same.

I think many of them would cite that
as one of their favorites.

Yes. No. Uh, I don't know.
Continue stocking.

Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning
is a brilliant film.

Unfortunately, it suffers from
being almost too good.

Cinematic quality,
gorgeous visual effects,

paired with a parody story
in Finnish

some of which works in English,
and some which doesn't.

You asked me, what is
my favorite fan film?

The kids that did
the Raiders movie.

The Raiders adaptation is probably the
greatest fan film of all time

and will remain the greatest
fan film of all time.

I will say that right now.
I don't care who does what.

They did it with a VHS camera,
nothing fancy.

They're in Mississippi.
They're down in the south,

and they just spent their summers
re-creating this movie.

That's awesome.
You cannot beat that.

And thy re-created the rock,
and they almost died re-creating the rock.

And he's hanging off the Jeep window,
and they're doing all the stuff.

If anyone was to ever do it again, it would just
be like, oh, that's just like the Raiders adaptation,

which is why, and I'll say it again,
it's the greatest fan film ever made.

Raiders, when I saw it, it felt like
something that was incredibly real.

Indiana Jones felt so well-crafted, and I wanted
nothing more than to be in that world.

I rode on the school bus with Chris and had
asked about his Raiders of the Lost Ark comic book,

having no idea what a fateful
request that was.

A few months later, I called him
up, and I said hey,

I want to do this remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Do you want to help?

He said sure.

Chris gives me a call and says, hey, man,
you know that movie I was talking about?

Well, we're making it, and we need somebody
to do the special effects

because we just can't do it.

So I'm like okay, and I do a little photography, too.
And they're like, hey, that's great.

When Chris and I started, we had no idea
how we were going to accomplish

remaking a $26 million movie on,
well, nothing but our allowances.

And I even thought it was
going to take a single summer.

It ended up just being the
most gargantuan project.

We had no idea it would
take us seven years.

The level of ambition, spending seven years,
they age in the movie.

I mean, it's funny, and you
can't make fun of them.

We worked from memory for
the first handful of years

and cobbled together every image, every little
bit of music, everything we could get our hands on.

There wasn't any videotapes back then.

There was no DVDs, and he didn't
have the money to see it a bunch.

Eric sat down one summer and hand drew
well over 600 individual storyboards.

He made 632 storyboards,
and they fit exactly.

It was never a question of what
we were going to do over the summers.

We would all just reconvene, pick up where
we left off and keep doing Raiders.

I loved that film.

I was watching it with a bunch of guys, and we
were just going, oh, they're not going to do that scene.

Oh, my God! They did that scene!
Jesus Christ!

And then you're thinking, who the hell
did they get to let them burn a building?

There was this scene in the movie where this
character gets his back on fire.

And yep, that gots to be in the movie.

He says we've got to have remake
shot, for shot, for shot.

So Eric gets a fire retardant jacket
because, you know, it's fireproof,

so hey, it can protect him from anything, including
gasoline, which he poured on his back, over the costume.

I didn't know what the hell it was.
I'm just there as the camera man.

Where were their parents?
This is unbelievable.

This is completely inappropriate.
And yet it's absolutely awesome.

It's incredible that we didn't
burn that house down.

We were so lucky that there wasn't more
damage to that house than there was.

This film that we made
couldn't be made today,

and that's because it did seem
a more innocent time.

It was a perfect little window.

Camcorders had just arrived, so the technology
was just enough there so we could pull it off,

but the world hadn't clamped down on some of the
innocence and the freedom that was there.

That's what Raiders for me was. Forgive the comparison,
but it was Lord of the Flies gone good.

It's hard to say objectively
whether or not you're watching

Raiders of the Lost Ark or
you're watching Raiders.

For one reason or another,
the Raiders adaptation fully works.

You can tell these kids loved it.

When you see the dog on their shoulder
being the monkey -

My favorite gag is they couldn't get a monkey, so they put
a dog on their shoulder and had a string Sieg Heil it.

Sieg Heil!
Sieg Heil!

Originally, we had storyboards that we were going
to be using a kitten and kind of scrapped that idea.

I had this great dog, Snickers.
I could rough him up, throw him over my shoulder,

and it was that great
boy and his dog kind of thing.

I said hey, Eric,
let's just use Snick.

He went okay. That's cool.
That'll work.

The first time Chris Strompolos
ever kissed a girl is in that film.

I know that sounds too perfect,
but it was really true.

It was my first on-screen kiss
and first off-screen kiss, too.

And we did multiple takes.

The magic is that Chris works
as Harrison Ford.

His eyes, he believes he's Harrison Ford.

You want to talk to God?

Let's go see him together.
I've got nothing better to do.

After a couple of segments, not
only can I hardly wait to see it,

I want to see how they do it, and I'm rooting
for them to pull it off. And they do.

By the time they get to the truck chase, which for me
is the high point of both Raiders of the Lost Arks,

the fact that they do it, and they're diving off
into swamps, it just blows my mind every time I see it.

The fact that they remotely approximated
the truck chase, I was pretty impressed by that.

I don't even know if they have licenses to drive
at that point. It was like, damn.

Stunt shots shot from moving vehicles driven by kids
who may or may not have had their drivers permit at the time,

seeing the crowd's reaction to that, we usually get
the most cheering during the truck scene.

I made movies with my friends in our backyards
when I was in elementary school.

That Raiders film is just on
a whole different level.

My first instinct is like being
a jealous 11-year-old.

Why couldn't me and my friends
have done that?

We were working in a vacuum.

We were just some kids on the Gulf Coast that
wanted to remake a Raiders movie.

They don't know what they got there.

Their story is unbelievable.
That really happened?

That guy had that much passion
for that project?

That's a great American drama,
great tale. I love it.

This is the thing, we were
just doing it for ourselves.

We had no plans of doing anything with it,
no plans of showing it to anybody.

We were just doing it for ourselves.

After we finished it, we all
went our separate ways.

We all went off to college
and had forgotten about it.

It sat on our shelves for 15, 16 years
until it was rediscovered.

Then somehow, a copy got made, and it
landed in Eli Roth's hands, and he loved it.

When I invited him to Butt-Numb-A-Thon, Eli Roth
had an old videotape from his NYU days.

He said Harry, if you have any time,
play this, and he gave me a videotape.

About 8 o’clock in the morning,
the projector breaks down,

so they're futzing with the projector, and so Harry
grabs a tape and puts it in and screens it.

House lights up. People talking, eating breakfast.
No introduction, nothing.

You have to understand
that when it played,

it played after the worst double feature
in the history of Butt-Numb-A-Thon.

The audience was about to revolt.

We had the breakfast break,
and I play that Raiders thing.

By the time the boulder is
rolling after the kids,

everybody had stopped
going to get breakfast

and was sitting down watching it going,
how are they going to do the next bit?

Just as we're about to go into
the truck scene --

Truck? What truck?

Stop.

The audience booed, even though they knew that we were
all about to see the premiere of The Two Towers.

They booed the premiere of The Two Towers because
they wanted to finish seeing this fan film.

That may well be the best bit of
flattery we have ever received.

So they screened The Two Towers,
and everyone loved it, of course,

but apparently people walked out of the theater saying,
you know, I wanted to see that Raiders movie.

Tim League and Eli and I began the search for
where are these kids. There's a story here.

So Eli brings along this the VHS bootleg
of our film to his own pitch meeting, at DreamWorks.

He was like hey, I did not make this.
I don't know these kids.

I just came across this tape.
But I really think Spielberg would like it.

So the head of production watched it and called Eli,
and said this is great. I'm going to show it to Steven.

Calls Eli back.
Steven loved it.

Wants to write the guys a letter of appreciation.
What are their addresses?

And Eli has no idea
who the hell we are.

All he's got to go on
is our names in the credits.

Eli Roth had tracked us down
through Jayson and Internet and phone calls.

Eli Roth called me,
saying I'm Eli Roth.

I'm trying to track down Jayson Lamb.

I thought it was a prank call.

That's how I got a letter one day saying
Spielberg has seen your Raiders movie, and he loves it.

He basically said I wanted to
tell you how much I really enjoyed

your loving and detailed tribute
to our original Raiders.

He goes, it was really great to watch, and I look
forward to seeing your names up on the big screen someday.

Sincerely, Steven Spielberg.

It's like wow. This is just like,
I'm going to die. It's so awesome.

He told Empire that it was the greatest piece
of flattery he and George Lucas have ever gotten.

We were all sort of bewildered. And this letter and
Eli contacting us actually brought us all back together.

We hadn't spoken to each other in years.

That's what led to the
Alamo Drafthouse theater in Austin

inviting us months later to come down
and have a proper standalone screening.

Whatever differences we had before,
they were washed away.

We hugged each other and picked up
where we left off in the friendship.

They had all left film behind.

They'd basically left that
dream back there,

and until we found it, resuscitated it for them,
sort of built a fandom for it,

once it played, it played.
It played extremely well.

Clearly, it resonates with people.

You go into a theater.
You see people go off on it.

That transcends cardboard vines.
That's real film making.

It got through to all the big magazines.

We agreed to an exclusive with Vanity Fair,
and in the 2004 Hollywood issue,

they gave us quite a bit of
page real estate, which was great.

Chris, Jayson, and I were in Los Angeles.

The Vanity Fair article had just come out,
and we got a call from our agent who said

Spielberg would like to meet with you
guys in his office tomorrow at noon.

And at that point, I think I felt sick.

There's nothing more weird than sitting in the
conference room just outside of his office

and hearing that familiar voice
and going up to the security guard

and saying, hi, we're here
to see Mr. Spielberg.

Sitting on the couch in his office was one of
those moments where you sort of leave your body,

sort of look at yourself and say
is this really happening?

It was not the goal per se of making our film
to meet Spielberg, but it was certainly a pipe dream.

He said something really incredible
that even topped the letter.

He said I watched your movie,
and I watched it again,

and I wanted to let you know
that it inspired even me.

And I think that was probably the greatest
compliment that we could ever have gotten.

They did something that I don't think has ever
been achieved in all of fandom.

I mean, they remade
Raiders of the Lost Ark.

That's - there has to be
an award for that.

The whole thing about fan films,
it's a maturation process.

The people who are making fan films now aren't going
to be making fan films in 5 or 10 years.

There's a point at which you've
got to boldly go out there

and take your own ideas and your skills
and abilities and do something for yourself.

A lot of people use fan films
as a springboard to get somewhere.

There are the success stories
of the fan film community.

There's Ryan Weber, who made
Ryan vs. Dorkman with Michael Scott.

Ryan was hired to work on effects
for LucasArts in large part I think

because of the work that he did on
the first Ryan vs. Dorkman film.

Now I work on visual effects and compositing
for a lot of network television shows.

Got a real career, and now he's won Emmys.

Ryan Weber, he's the one guy
to keep looking at.

I keep thinking he's going to be
signing my checks someday.

And then there was the other
fellow who made some fan films,

lives in Australia, and ended up working on
the Star Wars films themselves.

Justin Dix. He inspired me so much I hired
him for my crew for Episode II and III.

Matt ended up doing the voice for a bunch of different
video games, including The Force Unleashed.

I just sort of thought, like,
this can't really be happening.

Even though I've been doing it for
a while, it just doesn't seem real.

Sandy Collora is doing his own original feature
films, and I think that's great.

Sandy started working on a
feature called Hunter Prey

using Clark Bartram, who was his Batman,

and a lot of the things that he
learned on Dead End,

and went out to Mexico and shot it,
and it's awesome. It's really cool.

A lot of people made
something out of it.

Joe Nussbaum made something
out of his fan film.

I was hired to direct
a movie for DreamWorks.

Didn't make the movie, but got hired.

Three feature films later, whenever
I meet someone new at a party,

and they go, I loved your movie, I'm 99% sure
they're going to say George Lucas in Love.

I think that Kevin Rubio from TROOPS has
gone on to do some really cool things.

I do a comic book series called
Tag & Bink for Dark Horse Comics.

Lucasfilm asked Dark Horse if I would
like to do an original series.

I thought, you know what, one of my favorites is a
play called Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.

And I thought that would be just a great thing
to rip off for Star Wars

because if you steal from The Bard
and Tom Stoppard, how can you lose?

And then I had my first assignment
writing on the Clone Wars in 2005.

Eric and I have quit our corporate
jobs, and we have teamed up

and formed a small production company,
aptly called Rolling Boulder Films.

I no longer have financial security,
but I'm happy.

Whereas before, I was successful
but not happy.

The effect of this little film that we did
when we were kids is already profound.

I have my best friend back, and I have
rediscovered what makes me feel most alive.

The Hollywood Reporter did
an article about fan films,

and it simply stated that
calling card films

like Grayson and Revelations and Batman Dead End
and so forth don't work,

and it's simply not true.
They do.

The new film that I'm working on
called Trenches

is being financed and distributed
through a division of Disney.

I would've not gotten that opportunity had it
not been for making Revelations.

If nothing else, whether Pink Five
had ever been popular or not,

we basically used it to build an
independent movie-making company.

You can really see the progress of that
right in the Pink Five movies.

So when it came time to do Ark,
I was just able to call the team in,

put the band back together,
and okay, boom.

If nothing else, there's been evolving a system
that works pretty well to make low-budget projects.

So when someone says okay, here's Ark and here's
your budget, what do you think? we go, okay.

And then we turned around, and
they are amazed by the results.

They were like, wait, what?
You made that?

We're like, well, we're pretty good at this now.
So... We've got a few skills at this.

You're really taking the big
budget out of the blockbuster

and literally just moving it
into the backyard.

It seems to me that we're
just at the beginning of this.

You see what fans of Star Trek are doing in
the creation of a virtual television series.

I believe that what we now call fan film
is the birth of a whole new genre of film.

I think they're going to continue to grow
until there's a new ecological niche

that straddles all the way from
fan film to professional production.

I would like to see more
noted filmmakers do it.

I'd love to see Ridley Scott
do a Batman short.

I'd love to see any of these
other working directors

that were inspired by Star Wars
and so forth make a little short.

God knows, I'll do it.

I think now we basically
live in fan film culture,

having movies like Be Kind Rewind
and Son of Rambow.

It's become mainstream, whereas even
15 years ago, it was a very marginal.

At this point, I think it's safe to say
there will always be fans who are creating something.

Making these films, the end product is
the least significant part of the fan film

because the whole thing is
really about the experience.

At the end of the day,
what makes fan films great

is just the joy that people
get out of making them.

And that is something that
thankfully can be caught on film.

The real reason for anyone, anyone to make a fan film,
in my opinion, man, just have fun.

I think that's what really shows
with most fan films.

Whether they're the simple,
cheesy special effects,

or whether they're the ultra-produced things that
look like they might've come right out of ILM,

it's very clear the people involved
are having fun.

In the end, you're really just doing it for you,
so try not to take it too seriously.

If you take yourself too seriously and to try to
put yourself in the same market as Lucas or Spielberg,

You are already set to fail.

You really shouldn't make a fan film
to win the George Lucas Award

or to win the Audience Choice Award
or to win anything at all.

You should really make it out of the love
of the process or loving the end result.

Now that I've been through
a fan film process,

because I know what it took
for us to do this,

when I hear or see someone doing a fan film,
I desperately want them to succeed.

The greatest aspect of fan films is fans,
and I don't say that as just to kiss their asses.

It's because it's literally true.

You couldn't pull off productions of the level Shane's
done in Revelations or we do in New Voyages

without fans who bring their
resources, bring their time, to do it.

And I think fans should be
acknowledged for that,

that they're really not just the
audience for these productions,

but they're the thing that
actually makes them possible.

It is an art form where you
are going into a project

fully knowing that everything that you put in
that project will probably never see a return,

and that is a dedication to
an art that is not seen,

especially in an industry
where money makes it go around.

It is all driven by money, and
fan filmmakers don't see any of that.

But they still do it,
and they love doing it.

And that's dedication to an art form that
I have to salute over and over again.

Sometimes you just got to step back and say,
hey, it's only a movie.

What are you doing sitting watching this?
Go make your own movie.

Don't make a fan film!

Get up, get out, and
make your own movie.

I say don't make a fan film
as a way to coach the people

who really want to make fan films,
who will go against what I'm saying.

You got the equipment already,
your cell phone.

You can go out and
make a feature with it.

So why don't you?

I did a lot of research when we first started
and did a Google search for worst fan films.

Oh, God, there's...

Iron Fist of the Obsidian Sith.

Wow. Oh, man.
It was a classic.

Did you see the tight rope scene?
Wow.

So what was your favorite movie?
John Hudgens...

Yeah, pan over to the side with me
holding a great big Jedi Hunter sign!

Or that Crocodile Hunter one. Jedi Hunter.
Whoa, funny. Whoo!

The Sith Apprentice thing, which
I think opened the door of imagination.

You know I beat a dead horse to death.
I really do.

I think John’s tired of this.

Even some of the movies
that we gave awards to

would have been even better if they had been
trimmed a minute, two minutes.

And this is not a shot at you.

Are you still here?