"Monty Cristo" here.
MY SUCKY TEEN ROMANCE is now available on Blu-ray and DVD, as well as every VOD format known to man, including iTunes. Maybe you were in L.A., Chicago, New York, or Austin and caught it on the recent screenings we gave away tickets to, or maybe you saw it in one of its few festival dates following its acquisition the night of its SXSW 2011 premiere. Now you can see it in the comfort of your living room surrounded by friends, just as the director intended.
We've been covering Emily Hagins' career as a filmmaker here at Ain't It Cool since she began her teens. As she bids those years adieu, I thought it only appropriate to take a look at where she's been as well as where she's going in a new phase of her career.
An older photo of Emily from earlier in her career.
She's been interviewed and discussed to death her beginnings as a short-form filmmaker at 10, when her father taught her the basics of visual storytelling. She's tired of talking about it, but it's one of the most impressive parts of her story. By 12, she started making her first feature, PATHOGEN, which took a couple of years to complete (and with a bare minimum of resources). Rather than give up and move on to another hobby like so many kids do, she kept at it and finished the movie. The process is documented in ZOMBIE GIRL, a feature doc that can be watched on Netflix Instant (last I checked).
For her first movie and the two that would follow, she had no well-heeled parents to mooch off of, nor a famous relative who works works in the film industry. Instead, she scrounged together resources like the good ol' days of indie cinema, when "indie" didn't mean a 5 million dollar budget. She borrowed equipment and employed loads of free labor. As people learned about this ultra-dedicated teen filmmaker, support rolled in from all sides of the Austin indie scene, but don't sit there and think she suddenly had an Arri Alexa handed to her with a few hundred thousand in walking around money.
Her parents supported her financially to the extent they could, and by the time her third feature rolled around, she funded part of it via an IndieGoGo campaign and most of the rest out of her own college fund.
She stretched into darker, more serious fare with her second feature, a ghost story called THE RETELLING. Emily has said that the greatest thing she learned making it was that she didn't want to dwell on more dire subject matter, opting to embrace her love of mixing genre and comedy in her next feature.
Combining her frustration at the lack of realistic portrayals of teens and the vampire genre, she aimed to make a teen vampire romance that portrayed realistic teen romance among outsiders, while at once treating vampires like the monsters they are in most genre fiction.
MY SUCKY TEEN ROMANCE is undeniably a reaction to the TWILIGHT phenomenon in some respect, but to consider it one of the million attempts to cheaply, inanely satirize Stephenie Meyer's books and their movies is completely wrongheaded. Aside from a couple of directly referenced jokes, the comparison ends in their exploring some of the same general themes.
MSTR is predominantly set at a scifi convention modeled after CONvergence, a con that Emily and her friends have attended for a number of years. The main characters all have realistic lives and jobs, wear the kind of clothes that regular teens wear clothes, and have believably awkward encounters between the sexes. None of the main cast look like they could be 28 playing 18, unlike so many studio comedies. The performances are unpolished and rough around the edges in the same way, evoking what kids that age and who run in those circles are actually like.
They raced to get the movie done in time for South by Southwest 2011, and Emily's team was aproached in the theater by Dark Sky Films, the distributor who has since released the movie this year. There aren't loads of filmmakers who can claim the same.
During the screening tour that hit Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Austin before this week's home video release, Emily discussed plans for her next feature, which she hopes to start shooting this fall. She also made it pretty clear that she isn't content to keep doing the same thing over and over.
The most interesting thing, to me, was her interest in being able to spend more time on longer scenes and deeper character development. She's written a smaller main cast and is plannign to employ a more mature overall style of moviemaking.
This script she wants to make is about an 18-year-old guy who refuses to stop trick or treating, and the friends and family who want to help him move on with growing up. There's something great about how much he loves Halloween, but his arrested development in other respects isn't so great.
Emily describes it as being more along the lines of early Chris Columbus movies than anything else, which would indicate some connective tissue with what she's done before. The difference, as I interpret it, is on driving much more focus on this protagonist than on the much more ensemble spread in MSTR. There's some action, a chase sequence in particular, but the emphasis is firmly on more intimate personal development.
Here's another note on her immediate filmmaking future, before I forget.
Something interesting came out of the Austin Pajama Party screening last Friday: Emily chose to screen an anthology episode of Adventure Time as part of the private event, saying that what she was doing immediately next was very closely linked to it. So...in addition to shooting her own feature this fall...is she also part of an anthology feature that no one knows about yet?
She's mentioned having other genre and comedy ideas in various phases of development, and promises a very busy 2013.
If there's anything to be certain of with Emily, it's that she is determined to continue growing and learning as a filmmaker. I think that's admirable, and it's something that I wish were more true across filmmaking as a whole, not just indies. In a world where the studio system actively discourages indie production, she refuses to stop, and in an indie filmmaking world mostly obsessed on the trend of the moment, she's doing her on thing.
If you ask me, that's pretty fucking cool. I can't wait to see what's next.
I recorded an interview with Emily this afternoon that will go live sometime this weekend as part of the latest episode of SCREEN TIME, my podcast on the 5by5 network. You can subscribe in iTunes here, and it'll show up in the podcatcher of your choice as soon as it's uploaded. As a tease, the episode title is "Sam Raimi's Yellow Oldsmobile". I'll link it directly here once it's up (HERE IT IS).
MY SUCKY TEEN ROMANCE is now available on Blu-ray, DVD, and on iTunes, as well as a host of other VOD services. The weekend is comparatively sparse with new theatrical releases, so give it a rental and see what we've been yammering about for so many years.
If you like the idea of actively supporting independent movies, there is a reasonable price point at which to do it with this one, from a $3 SD digital rental to a $25 Blu-ray with a bunch of extras.
If you want to be cute in the Talkbacks and say that you've torrented it, then consider this an open invitation to box.
Moisés Chiullan / "Monty Cristo"
@moiseschiu
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Screen Time podcast on 5by5