The lost film of Paul Feig is found, sort of

"I had just come off of a year of trying to promote this movie I'd written, directed, produced, and paid for, and I had lost a good-paying acting job before that on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Everything had kind of hit the rocks; I was really at my lowest point." —Paul Feig, creator, Freaks and Geeks

Last week, Paul Feig and a host of others participated in Vanity Fair's great oral history of Freaks and Geeks. The show is now on Netflix streaming and the world is a better place for it. But in one of Feig's first quotes (excerpted above), he refers to an unnamed film that predated Geeks as his first major off-camera project.

I spent time this spring working for Wired's Relic Wranglers initiative, an online community dedicated to uncovering lost bits of pop culture. So when Feig made this passing reference, I knew exactly what he was talking about — his first feature film, Life Sold Separately.

Don't bother searching it out via Wikipedia, IMDB lacks detail too. I first caught wind of Life Sold Separately when Feig appeared on an episode of Marc Maron's podcast in January. It was a quick mention, Feig describing it as a "small movie that took place in a field with four people in one day." He went on to flesh out the plot. "Four people who all don't know each other all show up in a field, after being given some type of information from the beyond that a spaceship was going to come and take them away." Feig told Maron it was a clunky metaphor for suicide and that Penn Jillette (really?) was in it. Feig himself plays a guy who went off his Prozac, completing the Woody Allen writer-director-actor triumvirate.

(Intriguing, right? Naturally I had to track him down. We talked about Life Sold Separately in the spring.)

At the time of this film, Feig primarily was an actor who wanted his chance behind the camera. He finally had the opportunity after finished up the first season of Sabrina, The Teenage Witch (where if you recall, Feig landed a recurring role as Eugene Pool, Sabrina's science teacher). He saved just enough from the experience to make his first feature a reality.

"I wrote it to be easy to shoot," Feig says. "Filmed on 16mm. $30,000 was the cheapest I could do it for then. Now it would be $100 (thousand)."

Feig wrote the script with some actor friends in mind: Kari Coleman, Dave Gruber Allen and Steve Bannos (who would both go on to Freaks and Geeks), and Jillette, whom Feig admired and met while making Sabrina. He kept the film to one location by using an open field as the main setting. He could avoid spending big on lighting (natural light) and on costumes (everyday people as characters). Feig even storyboarded the entire movie, giving him the ability to shoot one angle at a time to save film.

Keeping with the low-budget ethos, everyone off camera had a chance to step into new roles with Life Sold Separately. Feig was a first-time feature director. A director of photography was a former video technician who did color correction at the Oscars. One editor previously worked as an assistant on Hallmark Hall of Fame movies. Feig says nearly all these professional experiments went well — until it came to final negative cutting.

"I remember I got woken up in the morning from a guy at the lab who said there's a big problem," Feig says. "'All your edits are flashing, whoever cut the negative did it completely wrong.'" At the time, this was literal film editing. You're supposed to cut so tabs at the edge of frames seamlessly overlap. If not, you can get a big glue mark or scrape the emulsion. "It was a big nightmare. This is my negative, it's all I had."

Fixing it would've required Feig to cut an entire frame from every single shot, causing major sync-ing issues. So Feig tried a viewing with this flashing print. "It was like getting punched in the face every time there's an edit," he says. "It ruined the whole thing for me, jump cuts right in the middle of shots."

Luckily, he still had a telecine workprint of the film (Feig describes its visual aesthetic as "more Texas Chainsaw Massacre than anything"). From this, he was able cut a videotape version of the movie. "Technically, it works. But it's grainy. The irony now is you can clean a lot of this stuff digitally."

Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of his issues. Feig says the next year was easily the worst of his professional life. He was written out of Sabrina and couldn't find any traction for his film. His lone breakthrough? A tour of small colleges sponsored by Movieline (a magazine back then). Three films were picked and each filmmaker was sent out separately to screen their movie.

"You expect a hero's welcome, but there'd be six or seven people in the audience in these giant rooms," Feig says. "I had to show it off a videotape and it wouldn't fill the screen. People who came liked it; some colleges even screened it in a class. But one time I got there, no one's around, and I'm told 'They booked you on Spring Break.'"

Feig traveled throughout the East Coast and the Midwest. He says he even shot a lot of footage from this adventure (future Life Sold Separately DVD extras?). Not the most encouraging first experience for a filmmaker, but the journey came with one significant upside.

"While I was out there, that's when I was writing the pilot for Freaks and Geeks," Feig says. "The tour was in two stages, so I came back and sent it to Judd (Apatow). I was in Kansas when they called and said DreamWorks wanted to buy it. I was walking on cloud nine."

Today, Feig's copy of Life Sold Separately sits on a shelf. He hasn't screened it publicly since 1998. "Want to talk about a buried gem or hidden relic, this is it. "It's the world's most expensive party tape."

Feig thinks the film has always been a bit tainted because of the print quality, but over the years it gained a certain charm. He'd need to do some digital cleanup and there are a number of songs from the Canadian band Odds that need clearing, but he would be open to releasing it, likely digitally, via iTunes or a streaming service.

"I do really want to do something with it," Feig says. "Compared to other things I've done maybe it's not that great, but it's interesting to see where my head was at or to see these guys who went on to do Freaks and Geeks. Penn says it's his best work."

Feig says he hasn't watched Life Sold Separately in a few years. That's not unusual for him, he hadn't watched Freaks and Geekswhen we spoke . He says the film has the serio-comic tone he's always liked. It's a glimpse at the embryonic version of Feig's work, something any die-hard would be eager to see.

For now, there's one thing holding him back beyond the logistical work. While at film school at USC, Feig says he learned his most important industry lesson: Screenings can't come with disclaimers. Even a film marked as a director's first needs appeal beyond novelty.

"You worry about putting it out there and people saying it's shitty. 'I know why they didn't release it, it's not that good.'" he says. "You can't just pull something out because it's there, especially if it should have stayed in the bottom drawer. One of the biggest things you have is your reputation and your reputation with knowing what's good and what's not good."

So while everyone is still revisiting Freaks and Geeks this week and (appropriately) basking in its glory, take a moment and ask yourself. "Do I want to see the first film from the guy who created Freaks and Geeks?" Of course, right? I smell a Twitter campaign.

@PaulFeig I'm in for #LifeSoldSeparately.

Find Nathan on Twitter @NathanMattise or reach out via e-mail: natemattise@gmail.com.