Review
Film is probably the most frustrating and heartbreaking art form to be involved in. A musician can always find a place to play. He may play in front of 10 people, but he ll play. A writer can always self-publish a few hundred copies of his book and give them away to libraries. He may not get read by millions, but he ll get read. A painter has countless venues in which to sell his stuff. So eventually, all his canvasses will hang on someone s wall. It s not easy, but you have options. If you really work at it, aren t afraid to lose money, and have a minimum of talent, you ll achieve some sort of recognition eventually. It may not be superfame, but your hard work won t be for naught. But being a filmmaker? Hell, pure h*ll. It s all tension and no release. It s all planning and struggling and hoping with only a tiny chance for a payoff to all that work. I don t know how some of these guys do it without having nervous breakdowns. It s entirely possible to plan a movie for years and never see it happen; and even if you DO make the thing, it might never come out. Or worse, get a token cr*p release and just die in some dark corner like an old dog. None of this is helped by the fact that it s so freakin expensive to make a movie if you do it the way you re supposed to; a paradox when you consider that in this digital age it s now possible to buy basically every single tool that you need to make a low budget film for the price of a new Toyota Camry. "Wamego Strikes Back" is both a documentary on the oft ignored world of indie film distribution and a pep talk to like minded filmmakers who feel strangled in the age of the bloated Hollywood monopoly, gazillion dollar budgets, shoddy distributors and even shoddier financiers. It chronicles the efforts of Steve Balderson, writer and director of the excellent Firecracker, as he tries to get that film out to the public and acquire financing for his next project Wilbert Brummett, going so far as personally making dinner for prospective investors. Along the way we meet his family (who are definitely inspirations for his work), talk to people he s worked with and get their views on why less mainstream fare is ignored by Hollywood in favor of sure things that cost much more and who often make less money than the least accessible movie by David Lynch. We also see the genesis for the straight to DVD Phone Sex that Balderson made in between projects, a fascinating movie that s more of an experience akin to going down into the monolith with Dave at the end of 2001 than a film. It s a fun ride and Balderson knows how to string together a fast paced and interesting doc. Besides, no film on this planet can ever be boring when it includes footage of Lily Tomlin and David O. Russell losing their sh*t on the set of I heart Huckabees. A movie, which, interestingly enough made no money and is a HELL of a lot less mainstream or accessible than anything Balderson s done. Not a traditional Makin of... That would be this documentary s prequel/sister work: Wamego: Making Movies Anywhere which was about the filming of "Firecracker." Instead, "Strikes Back" starts where most Making of s end; with the selling and promotion of the movie; a crucial process in the production of a feature whose importance is rarely discussed in documentaries. "Wamego Strikes Back" makes you feel as if you re right there with Balderson as he hustles his work and muses on the philosophy of making films without going the traditional route, always showing a love and enthusiasm for what he does without being unrealistic or making it sound easy. Interviews with his father Clark and author Eric Sherman gives us further insight on the hard truths of trying to sell your movie in the old boy s network now in place. The thing that stayed with me the most after seeing "WSB" is just how well Balderson would fit in the very same... --Film Threat
Wamego Strikes Back starts with the Star Wars theme music (not the original version, obviously) and a text crawl that spoofs the opening of each of the Star Wars films. It s a little affectation which we can allow Steve Balderson before he plunges headlong into the sequel to his earlier Making Of feature on Firecracker, his second feature film proper. And just think for a moment how odd this is: a sequel to a documentary. Who has ever heard of a documentary having a sequel? Who has ever heard of a movie having two feature length documentaries made about it, each of which is released on a separate DVD? But then, young Mr. Balderson is not someone who does things the normal way . Tucked away in a corner of Kansas, he is about as independent as independent film-makers get. Wamego: Making Movies Anywhere told the story of how Firecracker was conceived, cast and produced. Wamego Strikes Back picks up the story with the film s world premiere at Raindance in London and tells of how it was distributed - or not, as the case may be. Making movies, as anyone who dips a toe into this ridiculous industry rapidly discovers, is only half the battle. Once you ve made a film, you ve got to find a way for people to see it. Sure, you can send it to film festivals, but only a very small percentage of the movie-going population ever attend a film festival and to some extent every festival acts primarily as a shop window for (a) distributors and (b) other film festivals. So for eighty minutes we watch Steve and his producer/father Clark struggle with distributors, seeing the film that they slaved over turned down again and again for increasingly ridiculous reasons which all basically translate as: Though we like to think we re edgy and independent, in actual fact we are as conservative as the Townswomen s Guild s cake-and-jam stall at a village fete and we dare not touch anything that doesn t look like everything else that we and our sheeplike competitors are buying at the moment. It s not like Firecracker doesn t come with a seal of approval. Roger Ebert no less praised it to the skies in one of the best-written film reviews I ve ever read. It picked up a truckload of nominations and awards at festivals around the world. But no, no-one wanted to distribute it. And you know, you can make your own movie in Kansas but if you want people to see it, you ve got to work with the Hollywood system. They control the horizontal and the vertical. There is no alternative. Bollocks to that said Steve (or would have done, had he been making films in Market Drasen instead of Wamego). Inspired by the travelling carnival in the movie, he took a 35mm print of Firecracker out on a roadshow tour of the USA, proving that there is a way to let people see your work. Suddenly, distributors came sniffing but as we see in a series of scenes featuring an increasingly exasperated Clark, Hollywood is just naturally structured to screw the little man. So huge corporations for whom anything under a million dollars is small change are months late in making payments of fifty or sixty thousand dollars. While Clark struggles with the financial chicanery surrounding Firecracker, Steve tries to drum up investment for his putative third feature, Wilbert Brummett, a character ensemble piece loosely based on his own family. By the end of this movie, Wilbert Brummett is consigned to a shelf as Steve realises he can t just make one film every six or seven years. Instead, he sits at his desk and makes his offbeat documentary/installation Phone Sex for pretty much nothing at all (as he points out, he didn t even have to pay for long distance phone calls because people were calling him). On this basis he decides that he can go completely outside the system , making the films that he wants, when and where he wants, rather than slaving for years to make one specific.... --http://www.mjsimpson.co.uk/reviews/wamegostrikesback.html
