Official Rejection
I saw a smart little documentary last night called Official Rejection, a doc about the experience of one group of filmmakers who got rejected from Sundance, Slamdance, and a parade of other festivals before they start making the journey into the third tier of U.S. festivals, which brought its own ups and downs.
The filmmakers, writer/director Paul Osborne and film’s subject/director of the rejected film that Osborne wrote, Ten ’til Noon, Scott Storm, go through this journey with humor and a willingness to expose their limitations, especially in personal relationships. They did a good job of getting a strong line-up of interviewees – Kevin Smith, Tracey Lords, Chris Gore, and Lloyd Kaufman among them – and did a nice with those interviews.
The weakness of the film is that it is too long, it loses its narrative flow a bit in the third act, and for me, there were not enough independent voices about the fest circuit (guys who would actually do interviews, like Jeff Dowd, Mickey Cottrell, Mark Lipsky, Ted Hope, etc.).
I also wondered about the timing of this “first screening.” It’s months after Sundance/Slamdance, so while I am sure they wouldn’t bother even trying for Sundance with this film that’s tough on that fest, you would have thought it would have been a lock for Slamdance. It was not. On the website (and not in the film, which should have it in there), they acknowledge that this film, following in the 2-time rejection of Ten ’til Noon by Slamdance, was also rejected by this year’s fest..
Really, I don’t get that.
One of the really interesting sectons is the self-shredding by Chicago IndieFest, an apparent disaster zone also reported on by the Chicago Reader back then.
Anyway, watch for the film on the fest circuit. Like many docs these days, there is a lack of high-level filmmaking skill on display. But it does the job of telling the story. And if you have spent any time on the fest circuit, you will recognize and identify with much of the movie. And if not, you will get some insight into what everything but the biggest 10 (or so) fests in the United States are like.
While I’m sure the story they tell is interesting, I see two issues –
(a) that the primary audience for this movie, i.e. other aspiring filmmakers, is going to be pretty small, and
(b) it used to be in, say, the ’90s that there was a wave of indie films about people struggling in the world of indie films, like Living in Oblivion, In the Soup, Search and Destroy – and now this makes it seem like we’re going a step deeper down into the belly-button?
The topic makes the film a little more unique than being just another movie about making movies, but the trailer you can see on YouTube right now is kind of horrible. It feels more like a news report than an actual film; and also seems to say everything you need to know about the story (getting into a festival can be hard, thankless, and no guarantee of anything), so why see the whole thing?
Besides, anybody paying attention to the press coverage of any given Sundance festival could already tell you the nosebleed-high percentage of films that don’t get noticed, sold, or heard from again.