Revenge of the Nerds

By: Adam L. PenenbergWed Dec 19, 2007 at 8:11 AM

Arin Crumley and Susan Buice were just art squids with a handful of credit cards, a digital camera, and very patient parents. Now they have a (long) shot at the big time. How the digital wave gives power to the little people and reshapes the way movies reach the world.

Crumley and Buice in their Brooklyn flat.

Like many of his peers, 21-year-old Arin Crumley, a tall, Twizzler-thin video-grapher living in Brooklyn, New York, went trawling for a girlfriend on the Internet, blasting notes to more than 100 likely prospects who had posted personals on Time Out New York's Web site. Shortly afterward, Susan Buice, also young, a self-styled "artist in theory, waitress in practice," clicked open his email: "What made you move to NY? Do you have any more pix? I think I might find you hot."

Unlike the others on Crumley's hit list, Buice decided to give him a chance and told him to drop by the restaurant where she worked the late-night shift. Crumley showed up, but in disguise--sunglasses, a baseball cap--packing a video camera and snapping surreptitious candids, then trailing her as she left the restaurant for the subway. "Dear Stalker," Buice replied, after the photos arrived in her inbox. "So this is what the world sees. Just an innocent bystander. So pedestrian. Nothing like the tragic hero I feel as I trudge through each day." She told him the typical date wouldn't do justice to the stalking experience. "We need to think of another unique scenario--something challenging." He suggested they communicate without speaking, to avoid small talk.

For their first date, they wandered the Brooklyn waterfront, passing notes, drawing pictures, listening to music on each other's iPods, but not talking. Later, when Buice attended an artist colony in Vermont, they mailed videos back and forth; six months after meeting, they moved in together. Along the way, they amassed a collection of artifacts most couples would call "keepsakes." Buice and Crumley considered them artistic "by-products."

Eventually, in the way of youth the world over, they concluded that their courtship had to be immortalized--and that only a full-length feature film would suffice. They quit their jobs, pooled $10,000 in savings, lined up a stack of credit cards, and flew in a friend from the Left Coast to operate their prized possession: a Panasonic DVX-100 digital video camera. The saga of Four Eyed Monsters, their self-directed, self-obsessed movie, had begun.

It was an unlikely way to make a movie, and if it sounds self-indulgent and a tad "meta," well, it is. But we live in an age when the tools of self-expression have never been more accessible. Until recently, making a movie meant using a shaky Super 8 or low-resolution camcorder--or taking a flier that required tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of personnel, and superior technical expertise. It also meant dueling with the studio executives and distributors who decided which movies made it into theaters and which didn't--and who exerted ham-fisted control over the industry, making it all but impossible for neophytes such as Buice and Crumley to break through. (And even if they did, they were often roundly fleeced: bought off with a nominal take-it-or-leave-it offer, stripped of control of their work, and sent packing back to Mom.)

But the great digital push is under way. Now the same pair of lovelorn kids who would have vanished completely in another age can pick up a camera, teach themselves the art of filmmaking for next to nothing, and make a commercial-quality movie. They might even hit it big.

Of course, digital movies are not new. A decade ago, Love God, long since forgotten, was one of the first--if not the first--independent films entirely shot and edited in digital video. Back then, the format was merely a curiosity; now, with the price of a decent camera dipping below $4,000 and quality steadily improving, digital is reshaping entertainment as the talkies did 80 years ago, with similarly revolutionary effects. Even the notion of a "film" has begun to seem a little quaint: Sure, there are still your standard 90-odd-minute narratives, and they may be around forever, but because moving images are increasingly being viewed in and over a variety of venues and devices--from 3-D high- definition digital theaters to TVs to laptops to PDAs, cell phones, iPods, and everything between--even that form is morphing. A film today might be a series of 3- to 5-minute episodes or a 20-minute short. The Beastie Boys handed out 50 Hi8 videocams so that fans could capture them in concert (the band later returned them for a refund). For $164,000, South African director Aryan Kaganof created SMS Sugar Man, the first feature-length movie shot entirely on cell-phone cameras.