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.

As a practical matter, digital opens up other opportunities as well. Not only is it cheap (35mm film costs about 200 times more than digital tape) but it's also lightweight, simple, and subtle. For documentary filmmakers, for example, the format lets them make movies they couldn't do otherwise. James Longley, director of Iraq in Fragments, rode in the back of a pickup truck filled with Mahdi Army militia, recording everything as they arrested alcohol sellers in a local market and later interrogated them. "A large part of being able to record that kind of material is the ability to be unobtrusive," Longley says, "to let the mechanism of the camera nearly vanish, unencumbered by lights, sound recordists, and film-changing bags."

With some 18 billion videos streamed online in 2005--up 50% from 2004--it's not surprising that new businesses are sprouting up around this digital explosion. Each day on YouTube, more than 40 million video views are delivered and 35,000 new clips are uploaded. Google and Yahoo have video search sites and large caches of moving content. Apple's iTunes Music Store sold 12 million video clips for $1.99 each over the span of just a few months. A new company out of Berkeley, California, called Dabble is vying to become a micro movie studio for the masses by inviting users to create, remix, browse, and organize video online. These aggregators are fast becoming the central nodes of an entirely new video marketing and distribution system, one far from Hollywood's control.

Eventually, they concluded that their courtship had to be immortalized--and that only a full-length feature film would suffice. The saga of Four Eyed Monsters, their self-directed, self-obsessed movie, had begun.

"Things that are authentic have great appeal," says Dabble founder and CEO Mary Hodder, who believes that movie studios will increasingly find themselves competing with films made by the masses. "Part of the issue is lowering the transaction cost for making and distributing programs and films, and part of it is the low cost of user-generated content, which is usually free. It's totally disintermediating."

That process of cutting out the middleman, while still in its infancy, has the potential to upend the balance of power that has governed the film industry for decades.

One of the early demonstrations that homespun digital could deliver Hollywood-worthy numbers was the 2003 release of Open Water, a psychothriller with a cast of two, a crew of three, and lots of sharks. Chris Kentis, who had been cutting film trailers for a production company, pounded out a script, auditioned actors, bought two digital video cameras, and shot the movie over the course of two years, mostly on the open ocean. "We were chasing weather, and weather was chasing us," Kentis says. "We could see a storm approaching with lightning, and the captain would tell us we had 15 minutes to shoot the scene. We could react immediately. It was guerrilla filmmaking on the water."

Kentis submitted the film to Sundance with low expectations, figuring that festival organizers would take a dim view of a movie with so few credits (written by Chris Kentis, directed by Chris Kentis, cinematography by Chris Kentis …). But not only was Open Water accepted, it attracted a distribution deal from Lion's Gate and, later that year, opened at 2,700 theaters across the country. Made for $130,000, it went on to rake in about $30 million at the domestic box office and close to $100 million worldwide (counting DVD sales).

At the outset, Buice and Crumley had none of Kentis's skill. For starters, they had no idea how to frame a shot or do basic cinematography. Their cameraman wasn't familiar with the camera. They had never acted before. After each shoot, they beamed the dailies on a wall of their cramped loft and edited footage on a Mac G5 computer with Final Cut Pro software. "Sometimes we ended up shooting and reshooting a scene four or five times before we got it right," Crumley says.

Then, a year into the project, with our young heroes maxed out on seven credit cards, Four Eyed Monsters was accepted into Slamdance, the rogue sidekick to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. That led to invitations to other festivals-- 18 in all, including South by Southwest, the Sonoma Valley Film Festival, and Gen Art. Along the way, the pair collected several awards and glowing reviews. Variety called Four Eyed Monsters "fascinating," a film that "deliberately smudges the line between nonfiction and invention." The Boston Phoenix said it was "spry, brainy, endlessly inventive," an "Annie Hall of the 25-year-old set." Others described it as "exhilarating," "accomplished and endearing," a movie that contains "frantic vibrancy" and "delivers a powerful narrative punch." It felt like the beginning of a Nora Ephron script that would, inevitably, end with Buice and Crumley better dressed, in a fabulous apartment, and very much in love.