By Richard Foltz
When I was a teenager, all I wanted to do was get a job at my local paper writing about movies. Reviews, opinions, previews, etc. didn’t matter, I just knew that I wanted to write about movies. Now, decades later, I’m not quite sure how one should cover film for a small-town newspaper.
Of course, we all love and watch movies, especially with the ease of modern streaming services. But it seems with age and knowledge, and having worked a bit in modern news media, I know that more often than not, space is limited. And when space is limited, it hardly seems important to cover films that get covered by every blogger and You-Tuber on the internet with a Tarantino poster on their wall.
So, I guess I’ll just try to state my case, and it goes as follows. When I was in my 20s, fresh off a childhood filled with Blockbuster-bag Friday nights, and Saturday mornings at the local cinema, with a budding desire to spend the rest of my life behind a camera on the horizon, I made a micro-budget film about my small Northwest Ohio community.
Having almost no money, and just enough to buy a digital film camera and a computer to edit on, me and a group of friends set out to make a film on a shoestring budget that could be filmed around town and in the homes of friends and families.
With an affection for horror and an interest in true crime, a friend pitched me an idea about the local murder of a girl that had happened in the 1980s in my hometown. I’ll leave out the details, but if you look up “murder in Whitehouse, Ohio,” you’re bound to come across it. I will say that the murder was covered in an Investigation Discovery episode of a show called “The Lake Erie Murders,” and that since our film, the case has been resolved.
We fictionalized our version, deciding that although the true story was interesting and at that time an unsolved crime, we didn’t want to be exploitative. These were real people, many of whom I knew, although distantly.
So, we took the basic idea and I sat down to write a version based on evidence that was about the effect such a tragedy would have on a town and on the friends and family of a person murdered, as well as the community members tasked with solving such a crime.
The movie we ended up with wasn’t exactly what we hoped for going in. Even the cheapest productions cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we had a couple hundred, not counting costs for a camera and a computer. “The Blair Witch Project,” perhaps the cheapest well-known film ever made, cost $60,000. Beyond that, “Primer,” a mega-low-budget film only film nerds have heard about cost $7,000 and was filmed on barely enough film to cover a single take for each scene.
Needless to say, what we ended up with was 124 minutes of compromised mess, filled with brief moments where things clicked the way they were supposed to. But, after some time, I grew to love it.
I say all of this to say that the purpose of a local newspaper should be to serve the local community, and the stories within said community. In a world with 24-hour news channels by multiple major networks, YouTube, the internet, and more streaming services than any one person can afford, content should serve the desired audience. In other words, there’s just too much out there for my 500-1,200 words to matter to the average reader.
So, then, what’s the point?
The truth is, that every community is filled with dreamers who see film on the horizon or in their rearview. Every community is filled with people who see something in a Saturday afternoon at the cinema, who would or may have frequented the video rental store the way most people visit the grocery every week, searching for sustenance.
So, I’ll provide a small section, a cocoon for the celluloid-obsessed, and blather on about movies as best as I can, trying my best to keep the beat in the range of interest. This is for anybody and everybody who gets as excited as I do when Peacock puts up the old Universal Monster movies every September, who can name nearly every movie John Hughes ever wrote, including “Baby’s Day Out,” who can tell you why the set design in early Tim Burton movies was an homage to old German silent-era films. All are welcome, all opinions are subjective.
What are your top five films, and what were they five years ago?
Enjoy this column? Please send feedback to Wilmington News Journal reporter Richard Foltz at [email protected]
