The cries of a wailing baby ring out across the farmland, spreading in the light of a harvest moon. A mother, weeping and frantic, races out of the house to retrieve her child from the middle of a cornfield. A great black shadow moves across the land, taking the ground with it.
This is the ambitious opening scene of The Empty Acre, the first feature-length film directed by Patrick Rea. Structured like a Twilight Zone episode, the film is set in a small Kansas farm town that's slowly eroding at the hands of a mysterious force - kind of like that planet-swallowing "the Nothing" from The Neverending Story, but set in Kansas. While this sounds like a metaphor for the Wel-Marting of America, the director insists his film is more about living in a small town where the life gets sucked right out of you. Rea, his uncutt stubble and dark glasses crystallizing the look of an independent filmmaker, is shooting in towns like Burlingame, Eudora and Baldwin City to capture the landscape of a farming community. He's using equipment borrowed from the film school at Oldfather Studios, including associate professor of film Matt Jacobson's 24P digital camera, so the footage will look more like film than video.
will look more like this. There's no official Director of Photography, or DP, on The Empty Acre. A DP is usually there to light the scene and choose particular shots to ensure the story is ending up on camera and the director has enough coverage to edit the film. Instead, Rea is working with a small crew on a sporadic schedule, and whoever has the time
to show up gets the job,it's basically a no-budget film,dependent upon a few favors,a little luck and a lot of hard work,though Rea hopes to get a grant. "For the actors," he says.
Beginnings
Rea was inseparable from his diminutive leading man throughout high school. The pair would crop up at the local bowling alley to shoot a movie to
shoot a movie to broadcast over the student television station. Curious bowlers would materialize as Rea carefully placed the little guy at the end of a lane, setting up his master shot. "There's that silly son-of-a-bitch with his garden gnome," they would say.
even know what a director is.
A native of Schuyler, Neb., a small town not unlike the one featured in The Empty Acre, Rea enrolled in the University of Kansas in the fall of 2000. Studying under Kevin Willmott and Matt Jacobson, the director and cinematographer, respectively, of this year's Sundance sensation CSA: The Confederate States of America, Rea became one of the film school's most prolific students. He served as president of KU Filmworks from 2001 to 2002. In the group, students submit screenplays and then members vote on which ones they'll go out and shoot. Jacobson, the group's faculty advisor, saw Rea as a source of inspiration for other students, challenging them to attain the same level of productivity.
garden gnome, they would come Now 24, Rea says he's wanted to direct since he was 7 years old, when he first saw Steven Spielberg's Jaws. "Some people say they wanted to direct when they were 3," Rea says. "I'm like, Dude, you didn't want to direct when you were 3. You didn't
Rea films a "dolly shot," where the camera physically moves to capture an image. With a big budget you can lay down tracks and roll the cammer along them. Low-budget filmmakers must improvise.
ity.
With fellow film student Ryan Jones, Rea formed a production company called Senoreality Productions in March 2002. The company's first short film was The Walls, with Rea writing and directing and Jones designing the sound and special effects. In the film, a tenant discovers the walls of his new apartment have feelings. Cries of pain (voiced by Rea) ring out as the tenant hangs up his furnishings along the walls. The Hollywood Scarefest, an annual festival for horror shorts, picked up The Walls in 2002.
Walls in 2002, where it won a prize for best sound design.
shooting, and when he is home he's on the Internet e-mailing people from all over the country, setting up contacts.
Blood Drive: America's Best Short Horror Films, hosted by shock rocker and House of 1,000 Corpse director Rob Zombie and funded by industry-of-gore magazine Fangoria. Koch Vision Entertainment released Fangoria Blood Drive in June; you can rent the DVD at Hastings Books, Music & Video, 1900 W 23rd St.
Rea began hanging out at Jones' place to work late nights. Wade Burtchet, who lived with Jones at the time, remembers Rea becoming like a third roommate, until finally the three just decided to move in together. Now, Burtchet says Rea is rarely home because he's out
An industry of gore
Of the nearly 30 short films Rea has directed, most fall under the category of sci-fi horror. This has as much to do with personal creative drive as it does with marketability. Two of his films - AMan and His Finger and Disturbances - were selected for the compilation Fangoria
1900 W 23rd St. Filmmakers often spend their early years wallowing in buckets of blood.The
years career of Sam Raimi, the director of the Spider-Man movies, represents one of the most famous examples. In the early '80s, he and Bruce Campbell journeyed into the Tennessee woods to shoot a horror movie about an ancient Book of the Dead. Shooting on 8mm, a bargainfrom page to screen. Rea says it's easy to despair when working on a feature-length script, when the material is untested as it goes through successive rewrites. Part of the reason why he's been able to make so many films with so little money in just a few years has to do with the technological innovations that have galvanized the independent film
8mm, a bargain basement film stock, the duo eventually emerged with an epic called The Evil Dead that would make them cult heroes. (Notably, Raimi's career began to take off when Fangoria lavished him with attention later than decade.) Then there's Oscar-winning New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings). Jackson is responsible for some of the goriest fright films of all time.Paying for the first of these, Bad Taste, with the salary he made as a photo engraver at a daily newspaper, Jackson built his own dolly tracks and did all of the production work with just one other crewmember.
Notice how directors are always shown doing something with their hands? Rea is no exception as he shows an actor how wide the next camera angle will be.
As Rea says, "Gore sells."
Formidable odds
Rea says he'd prefer not to make horror movies forever. "Eventually you have to make something exploitative. I'm interested in stuff that's more subtle," he says. But if he's on a set directing for a living, he'll have achieved his goals. To appreciate the kind of accomplishment that would be, consider that for this year's Sundance Film Festival, there were 688 submissions for the dramatic competition alone. Willmott, who in addition to directing CSA has written never-filmed screenplays for Alexander director Oliver Stone, knows firsthand the difficulty of getting your work produced and your name recognized. Roughly 90 percent of the screenplays commissioned by the major Hollywood studios each year never make the leap from page to screen.
movement over the last decade.
movement over the landscape When South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone were making films at the University of Colorado in 1992, the Avid Film Composer computer system was still in its infancy. Before the Avid, film was often edited on a moviola, where you're dealing with the actual film instead of images on a computer. Also, digital cameras, which multiplied the quality of video
The Empty Acre is being shot with a 24P digital camera. Rea says the footage will look more like film than video with this camera, which was used to shoot November, the movie that took the cinematography prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
and boosted the interests of distributors in movies shot on video, were still years away. "Now you can do so much of it with a video camera and a laptop," Stone says. "We didn't have any of that stuff when I was in school." Instead of concentrating on production value, he and
Parker would concentrate on the script. "You're never going to get good production value at a student level," Stone says. "Forget about spending your money on really cool-looking stuff, because it's all about story and character." If Parker and Stone had $1,000 to spend, they would write three scripts and spend it on three movies. Quantity was everything, and the same is true today, whether you're using an Avid like Rea is or a moviola like Parker and Stone were before they hit it big - with a festive piece of holiday poop.
Fahrenheit 2004
Before The Empty Acre, Rea's most ambitious project was Patterns of Thread, a short film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's story Embroidery. Rea was relentless in pursuing the famous sci-fi author of CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE