Press: The arkansas times

little rock arts underground

By David Koon

An excerpt of the original article published in the Spring 2003 Arts issue

... On a recent Saturday at Little Rock's artist-friendly Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church, a group of people met to do what most people think it takes a cast of thousands to accomplish: make a movie.

A small anteroom on the second floor is transformed into a doctor's office waiting room. They all take turns manning the lights— stand-mounted construction lamps which burn bright enough to tan hides - and the milky white diffuser. Roxanne Shelton plays a nurse. Chris Paradis, in white lab coat and bow tie (he's got an assortment of them, in several colors, in his pocket) plays a doctor. Julia Baugh is Max, the star of the film. Director Robert Kirkpatrick works his way methodically through the script, moving his tripod-mounted camcorder to get the angles he wants.

The gears of art grind slowly. After two hours and a multitude of takes, Kirkpatrick says they have a minute of screentime - maybe - and the reporter is the only person present who seems dismayed by the news. More telling is the fact that, though no one in the room will ever see a dime from the 10-minute movie they will spend eight hours filming this Saturday, they still came, and all with a peculiar light in their eyes which no amount of coffee could ever inspire.

Thirty-two years old and serious enough while he works to make paint peel, Robert Kirkpatrick started a "no-budget" filmmaking group called Arkansas Independent Film and Video a little over five months ago. The plan was to attract other people in Little Rock who were interested in movies, and to help him get his own Crowfeather Films imprint off the ground.

It worked. Now made up of three small filmmaking companies in town - as well as a good-sized group of actors, writers and people just looking to help out - it's an overwhelmingly collaborative effort; an artistic give-and-take that will quickly ground the ego trips of any would-be auteur. The proverbial 500-pound gorilla this week, next week is likely to find Kirkpatrick lugging extension cords or working sound under the banner of Paradis' No Parking Films.

"In a lot of other art forms, you can work alone," Kirkpatrick said. "But with film, it's a collaborative medium; not just in trying to find actors and getting crew to help you out, but also in trying to find locations, talking to people, getting a place to film, all this additional stuff that you don't need if you're sitting in your room with a pad of paper writing a short story."

The budget for the films Kirkpatrick and other members of the group work on is often sub-shoestring. Though they are all long-time fans of film, none of them has ever been to film school. They shoot wherever they can. And with no outlets for renting the high-end video equipment that might be had in a larger city, they film mostly on standard video cameras.

"Most production houses would scoff at the things we use, because they probably spend in one breakfast's catering budget what we spent on our equipment," Kirkpatrick said. "But the main thing is that, everyone I've worked with, we've got a real drive to create something. We have a choice to either create with what we have or creating nothing at all."

Part of that drive means they all work for free, trading time lugging equipment or manning the lights on a friend's set for time on theirs. Without that you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours philosophy, says Chris Paradis, the process can quickly devolve into a kind of artistic cannabalism, with would-be directors using everyone around them to reach their own goal. "The weirdest thing is the lengths people will go to to make you want to come and follow them," Paradis said. "It's like little Messiahs everywhere."

Paradis dabbles in art of all kinds. In between talking about everything from a nightmare job interview at the Arkansas Baptist Association ("They had Moses the Video Game in their lobby.") to Star Wars ("I put on my dad's welding helmet and some Army boots, and I was Darth Vader"), Paradis said the trick to being a filmmaker in Little Rock is to find your limits and embrace them. It's the difference, he says, between creating something and becoming disenchanted.

"There are people who carry these scripts around, and it's their whole life," Paradis said. "It's this big burden to them. They're like: 'I've got to make this, this is my dream.' Sometimes dreams can be a burden. Especially [for] these people who want to go out to L.A. and make it big. It just comes to a point where you've just got to figure out what you can produce and just find good solid people to work with."

Kirkpatrick said that working cheap has its benefits. "The nice thing about doing this sort of thing, with your own equipment and your own money, is that you can do whatever it is you want. You're able to tell stories that probably no one else is going to tell, because it's not going to make money. You make the films because you're driven to have the story exist, to have these images, to have all the pieces fit together. You don't have many people to answer to. You do your own thing."

That kind of optimism rises to the surface of any conversation with Kirkpatrick. He sounds as excited as any Spielberg when he talks about his craft. "The best thing is taking all this chaos and forming something," Kirkpatrick said. "It's actually even better before it becomes a film and it's all edited; that moment when it's all coming together, the pieces are slowly fitting and you've got the scenes and the actors working. That's the enjoyable part. That's when it's all worthwhile." ...