Let’s Make a Deal
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She at least understands that the deal is what it’s all about. As a graduate student in arts and media management at Columbia College four years ago, Womack drafted a thesis on how independent filmmakers could jump-start their careers. “People were still thinking there’d be this huge distribution outlet for independent film on the Internet, with audiences downloading movies on their computers,” she says. “I didn’t think that would pan out. The technology was too slow, and the way computer screens looked then I didn’t think people would want to watch movies on them. I came up with a plan to shoot inexpensively on digital video and do straight-to-video projects.” The idea was to bypass the expense of theatrical releases and use festivals and nonprofit screenings to build an audience that would help land a sale to a DVD distributor. “It wasn’t totally novel,” Womack says, “but it wasn’t something a lot of people were doing.”
“We didn’t have a budget,” Womack says. “We had a general concept of what everything would cost. It was so depressing–if we looked at it in bulk we probably wouldn’t do it. But we thought we could rehearse and shoot each story in a week, and we decided to look at it as a weekly payment. We’d rehearse for two days and shoot on a Saturday or Sunday.” They paid the nonunion actors and crew out of their pockets, with some help from N’Namdi’s father, art dealer G.R. N’Namdi, who signed on as executive producer. The total cost for the 80-minute film, including postproduction and marketing to date, was a relatively minuscule $20,000.
Last time the Reader talked with Ronn Vrhel, five years ago, the Berwyn entrepreneur and filmmaker was going by the name Ronnie Lottz and basking in the glow of a $2 million budget for his biggest-ever film project, Blackstone, a fictional JFK assassination-plot feature to be shot in Chicago. But things change: his name, for example, pretty much shucked along with a career as a wrestling promoter; his business, a cigar shop that’s evolved into a bar and soon-to-be restaurant; and the budget for his film, which disappeared–along with dreams of stars like Harvey Keitel–when his largest investor was sent to the pen for securities fraud.
