Original subtitles

Thunder

In 2003, a new Batman movie finally appeared on our screens.

Only this time, it was not made by a movie studio that owned the character.

It was a fan film made by fans on their own and without permission.

Batman has never been done really gritty,

that face-to-face two inches from your nose experience

with this frightening creature of the night.

And I thought, you know, let's do a Batman movie.

He was hardly the only one.

Pick any modern entertainment property.

Batman, Superman, Ghostbusters, Lord of the Rings, Firefly, Doctor Who,

Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Star Wars, you name it.

If it exists, somebody's made a fan film of it.

My name's John Hudgens, and along with my friends,

I have made fan films, too, several times.

And our films keep getting bigger and more elaborate.

We started winning awards.

John Hudgens, Sith Apprentice!

We started getting national press and influencing actual Star Wars products,

and that first one even played at the Cannes Film Festival at the request of Lucasfilm.

But invariably, when we said that we were making a fan film,

the general reaction from nonfans was, a what now?

So what is a fan film?

I'd met a lot of other fan filmmakers over the years because of our films, so who better to ask?

I'm sure there must be a few good stories about these things out there,

other people doing the same things we were, making movies on their own,

playing in someone else's cinematic universe,

making their own blockbusters in their backyards.

Some people got a trading card collection or whatnot.

Some people have a train set.

And I don't mind, it's fine with me if you think that I'm crazy.

But I got it in me deep inside. I want to go outside and play.

See I want to go to the movies

out in my backyard now. God, I want to start now.

Grab a camera and my friends.

And I know I'm going to seem weird in this bathrobe with a beard

swinging sticks around all day, but it's just the way I play

for my backyard blockbuster.

Whatever.

Awesome!

On my backyard blockbuster.

They just don't make bad guys like they used to.

My backyard blockbuster.

Dude.

Oh!

Cut!

So I present you guys with a Star Wars fan film.

How would you guys like to make a movie?

To me, the definition of a fan film is a movie made by someone that's incredibly passionate but also very naive

because they're using copyrighted characters in a way that they can't really capitalize on it.

I don't recall the moment that I heard that term.

I just remember thinking, oh, everybody's making their own movies.

And then somewhere along the line, the fan film crept into it.

If I say we are doing a little Star Wars light saber fight,

and people go oh, like the Star Wars kid? It's like Jesus, I hope not.

A true fan film, of course, is not made to make money,

and especially if you're using someone's intellectual property.

Then you really can't make money.

The point of a fan film in many cases is to do something that the lawyers would never allow,

that the studio would never allow, that the people who own the characters would never allow.

I consider a fan film something that takes place in the universe of the thing that you're a fan of.

I think of fan films as being as diverse as possibly could be.

I mean, sometimes people make fan films as parody.

Sometimes they do it to add on to the story as realistically as possible,

or they're just trying to do a mashup.

It's such a wide, vast market that you can't put your finger on, this is the way it should be.

But I think for fan films, that's the reason they're so successful is it doesn't fit the mold.

You can't have six people in one conversation all saying this is a way a fan film should be

because you're going to get six different points of view.

The ones I like best tend to be the ones that actually make an effort

to tell a story that might have actually taken place in the canonical universe

and make me think, wow, I'm watching a new episode, and that's great.

I think when you say fan film, even a Hollywood movie can be a fan film

because those people like things.

Lord of the Rings is a fan film, and Peter Jackson can't deny it.

He just got the rights to do it. That's the only difference.

The word fan film I think didn't really evolve until after the film TROOPS came out.

Bad droids, bad droids what you gonna do?

That I think was the first fan film that said hey,

not only can you make a movie that is in the same spirit with the same characters,

you can have the same production value.

TROOPS is filmed on location with the men of the Imperial Forces.

All suspects are guilty, period.

Otherwise they wouldn't be suspect, would they?

We had seen the Star Wars Special Edition.

And somebody said, you know, what would be really funny is if you crossed COPS with Star Wars.

And you know, we are all laughing. God, that would be great.

And then there was a silence.

And as we're walking to the parking lot, I'm going, anybody going to take that?

Everybody said no. I said, anybody mind if I take that?

And they said no, not at all, so...

I joined the Empire about six years ago.

I can remember as a kid watching the holographic images

and being excited about the new direction that the galaxy was taking.

It was so spot on. It was so funny.

And it parodied two things.

It parodied Star Wars. It parodied COPS. It was brilliant.

Excuse me. Excuse me. You want to come over here, please?

Yeah, I'm talking to you.

TROOPS was spectacular. It looked like Star Wars,

but it made the troopers themselves interesting characters.

They weren't spear carriers anymore. Suddenly they had personalities.

It was the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of it,

the idea of there was the part of the movie you didn't see, the other half of the story,

the fact that some of these other characters had these lives that weren't in the final film.

Now, we're familiar with this couple. This is not the first time we've been out here.

So we're going to see if we can straighten this whole thing out.

What's the problem?

I've had it with him. He keeps lying to Luke and me.

And now Luke's run off and hasn't come back.

That's ridiculous.

Hey! I'll talk to you in a second. Right now I'm talking to your wife, all right?

Okay. Okay.

I never watch COPS anymore because that's all I can think about. I can just think about TROOPS.

The reason TROOPS exploded like a land mine was we'd had 10 years off.

Lucasfilm had really let the land go fallow for like a good 10 years by that point.

When we were shooting this, there were rumors of the new Star Wars film.

So here we are in the desert. It's a pretty professional-looking crew.

The only thing that gave us away was the camera we had.

It was a Sony Hi-8 camera.

So people see storm troopers walking around of that quality,

and we couldn't convince people that we were not Star Wars.

You know, these costumes. I was like, where do these people get this stuff?

It looked like they raided Lucasfilm archives.

It was before the 501st. People didn't know how to make their own at the time.

And so yeah, I imagine tapping into people that could dress in costume like that was a hard thing to do.

The day that Star Wars Special Edition premiered,

the front page of the Los Angeles Times

had a picture highlighting four storm troopers.

Two of them are twins.

They are girls.

You'll see the ones wearing the high heels. Those are the girls.

When we premiered it at the Comic-Con, rightly so,

it really wasn't looked on as something big before it was screened.

That screening of TROOPS, that was a game changer.

The very first effects shot, you could hear the reaction of the crowd thinking,

well, it looks like Star Wars, but I don't remember that shot.

And then the next effects shot is trooper bikes,

and everybody knows there was never anything like that there.

So then the audience is like, whoa.

The effects were on a level that nobody expected.

Like some of those scenes, you go whoa, that looks like an ILM shot.

That really started the explosion of fan films was right after Kevin Rubio screened TROOPS.

Chris Gore came to me, and he said hey, I want to put it on my site,

and there are these other guys want to put it up, kind of as a mirror.

They run the most popular Star Wars site on the web.

That was the film that kind of launched TheForce.Net

and got so many people excited and thinking about this idea of creating fan films.

Once it got on, it crashed servers.

From what I remember, it crashed Oprah's server.

It crashed Newsweek's server because they all were being run by the same company.

And so when you start doing that, people start wondering what the hell is crashing everything.

And then the story starts floating around.

Wow, it's this movie, and people are waiting 10, 20 hours to download this thing.

We were on dial-up. It was like 40 megs.

It took like eight hours to download, and you know, I'm like --

Good times.

TROOPS was probably the first viral video because, I mean,

the concept didn't even exist at the point that you could download an entire movie off the Internet.

And once people got a taste of that, they were like,

I wonder what else I could find on the Internet?

If you take out porn, I'm fairly confident saying

it's still one of the most downloaded pieces ever.

Okey-doke. Shut the camera off.

The guys that were my troopers did an offshoot called I.M.P.S.,

which initially was called TROOPS 2, which I gave my blessing to.

They changed it, I think probably for the better

because if it had been TROOPS 2, even though I hadn't been associated with it, people would have associated me with it,

and they would not get the credit that is deserving of them.

TROOPS has such staying power in my mind.

It was so visual. It was so clever. It was brilliant.

Kevin Rubio hit the jackpot with that one.

Well, we didn't find the droids we were looking for,

but we did find one that a kid had reported stolen.

So he and his parents are going to come down to the detention center and pick it up.

Boy, I bet they'll be happy.

Yep. That's what it's all about.

For me, fan film refers to a state of mind behind a project.

Well, professionals are people, and people get to make fan films.

Generally speaking, the fan film is the ultimate exertion of all amateur forces colliding in one art form.

There are some people out there who are going to consider a fan film to be a pejorative.

These are the people who feel that anything that is not professionally made cannot be good.

This, of course, totally ignores the fact

that there are an awful lot of professionally made stuff out there that isn't any good.

Any film that gets made, fan film, short film, whatever,

it's going to have people that don't like it.

I don't care who you are.

There's people out there that don't like Star Wars, okay? Go figure that out.

My question is not so much why are people making the fan films

because I think that desire and that need - I think that's always been around

because I remember doing it all the way back to the age of 6

with a Super 8 movie camera and making Space: 1999 Super 8 movies.

I was really surprised how far back fan films went.

I figured at best maybe the 1960s when people started getting Super 8 cameras into their houses.

The further back I looked, I discovered you had people in the 30s making them.

I joined the Amateur Cinema League.

I would take pictures of our family doing various things and trying to tell little stories.

But it wasn't until 1936 during the summer, I got the idea,

why don't we, instead of taking ordinary family pictures, why don't we make a story about Tarzan

that would be our interpretation, our version of this great hero?

Of course, I played the role of Tarzan, naturally.

I made the Tarzan yell. Aaahhh aaahhh aaaahhh aaaaahhh!

And they looked up, and there I was up there on the top,

and I flexed my muscles and beat my chest.

I said oh boy, I am Tarzan.

I think that was probably the high point as far as I was concerned.

In the case of the earliest one I found, they made it in September of 1926.

It was these two itinerant filmmakers walked into Anderson, South Carolina.

They were sort of saying that they were from the Hal Roach studios.

So hey, we're going to make a movie, and we're going to audition 200 kids.

Were going to show it in the local movie theater.

And the local movie theater's more than happy to be a part of this because everybody went to the movies.

The plot of the movie is based on

two separate Little Rascals movies that came out that year,

which means they kind of had to know their Little Rascals

because they were churning those out eight or nine a year.

And successful people have made these. Andy Warhol made fan films.

The king of pop art made a Tarzan fan film

that starred Dennis Hopper of all people.

In 1964, he made this movie called Batman Dracula.

It's one of the great lost Andy Warhol artifacts.

Hugh Hefner made one when he was 16 in his basement called Return from the Dead,

which was kind of a combination Frankenstein-Dracula one.

He's like a mad scientist in it.

If you told me that Hugh Hefner was making movies with coeds in his basement when he was 16,

I wouldn't have thought it would be a fan film.

A lot of gets into the semantics of what is a fan film.

Like is Hardware Wars a fan film?

If that is, then Hardware Wars is probably the earliest fan film I ever saw.

I'm Ernie Fosselius, official Hollywood Has-Been.

I once made a film called Hardware Wars.

And then I went into total obscurity for 30 years.

Hardware Wars, a spectacle light years ahead of its time.

When that came out, it was just so over-the-top ridiculous.

It was the type of thing that you couldn't believe

that someone went through that kind of effort to make fun of Star Wars.

See incredible celestial battles ablaze with death-dealing weaponry.

It was the first really true spoof, fan film, Star Wars type thing.

Hardware Wars is really a satire.

Hardware Wars isn't a fan film.

It's all according to whether you consider Hardware Wars a fan film or not.

I do. It was really the first.

I went to see Star Wars the first week it was out,

and I was already plotting to do this parody while I was sitting in the theater.

Oh, dear. I'm going to regret this.

They were professional filmmakers at the time.

And still, they were just starting out.

We were clueless.

In fact, Hardware Wars taught me everything I know

about film marketing and film distribution.

And I say that jokingly, but not really

because it made over $1 million in many different markets.

I never saw really much of that profit.

I could use some of that right now because AT&T has been calling me about the phone bill.

We had weird sales.

The Defense Department bought like 20 copies of Hardware Wars,

and I guess because of the title. Go figure.

And schools were showing it in their classroom.

What does that have to do with anything? What can be taught?

Well, you could teach comedy writing I guess. But I think it was to shut kids up.

It's like, be good for the first 40 minutes of the class,

and at the end, we'll show you Hardware Wars.

I vividly remember being at day camp, and they would show us films.

Not videotapes, films.

They would show us Laurel and Hardy. And they'd put on Hardware Wars.

I remember Ham Salad,

the mixer flying through space.

I loved it. I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen.

A lot of the attendant fandom and extended universe had not really sprung up.

So you could do Chewbacca as the Cookie Monster,

the girl with the giant donuts over her ears,

the flying iron like a CHP car. It just seemed like fun.

The use of household objects as ships,

it reminded you that the actual special effects 278 00:15:03,000 —-> 00:15:06,000 were themselves put together out of goofy shit that they found lying around.

I had to go to a lot of flea markets and pick up steam irons and stuff.

And you know, it was all very high-tech.

I took a sewing needle and scratched the laser beams

on the emulsion of the original film and all that stuff.

They managed to hire the lovely Paul Frees for their narration.

Experience the expensive, spine-tingling special effects.

And apparently, well, from what I heard,

Paul Frees didn't even remember doing it.

One day the phone rings.

I pick it up, and I hear the unmistakable voice of Paul Frees.

Is this Ernie? How did you get my voice?

I was like, oh, don't you remember?

We recorded you in your studio, and it was a swap for some maintenance for the thing, and --

Oh, never mind. Click. And that was it.

When I did Hardware Wars, I expected some legal stuff to happen.

The only thing that happened was I got a letter from a lawyer at 20th Century Fox saying

we enjoyed your film, but we don't want you to use the 20th Century Fox logo.

And I wrote back and said, it isn't. It's 20th Century Foss.

And they kind of laughed, and that was it. There was no big deal.

I moved to England in 1999.

I think Phantom Menace just came out, and Lucas was on The Big Breakfast show.

The host asked him, what's your favorite fan film?

And he said well, it came out a long time ago. You probably haven't seen it.

Probably don't know about it, but it is Hardware Wars.

And I went yes! Finally!

Get us out of here!

Take it easy, kid. It's only a movie.

My favorite line from Hardware Wars has got to be the last one. You'll laugh --

You'll cry. You'll kiss four bucks goodbye.

You'll kiss three bucks goodbye.

You'll kiss three bucks goodbye.

You'll kiss six bucks goodbye.

Or was it three back then? Three bucks. Inflation.

You saw the explosion in the late 70s and the early 80s of fanzines and fanfiction.

One of the best things about fanfic, and one of the things that's enjoyable about it,

whether it's in film form or written form or whatever,

is you are able to mush together disparate things.

You can do crossovers.

You can do Babylon 5 done as South Park.

That costs you nothing.

You sit down at the typewriter or the word processor, whatever,

and you just type in, well, Bruce Wayne got up today,

and you can weave into that any thread you want.

You are writing for yourself and writing with characters you know really well.

The fanfiction and fan film difference

is that if we're making a fan film based off of a film or a TV show,

it's running kind of the same gamut.

The culture of the modern United States America is such that

if it's on screen, it is automatically better, cooler, niftier, more real

than if it's written down as prose or a comic book.

When there's a new release of a Star Trek fan film,

all the Star Trek news sites will pick it up.

If there's a new release of a particular piece of fanfiction, nobody gives a damn.

If people give more respect to fan films than to fanfiction,

maybe that's because they think that fan films would be harder to do, require more effort,

that anybody maybe could dash off fanfiction.

I think it's the same if you start to say

what's the difference in a fan film and an indie,

and people look down on a fan film, but they don't on an indie, right?

It's all a perceived level of effort and skill.

Fan films are the continuation of fanfiction.

Now that people can get themselves really good video equipment

and really good software to put it all together, who wouldn't?

It's only in the past few years when the final piece of the puzzle -

and that is the distribution system - has come available.

I think video makes it a whole lot easier than it did with film.

But I think the Internet and the technology that allows you to bypass the processing

is something that makes that come more to the forefront.

What makes the Internet great for fan films is it's instant distribution on a global scale.

That doesn't mean you're going to get a global audience automatically,

but you are distributed throughout the known universe.

Anybody with a web browser can access your video.

Something like YouTube makes it possible for 5 million people to see your fan film

versus 5,000 who go to a convention in your local town.

That was kind of the missing piece of the puzzle

so that more people than just your little circle

that came to your convention from a hundred mile radius could see it.

The delivery media keeps changing.

Babylon Park was shown on VHS tapes at conventions. Nobody does that anymore.

15 years ago, no one would have imagined the idea of

watching an entire movie on the Internet because modems didn't move that fast.

I think all aspects of fandom have changed through the Internet.

I think the general theme is it levels the playing field.

Now things get exposure more based on their true merits,

not because some heavy-budgeted entity is funding it.

Thou shalt let the Wookiee win.

On the other hand, the Internet is notorious for having a very high noise-to-signal ratio.

There's a lot more garbage in everything you have to sift through to get to the real gems.

When you had TROOPS, and it would take you 10 hours to download it,

it damn well better be entertaining.

Now you can download it in 30 seconds, but still, you've got to hold my attention.

Dramatic Squirrel is hilarious, but I don't want to see 30 minutes of Dramatic Squirrel.

The democratization of the Internet is both a good and a bad thing.

There were those filters early on like TheForce.Net and other websites that picked from the best.

It may be hard to remember, but for years,

to put a video online was a pain in the ass.

Back in the day, TheForce.Net Fan Films was offering two things.

One of them was the exposure that you get by being hosted on this really popular website.

The other one was just the bandwidth, the simple ability to get your video on the web.

You didn't have to pay tons and tons of money to let people see that.

So for a moment, they were literally at the center of the universe for getting your Star Wars movie seen.

The Formula is 280 megabytes, and we've been downloaded a few million times.

I couldn't afford that bandwidth.

TFN has given us a place to be able to distribute and not worry about it.

They foot bill.

TFN, it's also the only place with a quality assurance.

Long before YouTube, we're talking about 2000 to 2002,

the only option you had was TheForce.Net theater.

A huge goal of mine at the time was to get hosting on TheForce.Net.

That's like the Mecca of fan films.

We knew that there were other sites out there

that tried to be comprehensive satabases, links to every fan film that was out there.

We really wanted to be the cream of the crop.

They gave fan films a place.

TFN is the biggest reason why fan films are this big of a thing.

I'd found out about TheForce.Net, and I was like, there's other people here that do this?

I didn't know it was this big and stuff. It was like this whole community.

I think the community at TFN,

they allowed fan films to be shown and allowed people to be entertained,

but they also proved to people, the normal, the average Joe, that you can do it, too.

Another thing that we tried to do maybe subconsciously was get a real variety of films.

I think the goal was whatever we put up

we wanted to be a lot different from the thing we put up previously.

So that way, we really represented the spectrum of all things that fan filmmakers were doing.

TFN, they were selecting which movies made it on based on parameters of quality,

and to make sure that TFN's brand stayed the same

because TFN's brand at that point was the one-stop shop for fan films.

We had tons of Star Wars films.

We started getting other kinds of submissions.

And we would always say sorry, this is a Star Wars fan film site.

We can't host you, even though we think you're making a great film.

You shall not pass!

This is crazy.

We started to think that it made more sense

to think of fanfilms.com as kind of its own entity

that was affiliated with TheForce.Net, but it was really broader than that. It wasn't just about Star Wars.

As long as it was a fan film, it was good enough to be on TFN Fan Films.

As time kind of rolled on and YouTube and Vimeo and those places came about,

as soon as it became a completely ubiquitous thing

that if you want a video, put it on YouTube,

it sort of spelled doom for the aspect of TheForce.Net's vitality

because when you no longer have to go to TFN first to know which ones are good,

you no longer have any reason to go anywhere but YouTube.

And that's where we get Chad Vader, so go YouTube.

But at the time, the balloon deflated.

It didn't pop. It was just like, where's it going? Where's the air going?

It's going over there. YouTube. YouTube. YouTube.

When you look back on it, the process of putting something out there for everyone to see,

it all started right over our heads, right in that community.

And there was Entertainment Weekly stories on it.

It was on MSNBC, and all these things were happening.

The New York Times was talkingabout fan films and the state of the fan film community.

When you could only go to one place to really find the good stuff,

in terms of fan films, that was TheForce.Net.

That was our community. It was pretty cool.

And then you had the Official Fan Films Network with AtomFilms.

And it's like whoa, okay, what's this?

We were looking at the growth of the Internet.

We were looking at more fan films being on other sites.

And we said, you know, we should do something to encourage this, but in an organized way.

Lucas saw that we were running a business around online videos

and actually paying some attention to copyright law in the process.

We thought, wouldn't it be cool to put together a contest with AtomFilms

to honor fan films and encourage fans to make more films?

The contest that culminated in the summer of 2002 was a very big deal.

That was Episode II in theaters.

We got hundreds of submissions.

And I believe we had our biggest crop of all time.

We also had a special on the SciFi channel that year,

so we were just able to generate a lot of attention for the fan films.

There was so little online video at the time

that being on AtomFilms and being promoted on AtomFilms was away to get a lot of views.

We never struggled to find entries, but it definitely does fluctuate.

And '02 and '05, were both big years

due to the presence of the new Star Wars film in the theaters.

At first, they were really, really hard on any sort of serious fan film.

They would only allow parody material.

Initially, Lucas was - and probably to some extent still is -

concerned about serious-minded attempts to expand on the universe.

You know the lawyer's weigh in.

People concerned about intellectual property weigh in - nobody had really asked George.

So 2006, I had a chat with him, and I said fans love doing these things.

And he said, I'm fine with it.

If you can do something that the lawyers are comfortable with, yeah, fine.

I have no problem with it.

Which is great, because we had had to deny a lot of people who had entered the contest years prior.

Opening it up allowed us to have more films entered into the contest.

What Lucasfilm has done with their contest for fan films

is actually a very healthy way of dealing with it.

Studios are going to have to tolerate fan productions

because first of all, it's good for them.

It means that fans are keeping the franchise alive

even if the studios are busy doing other stuff.

.

On some level, it's all free advertising.

I absolutely think other studios and entities

should adopt the model of the Lucas Fan Film Awards.

I think it's brilliant.

If you have these devoted fans, how much more devoted will they be

when they can create their own story

and put it online and see that a few hundred thousand people are watching that as well?

It's all just more adding to the world.

What is great is about that is that George Lucas actually watches these films and picks out his favorite.

It so much fun just to see what he's going to pick.

I was surprised. I was like wow, he picked our film.

That's interesting. All right, George, rock on. He can take a little ribbing.

Whoa.

This is really exciting.

It was like winning an Oscar or winning an Emmy or something like that.

Just to have that kind of official validation is really gratifying.

He came out, and he said, I'd like to give this fan film award to Matt Sloan and Aaron Yoda.

And he was like, oh, wait, am I reading that right? Oh, Aaron Yonda.

So how many people can say George Lucas has made a joke about their name?

The Fan Film Pioneer Award, that was a huge honor, and it's the greatest trophy.

I joke that it was sort of like a lifetime achievement award.

There was a very sort of delayed reaction.

It didn't say was the best. It didn't say it was the most fanlike. It was just the first one.

That alone is pretty good recognition.

And besides, it's a pretty cool looking trophy. So I'm happy with it.

We plan to keep it going as long as it continues to generate this kind of response

and as long as Lucasfilm will have us.

I sort of hate the idea that they stopped doing the fan film contest.

It's too bad that they couldn't do it just one season more.

I will spread my wings one season more.

When we first started watching fan films,

most of the fan films that you saw at the time

were all Star Wars or a few superhero properties,

but there were very few Star Trek fan films.

With Star Trek, there's so many books and movies and TV series, it had covered a lot of ground.

I don't think a lot of people were as inspired to try and create their own vision of it initially.

It's a lot more difficult to pick up with Star Trek.

You need the sets. You need the costumes.

You can't just be like out in the field somewhere shooting dinosaurs with your phasers.

I remember reading about people doing filmed episodes in the late 70s and early 80s.

I had seen a fan film clear back in '74 or '75 that had been done on Super 8 film.

I think they used Lego blocks for the control panels on the bridge.

For the time period, it was a marvel.

In a lot of ways, it was a greater technical achievement

than what people are doing now because it was so much harder to achieve it.

It was just fans doing a knockoff here and there.

They were mostly parodies at that time.

Prepare to beam down. Ensign Expendable, report to the bridge.

I work with a lot of people that are very familiar with Trek. Occasionally, we still refer to Ensign Expendable.

Sure, 300 years ago, our ancestors may have exercised

their God-given right to maim and kill whoever stood in their way.

I have one thing to say in our defense.

We got better.

One of the things I think is the funniest bit is Weasley had taken apart the transporter, so --

Due to transporter difficulties,

we've decided to jump to the planet's surface.

Enterprise, down and safe.

Boy, do our ankles hurt.

Captain, look! Ensign Expendable!

Years later, to see a new Star Trek parody

which is basically Star Trek meets The Flintstones,

and the transporter there is basically a lever

that opens a hole, and they fall to the planet.

Look around. See what you can find.

Yes, sir.

Yeah, if any thing's going to happen to him, let it happen somewhere else.

Right.

Whoever came up with the idea of mixing Star Trek and The Flintstones

was pretty creative I thought.

Sprock, does our insurance cover this?

The thing that's great about Stone Trek, it has its own voice.

It's not just trying to mirror things in sort of that fan-wanky way

that a lot of fan productions try to do.

And I think that's the mark of a really great fan film.

There's no one here, Mr. Sprock.

That because I killed them all. Bwoo ha ha ha ha ha.

Zoinks.

Mother.

The idea of actually doing something substantial,

I mean that was one of the things I think that caught the attention of the press.

When Starship Exeter came out, it caught my attention, certainly,

because I really wanted to see, what could fans pull off?

The recreation of the sets, the costumes - Exeter got it right.

Star Trek didn't have to be, These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

With the debut of Deep Space Nine, the dam broke,

and all the sudden, pretty much anything in the Star Trek universe was fair game.

And I think that made it a little easier for people to figure,

okay, we can do the Starship Farragut or some other odd thing.

One of the cutest things was the Farragut people jumping in

and doing Filmation-style animation like the Star Trek animated

and got Lou Scheimer's post-retirement blessing.

In the newspaper article I read about the Starship Exeter,

it made a mention of a couple of other fan films,

and one of them was Hidden Frontier.

Hidden Frontier was an offshoot of the USS Angeles Star Trek club.

We've done basically a seven-year series with a total of 50 episodes.

Largely produced with the same cast and crew over seven years,

which is a phenomenal thing in fan films.

Once you forgive the visual, they have a really unique take on the whole look of it.

I was very impressed by the - not so much the production value because that wasn't there,

but I was very impressed by some of the actors,

the dedication to the story, and the fact that no matter what adversity --

I mean, they shot these things in a bedroom - God bless them - in front of a green screen.

The Hidden Frontier here in L.A., they had green screen, kept their production simple,

but the storytelling and the characters have been going on for years and years and years.

Regardless of the visual look of a project, look at Hidden Frontier.

They've been going for seven years,

and they've been pumping out stories and stories and stories. That's their strength.

Hidden Frontier proved to me that it could be done with some class.

As much as possible, we've tried to follow the original credo of Gene Roddenberry

in making social commentary in our episodes.

We've handled things like drug addiction, clinical depression.

I still couldn't protect the life of one little girl,

my little girl.

We were one of the first series to introduce gay characters

as regulars and not treat them as stereotypes.

I'd heard that there was a show that was dealing with gay characters,

and I really wanted to see that.

We split up a long time ago. We just didn't know it.

It was one of the things that had been a big issue with Next Generation.

A lot of the gay characters had either been kind of given the shaft

or had been written out.

I feel that that's one of our greatest achievements,

was normalizing portrayals of gays because they are ordinary people,

and portraying them as anything else does them a disservice.

You have time for dinner? We have a lot of catching up to do.

I'd like that.

They made it just normal.

It's not like their whole point.

Their whole point is to make really great Trek,

and then, oh, well, if there happens to be some gay people in there, great.

We've been on Good Morning America.

We were featured on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

I produced or wrote all or parts of 13 of their episodes

and then ran into James Cawley, who was a Hidden Frontier fan.

And James, of course, is the executive producer of New Voyages.

James Cawley, a professional Elvis impersonator

who had built full-size replicas of all the Star Trek sets in upstate New York

and had started shooting his own Star Trek episodes and putting them on the Internet

and getting an audience of millions of people around the world.

To me, Star Trek was, is, and always will be

the original Enterprise with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

I always wanted to see more Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

That was what Star Trek was.

I thought, well, I've seen six Batmans, five Supermans,

I don't know how many James Bonds now,

and I always felt in my heart, you know, I love William Shatner,

but who's to say somebody else can't do it and do it better?

Maybe not me, but there's a bunch of actors out there, certainly, that could give it a good go.

Klingon vessel, this is Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise.

I've known James since before he began this,

and it was always his goal to get together and play Star Trek.

He had some bridge sections, nowhere near complete,

but some stuff we could sit and flip switches on

and go Yes, Captain and play around.

I felt the original series was the only series that never got it's just rewards.

It didn't go seven years. It didn't even go its full five years.

So I wanted to complete that five-year mission.

It's not the fourth season. It's the fan season,

and the fan season will always go on.

He and Jack Marshall got the idea of actually doing an episode.

Mr. Spock, any readings?

Nothing yet, sir. We are still too far out.

New Voyages was kind of a lightning rod

because you had a lot of fans saying how dare you.

How dare you play Kirk, Spock, and McCoy?

It was a gamble, and of course, we've had detractors.

But I think that we see a lot more posts saying I was ready to bash you guys,

and then they watch it, and they get sucked into it,

and suddenly they began to accept the characters as the original series characters.

And when it finally came out, it definitely got a mixed reception

because clearly, it was a work of passion,

but maybe it didn't quite reach what they were hoping to achieve.

It was a proof of concept.

We proved that we could do what we did.

And then In Harm's Way, the second episode, was where it really ballooned.

In Harm's Way takes three of the best classic Star Treks

and finds a way to make those three stories meld

into what I thought was an incredibly creative use

that really did justice to all three of them.

Even though it was fairly crude by the standards of the later episodes,

I watched that one going, that felt like Trek.

We put the first episode online, and we were noticed within hours.

The episode was brought in by some people that worked on Enterprise,

and it was viewed at the studio.

And they had a very important meeting about it and contacted us,

and there were some tense moments.

We thought they were going to shut us down.

Keep us out of reach, DeSalle.

That was my plan, sir.

Thankfully, they saw what we were trying to do as fans.

They basically said, here's a couple of rules.

No profit -- No profit at all.

And no sales of the DVDs. No DVD sales.

Proper documentation and recognition of Paramount's properties.

The biggest one was don't make money, guys.

That puts you - pardon the pun - in harm's way.

Then the lawyers perceive it as a threat. It could damage the franchise.

So don't break those rules, and we're going to politely look this way.

We're just kind of going to let you do your own thing.

Status report, Mr. Scott.

Everything's ready, Captain.

Well done, Scottie.

The fact that a lot of the original series actors

and a lot of the original series writers are involved

just does nothing but lend credence to what they're doing.

I looked at the first film.

I found it wanting in many ways, but I also saw the potential.

I had a friend John Kerrigan who did one.

He suggested that I might show an interest

if I had a say in what the story would be about.

I really - I didn't take it seriously because I thought he's never going to do this kind of thing.

He's aged 25 years in one day.

So I contacted Dorothy Fontana, and she loved the idea.

With her writing it, there was no question to me that I would involved.

I blame Dorothy Fontana.

She called me and said I want you to take a call from this fellow named James Cawley.

He's got a production facility, and he shooting Star Trek for the Internet.

And I said you're crazy. You're kidding.

She said take the call.

I think what makes it work is it feels like episodes of the original Trek.

The last few especially, and the one directed by Marc Scott Zicree and written by Michael Reaves and Marc,

could have easily been a classic episode.

It's not a fan film. It's Star Trek.

It looks and feels like the original series.

Range, Mr. Sulu?

29 million kilometers, Captain.

We've drifted well within the Romulan neutral zone.

Walter Koenig mentioned that he was about to star in an episode

of Star Trek: New Voyages, and I was fascinated by this.

And he mentioned that they were getting an audience equivalent of what Enterprise was getting.

I sat down with Walt, and I said tell me everything about this.

Marc Zicree had been trying to get in touch with us.

He referred to it to me as Sulu the Barbarian.

Sulu ends up wounded on an alien planet and raising a family,

all in the wink of an eye on the Enterprise.

You will stand down now, sir,

and see, I believe, that you know us.

Captain Kirk.

I called up George and said they're interested in you,

and I had a lot of fun, and I think you will, too.

Shouldn't you send me candy and flowers first?

I do not understand.

No, I didn't think you would.

We're rapidly getting to the point where a lot of these are -

they're not really fan films, but they're not full-scale union jobs, so you can't call them that.

I don't think World Enough and Time is a fan film at all.

I think of it as the same as all the network shows I do. I made what I wanted to make.

World Enough and Time was nominated for the Hugo award,

and there was a desire to have it nominated for the Nebula Award.

Getting nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula,

the two top awards in science fiction,

no Internet or independent project has ever been nominated for either award.

When we were nominated for a Hugo, I thought, this is nuts.

And then for the Nebula to come out of nowhere, and there was some controversy about that.

I have no problem with it being up for Hugo.

I do have a problem with the fact that it was up for Nebula.

The Nebulas are about professional writing.

My issue with World Enough and Time getting a Nebula nomination

had absolutely nothing to do with World Enough and Time.

It had to do with the SFWA bylaws which specifically stated

for the best script category that it had to be for a professional production.

Whether somebody was paid for it or not, pro, fan, what we're seeing is that these are malleable categories.

By definition, a fan film is not a professional production.

It can't be a professional production.

If it was a professional production, CBS and CBS Paramount would bring it to a halt.

I spoke out and thought, you know what, it really probably shouldn't be because it is a fan-based production,

and we have certain guidelines because of CBS that we have to follow,

and I don't want us to be perceived as anything other than what we are.

This might be one of those rare times when we actually get out of a tight spot with some breathing room.

But it's pretty professional.

It is very professional.

When we're on the set, we're working.

I don't call it work.

If you want - you got to work - you can be a part of that.

What a cool thing.

People from all over the world basically coming here

like being drawn to the mountain from Close Encounters

for a reason no one really understands, but they're brought here.

It's just really fun to be able to, as adults, play like you're 10 years old again.

It's fulfilling a dream. I think it's, oh, my God, I've always wanted to do this.

He always calls it Star Trek Camp, and they go play.

They have baseball dream camp where people go and pretend to be a big league baseball player.

Well, this is kind like that for Star Trek fans.

People from all over who came together and cooperate and share something in love.

That's very inspiring.

This is all these people coming together from all over the world.

They live together. They eat together.

They don't sleep together because we don't sleep.

It's midnight. We're just getting started.

The fascinating thing is that more people were downloading New Voyages

than were watching Enterprise, the then current Star Trek series.

Our episodes are downloaded by upwards of 30 million people.

Star Trek: Enterprise was being viewed by 3 million people, and Paramount knows that.

I think, clearly, New Voyages had some influence on J.J. Abrams.

And when Paramount approached him and said hey, what do you think of rebooting the Star Trek franchise,

well, clearly, you just go back to what made it popular to begin with.

I think New Voyages was a necessary step to convince people

that the public would get behind somebody other than William Shatner being Captain James Kirk.

I had J.J. Abrams tell me that we showed them the way.

We proved that other people could step into the shoes of these iconic characters

because until we did it, it was taboo.

James Cawley, the driving force behind New Voyages,

has a bit part in Star Trek 2009.

J.J. Abrams saw World Enough and Time,

and that convinced him to bring James into the new films.

I was pretty shocked and humbled when he asked me to come into the set.

For him to ask me to stick around and be fitted

and have a small part in the movie was really amazing.

Certainly unexpected, but it was really fun.

Would you care to join the mission team?

The defining moment for me that cemented what we were doing

was the day Walter Koenig appeared in old-age makeup on the bridge as Chekov,

when he went to leave his station, and he turned around, and he call me Captain.

Permission to return to my quarters, Captain.

For me, that cemented everything.

We were embraced by an original series actor

who validated everything that we were doing.

The sky was the limit after that.

There was no going back. There was only going forward.

You know, the legal questions around fan films are definitely not going to go away.

Anyone that is using a character that they don't have the rights to to make a fan film

is not going to be able to do anything legally with it other than show it off to their friends.

What's the worst that's going to happen?

We're not going to get put in jail. We're not going to be creatively ostracized from the Internet.

The worst that could happen is that they would say stop doing that.

We had this James Bond fan film that had been sitting on a shelf for 30 years.

Then Stuart, who still had it, puts it on YouTube, and it starts to get a following.

The next thing you know, MGM shuts it down.

I can't imagine how they could be threatened by that, but yet they were.

People have this misconception that fan films are not illegal if you don't try to sell them,

which is wrong because they are illegal just period,

the fact that you've made them, it's an infringement of copyright and intellectual property.

I suppose this gets into the question of copyright and so on,

but I think always there's been an open season for parody.

One of the upsides of parody is that it's protected under fair use, under U.S. copyright law.

It's very, very obvious to me and to a lot of people who were working on these legal questions

that fan films are definitely fair use.

People need to learn a little more about fair use before they start like waving it around.

There's a lot that goes on with fair use.

It's not just that you're not making money off it.

Fair use is not a bright line.

Fair use is on a case-by-case basis, and it's analysis of all of these factors and then some.

Well obviously, the companies who own the characters in the series

have to protect their copyrights and their trademarks.

One of the big differences between copyright and trademark issues, both of which play into this,

is that trademark has this affirmative duty to police.

Early on I was hearing from a lot of studio executives, well, we're shutting these guys down.

I was like, really?

There's some really good stuff out there. You might want to take a look at this.

I think I heard something about a Stargate fan film being shut down.

Those guys made a Stargate film, and then they, as I recall, they were practically just daring MGM.

We're going to sell these things, and just making so much noise about it.

In the end it was like no surprise at all that they kind of got, you know, oh, okay.

Most of these that we're talking about, there's no revenue stream.

Basically, it's for the fans by the fans.

It only helps encourage and build momentum and keep the momentum going for certain franchises.

It's a really tricky line to draw.

And I sympathize with the corporations who own these things

because typically, if you let a trademark go too far, it becomes public domain,

and obviously, Lucas and Paramount and Fox

do not want their characters, things they put money into, to become public domain.

I think that there are ways of dealing with that that maybe are

going to have to take the place of the public domain,

which no longer really exists, or at least not for modern properties.

We can't, like, take your movie, put it in a theater, charge tickets,

take that cash, and put it in our pockets.

We screen only for places that are nonprofit

where the revenue is funneled back into organizations

that go to support film education for youths or for charity.

The Can't Stop the Serenity guys produces large amounts of money for charity every year.

We kind of went all right, why don't we take that and then just extend it to a fan film.

We called Fox, we called Universal.

We said we're using new ships, new crew, continuing it in an area that nobody's ever seen before.

What is your objection on this?

And they couldn't find an area where we fit.

And they were like, well, as long as you're not making money, have fun.

Got in touch with Joss through his assistant.

Got an email back, said Joss says you have his blessing

and he thinks it's cool, and he's excited to see the project.

So we did it all 501 nonprofit.

We have five charities that we went ahead and selected.

And all of the proceeds from any of our DVDs or sales or whatever

get split evenly between those five charities.

Ultimately, if we can continue this, hopefully it changes the way studios look at fan films.

The question is whether the people who control the intellectual property

are going to let you continue to play or whether they're going to try to shut you down every time.

We've opted to not only let people play but to encourage people to play.

It should be the example.

It should be what Paramount and Fox and Warner Bros., certainly, and all these others should follow suit.

Whether they will, tough question.

I think overall, Lucasfilm and folks like that who find ways to embrace the fan films

get the better press because, of course, you hear,

Warners shut down that guy's Superman film,

and it was really good, and that's terrible.

Whereas, Lucas gives you prizes.

It's really easy to hate Warner Bros.

It's easy to go, you're a bajillion-dollar company.

F.U. I want to make my own Batman movie.

I would say to studios that fear film fans, just chill out.

Most of them suck, so you have nothing to worry about.

It's just some guys having fun in the backyard. More power to them.

What's going to happen from a copyright perspective

when you can't tell the difference between what's made at home and what's made by a studio?

They're not going to significantly replace the original product, and if they do,

well, then then maybe the studios should be worrying about that, and it's a separate question.

We've seen fan films that have risen to the level

where they're nearly as good as the original movie.

Batman: Dead End really showed that you could make

a serious Batman movie that's bad ass like the comic books.

Batman was something that I felt at that time needed to be done differently.

At that point, the Batman films had sort of ground to a halt. They'd become just ludicrous.

It doesn't have to be Batman with nipples and big stars playing terrible cameos.

Or the gratuitous ass shot as he gets dressed, you know, because that's not Batman.

It looks like anything you'd pay to buy a ticket to go see. It was phenomenal.

To me, it was the best incarnation of Batman we'd seen

that was really right out of the comic books.

It wasn't comic-booky in a pop sense.

That sort of realistic look to Batman in terms of the gray - the suit.

It came out of Alex Ross' head essentially.

That had never been done before, buff guy in a cotton cloth costume.

It was the first one that really caught people's imagination

after a long time that wasn't Star Wars.

And it kind of broke the mindset that almost all fan films at the time were somehow Lucasfilm related.

Got this really great dark, gritty story with Batman and Joker,

who's actually played by Andrew Koenig, Walter's son.

Andrew Koenig, Boner from Growing Pains, is the Joker

who delivered, years before Heath Ledger would, a great Joker.

That's why you'll never kill me, Bats.

You made me... Daddy.

His Joker makeup is still the very best Joker makeup

that's ever been put onto film in my opinion.

I like Heath Ledger's a lot, but I prefer the more sardonic Joker.

Can't take a little joke?

Just like the most bent psycho you can imagine,

and then you throw Alien and Predator in the mix?

Ha ha ha ha!

Spoiler: Alien and Predator.

You're interested, I know. I was interested, too.

Ahhh!

I know a lot of the hard-core Batman fans out there

don't like the fact that the alien and the predator was in it,

but I always reference the comics and say hey, look, they made comics about it.

It's not like I just pulled it out of thin air.

It was a huge hit at San Diego Comic-Con.

Batman: Dead End is going to open the masquerade and the lights go down,

and all of a sudden, you hear and everybody gets real quiet.

When you see Batman on the building and everyone

and I could hear people whispering and talking.

What is this? What? Is this real?

By the time the film starts to unfold, you couldn't even hear the film because everybody was going so nuts.

5,000 people, no joke, throng.

Play it again! They start showing the trailers Dad, show the Batman thing again!

People are yelling, screaming. We got mobbed.

We went back to our hotel room that night,

and they had already posted a report of it on Ain't It Cool News.

Word spread all over the Internet real quick, but you couldn't see it.

Ain't It Cool News offered the ability to see it. The entire Internet went nuts.

Batman: Dead End got more press that summer than Underworld, than any of those movies.

Again, not taking away from what those movies are,

but Dead End got more than all of them put together.

Look at that quote in Wizard magazine.

It's the hottest movie of the summer, but you can't see it in a theater.

I was not as big a big fan of World's Finest, which was Sandy's followup.

World's Finest was something that we didn't plan on doing.

It was more of a thing where I felt obligated to the fans.

The World's Finest was a great little movie.

They looked better than professional films had looked for a long time.

World's Finest, beautiful productions.

They look exactly like movie trailers for movies I want to see.

I really wish that it was a full production instead of just a little vignette.

The very next year, there were protests from some of the comic book companies

that they did not want their characters used in fan films,

and so their weight was used to basically keep fan films out of Comic-Con.

I think it's a pretty obvious conclusion that Warner Bros. just saw Dead End

and went whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't want to be competing with fans.

Everything was great while you guys were shooting on video,

but you guys start using the tools that we use to make it

and get a guy that looks that good doing it, that's not cool.

I don't know if DC Comics was ever scared. They're DC Comics.

I don't think that one person's fan film

is going to rattle their cages too much.

It was well done, but I think you could look and go

well, that's not going to be easily replicable at that time.

That guy spent $35,000.

DC coming and stomping all over it, and that's their prerogative.

And I can understand how corporations get nervous because they have a product.

They have to protect their license. I get it.

But by my lights, it's overkill.

And there's also Predator in there. Who owned the Predator?

They can't turn around and go hey, this is a great movie if it's got somebody else's copyright in it.

So it's a legal thicket.

There is a balance point. It's not like copyright will cease to exist.

It's not like making art for profit will somehow stop

because if everyone is making their movies for free,

then who's going to pay for the next Batman movie?

For the record, and you know, you can put this in the movie,

there were executives, people way up the ladder in Warner Bros.

that said, hey, a dark Batman film can work.

The studio probably did come and look and go, this guy did this for $30,000

and look at all this press that he's gotten.

I think it probably did influence him in some capacity.

I don't think it did, but I don't doubt that

there were people watching it at Warner and thinking, man, we got to step up the game.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Christopher Nolan or those guys stole anything from me, whatever.

Nobody stole anything. Look at all the great artists that have drawn him.

You are contributing to the mythos of the character.

You're bringing new angles of how to look at it, like Miller and all these guys have done,

like I feel I've done.

Everybody sits around and talks crap with their pals about

like, hey man, if I was going to make a Star Trek movie or a Spiderman movie,

you know what I would do? I would do --

And people like Dan Poole did it.

Spiderman!

I have your girlfriend here, Spiderman!

That's it, Pumpkin Boy!

This video was in no way intended for a mass audience.

It was intended for two people to see: James Cameron and Stan Lee.

Who, me? I've got a date. See ya.

Damn! She must be one happy lady.

In 1992, I found out James Cameron had the rights to do the Spiderman movie.

I did a tease of all the stunts and then had, like, here's the complete film.

All I wanted to do was some action.

I just wanted to get myself thrown around, bust through some stuff,

and just show some swinging, and just impress Cameron.

I would just kill to work with that guy.

I would literally kill someone in order to get on that film, and it was almost myself.

I didn't have a penny.

I was working part-time, so I had money,

but it was money going toward 14 titles a month at Comic Book Kingdom.

It wasn't enough to finance any kind of 50-minute live-action Spiderman video

with a Green Goblin that throws pumpkin bombs that blow up,

and Spidey swings around a building. That's nuts, man.

I sit here now as a grown man and go, I got away with a lot of good stuff.

Oh, really?

Here he is in this Spiderman costume

wearing cotton gloves, swinging four stories above a building

on a rope with a mask on where he can barely see.

Every time I see it, I'm like, that guy's about to become a big red spot on the sidewalk.

But it is more legitimate than any of the Sony movies because you know there's no net.

There was no way that I could do it without swinging around a building.

I had no green screen or chromakey.

I just thought, I'll find the lowest point of a building that looks high, and I will tie the rope off.

I tied it off to the fourth story there.

That's a new lamp post. Glad it wasn't there then.

Actually, I wish it had been there. I would have stepped on the top of it. That would've been really cool.

I go up Sunday morning, mask on, cotton gloves.

I put a bunch of knots in the rope.

Thank God, Tim McFarland came along and put knots all over the rope so Ihad an excuse to hang onto something.

I remember seeing stills from it.

And I remember there was some video clip somewhere online, but never seen it in its entirety.

It was years until I finally saw it.

And when I did, my jaw just kind of hit the floor and bounced across the room.

I don't like this.

I don't like this at all.

Now, is he a great actor? No.

Will he tell you that he did a terrible job of acting? Yeah.

He mostly blames it on his hair, and I'll go with that.

He has really kick-ass Peter Parker hair.

I met Stan Lee for the first time in Baltimore.

I tell him I'm making a live-action Spiderman video.

This was 1991, so now he'd be like, oh sure, a fan film.

Back then, he was like, you're what?

I said, oh, yeah, we've got a Green Goblin costume.

We're throwing pumpkin bombs, and I want to make him proud.

Stan Lee looked at me, and he said, son, you already are.

Dan was at the Comic-Con - I think it was 2000 -

and resigned to the fact that he wasn't going to be able to direct Spiderman,

but he had this tape for Stan Lee.

And he would be hanging with us occasionally,

and I swear to you, 30 seconds after he left, Stan would walk by.

This happened like four times throughout the Con.

It was just tragically funny.

Finally, it was at that Comic-Con, having met Dan and then getting to see the epic film, it's amazing.

I couldn't believe that anybody could be that bananas.

It's like, okay, yeah, I'll hang on the top of a car

as you go speeding down the street and doing 90-degree turns.

In that respect, Dan Poole beats everybody else hands down.

It's an amazing thing.

A lot of people only define fan films as films that take place in the Star Wars universe.

The ones that have probably gotten the most notoriety have been

Broken Allegiance, Revelations, Pink Five, Ryan vs. Dorkman,

Jedi Hunter, and TROOPS. And Duality.

Somewhere fairly early on, I saw the infamous Duality, which is a very impressive film I thought.

It was probably the first serious one that I saw.

If you know the chronology, you can see the shift that Duality created.

The thing about Duality is that it was purely green screen.

And green screen at the time was still kind of this new technology,

even though studios in the industry had been using it.

The common man had not quite gotten there yet.

They were the first that really proved that you can take your camcorder and make a movie,

not just a home movie, and not just some fun thing to show at parties or whatever.

Duality is where it's like, this is where you go pro.

If you lay this out on an Excel spreadsheet and just go, that's a lightsaber fight, that's a -

several of them are just lightsaber fights.

The big joke on TheForce.Net board is like two dudes with a lightsaber in the forest.

Personally, I like that because you know what you're going to get. I want a lightsaber fight.

Ryan vs. Dorkman, I thought absolutely one of the best choreographed battles ever.

Ryan vs. Dorkman was created as an entry to the first

lightsaber choreography competition on TheForce.Net's fan films forum.

We had been like rivals on the message boards.

It's such a shame for Michael Scott that he is so immortalized as the Dorkman.

Sort of jokingly, we had said, it would be funny if we got together

and had a fight between Ryan and Dorkman

because it's this rivalry on the forums.

I was really intrigued by the idea that these two people

who didn't live in the same place could collaborate on a fan film.

We had never met or anything like that.

In fact, you lived in Los Angeles and I was up in San Jose.

So 2003, had the contest. We got hosted on TheForce.Net.

Went by like that for years until 2006, and then YouTube came around.

And YouTube has this power to make things explode.

We went to put it on YouTube, and it was already there.

And then we became the featured video on the front page of YouTube, and we stayed there for like a week.

And that's when our popularity really exploded.

Once we saw how popular Ryan vs. Dorkman had been getting again,

we were getting all these e-mails, people saying they wanted to see more, and we thought,

well, now is the time to make something in the same spirit as the first one,

just better in every way that we possibly can.

Ahhh!

The choreography and the fighting and the effects were just stunning.

And then I show them to people.

I'm like, you got to check this out, and they're sitting there like, who made this?

And that's what's great, when someone can sit there and watch it and be like,

how did they do that?

It's more impressing sometimes than what you see in big movies.

It's always fun to see the debate when people go well, they don't have a story.

Is like well, so what. They're what they are.

They're these beautiful choreographed pieces,

a little bit calculated as a showcase, as a local weekend dude kind of a piece

because they had this popularity and this notoriety, and they decided to capitalize on it,

and I can't blame them because I've done exactly the same thing. And they did it really well.

Several of them are just raising the bar in terms of effects.

Revelations had beautiful, beautiful effects.

Revelations was a labor of love or love of labor, however you want to look at it.

Shane and I had been watching movies on TFN, and we thought, that looks like a lot of fun.

We'd like to make one.

We would be driving in the car commuting to work, talking about ideas,

and one idea she said, that between Episodes III and IV,

what did happen to the Jedi during the purge?

And see to it that the transfer of power is complete.

Star Wars: Revelations is 40-minute, epic.

Darth Vader's in it. There's character drama.

There's Jedi. There's rebels.

There's everything you'd want in a Star Wars movie.

Of course, Revelations with their effects, that was amazing.

I couldn't believe people could create that on their own.

Revelations was obviously a big leap forward in a lot of ways for fan films.

Just the effects in it, in all honesty, it looked just like it was going to be Episode III or something.

When we'd approach people and say hey, do you want to be in the movie,

I think the idea was filming would take less than a year.

And we thought that it wouldn't be that big a deal.

We would shoot maybe, you know, over the course of a weekend,

like most fan films, in somebody's backyard.

Not with Shane.

This was a three-year process.

Anybody who's made film, it is probably the hardest,

most difficult thing you could possibly do other than childbirth,

and I wouldn't know about that, but I'm sure it's very hard.

Shane and I are among the very few people

that either of us knows who have been crazy enough

to do a Star Wars fan film on that big a scale,

and so we recognize each other's pain.

The very first shoot, I was in a rock quarry about, I don't know, 100 feet in the ground,

and I had coordinated about 60 people on location, storm troopers and extras and the crew.

And the next thing I know, it's just an enormous production

with 200 people from around the world coordinating all together into one effort.

You look at something like Revelations,

and the production values on that were starting to approach the original.

The acting didn't approach the original.

There were many comments where they bashed the casting of women in the lead roles.

It was almost like they were so offended that there were women,

that it should have been men in the lead roles for a Star Wars fan film.

That's another thing that burns me up.

People go, Revelations, well, lots of money. This guy must be rich.

No, I'm not. I'm in debt.

I spent $20,000 making Revelations. That's a lot of money for me.

He says 20 grand, but there are so many incidentals

that we paid for out-of-pocket on top of that 20 grand.

For good or for worse, Revelations is my first film.

I am very proud of that despite all its weaknesses and ugly hairs and moles and issues and problems.

It was like your first child. It's very dear to your heart. I'll never forget it.

The serious fan films always are just so serious.

They have lightsabers, and I challenge you. Vwoom Vwoom.

And no one cracks a smile or makes a joke,

which was very integral to the original Star Wars films.

Most of the comedy fan films are crossovers of one kind or another. There's so many Star Wars meets X.

Crikey!

Jedi Hunter, is obviously, is a Star Wars meets X.

And I'm not saying that just because you're in the room, but it helps.

But Jedi Hunter is a well-made film, and it takes that concept

and it runs with it as far as it can be run with.

Whoa, look at that! Launching straight up between my legs, the little devil.

I was just laughing hysterically with that one.

It was just an idea I had never thought of. I really loved seeing that.

That's why I think the fact that so much of the stuff is done humorously,

you can really find those absurd truths of Star Wars.

There have been so many. There's just tons of them out there.

The Pink Five series is just incredible.

Hi. I'm Stacy. I mean, Pink Five or whatever. Standing by.

Luke always struck me as a valley dude.

So if there's valley dudes in Star Wars, where are the valley girls?

Surely there must have been at least one.

You know, this is so cool.

I mean they almost never let me fly, but like today, they said that everybody gets to.

It does seem really ridiculous, the attack on the Death Star, the more you think of it.

And if you really are putting any available person who could remotely fly,

who knows what you'd end up with?

Lock X-foils in attack position.

X-foils. That's this one, right?

Oh!

Man, I hope nobody saw that.

Some friends of mine had this blue screen stage,

and they were doing this Top Gun demo,

and they had this fighter pilot helmet, and they had this jumpsuit.

Really, Pink Five is just an excuse to do some blue screen testing of my own.

Trey lied to me.

He said Pink Five was never supposed to see the light of day. It was a test.

I called Amy up. We'd been working together already making videos.

And I said, oh, I got this thing I want to shoot, and we spent a couple hours shooting it.

Hey, are they shooting at us now?

This sucks. Nobody said anything about them shooting at us.

I didn't know how to pronounce words in the script like Tatooine.

I didn't know what the basketball reference was.

Like, the bad guys live in that basketball, right?

If you accept the absurdity of a valley girl in space, it actually worked.

And it was just beautiful to look at. And she was great.

Of course, I was just thinking, did he just rip me off

with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, but I know he didn't.

I submitted it to Atomfilms and I-Film on the same day.

Got an email back from I-Film sometime later saying we have chosen your film.

We're going to run it.

What they didn't say was that they were going to run it as their pick of the day,

the day the Attack of the Clones opened.

I told some people, hey, our little film's up,

and I saw the hit counter get up to seven.

I'm like, oh boy, seven people watched it.

And then an hour later it was at 3,000, and I couldn't understand. How'd that happened?

Luke, Leia, Chewy.

Hi, it's me, Stacy.

Stacy?

Pink Five is one of the most popular Star Wars fan films on i-Film.

It freaked me out when I first heard that Pink Five had been seen by half a million people.

It went like wild fire from those portal websites to TheForce.Net.

Everyone loved Pink Five because it's funny.

And much like TROOPS, it shines a light

on the implicit between-the-scenes moments that you find out

based on this movie, though implied, are not the case.

Newsflash! He is totally crushing on me.

Meanwhile, I never heard anything back from Atomfilms at all.

Several months later after the first contest was over,

I got an email from Megan O'Neill at Atomfilms that said hey, I just moved into my new office,

and there was this box of tapes. There's one with your name on it.

I think it's great. I'd love to run it.

By that time, they'd announced that the second year was coming up.

I said well, can I just be in this year's contest then?

Finally.

Never really thought that the George Lucas Award was anywhere near a possibility,

mostly because the year before, he'd picked Christmas Tauntauns. How do you handicap that?

It seems like about as different a film as you could have, so never really saw that happening.

I love Pink Five. We gave these movies awards because they were great.

Whoa.

I did these programs where I show groups of fan films at libraries.

Whenever I'd put on Pink Five, all the women in the audience immediately go,

because this is just -- look how stupid women are.

Look how sleazy it is. Just sexist crap.

And then by the end of those five minutes, they love her.

And then they watch the sequel and the other sequel,

and they get progressively more grandiose.

Amy and I had decided we absolutely know we will not do sequels to that.

That's the one thing we were sure about.

And then we get this e-mail from Lucasfilm that had exactly the effect it was intended to,

which was to kind of make us go, well, I guess we could do a sequel.

It is not my fault.

I just followed the new kid who was apparently also text messaging during the briefing,

but the point is, I'm not an idiot.

Artoo!

Am not.

Artoo!

Am not!

It's got the humor. It's got the very attractive character,

not just physically, but she's an interesting, fun woman.

The one thing that Amy and I both were very strong about is

we're not going to go back and do another five minutes sitting in the snow speeder on Hoth.

Duh. Am I missing something?

That would be the reason to not do a sequel.

That would be wearing out the welcome, and it would definitely ruin it.

I am so sure.

So we said, well, if we're going to do another one, we need to start going in a new direction.

Early, you are.

Oh, sick.

Hmmm? Hm.

Strikes Back had a Yoda, a puppet Yoda made by actual puppet guys.

It really came down to Yoda.

It had to be a Yoda piece, and if we didn't have a good Yoda, it wasn't worth doing.

You don't have a phone?

Nope. No phone. Too expensive.

Pink Five Strikes Back, I'd never had such a great time working on a film.

And it was all people that just wanted to work on it and have fun.

Even as rough around the edges as it was, it turned out to be popular.

And that year, we won the Audience Choice Award, so we went two for two with that one.

So that's when I think the whole legacy of Pink Five began to sort of take shape.

Wow. I bet that is a really long story.

Hmmm. Totally.

The real problem was, if we do the second one,

that pretty much was going to obligate us to do a Return of after that.

So we were definitely signing on for a pretty big job.

When it continued on, it kind of lost its spirit of what the first one was,

but I still can't stop watching.

And the production value got bigger and better,

and now, I can't tell the difference between the real movie and their movie other than it's Stacy.

The writing of that script was a constant, ongoing process.

Oh, this is a great scene. We'll never actually do it,

but let's go ahead and write it because we'll never get someone to play the emperor.

Oh, God, let's talk moisturizer.

I have no interest in moisturizer.

Yeah, I can see that. We'll never get a Threepio costume. We'll never get a Darth Vader or be able to do a scene like this.

You're doing really well.

We'll never actually go to the redwoods and do a scene like that.

But we wrote it anyway with the intent that we would always go back

and just pull the scenes right back out again, and the thing would be much more manageable.

And what happened instead was it went the other direction.

Why you got to be all up in my grill about it?

I will get all up in your grill anytime I choose.

Hey, guys, I was napping.

It is, as far as I know, the only fan film created property,

in this case, character, to have been formally adapted into the canon.

What? What?

Oh, but don't tell anybody that I told you guys. Okay?

Okay.

Yeah, I was introduced to Timothy Zahn, the Star Wars novelist, and he said

I'm going to put Stacy in a novel if I can, and then did.

It's a hand wave to all the fan filmmakers.

That was the one I thought would kind of epitomize for me the fun people are having with Star Wars.

Whatever. Yes, I see.

Whatever works for you.

You have fans making dolls and all kinds of cool arts and crafts.

She shows up on an official Star Wars trading card.

There were always these odd little, you know, she sort of kept recurring,

becoming more and more intertwined with Star Wars.

And the first time I saw someone at a convention in costume, it was at one of the panels we did,

and standing out front waiting in line was a girl in a Pink Five costume.

I actually just came to a stop and just stared at her in a very creepy way.

I couldn't quite grasp that I was looking at someone who had come to a convention dressed as Pink Five.

There's something about Stacy that people relate to,

maybe because you know that's, on some level, how you would be.

In the movies, from the necessity of moving the plot forward,

everybody's always concerned with what's right in front of them,

but she's kind of concerned with just about anything but.

It's not that she's dumb.

She just is sort of oblivious to the fact that other stuff is happening.

She's really sort of in Stacy world.

Where's little frog guy?

Hmm? Oh, uh, he has gone to meet Luke.

You better tell him I need a ride.

Luke must not know that you're here. You would be a distraction.

A big distraction.

I get asked rather a lot, so you going to do the prequels

with Stacy or Stacy's mom or something like that?

When the Pink Five trilogy is done with that last chapter, it does pretty cleanly say that's it.

Stacy's tale has been told, and we're moving on now.

I think I'm over it.

There's a life to that character that really is beyond all of us now.

A lot of people, for better or worse, picture that somewhere in the Star Wars universe,

Stacy really is in there somewhere.

And I don't have any problem with that at all.

I think of her there, too.

Hey, base one? My little robot guy's head got blown off. Is that bad?

To me, fan films are a good training ground,

and it's a great place to hone skills as a filmmaker with characters you're familiar with.

You can be creative becauseat the end of the day, you've kind of studied them.

You've studied them for years.

That's how you learn how to do something.

Painters learn how to paint by imitating the great masters,

and you learn how to make movies by imitating George Lucas or Spielberg or whoever it is.

This is one of the hardest industries in the world because everybody thinks they can do it.

And everybody can't.

Any time you watch somebody do what they love and they're pouring their heart into it,

whether it's good or not, there's just an inherent respect there

that you have to have for that as a filmmaker because we're all brothers in that respect.

I find that with fan films, there's a level of dedication,

of passion and love that is a real rarity in entertainment.

I think the people that are making fan films do love the world of the films.

They want to be closer to it. They want to participate with it.

Hollywood's not letting them in, so they're home in Iowa or Texas or New Hampshire,

and they get their friends together, and they make these films.

It's totally about imagination.

And a lot of it probably has to do with sort of like being a kid again.

We all like to get out of ourselves occasionally and feel that we can have other experiences,

and I think that's what fan films enable people to do.

They find somebody interesting and exciting and say okay, we'll do our own take on this particular character.

The fantasy world lets you do that.

Kids don't go out in the back and pretend that they're playing Kramer vs. Kramer.

You've never seen any fan films about Lawrence of Arabia.

At least not yet. That might be a good idea.

It's so easy to imagine yourself in Luke Skywalker's shoes or Captain Kirk's shoes.

In some ways, I think it's easier to imagine yourself in a completely different setting

than it might be to imagine yourself in a true-to-life drama.

They're not creating universes.

Star Trek created a universe. Star Wars created a universe.

You can find yourself in these worlds because the worlds are so vast.

There is a world out there where you are the rogue,

you are the hero, you are the woman kicking ass.

Something like Grey's Anatomy doesn't engender itself to participation.

I don't imagine people want to get around and go like, hey,

let's pretend like we slept with each other, pretend to get married and not get married, and all this stuff.

I'm revealing that I know too much about Grey's Anatomy right now.

You're not going to see a lot of Grey's Anatomy. You're not going to see a lot of ER.

It would be interesting if you did.

I think the closest I ever saw to that was Law & Order: Gotham City,

which was a really great idea except that they should've done Batman and Twin Peaks

because they lived in the middle of nowhere.

When you create a whole world from scratch, as you do when you create a Star Trek or a Star Wars,

you get people who really get enthusiastic,

whereas it's hard to find the guy to say, oh, we all love I Love Lucy. You do the sets.

Excuse me, no. I want to - the only part you love is being Lucy.

If it's I Love Lucy, you're not going to get excited about dressing up like Ricky or Lucy.

It's way more fun to dress up like Darth Vader.

You have to react when I choke you.

Seeing myself on film, portraying a part that I would never

have an opportunity to do for Lucasfilm or anybody else,

but I was able to do it and have a little fun with it.

The one thing that I feel is that everybody does this out of an insane passion for filmmaking.

You love the subject material that you've picked, and you just want to make a movie.

You're driven to be a part of something really special, and that's what this is all about.

That's what filmmaking is all about.

My favorite fan film? Wow, there are a lot of good ones.

Reign of the Fallen. I thought that one had beautiful cinematography.

It was really nice to see a more dramatic films.

Do you really think you could sneak into my home without me knowing?

One of my favorite films, it was George at a bar, and Jar Jar walks in,

and it sounds like a punchline to a joke, and it was.

It's control-sa, alt-sa, delete-sa.

Chad Vader is a great series, and I know Lucasfilm feels the same.

I think many of them would cite that as one of their favorites.

Yes. No. Uh, I don't know. Continue stocking.

Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning is a brilliant film.

Unfortunately, it suffers from being almost too good.

Cinematic quality, gorgeous visual effects,

paired with a parody story in Finnish

some of which works in English, and some which doesn't.

You asked me, what is my favorite fan film?

The kids that did the Raiders movie.

The Raiders adaptation is probably the greatest fan film of all time

and will remain the greatest fan film of all time.

I will say that right now. I don't care who does what.

They did it with a VHS camera, nothing fancy.

They're in Mississippi. They're down in the south,

and they just spent their summers re-creating this movie.

That's awesome. You cannot beat that.

And thy re-created the rock, and they almost died re-creating the rock.

And he's hanging off the Jeep window, and they're doing all the stuff.

If anyone was to ever do it again, it would just be like, oh, that's just like the Raiders adaptation,

which is why, and I'll say it again, it's the greatest fan film ever made.

Raiders, when I saw it, it felt like something that was incredibly real.

Indiana Jones felt so well-crafted, and I wanted nothing more than to be in that world.

I rode on the school bus with Chris and had asked about his Raiders of the Lost Ark comic book,

having no idea what a fateful request that was.

A few months later, I called him up, and I said hey,

I want to do this remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Do you want to help?

He said sure.

Chris gives me a call and says, hey, man, you know that movie I was talking about?

Well, we're making it, and we need somebody to do the special effects

because we just can't do it.

So I'm like okay, and I do a little photography, too. And they're like, hey, that's great.

When Chris and I started, we had no idea how we were going to accomplish

remaking a $26 million movie on, well, nothing but our allowances.

And I even thought it was going to take a single summer.

It ended up just being the most gargantuan project. We had no idea it would take us seven years.

The level of ambition, spending seven years, they age in the movie.

I mean, it's funny, and you can't make fun of them.

We worked from memory for the first handful of years

and cobbled together every image, every little bit of music, everything we could get our hands on.

There wasn't any videotapes back then.

There was no DVDs, and he didn't have the money to see it a bunch.

Eric sat down one summer and hand drew well over 600 individual storyboards.

He made 632 storyboards, and they fit exactly.

It was never a question of what we were going to do over the summers.

We would all just reconvene, pick up where we left off and keep doing Raiders.

I loved that film.

I was watching it with a bunch of guys, and we were just going, oh, they're not going to do that scene.

Oh, my God! They did that scene! Jesus Christ!

And then you're thinking, who the hell did they get to let them burn a building?

There was this scene in the movie where this character gets his back on fire.

And yep, that gots to be in the movie.

He says we've got to have remake shot, for shot, for shot.

So Eric gets a fire retardant jacket because, you know, it's fireproof,

so hey, it can protect him from anything, including gasoline, which he poured on his back, over the costume.

I didn't know what the hell it was. I'm just there as the camera man.

Where were their parents? This is unbelievable.

This is completely inappropriate. And yet it's absolutely awesome.

It's incredible that we didn't burn that house down.

We were so lucky that there wasn't more damage to that house than there was.

This film that we made couldn't be made today,

and that's because it did seem a more innocent time.

It was a perfect little window.

Camcorders had just arrived, so the technology was just enough there so we could pull it off,

but the world hadn't clamped down on some of the innocence and the freedom that was there.

That's what Raiders for me was. Forgive the comparison, but it was Lord of the Flies gone good.

It's hard to say objectively whether or not you're watching

Raiders of the Lost Ark or you're watching Raiders.

For one reason or another, the Raiders adaptation fully works.

You can tell these kids loved it.

When you see the dog on their shoulder being the monkey -

My favorite gag is they couldn't get a monkey, so they put a dog on their shoulder and had a string Sieg Heil it.

Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

Originally, we had storyboards that we were going to be using a kitten and kind of scrapped that idea.

I had this great dog, Snickers. I could rough him up, throw him over my shoulder,

and it was that great boy and his dog kind of thing.

I said hey, Eric, let's just use Snick.

He went okay. That's cool. That'll work.

The first time Chris Strompolos ever kissed a girl is in that film.

I know that sounds too perfect, but it was really true.

It was my first on-screen kiss and first off-screen kiss, too.

And we did multiple takes.

The magic is that Chris works as Harrison Ford.

His eyes, he believes he's Harrison Ford.

You want to talk to God?

Let's go see him together. I've got nothing better to do.

After a couple of segments, not only can I hardly wait to see it,

I want to see how they do it, and I'm rooting for them to pull it off. And they do.

By the time they get to the truck chase, which for me is the high point of both Raiders of the Lost Arks,

the fact that they do it, and they're diving off into swamps, it just blows my mind every time I see it.

The fact that they remotely approximated the truck chase, I was pretty impressed by that.

I don't even know if they have licenses to drive at that point. It was like, damn.

Stunt shots shot from moving vehicles driven by kids who may or may not have had their drivers permit at the time,

seeing the crowd's reaction to that, we usually get the most cheering during the truck scene.

I made movies with my friends in our backyards when I was in elementary school.

That Raiders film is just on a whole different level.

My first instinct is like being a jealous 11-year-old.

Why couldn't me and my friends have done that?

We were working in a vacuum.

We were just some kids on the Gulf Coast that wanted to remake a Raiders movie.

They don't know what they got there.

Their story is unbelievable. That really happened?

That guy had that much passion for that project?

That's a great American drama, great tale. I love it.

This is the thing, we were just doing it for ourselves.

We had no plans of doing anything with it, no plans of showing it to anybody.

We were just doing it for ourselves.

After we finished it, we all went our separate ways.

We all went off to college and had forgotten about it.

It sat on our shelves for 15, 16 years until it was rediscovered.

Then somehow, a copy got made, and it landed in Eli Roth's hands, and he loved it.

When I invited him to Butt-Numb-A-Thon, Eli Roth had an old videotape from his NYU days.

He said Harry, if you have any time, play this, and he gave me a videotape.

About 8 o’clock in the morning, the projector breaks down,

so they're futzing with the projector, and so Harry grabs a tape and puts it in and screens it.

House lights up. People talking, eating breakfast. No introduction, nothing.

You have to understand that when it played,

it played after the worst double feature in the history of Butt-Numb-A-Thon.

The audience was about to revolt.

We had the breakfast break, and I play that Raiders thing.

By the time the boulder is rolling after the kids,

everybody had stopped going to get breakfast

and was sitting down watching it going, how are they going to do the next bit?

Just as we're about to go into the truck scene --

Truck? What truck?

Stop.

The audience booed, even though they knew that we were all about to see the premiere of The Two Towers.

They booed the premiere of The Two Towers because they wanted to finish seeing this fan film.

That may well be the best bit of flattery we have ever received.

So they screened The Two Towers, and everyone loved it, of course,

but apparently people walked out of the theater saying, you know, I wanted to see that Raiders movie.

Tim League and Eli and I began the search for where are these kids. There's a story here.

So Eli brings along this the VHS bootleg of our film to his own pitch meeting, at DreamWorks.

He was like hey, I did not make this. I don't know these kids.

I just came across this tape. But I really think Spielberg would like it.

So the head of production watched it and called Eli, and said this is great. I'm going to show it to Steven.

Calls Eli back. Steven loved it.

Wants to write the guys a letter of appreciation. What are their addresses?

And Eli has no idea who the hell we are.

All he's got to go on is our names in the credits.

Eli Roth had tracked us down through Jayson and Internet and phone calls.

Eli Roth called me, saying I'm Eli Roth.

I'm trying to track down Jayson Lamb.

I thought it was a prank call.

That's how I got a letter one day saying Spielberg has seen your Raiders movie, and he loves it.

He basically said I wanted to tell you how much I really enjoyed

your loving and detailed tribute to our original Raiders.

He goes, it was really great to watch, and I look forward to seeing your names up on the big screen someday.

Sincerely, Steven Spielberg.

It's like wow. This is just like, I'm going to die. It's so awesome.

He told Empire that it was the greatest piece of flattery he and George Lucas have ever gotten.

We were all sort of bewildered. And this letter and Eli contacting us actually brought us all back together.

We hadn't spoken to each other in years.

That's what led to the Alamo Drafthouse theater in Austin

inviting us months later to come down and have a proper standalone screening.

Whatever differences we had before, they were washed away.

We hugged each other and picked up where we left off in the friendship.

They had all left film behind.

They'd basically left that dream back there,

and until we found it, resuscitated it for them, sort of built a fandom for it,

once it played, it played. It played extremely well.

Clearly, it resonates with people.

You go into a theater. You see people go off on it.

That transcends cardboard vines. That's real film making.

It got through to all the big magazines.

We agreed to an exclusive with Vanity Fair, and in the 2004 Hollywood issue,

they gave us quite a bit of page real estate, which was great.

Chris, Jayson, and I were in Los Angeles.

The Vanity Fair article had just come out, and we got a call from our agent who said

Spielberg would like to meet with you guys in his office tomorrow at noon.

And at that point, I think I felt sick.

There's nothing more weird than sitting in the conference room just outside of his office

and hearing that familiar voice and going up to the security guard

and saying, hi, we're here to see Mr. Spielberg.

Sitting on the couch in his office was one of those moments where you sort of leave your body,

sort of look at yourself and say is this really happening?

It was not the goal per se of making our film to meet Spielberg, but it was certainly a pipe dream.

He said something really incredible that even topped the letter.

He said I watched your movie, and I watched it again,

and I wanted to let you know that it inspired even me.

And I think that was probably the greatest compliment that we could ever have gotten.

They did something that I don't think has ever been achieved in all of fandom.

I mean, they remade Raiders of the Lost Ark.

That's - there has to be an award for that.

The whole thing about fan films, it's a maturation process.

The people who are making fan films now aren't going to be making fan films in 5 or 10 years.

There's a point at which you've got to boldly go out there

and take your own ideas and your skills and abilities and do something for yourself.

A lot of people use fan films as a springboard to get somewhere.

There are the success stories of the fan film community.

There's Ryan Weber, who made Ryan vs. Dorkman with Michael Scott.

Ryan was hired to work on effects for LucasArts in large part I think

because of the work that he did on the first Ryan vs. Dorkman film.

Now I work on visual effects and compositing for a lot of network television shows.

Got a real career, and now he's won Emmys.

Ryan Weber, he's the one guy to keep looking at.

I keep thinking he's going to be signing my checks someday.

And then there was the other fellow who made some fan films,

lives in Australia, and ended up working on the Star Wars films themselves.

Justin Dix. He inspired me so much I hired him for my crew for Episode II and III.

Matt ended up doing the voice for a bunch of different video games, including The Force Unleashed.

I just sort of thought, like, this can't really be happening.

Even though I've been doing it for a while, it just doesn't seem real.

Sandy Collora is doing his own original feature films, and I think that's great.

Sandy started working on a feature called Hunter Prey

using Clark Bartram, who was his Batman,

and a lot of the things that he learned on Dead End,

and went out to Mexico and shot it, and it's awesome. It's really cool.

A lot of people made something out of it.

Joe Nussbaum made something out of his fan film.

I was hired to direct a movie for DreamWorks.

Didn't make the movie, but got hired.

Three feature films later, whenever I meet someone new at a party,

and they go, I loved your movie, I'm 99% sure they're going to say George Lucas in Love.

I think that Kevin Rubio from TROOPS has gone on to do some really cool things.

I do a comic book series called Tag & Bink for Dark Horse Comics.

Lucasfilm asked Dark Horse if I would like to do an original series.

I thought, you know what, one of my favorites is a play called Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.

And I thought that would be just a great thing to rip off for Star Wars

because if you steal from The Bard and Tom Stoppard, how can you lose?

And then I had my first assignment writing on the Clone Wars in 2005.

Eric and I have quit our corporate jobs, and we have teamed up

and formed a small production company, aptly called Rolling Boulder Films.

I no longer have financial security, but I'm happy.

Whereas before, I was successful but not happy.

The effect of this little film that we did when we were kids is already profound.

I have my best friend back, and I have rediscovered what makes me feel most alive.

The Hollywood Reporter did an article about fan films,

and it simply stated that calling card films

like Grayson and Revelations and Batman Dead End and so forth don't work,

and it's simply not true. They do.

The new film that I'm working on called Trenches

is being financed and distributed through a division of Disney.

I would've not gotten that opportunity had it not been for making Revelations.

If nothing else, whether Pink Five had ever been popular or not,

we basically used it to build an independent movie-making company.

You can really see the progress of that right in the Pink Five movies.

So when it came time to do Ark, I was just able to call the team in,

put the band back together, and okay, boom.

If nothing else, there's been evolving a system that works pretty well to make low-budget projects.

So when someone says okay, here's Ark and here's your budget, what do you think? we go, okay.

And then we turned around, and they are amazed by the results.

They were like, wait, what? You made that?

We're like, well, we're pretty good at this now. So... We've got a few skills at this.

You're really taking the big budget out of the blockbuster

and literally just moving it into the backyard.

It seems to me that we're just at the beginning of this.

You see what fans of Star Trek are doing in the creation of a virtual television series.

I believe that what we now call fan film is the birth of a whole new genre of film.

I think they're going to continue to grow until there's a new ecological niche

that straddles all the way from fan film to professional production.

I would like to see more noted filmmakers do it.

I'd love to see Ridley Scott do a Batman short.

I'd love to see any of these other working directors

that were inspired by Star Wars and so forth make a little short.

God knows, I'll do it.

I think now we basically live in fan film culture,

having movies like Be Kind Rewind and Son of Rambow.

It's become mainstream, whereas even 15 years ago, it was a very marginal.

At this point, I think it's safe to say there will always be fans who are creating something.

Making these films, the end product is the least significant part of the fan film

because the whole thing is really about the experience.

At the end of the day, what makes fan films great

is just the joy that people get out of making them.

And that is something that thankfully can be caught on film.

The real reason for anyone, anyone to make a fan film, in my opinion, man, just have fun.

I think that's what really shows with most fan films.

Whether they're the simple, cheesy special effects,

or whether they're the ultra-produced things that look like they might've come right out of ILM,

it's very clear the people involved are having fun.

In the end, you're really just doing it for you, so try not to take it too seriously.

If you take yourself too seriously and to try to put yourself in the same market as Lucas or Spielberg,

You are already set to fail.

You really shouldn't make a fan film to win the George Lucas Award

or to win the Audience Choice Award or to win anything at all.

You should really make it out of the love of the process or loving the end result.

Now that I've been through a fan film process,

because I know what it took for us to do this,

when I hear or see someone doing a fan film, I desperately want them to succeed.

The greatest aspect of fan films is fans, and I don't say that as just to kiss their asses.

It's because it's literally true.

You couldn't pull off productions of the level Shane's done in Revelations or we do in New Voyages

without fans who bring their resources, bring their time, to do it.

And I think fans should be acknowledged for that,

that they're really not just the audience for these productions,

but they're the thing that actually makes them possible.

It is an art form where you are going into a project

fully knowing that everything that you put in that project will probably never see a return,

and that is a dedication to an art that is not seen,

especially in an industry where money makes it go around.

It is all driven by money, and fan filmmakers don't see any of that.

But they still do it, and they love doing it.

And that's dedication to an art form that I have to salute over and over again.

Sometimes you just got to step back and say, hey, it's only a movie.

What are you doing sitting watching this? Go make your own movie.

Don't make a fan film!

Get up, get out, and make your own movie.

I say don't make a fan film as a way to coach the people

who really want to make fan films, who will go against what I'm saying.

You got the equipment already, your cell phone.

You can go out and make a feature with it.

So why don't you?

I did a lot of research when we first started and did a Google search for worst fan films.

Oh, God, there's...

Iron Fist of the Obsidian Sith.

Wow. Oh, man. It was a classic.

Did you see the tight rope scene? Wow.

So what was your favorite movie? John Hudgens...

Yeah, pan over to the side with me holding a great big Jedi Hunter sign!

Or that Crocodile Hunter one. Jedi Hunter. Whoa, funny. Whoo!

The Sith Apprentice thing, which I think opened the door of imagination.

You know I beat a dead horse to death. I really do.

I think John’s tired of this.

Even some of the movies that we gave awards to

would have been even better if they had been trimmed a minute, two minutes.

And this is not a shot at you.

Are you still here?