5 Not Famous First films by Famous Directors

So you’ve read a few film books, watched a LOT of movies, maybe even cut together a couple cute videos of cats and posted them on Youtube. Your ultimate goal is to remake Con-Air or perhaps to create a superhero movie based on your best friend’s underground comic book. When people hear you say you want to be in the movies, they think you want to an actor. But you know where the action’s at; you want to be in charge of it all, you want to DIRECT.

Yet, like everything else, directing requires a multitude of skills much like every other job; do you get along with people? Are you a leader? Are you organized? Can you visually tell a story that is entertaining and noteworthy? Do you know what a green screen does and where you can get one for cheap?

Directing fame can come one of two ways; you can go the long, slow easy route; attend film school, maybe start working at an ad agency, create a demo reel, shop it around the film industry, find work directing second unit stuff, avoid porn and cocaine, gradually gain a reputation of steady and dependable craftmanship which will one day get you considered to helm a Zooey DeJulia Roberts rom-com script that is so safe that terrorists rent it to waylay suspicion.

Or, you can go big and go hard; find people of like mind willing to work long hours for nothing. Beg, borrow and steal the money needed to shoot your film with decent cinematography and actors. Believe in yourself and your movie, shoot and edit it by yourself while eating crackers and cream cheese then find a distribution deal. Repeat the process until you are awarded the recognition, star power and director’s cut privileges you so richly deserve.

Here are 5 directors that went Balls In, taking risky subject matter and convincing other people to give them money so that they could live their dream. The got investors to believe that once they had enough money to shoot their amazing script, it would be so good they would make their money back plus more upon the massive distribution deal.

These 5 have been selected due to their somewhat humble non-Hollywood beginnings, their inane first projects and their continuing upward career trajectory due in some part to their ability to continually challenge themselves and their skill set by creating innovative and interesting films that move the industry forward.

5. Sam Raimi – Evil Dead (1981) – $375,000

When it was first announced that Marvel’s web-slinging comic hero Spider-Man was being given the full-on cinematic treatment back in the early 2000′s following the success of X-Men, some people were trying to figure out who the director, Sam Raimi, was. To some he was a decent B-movie type director, as close to geek royalty as Joss Whedon. Raimi had brought Xena, Princess Warrior and Hercules to the small screen, proving that New Zealand had the ability, locations and nerds (I say lovingly) to host both Lord of The Rings and the Matrix years later. Yet before Spider-Man, Xena and even Darkman, he had achieved cult-status with his infamous Evil Dead trilogy; three films that went from straight up horror film to spoof send-up of itself with talking skeletons, bad screen blending, and three immortal cinematic buzzwords; Klaatu birata nikto, itself a nod to ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’, a classic sci-fi B-movie, recently remade with Keanu Reeves.

But for Raimi it all started with a camera and a dream way back in the late 70′s. And getting $375,000. That’s a lot of begging for cash, which stalled or halted completion of the film many times. It helped that the dream involved his BFF Bruce Campbell willing to do anything on film. There were a lot of people, some grudgingly, willing to give a bunch of kids just out of high school a chance to go off to Tennessee to make a movie about evil spirits coming back to life in the middle of the woods. Raimi was a true innovator when it came to camera placement, chase scenes and the smash-cam to show the Evil’s POV. And of course, they used lots of blood.

Once completed, they were eventually able to sell the film to Dino De Laurentiis and a cult film was born. A couple of young kids followed their dreams to Hollywood and twenty years later Raimi took the helm of Spider-Man and made it his own while giving both his BFF and his Evil Dead car (1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88) cameos in the movie. Not bad for a couple of nerdy kids from Michigan.

4. David O. Russell – Spanking the Monkey (1994) – $200,000

With another Oscar nomination to his name for this year’s excellent American Hustle and last year's Silver Linings Playbook, David O. has established himself as a bankable A-list director following an impressive run of movies that include some innovative cinematic story-telling in Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees and The Fighter (also nominated for Best Picture), David O. Russell is pretty much at the top of the Hollywood director’s pool right now - if you are keeping score, that's 3 Best Picture nods - nearing Scorsese territory. Too bad he's a bit of an asshole.
But his movies are great, dealing with (among others) the fallible humanness of American soldiers in Iraq, philosophical conundrum and environmental awareness, drug addictions, the American Dream, mental illnesses and family. All pretty heavy subjects to sell to investors and ticket-goers, especially considering that he frequently uses go-to every day guy Mark Wahlberg but give him credit, David O. basically made Marky Mark a respected serious actor. More recently he's become 'the director' to work with from his more recent ensemble castings.

1994′s Spanking the Monkey however, did not star Mark Wahlberg. Now when others thought movies with blood and guts was the way to go, Russell decided to make a movie about a boy having an unhealthy crush on his mother with no blood in it whatsoever. Instead of blood, there was uncomfortable masturbation. That is what he thought would make for a good introductory film that would get him noticed.  And it worked.  Spanking the Monkey was made with about $200,ooo, a lot coming from short film grants and the classic knee down, hand out financing strategy.

It hit the festival circuit, garnered mass attention at Sundance and was sold to New Line distribution, allowing David O. to continue his chosen path all the way to Oscar contention and perhaps the most famous on-camera temper tantrums of Hollywood history.

3. Trey Parker (& Matt Stone) – Cannibal the Musical (1993) – $125,000

Although Trey is widely considered the ‘director’ of the duo, Matt has been with him since Day One.  The two are an inseparable innovative creative machine, be it through the crude animation of South Park, the x-rated marionette puppetry of Team America, or Broadway live theater with The Book Of Mormon. But before they were the demi-gods of Comedy Central, they were just a couple upper middle-class rich kids from Colorado who had a dream. Their dream was to make a movie about the true story of Alferd Packer, a frontier times American cannibal. It would have blood and guts and murder and singing. Lots of singing, because that was what was missing in horror movies in the nineties, singing. And they would make it with other people’s money.

So that’s what they did. They made a musical about cannibalism because they thought it would get them noticed. They cut class at the University of Colorado to film it, gave their drama teacher a small bit in it then proceeded to ultimately ruin the musical Oklahoma! for anyone who prefers that type of thing over a man getting an butcher’s knife to the face.  But to be safe they added that in too, as well as a song about building snowmen. For an added bonus there is even the earliest sound bite of Eric Cartman recorded in the movie.  Again, remember that their ultimate goal was to get Alferd Packer, The Musical noticed by Hollywood-types and get famous.

Short story, it didn’t.  They did eventually sell it to D-movie distribution legend TROMA films (home of the Toxic Avenger franchise) three years later who renamed it ‘Cannibal, The Musical‘. Finding Hollywood not moving to them, they moved to Hollywood where they once again decided that what the world of film really needed more than a cannibal/musical picture was a movie about a porn-star superhero (preferably a Mormon one) so they found more investors, wrote another script, went to porn shoots and hired actual porn actors, all of which gave birth to ‘Orgazmo’. Yet, still there was no giant studio knocking at their door with a dump truck full of money.

Then, as the legend goes, they created the South Park Christmas card. A few minutes of badly animated children swearing and a short story about Santa Claus and Jesus Christ that was sent to a few industry insiders and the world of cartoons and comedy changed forever. It was like they didn’t even need to make those films but thankfully for us, they did.

Now, these two have the enviable position of being able to write/direct/produce anything they want with minimal interference and people love it and pay them to do it. And it all started because of a musical about cannibalism.

2. Peter Jackson – Bad Taste (1987) – $30,000 

Before The Lord of the Rings trilogy guaranteed Peter Jackson a place in the Hall of Greatest Directors Ever, he was a semi-successful film director from New Zealand who’s artistic vision hovered between ‘artsy’ (Heavenly Creatures) and ‘fartsy’ (The Frighteners), a Michael J. Fox paranormal serial killer movie and BrainDead, (aka Dead Alive), a zombie film that at one time held the record for most buckets of blood used in film and can best be summarized in two words that make it a must-see; Baby Zombie.

Jackson was always going to be a famous film director, despite his obvious handicap of being born and raised in New Zealand which is pretty near as far away as you can get from Hollywood. To prove this, his first movie was the campy, eighties-esque horror Bad Taste, which he also wrote. It was movie about aliens who kill the people of a small village to use as filler for their intergalactic hamburger franchise and he was able to make it for about $30,000 New Zealand dollars, roughly equivalent to 10,000 sheep.

Not exactly Sir Ian McKellan territory but it was a start. He then followed that straight to video epic with the ‘much’ safer sell Meet The Feebles, which was basically an X-rated Muppets movie. It’s loosely the story of Heidi the Hippo who is the star of the show, but is being cheated on by her Walrus boyfriend who is having an affair with a cat. There’s drugs and sex and homosexuality and a puppet who may have AIDS. One can only imagine Jackson thumbing through a copy of Fellowship of the Ring while watching dailies of a cat giving head to a walrus and thinking ‘one day, this film will enable me to make Sauron into a giant flaming eyeball’.

Which it did.

1. Robert Rodriguez – El Mariachi (1992) – $7000

Sure, he may have shot to fame alongside video clerk come cult-fav Quentin Tarantino, but where Q’s path involved a few script sales and his first movie being backed by Harvey Keitel enabling Q to get a great ensemble of proven actors, RR had to go a slightly different path to help fund the filming and completion of El Marachi. He the writer/director/camera man/cinematographer/gaffer/coffee boy/editor and script supervisor of his first film. To help fund the film, set in the notoriously not-full-of-film-investors country of Mexico, he also sold his body to a Mexican laboratory research firm for medical experiments, making $100 a day.

Taking the notion of personal sacrifice one notch higher than asking your parents for your college fund to help production, Rodriguez offered the last thing he had, his health. It was a gambit that paid off because deep down he knew what people ultimately wanted was to see was a puny Mexican guitarist shooting the shit out of a bunch of bad guys.

With the success of El Mariachi and its distinct, hyper-jump cut style (which Rodriguez attributed to being able to only budget one take per scene, resulting in numerous cut-aways and fixes in post-production), Rodriguez became the prototype of the Big Dreams, Limited Financing filmmaker of the nineties. Columbia Pictures hired him to remake El Mariachi with more explosions and more guns and more Antonio Banderas. Yet Rodriguez’s introduction to the snail-like pace of American filming caused many grievances filed from unions that not only was Rodriguez was filming ‘too fast’ for their liking but that he often wanted to run the camera himself, a no-no in unionized studio productions.

Unlike Tarantino or fellow nineties indie-fav Kevin Smith (who never seemed to really evolve past basic filmmaking 101), Rodriguez has remained an innovator in telling stories on film. He’s championed the Mexican film industry and the use of HD film technology. He’s created family friendly special effects-riddled romps through the Spy Kids series and brought forth the amazing grown up and stylish HD filming of Sin City. The Director’s Guild of America insisted Frank Miller not receive a co-directing credit for Sin City so he resigned from the Guild, which made him unable to direct the semi-bomb, John Carter (unfortunatly for Paramount). And to keep true to his roots, he had Tarantino guest direct a segment of Sin City as repayment for Rodriguez scoring Kill Bill Vol 2, which he did for $1.

Because that is what friends do when they are trying to make a film and save a buck or two. So, get filming and have fun with it. No matter what your age, with some free publicity you never know who’s going to watch it.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to express yourself in the comments...