Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, and welcome to know the news. No, I did not study tv in college, but I'm here anyway. I'm Becca Martin Brown, the arts and entertainment editor for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette. And know the news is our Friday podcast where we try to convince you that we've got stories this weekend that you just have to know about. The first thing we're going to do today is talk to Barry Cobbs, who is the director of the Rogers Short Film Festival, to talk about what's coming up with that the weekend of May 4 and fifth, and why short films matter.
I'm Becca Martin Brown, the arts and entertainment editor for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette. And our guest in the studio today is Barry Cobbs, who is the director of the Rogers Short Film Festival, which is coming up next weekend.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Week from Friday is when we start.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: Okay, so where did you come from? How did you get here, and why did you want to do a film festival?
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Well, okay, this, it started in 2021.
Rogers normally has a summer little festival called Frisco Fest and the Victory Theater and Arkansas Public Theater.
I was their director of alternative programming at the time.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Which started because of COVID Exactly. Because you did a series.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: We did a, we did. We called it an illustrated radio play that we put on YouTube, but just to try to figure out how we might use the talent and the facility there at the theater as best we could. And then things were starting to open up.
This was quasi post COVID. And so about three weeks before Frisco Fest started, which was like April 21 or August 21, I mean, something like that.
Joey Farmer, who was in charge of Apt, then said, barry, what should we do? And I said, well, we don't want to. I told him all the things we don't want to do. We don't want to have a tour. We don't want to be playing silent movies. We don't, blah, blah, blah. And I said, let's have a short film festival. And the reason I said that was I'm a filmmaker myself, and I know a lot of filmmakers, and most filmmakers are making short films. And in Northwest Arkansas, there are tens, dozens of films at any point in the process of production.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: I've worked on several of them that no one will ever see.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: But you know what? God bless you for that, because it's probably the lowest paying job in America.
[00:02:48] Speaker A: People get paid for it.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: Well, that's just it. That's what makes it the lowest paying job, but it's the most appreciated. And between Lisa Turpin and Joey at Arkansas Public Theater, and then my cohort, Elizabeth McCurdy at Studio Chunky, I went running back to the office studio chunky, and I said, hey, Lizzie, do you think we can pull a film fest together in three weeks? She had fortunately worked at Cannes, at Sundance, and for the Bentonville festival. So she knew the behind the scenes side. I knew from what you might call a customer side, I had been a filmmaker. I had, you know, entered film fest. So I knew what, as a filmmaker, I wanted, what I would like to see when I go to a film fest. She knew what it would take to get us there, and we pulled it together.
We had 40 entries that first year. We screened about 23 of them, and it worked so well. They said, let's do this again. So the next March, the first weekend in March of 2022, we had round two and got in 50 films, ran 34 of them.
Last year we got in 75 and ran 52.
This year is kind of a wonky year for us because for the last year and a half, they had been restoring and refurbishing the Victory Theater, which is our home base. And it is a magnificent theater, and it's a rarity for any film festival to take place in an actual theater. So it's really, really cool to see your movie playing back on a big screen in a real theater. In a real theater and hearing the sound, hearing all of that. Normally you're in some junior college's auditorium. This time you're in a real theater. And so they were doing the remodel, and we didn't know, we knew we were going to have a film festival. We just didn't know when it might be based on, when the remodel was going to be done.
We learned kind of late that we had snagged the first weekend in May, which is a great time for us to have it, great time of year. But it got us off to a late start in getting things going.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: And so you did the same miracle again. Hey, let's do a film fest over.
[00:05:09] Speaker B: Exactly.
We have 54 films submitted. We accepted 35 for screening. And they're in four different categories, kindergarten through 12th grade, what we call post secondary.
And that could be college kids, could be kids going to votec schools, something like, or I should say students in general that are beyond high school grade amateur, which is basically the love of the business kind of films you're talking about. And then professional, where they are professional production companies and they have funding, and they're putting together generally higher level movies where they have paid actors, they have sets, and they're generally trying to get into.
They're using them as either pilots or sort of samples, hors d'oeuvres for a larger film idea that they have.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: Filmmaking in northwest Arkansas has blown up.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: And I asked you when we were talking about this for the story, what makes short films something special, something people want to see? And you had a really profound answer.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: Short films serve two purposes to me. Well, they serve multiple purposes. But the two biggest reasons that short films are very important is one, if you're a budding filmmaker, a beginning filmmaker, short films are where you're going to.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: Start and define short in case we've got somebody listening to us. That.
[00:06:46] Speaker B: That's a good question. And it varies from festival to festival. Our definition of a short film is 1 minute minimum, 40 minutes maximum. Other films can vary more than that. And there are film festivals that specialize in under 1 minute, under two minutes, things like that all over the place. So think that fast. Our definition is between one and 40. Most of our films come in somewhere between twelve and 15 minutes.
And what makes short films so important is it gives those new filmmakers a chance to learn the craft, learn what it takes to direct, what it takes to put a film together.
Two thirds of the time in filmmaking is simply spent in pre production, writing, planning, scheduling, and especially if you don't have a budget, begging people to come and play this role, work on the crew, things like that.
The other aspect that is very important, that's often not thought of is at the professional level, a lot of filmmakers, and this includes big directors, Hollywood level, will work on a short film format to experiment, to try new things.
So you get to see at a short film festival some things you wouldn't see at a feature film festival. You get to see people experimenting, trying new things, doing things that they might be reticent to do on a big film budget. Or another thing to think of is a short film is the short story version of filmmaking. So you can tell a story, a certain type of story is a short story that you wouldn't write a novel about, that wouldn't hold up as a novel level thing. But the beauty of that is you've got this time compression, and you've got these limits, and you've got to tell something that is going to touch everyone out there, something that is basic to their humanity and connects with them, and you've got just a few minutes to do it in. And there's a real challenge to how you do that because of the limitations of the timeframe itself, limits how many characters you can have, how many scenes ultimately you can have, and telling a good story in that really shows an artful storyteller.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: I talked to and saw Jules Taylor's film that you'll be seen at the Roger Short Film Festival.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:09:29] Speaker A: And that's another one of the magical things to me is every adult in that film I've watched on stage, I've watched in film.
It's the magic of community theater on.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: Film, especially for northwest Arkansas. Our biggest source of talent on screen talent are our theater people.
And they, I am really impressed because there is a difference in acting between the legit theater, the stage, and the intimacy of film.
Totally different. And they master it. They come through, and they really love what they do. We've got talented people here, and I think that's another reason, not just Rogers, but Fayetteville, Fort Smith, the film festivals, Bentonville, are so important is so that our local filmmakers have an outlet.
Now, that said, this isn't a northwest Arkansas film fest or north.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: No, you've seen films from all over.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: Exactly. Exactly. We have had films from 17 different countries, almost every state.
Last year, I don't even know the winners this year. We're just now viewing them. But last year, our post secondary winner was peruvian, and he zoom called his thank you into us during the awards ceremony, and we also had to get an interpreter because he only spoke Spanish.
[00:11:05] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: So, yes, the reach is around the world, and I think there's an importance there. It gives our local filmmakers in our state and regional, sort of geographically regional filmmakers an outlet, a really handy outlet for their short films, but it also puts them among their peers from across the country and around the world and doesn't set them apart. We don't have an Arkansas award. If you're an Arkansas filmmaker, you're competing against everyone who is in your category. And I think that's the only proper way to do it, because if they're going to move up in the world, they're not just competing with other architect filmmakers for people's attention. It's anybody who can make a film.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: So how did you fall in love with film?
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Early. Early. When I was in third grade, for Christmas, my folks got me an eight millimeter movie camera.
I know that sounds pretty corny, not to me.
But I had always loved telling stories, and I come from a family, especially on my mom's side, that were really big into telling stories.
They were from Cane Hill, from Haw guy, places like that, and they had all of these stories about civil War battles, the ghosts that still haunted the prairie Grove battlefield and just all these amazing stories, and I love that.
And then I got this movie camera and I just started. I didn't have any way to edit, so I'd have to, as they call it, edit in the camera, cut, reposition, fire again, do things like that. And it was all silent, too. So I had to learn how to tell a story without words, without cue cards, you know, or that kind of thing.
And then as I kept going, I went to college, went to the University of Missouri and majored in film there. Then went to the University of Texas.
I know, and got my masters in film. And then after that, at the time, this was in the late eighties, there were basically two places you could really go. It was Los Angeles or New York if you're going to work in film or network level television. So I chose LA, moved out there and worked. I actually worked more in television than in film while I was out there. Started with Fox, then went to work for Time or Warner Brothers in television, and then NBC productions, CB's, did some Disney stuff, and then freelanced working for wide variety, Castle Rock, and a number of different companies, and then probably did about a half dozen feature films over the course of that. Almost accidentally, as I was doing tv, they would go, hey, we need what you can do in our crew. Can you come to it? And it'd be like, yeah, sure. And so I ended up doing probably about a half dozen movies.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: So tell our listeners the biggest romantic fallacy about filmmaking.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: The biggest fallacy is that it is cool, star studded and relatively easy, and that you will make a lot of money, have a porsche and have someone beautiful hanging off of you. Yeah, that's the biggest fallacy. I think probably for when I was in college, one of our professors asked the class I was in, how many of you want to go on and work in the biz when you graduate? Of course, every hand shot up. He said, I hate to tell you this, 10% of you will go on to work in the biz. And he was absolutely right. It's a cool major. It's cool to be seen as a filmmaker. But once you start doing it, once you start hauling equipment, sandbags, light stands, lighting, stuff like that, it's like you're hauling plumbing equipment around. They're long days, they're exhausting days. And as opposed to college or to someone who's never made a film, sitting back thinking about the romance of sitting in a director's chair with a megaphone, you can't not be creative. You have to. Monday morning, you don't want to be there. You've got a sinus infection and a hangover, but you got to turn it on. You have to be creative. You have to make those shots be.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: And you have to figure out how to fix the fact that, that this person that was supposed to show up didn't. This just broke, and your lead actor has a sinus infection, and that's a hangover.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: That's a good point. And that's why having a good crew.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: I paid on a film with children in the film.
[00:15:53] Speaker B: Oh, now, children, I have to admit, there was always that rule of children and pets increase your ratings exponentially.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: They also increase the headache of filmmaking exponentially.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: Working with them is really, really, really hard. But you're absolutely right. But it's. That's part of the challenge. You have to love the constantly shifting nature of it and love the challenge that gives you. For some people, that's exhausting. It's tiring because there's no real order to it. In a sense.
If somebody calls in sick, then either somebody has to take over two jobs, or if it's a key role, then you got to figure out how you're going to spend that day shooting.
[00:16:32] Speaker A: Around it.
[00:16:33] Speaker B: Yeah, around it. What the heck do we do? Because in general, budgets are written around a certain number of days of production. And just because somebody calls in sick doesn't mean you can stop down and wait for them to feel better.
[00:16:46] Speaker A: I think the magic if you go to a short film festival, because odds are very good that it wasn't green screened, that somebody actually went out and made a film.
It changes your whole perspective on this, and it makes it so much cooler to watch. Like you're watching an old film that's got a car chase in it. And you know that at that point, the way you did a car chase was much different and much scarier. And suddenly you see films on multiple levels the same way you see theater having done it.
[00:17:26] Speaker B: There is one thing that people always we just got through shooting a short film that we're going to drop in. We're not in competition, but we're going to drop it in to screen it just to see if everybody likes it. And we had some onlookers at several of the scenes we shot, and all of them would comment. They didn't realize how long it took and how tedious it was to get a shot. Right?
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:55] Speaker B: And that's another myth, is that you set it all up, boom, the magic happens, and you're done, and just a cloud moving over the sun can stop things down, you know, all sorts of unexpected.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: It just gives you so much more appreciation.
That's why I would pitch to go to a short film festival, is you can look at it with those eyes of let me look and see what they did here.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: You can really appreciate the work they put into it, because, like you're saying, they can't just run into a controlled space with a green screen where they're not gonna have passing trucks and make a miracle and, yeah, and put up all sorts of things behind them. Now, that is an art in itself to shoot a good green screen scene, but you really are seeing the nuts and bolts hands on. If you see a car chase, it's the same way that Bullitt did it, Steve McQueen, all of that. It's a physical car chase, physically running down a real street, you know, shooting blanks, doing all of these things.
It's filmmaking in the older sense like that. But that's also like learning on a manual typewriter.
That's the best way to learn to keyboard.
[00:19:10] Speaker A: So if we've managed to convince people that they need to go see the short film festival, even if they've never been to one, tell us the details.
[00:19:19] Speaker B: Okay, this short film festival will run Saturday and Sunday, May 4 and fifth.
May 4, we're going to have a combination of our k through twelve, our post secondary, plus some professional and amateur. Then Sunday will be professional and amateur. And both days, the screenings start at noon, end about five or 530.
And then Sunday evening at 06:00 we'll do a quick repo on stage, and then we'll have our awards ceremony, which usually lasts about a half hour, and we'll award a winner per category and then an overall best of the fest winner.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: And should you dress for the Oscars, or.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Yes, you should.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: No, actually, it's a casual event.
I really love is people that just drop in. We have. It's astounding how dedicated both the film fans are, but also the filmmakers. And what I really am proud of with the Roger Short Film Festival, unlike other ones that I've entered films into, is the filmmakers stay and get to know each other and watch each other's films. They don't just find out when theirs is screening, come, watch it, leave they come, they stay, and they're cheering each other on, and it gets kind of rowdy. It's actually a really fun, energized event.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: See above. Created community through storytelling.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: Yes. Yes.
[00:20:54] Speaker A: And so tickets are available on the Arkansas public Theater webpage.
[00:20:58] Speaker B: Yes. And that's theater with an R E, correctly spelled.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: And they're $20.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: Day passes are $30. Do not sell tickets for individual films. You buy a day pass and then you can buy a weekend pass. There are all sorts of different and.
[00:21:17] Speaker A: I'm assuming they'll have the brand shiny new Victory theater bar open.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: They will. And it is magnificent. It is.
[00:21:24] Speaker A: You'll think you're in New York.
[00:21:26] Speaker B: You really will. You really will. It was put together by a true bartender and restaurant owner and manager.
And it is a magnificent.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: And rumor has it that a whole bottle of wine will fit in the cup holders on the chairs.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: It will, because I have done that myself.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: So there you go. Thank you so much. That's been Barry Cobbs talking about the Rogers Short film Festival. We'll have a story Sunday in what's up? And we'll see you next weekend in Rogers.
[00:21:55] Speaker C: If you're enjoying this podcast, consider a newspaper subscription to the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette or the River Valley Democrat Gazette. We have a special offer for our podcast listeners, so visit nwA online.com nwapodcast to get started. You can also click the subscribe button on our websites, nWA online.com and rivervalleydemocratgazette.com dot or call us at 479-684-5509 and be sure to say that youre a podcast listener. Now back to the show.
[00:22:26] Speaker A: Of course we dont expect to pitch you one story and have you stick around. So here are some other things coming up Sunday that you might be interested in in news Fuel Xcelerator is an initiative of startup junkie foundation designed to attract entrepreneurs to northwest Arkansas. Doug Thompson examines the impact of that program.
Benton county is set to start a remodel and expansion of its central communications facility later this year. Thomas Ascente has that story.
The Fayetteville Downtown Coalition has existed for a little over a year now, and Stacey Ryburn will tell you what that group is doing for Fayetteville.
Tracy Neal, who is the Benton county cops and courts reporter, will tell us about a new effort to find a 15 year old peerage girl who disappeared in 2006. An updated aged photo of the girl was recently released, and he talks to Benton county officers about that in the river Valley in Fort Smith, directors are weighing whether to offer free parking throughout downtown. Monica Brick has that story.
And in Van Buren, the city council on Monday heard an update on the almost home animal shelter. Sadie La Cicero will have that story in features. It's time for the artisphere festival. Happens every May. Thanks to the Walton Arts center in Fayetteville, and we'll have a story about that, plus everything else going on in northwest Arkansas on the river valley.
If that hasn't worked, we'll try harder next week. Thanks for listening to our podcast. I'm Becca Martin Brown, the arts and entertainment editor for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
