The film business is a tough racket. Anyone who’s worked in the movies will tell you how tough and competitive it is just to get a crew job, let alone actually make a movie. While the production phase of a film can be tedious and exhausting in and of itself, there’s a whole slew of headaches that involve development and financing before a film can even get to that step, and then after that, there’s post-production and distribution to worry about. While there have been plenty of documentaries about the behind the scenes of the movie business, very few have gone into the logistics of just how difficult it is to JUST get a film off the ground and before the cameras.
In Clapboard Jungle: Surviving the Independent Film Business, filmmaker Justin McConnell chronicles his own journey as an independent filmmaker over several years of his career as he tries to get a slew of projects off the ground. Along the way, he stops for interviews with lots of familiar faces as they share their own experiences and frustrations with getting their films funded. At first glance, producing a documentary about yourself may seem a bit self-indulgent. McConnell himself jokes that two of the unwritten rules of filmmaking is to never make a movie about filmmaking and never make a movie about yourself. Thankfully, the final product is a refreshingly honest look at both himself and the film business. McConnell paints himself as our protagonist, leading us along a sometimes frustrating and heartbreaking journey through the stop and go process of development. I think that every filmmaker has had a moment, most likely several, where they have second-guessed their career, and McConnell shares those low moments and his insecurities with us as well as his victories.
In film school, they can teach you anything from how to light and compose a shot to film analysis but rarely do they actually teach you about the business side of filmmaking. The film business is as much about networking and selling a movie as it is the art that goes into it, and I can’t help but feel that this film should be required viewing in film schools across America for its depiction of how competitive the film business really is.
If you are a filmmaker or have any interest in the film business at all, I can’t recommend Clapboard Jungle enough. It’s intimate, frustrating, but in the end, it’s an inspiring look at what really goes into just getting one movie off the ground. Even general audiences will probably find this both entertaining and enlightening as far as showing the trials that indie filmmakers face at every turn of their career. There have been plenty of films made about movies over the years, and we’ll get plenty more, but few of them have been as honest or heartfelt as this one. For those of us working in the industry, it reminds us that the road is long and paved with hardships, but the pay-off at the end is worth it.
James Reinhardt