Final Cut | Late-night shoots, shoestring budgets and plenty of gore — it's indie moviemaking in Maine with Emptyhouse Film

Film director Andy Davis specializes in full-length horror films, ones about haunted mansions and zombies with bloody teeth. In the last year and a half, Davis has made three horror flicks, with liberal use of fake blood, gross-out imagery and latex zombie masks. It's what he does for a living.

Tonight, a cool evening in mid-May, he's auditioning actors for his next film, "Monster in the Woods," about a team of cryptozoologists tracking Bigfoot in Maine's North Woods. Auditions are being held at the offices of Motion Media Film and Video, where Davis since 2005 has run the entertainment division, Emptyhouse Film.

Motion Media's offices are located in Freeport, on Route One in a small, white building next to Buck's Naked BBQ. Inside the editing room, Davis leans into a camera on a tripod and focuses on Tony Ezzillo, a housepainter in Waldoboro who's trying out for the part of Jack Killington, a ne'er-do-well former Bigfoot researcher. The role is one of 20 Davis is casting this week.

Glancing down from the camera, Davis reads lines from the script to Ezzillo: "I don't want you in my town or in the woods." In a gravelly voice, Ezzillo recites memorized lines into the camera. "Look, sheriff," he says, taking a swagger toward Davis, "I'm very, very rich and that enables me to buy the best scientists and professionals in the world."

Like all Emptyhouse films, "Monster" will take about three months to complete, and cost around $60,000 -- a miniscule sum compared to Hollywood features with bulging budgets in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

They do it on the cheap. Davis, Motion Media owner Olin Smith and producer John Lane shoot digitally, meaning no pricey film stock. They hire amateur actors, meaning no expensive union rates or overtime charges. And, at least for now, they aren't taking much of a paycheck.

Smith, however, hopes to sell the films to a distributor in the next year. Such a deal, he says, could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and allow Motion Media to make feature films for years to come. "There's no reason why I can't sell them," he says, "if the timing's right."

Dozens of independent film companies in Maine have similar ambitions, investing time and money in micro-budget films with hopes that their films will make it to multiplexes around the country. But like other businesses in Maine, film companies here face challenges, including limited funding, few skilled workers and geographic isolation, which can prevent some from making valuable connections in the industry.

Film is still unfamiliar territory here, says Randy Visser, a long-time member of the Maine Film Commission, a state advisory board. "In Maine, you can talk about wood, fishing and tourism, but you start talking about film and eyes glaze over," he says.

Do-it-yourself filmmaking
Davis, Smith and Lane used to make horror films just for fun. Smith and Lane, who started their own corporate video businesses in the 1980s in Portland, cut their teeth in 1989 making "Lobsteroids," a film about giant, steroid-enhanced lobsters that terrorized the Portland waterfront, set to a soundtrack that included local rockers Bebe Buell and the Gargoyles.

The film cost at least $60,000 to make, says Lane, who now runs National Landscape & Garden Center in Saco in addition to his role as producer for Emptyhouse Film. Film production was more expensive back then, he says, because they had to build sets and transport actors and crew from place to place. Nowadays, he says, a cheaper option is to put actors in front of a blue screen and insert settings later on a computer.

Davis fell in love with horror flicks as a kid, devouring films like "Night of the Living Dead" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." After studying film and video in the 1990s at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Davis started making short horror flicks.

Davis and his friends spent thousands of dollars of their personal savings to produce a handful of films under the moniker Zero Doomsday Productions. To keep costs low, they borrowed a $3,000 Sony digital video camera from Scarborough's public access station, which Davis was running at the time. "[My friends and I] pooled together money," he says. "That was our hobby."

Maine, home to Stephen King, has a heritage of horror and science fiction. Besides Motion Media, a handful of budding filmmakers are getting into the act this summer: In May, DiBacco Films in Westbrook began work on "Willow's Way," a $50,000 film about a man's encounter with a "stranded celestial being," according to producer Ralph DiBacco. In August, the Lewison Sun Journal reports, Buckfield artist Michael Raymond will shoot his own Bigfoot film, "Big Stuff," for about $15,000.

Davis and Smith decided to pursue horror films as a business in late 2005. By then, Davis had worked for Smith's company, Motion Media, on-and-off for several years, making commercials and training videos for clients like Wolfe's Neck Farm in Freeport and Sappi Fine Paper. On the side, he ran his production company, which he had renamed Emptyhouse Film.

But tiring of corporate work, Davis and Smith that year decided to make Emptyhouse a division of Motion Media. The arrangement meant Motion Media would continue to do corporate work, but invest the earnings into Emptyhouse feature film projects. "I had always wanted to make movies," says Smith. "I just didn't want to do it the way Hollywood was doing it, where you're just a cog in a wheel."

Like many independent filmmakers in Maine, Davis, Smith and Lane have to be creative with Emptyhouse's limited budgets, which usually are under $100,000. One strategy is to hire mostly amateur actors, which allows them to pay $100 per day and condense the production period, at times filming scenes from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. for five days in a row. By contrast, union members of the Screen Actors Guild are entitled to more than $700 per day and shorter work hours. "I prefer non-union actors because [otherwise] there's a boatload of paperwork," Davis says.

Davis also shoots digitally, on high-definition digital video, so he doesn't have to pay thousands of dollars for film or processing. Instead, he just uploads the footage each day into an Apple G4 computer for editing.

The three also rely on donations from the cast and crew members for props. For "Monster," two of Davis' friends worked for a full month to sew the Bigfoot costume. In early June, two weeks before filming, Davis sent an email to actors with a list of needed props, including eight rifles, orange hunting hats, crayons and dead chickens.

Other filmmakers in Maine take a similar do-it-yourself approach. Dana Packard and his wife, Jennifer Porter, who run theater company The Originals in Buxton, started Honey Tree Films in 1999, wanting to bring their scripts to the big screen without leaving Maine. "We always felt we wanted to have our cake and eat it, too," Packard says.

Like Emptyhouse, the couple set their films in locations they can use for free; they shot their 2003 ghost story feature, "Mr. Barrington," in their Victorian home. Even with such efforts to save money, however, "Mr. Barrington" was expensive for a Maine-based independent film, costing $500,000 to pay for several union actors and 40 crew members. Film investors have only recouped "a fraction" of their investment, Packard says.

"Frankly, we wound up with some good critical response," he says, "but just slowly the money is coming back."

The money hustle
Outside the editing room during the recent casting session, producer Smith leans back in his chair and waits for the auditions to finish. Casting isn't his job; he's in charge of financing the films. That, he says with a grimace, is the hard part.
The other half of the production money comes from outside investors, with the rest of the budget earmarked for marketing and post-production work. Lane is in charge of courting them. For "Monster," so far he's secured a total of $15,000 from nine people. Most are friends and relatives, he says, while others are former colleagues who call after hearing about Emptyhouse in local press. Three investors contributed money to Emptyhouse's third film, a zombie tale called "2," after seeing a story about it on a local evening newscast in January.

Raising money for films in Maine can be tricky. Joshua and Seth Gass run their production company, Shadow Puppets Entertainment, in Sherman Oaks, Calif., and Bangor, where they grew up. It took two years to raise $100,000 for their first feature, "The Mushing Mill," which they filmed in 2003 in Greenville and Bangor. Most of the money came from family and friends, but they supplemented it with plenty of donations and borrowed time at editing studios in L.A.

The film premiered at the Bangor Opera House in 2006 to an audience of 600. But to recoup their investment, the brothers have to market their film heavily. This summer, they'll release 1,000 copies of the film on DVD for $20 each, selling them online and at Bangor stores like Borders and Bull Moose Music. In the meantime, they've submitted the film to 30 festivals, but haven't yet received any acceptance letters.

Drumming up interest
After "Monster" premieres later this year, Smith and Lane will begin marketing it to distributors, with hopes to sell it for at least $100,000 to companies like KOAN Inc. in Park City, Utah, which bought "Mr. Barrington" from Dana Packard and Jennifer Porter last year to release on DVD, offering the two a percentage of profits in exchange.

The distribution process can be daunting, and expensive. Marketing "Monster" will cost another $20,000-$30,000 in travel costs, legal fees and promotional material like posters and DVD screener copies, Smith says. Just thinking about marketing makes his shoulders sag. "You can get caught up," he says, closing up the office one night in May, after the first "Monster" rehearsal. "After the premiere, you go, 'Okay. Who's gonna buy this thing?'"

Smith and Lane hope to earn more than $100,000 per film, basing their projections on market research, reading trade papers like the Hollywood Reporter and now-defunct Premiere. One tactic will be to market the films as a package, rather than each one individually. "I wanted to show consistency," Smith says, "because it's easy to just make one film."

These days, it might be easier to find an audience for films, too. Sites like YouTube, iFilm and MySpace allow filmmakers to share films online; companies like Netflix also allow films to reach more viewers. "The exciting thing now is there are more opportunities for people to get their films seen," says Tim Rhys, editor of indie film magazine Movie Maker. "You can have clips of your movie on a siteÂ… It's not whether you can get a theatrical deal."

Still, as those options increase, so does the competition. Right now, there's a glut in the horror film market, says Vini Bancalari, owner of horror film label Elite Entertainment in Scarborough, which buys the rights to horror films and releases them on DVD. He says the success of low-budget films like 1999's "The Blair Witch Project," which was made for $22,000 and grossed nearly $250 million worldwide, helped spark a renaissance in cheaply made horror flicks. Bancalari says he receives 75 film submissions a year — triple the number he was receiving a few years ago. "The market is so overly saturated with product, so it's more difficult to get shelf space," he says.

Smith and Lane haven't begun marketing their films in earnest, but small efforts — like placing film clips on YouTube and sending press releases to Fangoria.com, a site for horror buffs — have piqued distributor interest. After Fangoria.com ran a story about Emptyhouse's "I'm Sorry," Los Angeles film studio Lionsgate asked for a copy of the film. So did a handful of producers representatives, who help companies market their films. But so far no one's offered money.

The transition from art to business hasn't been easy for Davis, who prefers to stay out of business dealings entirely. If you ask him about numbers, he politely interrupts and gives you Smith's phone number. "With the thought in mind of selling them," he says, "It's tough sometimes because you have to dumb down [your films]. It's best for me to have my cut and whatever happens, happens. Deep down, I know I've had my cut."

In the meantime, he's concentrating on finishing up "Monster." After that, he's making a film for Motion Media that has nothing to do with blood and guts. "The Adventures of Christina: Teeni the Wonderdog," will star Smith's bichon frise, Christina. Smith has wanted to make the film for years. While it's a departure from his previous work, Davis is ready to dive in. "A movie is a movie, you know? Olin has helped make one of my dreams come true, so I'd like to help him with his," he says.