Imagine if Don’t Look Up were made with nearly no money and its only agenda were “make ALL the money!” Now imagine the behind-the-scenes featurettes about that.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.Heartland’s 33rd edition runs October 10-20, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least eight films in all (Lord willing). Longtime MCC readers know the rule: every film I see in theaters gets its own entry…
Next up on our to-do list is Micro Budget, an uproarious film-about-filmmaking, which of course means it’s legally guaranteed a Best Picture nomination. The uproarious satire’s skewering of indie movie production might seem offensive to other Heartland participants if they, like its witless fictional auteur, lacked any measurable integrity, artistry, or intent to at least watch a few “How to Make a Movie” YouTube tutorials, let alone see some actual movies while they’re at it.
Heartland’s catalog description touted some of its biggest names first: Bobby Moynihan! Chris Parnell! Maria Bamford! As I correctly suspected before going in, none of these three pros are the main characters. I might’ve been irritated at the mild bait-and-switch if I hadn’t called it and if it weren’t bang-on meta and retroactively funnier for it. Director Morgan Evans (Teen Titans Go!, Netflix’s The Fix) co-wrote the screenplay with Patrick Noth (Netflix’s The Iliza Shlesinger Sketch Show), who stars as the hapless Terry, a no-talent schmuck from Iowa who mistakes the rags-to-riches making of Paranormal Activity for a get-rich-quick scheme and goes forth to do likewise. He moves to L.A. with his nine-months-pregnant wife Erica (Emilea Wilson, Noth’s real-life wife), hires a crew, lures in an unsuspecting cast, and attempts to shoot an ostensible disaster flick entirely inside a swanky Airbnb with hopes of selling the end result to whichever streaming service is run by the biggest free-spending suckers. What’s the worst that could happen?
Not everyone shares Terry’s strain of cluelessness, but cluelessness takes many forms. Witness his young stars played by Brandon Micheal Hall (God Friended Me, Search Party), Nichole Sakura (Cheyenne from Superstore), and Jordan Rock (brother of Chris, from Netflix’s Love), all of whom signed on in exchange for back-end points in lieu of a real paycheck. Or crewman Mike (Mike Mitchell, also of Love), who keeps making adjustments to the house for the sake of camera movements, often by sawing through walls. In one of the funniest scenes, Neil Casey (Big Mouth, the 2016 Ghostbusters) is an intimacy coordinator who’s hired for only one day and proves perhaps the position should have qualifications that deny applicants who come off like Larry the Cable Guy’s kid brother.
Meanwhile, poor Erica supports her husband in his greedy dreams as she does all the cleaning, sometimes the cooking, and acts in the film as its fourth costar (performing, on her husband’s whim, in maternity PJs out of the Ingalls family collection), all while waiting for the baby to arrive any second now. And just as every real-life project has at least one rational participant, a single crewman (Jon Gabrus from Younger) is the one begging everyone to actually, like, make the film.
Evans’ influences are cheerfully blatant as he fully embraces the handheld-cam mockumentary format, and pulls extra duties in-film as Terry’s friend Devin who’s concurrently shooting the film’s making-of DVD extras, which Terry is also directing. A few punchlines seem perhaps a bit too borrowed from The Office (one of its costars is among the cameos), but the temptation to keep drawing comparisons to Michael Scott soon fades as we recall Threat Level Midnight had at least one or two whole production values, possibly even three of them, compared to the relentless vacuity of Terry’s “Untitled Meteor Movie”.
In less than 90 minutes Micro Budget covers a gamut of Terry’s jaw-dropping missteps and the incredulous responses — patting his own back for diversity hiring in front of the entire cast and crew; the compromises to keep shooting after the Airbnb rental has run out; Moynihan’s hilarious turn as the “visual effects supervisor” (if you thought The Flash was bad…); Terry’s unsurprising involvement in crypto (Dunder Mifflin is so lucky that wasn’t around in Michael’s day); and the epilogue that doesn’t let streamers off the hook as Terry’s intended marks.
It’s evident Evans has been hurt or at least flabbergasted within that world; perhaps his best possible catharsis really was to make an authentically micro-budget film about micro-budget films, instead of selling out to a major studio that would spend tens of millions on a micro-budget simulation. But after the abundant laughter fades, I’m scared to ask how many of Terry’s self-inflicted calamities were based on true stories.
…
Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:
Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Other crew members include Don Fanelli (Prime Video’s A League of Their Own) as the cinematographer and Carla Jimenez (The Mick) as the head of “craft services”, which sometimes means leftovers. Among still more cameos, Matt McCoy (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) is much older now and harder to spot in his Zoom call as a concerned parent. And TV’s Barney Miller himself, Hal Linden (still acting at 93!) is an agent from another era.
How about those end credits? I couldn’t tell you if there’s a scene after the Micro Budget end credits because they were stopped halfway through as the house lights were raised for a special post-screening Q&A with Morgan Evans himself.
Morgan Evans and our host Julie Landrum, Film Programmer for the Heartland Film Festival.
My phone loves low-light conditions but not across long distances. But I’d feel wrong bringing an actual camera into a movie theater.
The audience had quite a few questions before time ran out. Evans confirmed Micro Budget took 11 days to shoot. All cast members (including cameos) were paid the exact same rate quoted by one character in the film. The “Airbnb” was a house once owned by the late Peter Marshall, who passed away in August and who connected Evans with the aforementioned Mr. Linden. A scene shot on an outside balcony was not planned to include a deafening helicopter overhead, but they merrily improv’d through it. He begged us not to spoil one cameo in particular, whose walk-on got a huge response from previous audiences (and ours!) and is all the wilder for their randomness.
Evans spoke at length about the number of people who succeed in Hollywood by “failing up” — i.e., by getting increasingly better gigs despite being terrible at what they do. He declined to name names but pointed toward the general demographic of first-time directors who eke out a single indie flick only to be handed a major merchandising franchise as their second-ever job.
As of this writing Micro Budget has yet to find a distributor, but Evans merits at least as much real-world consideration as Terry did in his. Might Peacock have enough extra RAM to hold it on their server? Is Crackle maybe still a thing?
