Producer Aaron Douglas Talks About Making Movies in Portland

Insert photo caption or credit here

Indie film producer Aaron Douglas has found success in documenting American subcultures. “I’ve always been attracted to off-beat stories.” Douglas’s documentaries Monster Camp, The Man You Had in Mind, and Veer are all available on Netflix, or will be soon.

Douglas graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in journalism and worked in radio and television news before becoming a paralegal. After twenty years of working as a paralegal, Douglas went back to school to study film at the Art Institute of Portland in 2004. Today he balances a day job as VP of Research and Marketing for Investment Real Estate firm Hagerman Frick O’Brien, LLC. and producing.

Upon graduation from the Art Institute, Douglas began studying digital filmmaking and working on a short film he wrote called Krystal, about a woman who moves into a condominium complex and ignores all the rules and receives hundreds of citations. Ultimately, she takes over the condo board and creates new laws to eradicate all of her citations but causes the complex to go to pot. He received a $500 grant from the Oregon Media Production Association to make the film and hired Cullin Hoback to direct. Hoback rewrote the short and turned it into a feature, while Douglas’s fundraising efforts garnered $120,000 for a nine day shoot in high-def. The rewritten feature Freedom State only shared the name of the main character with Douglas’s original short (although changed to ‘Crystal’), and became the story of a group of mentally disabled people who lose their nurse and believe the world is coming to an end.

“I learned a lot about scheduling and budgeting and fundraising, and working with contracts for crew positions, and how important meals are.” It was trial by fire. “At the time (2005) there were only two HD decks in all of Portland. I was lucky to find an editor in town who had been doing HD commercials for one of the commercial houses, and he wanted to work on it so he had something besides commercials to put on his reel.” The film premiered at the Cinequest film festival in San Jose, California, which is one of the top ten film festivals in the country.

Insert photo caption or credit here

Douglas’s next step was documentary filmmaking with the doc Monster Camp. “It’s about the people who do live-action role-playing. It’s kind of like Dungeons and Dragons but in costume. It wasn’t so much about the actual game they were playing as it was about the people who were playing it and why they were playing. (It was about) their relationships in and out of the game.” The documentary went on to play at over thirty film festivals, including one in Israel, and win four awards for best documentary. It even screened on network television in Australia.

Working the film festival circuit, Douglas learned that a filmmaker’s job isn’t over when the festival accepts your film. “What new filmmakers don’t realize is that even though your film is playing at a festival, you still have to do all the marketing yourself. Your film is playing with three hundred other films and it’s up to you to get audience attention.”

There are so many films playing at so many film festivals, that there are only so many professional reviewers can see. Douglas was fortunate that writer Dennis Harvey from the film industry trade magazine Variety attended Cinequest... And that he preferred documentaries… And that he happened to choose Monster Camp as one of ten films he saw (Cinequest screened 169 films that year)… And that he liked it… And that he chose it as one of three films to write about… “It’s all luck.”

While producing his second documentary, The Man You Had in Mind, Douglas ran into an unusual problem with an unexpected result. The film follows five gay couples in relationships ranging from one to fifty years. “If you didn’t know any gay people this might be interesting to you to see that these people have boring lives just like straight people. It’s not all that different. So I think that’s why at the gay and lesbian film festivals, it didn’t get picked up because they already knew that.” But The Man You Had in Mind was translated into three foreign languages and found success in screenings in Israel, Germany, and Russia. “Maybe this was something new to them, to show it as so normal.”

This year, Douglas’s was associate producer of the documentary Veer about the bicycling community. “It’s been really popular with the bike groups because it’s about bike culture, so a lot of them have used it as a fundraiser.” Distributed by IndieFlix, Veer was included in a ‘Green’ festival exploring Green topics at the Lincoln Center in New York. Veer will be available through IndieFlix on iTunes and Netflix after it wraps its festival tour.

The key to making a successful film in Douglas’s experience is marketability. “Each of my documentaries has appealed to a niche audience. Monster Camp is big with gamers and they’re a vocal audience so they tell each other about the cool film they just saw. With Veer, the biking community didn’t have a film made about them, so there was an audience there.”

Insert photo caption or credit here

As an indie film producer, Douglas sees a lot of opportunity for indie filmmakers. “There’s DVD rentals, On-Demand, on-line… The most royalties I’ve gotten from anywhere is Hulu.com. I think people’s willingness to watch movies online is increasing. I read a study where a few years ago, the average length people would watch a YouTube video was two minutes, now it’s up to eight minutes.” With the next generation looking to the web for content, Douglas believes there will be a new wave of filmmakers who make unusual serials of 8-10 minute shorts on the web headed by a 30 second commercial.

“The hardest thing is finding money so start small,” Douglas recommends to budding filmmakers. “For your first project, work with people with more experience than you. Hire good people with talent and awards. Work on other projects to learn the ropes. Let others take charge when you’re starting out. Then when you know the people and know the ropes, make your film.”

Douglas formed a legal entity, Aaron Douglas Enterprises, LLC., to do produce his films through. “All of my copyrighted works are owned by my legal entity. Many documentary filmmakers form an LLC for every film they make. The reason is that you don’t want any assets if you’re making a controversial documentary, and you get sued.” In the past, documentary filmmakers were confronted with having to change reality while following a subject in order to avoid lawsuits. “If you’re following someone, for example, and they go into a store and there’s a song playing, you shouldn’t have to ask them to turn it off because that’s falsifying reality. That defeats the whole purpose of doing a documentary.” Eventually, documentary filmmakers and members of government sympathetic to their cause released a “Documentary Guidelines” that absolved them of such issues and potential lawsuits. But that doesn’t mean there’s no longer any risk of law suits or red tape to cut through.

“A lot of filmmakers in Portland, especially just starting out, don’t know the ins and outs of permit requirements and insurance requirements. If you’re filming in Portland you’re supposed to tell the city but a lot of people don’t do that.”

Next up, Douglas is working on the stage musical Planet Eden: The Musical with local broadcast personality Rick Emerson and Ragtime: The Musical musician Kurt Crowley. You can follow the musical’s progress on the Planet Eden blog. Douglas is also producing a short film called Salt and Silicone with director Warren Pereira, which will be out next year. You can follow Douglas and learn everything he has learned about filmmaking on his Oregon Independent Film blog where he provides links to good books and articles about filmmaking, and summarizes the talks and panels he attends.

CORRECTIONS: Cullin Hoback's name was corrected, as was the film title Salt and Silicone. Also, Rick Emerson is listsed as a "local broadcast personality."