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Friday, July 30, 2010

Cameras roll again as Shootout returns

By Dan Mayfield
Journal Staff Writer
          It started with a bang and will end, hopefully, with applause.

Duke City Shootout Gala Awards     WHEN: 7 p.m. Saturday, July 31     WHERE: Popejoy Hall, UNM Center for the Arts     HOW MUCH: $20 and $25 through www.unmtickets.com or at the UNM Ticket Office, 1155 University SE

    The 2010 Duke City Shootout film festival started last week with a literal bang, and some sparks, when Bobby Unser Jr. pulled the trigger on a rifle loaded with fake ammunition to start the weeklong movie-making festival.
        Since 2000, the festival has existed to promote, and encourage, local filmmaking by making 10-minute movies.
        Filmmakers come to Albuquerque from all over the world to make their films and are given only seven days to accomplish that task, which as anyone who's ever worked in the film industry knows, is a ludicrously short amount of time. But every year they do it by staying up late and working hard.
        After the week, the films are screened at an awards ceremony. This year, the ceremony will be at Popejoy Hall on campus at the University of New Mexico on Saturday, July 31, followed by a pub crawl in Nob Hill.
        Some of the filmmakers are professionals in the industry looking for their first filmmaking credit, while others are writers who entered the competition on a whim.
        Matt Ryan, for example, is an acting coach and theater actor in Los Angeles who said he'd written a script for a short play festival that he adapted for the Shootout.
        "It was just sitting around. A friend said to enter, and I was like, what?" he said.
        To many, including Ryan, the festival sounds almost too good to be true, and he was skeptical.
        "I just did it," he said, and his script "Nothing But Besties" was chosen.
        Every spring the Shootout puts out a call for entries for short scripts. A team of readers pores over the entries and this year chose five and one music video treatment. The screenwriters become the directors, and they're helped by teams of students from the Central New Mexico Community College who earn credit toward their film workers' union credits.
        Alex Major, though, has been trying for years to get a script into the competition. In 2008 he was a finalist, and this year his film "Random Natural Occurrence" was chosen.
        Major, who is an Air Force Reserve major, leaned on his years of military experience to write the film that is based on an air-traffic controller of sorts in Purgatory. When one person dies, another must be born. But then, of course, there are problems.
        "I was in intelligence, which is just telling nonfiction stories," he said "This was just a fun story."
        This year's Duke City Shootout is the 10th competition in 11 years. Organizers couldn't raise the money they needed to do a festival last year and took a break. But the event was brought back for 2010 with a slightly less ambitious schedule than in years past. For the last several years, the festival has recruited 10 filmmakers to make 10 films. This year, though, the festival made only six, including one music video.
        The music video will feature the local band Boris and the Saltlicks and is directed by Bob Lueker, a local film union member who submitted a treatment for the song "Pony Ride."