Lights, Camera, Stupidity in Austin-Made Satire

John Gholson in Make Popular Movies (Courtesy of Bryan Connolly)

IMDb lies. Make Popular Movies is not Bryan Connolly's filmmaking debut. That honor actually goes to "The Monkey Monster," a segment of an anthology film called Too Many Short Films by Douglas West that he shot on a camcorder in his backyard, with his brothers, when he was just 13. "It was a Sasquatch-type story in the woods," Connolly said, "and after that I went, 'I want to do that for a living.'"

It's only taken a couple of decades to finally get that first feature made: Make Popular Movies, a vicious satire drawing on every lesson he's learned about the film industry while not getting movies made. "It's tragic and funny to see people take seriously terrible, silly things, whether it's a commercial or this crazy version of Robin Hood where you have to act against invisible robots."

Because the big misconception about the movie business is that films happen quickly – or at all. For example, Connolly wrote his first feature script, for horror movie DESTROY, just after he left college in 2001. "We kept trying to get that made for 20 years," he said, even to the point of selling the rights in 2010. But it wasn't until 2017 that he started getting real career traction: That's when he wrote "The Suplex Duplex Complex," a South by Southwest award-winning short by Todd Rohal, "and I was lucky enough from that to get a manager, and then getting meetings in Hollywood, and then I started meeting ridiculous people constantly, and constantly getting frustrated that nobody was helping with anything." The industry is not filled with evil people, he added, but it is filled with people who "say things like, 'How can this be stupid enough to make money?' and you've got to figure out how to respond to that."

There's a brief, internal shudder as he recalls one particularly hellacious meeting when he pitched a producer on a serious drama about the Holocaust. "After all that, he went, 'Well, we have an internet dog and we want to make a movie with that.'"

Those eye-rolling experiences are summed up in Make Popular Movies, which screens at AFS Cinema this weekend. Connolly recalled his thinking: "Screw it, I'm just going to tell all these stories out of anger now that I've tried this and have failed for so long." And, he notes, everything in this film, no matter how insane, is based on anecdotes he either experienced or was told.

However, even with all those war stories, he initially wrote a lean, 30-page script, devoid of dialog, and decided to use Austin's improv comedians to give it life. Fortunately, producer Mohit Jaswal was not only the most experienced filmmaker he knew, but also a part of the improv scene himself. Connolly said, "We went to the Hideout Theatre, the Fallout Theater, every improv show in town, and saw every person he thought was funny or thought I should check out."

Some of the talents they approached had already made movies: Franny Harold, for example, appears in Jaswal's 2021 surrealist Night on Sixth. She said, "Improvising a film is a pretty crazy thing to ask someone to do, but I was excited to try it."

The experimental nature of improv keyed in with Connolly's idea to make this "slow cinema comedy" (imagine Andrei Tarkovsky with pratfalls, or Béla Tarr with knock-knock jokes). Connolly said, "I'm a big fan of Jerry Lewis, I'm a big fan of Blake Edwards, and even Mike Myers when he's really good, when you have the joke and it keeps going and keeps going to the point where you go, 'This isn't funny anymore,' and it keeps going and keeps going, and you're stuck in the joke like tar, and it becomes funny again."

By letting the actors expand the script, Connolly gave them all space to bring their own life experiences to play. Harold said, "I have a theatre degree, and everyone's so serious, and wants to be the next Marlon Brando, and there's so much comedy in that. … Playing an actress who is ready to do anything and takes their craft so seriously is something that I'm on board to do, always."

The same applied to John Gholson, who plays megaproducer Lou Bagetti. Gholson's both a comedy scene mainstay and a veteran of Austin-made films like Zero Charisma, Blood Relatives, and Maybe Shower. However, it was actually his experience as a film critic that informed a key scene, in which Lou's obsession with a bad review sabotages what should be a moment of victory. "I've heard [filmmakers] complain," Gholson said. "So I know how to complain as them." As a critic, he added, "We've all gotten those emails. I just got one from a director who was upset that I gave their film a mixed-positive review. The mixed part just confounded them."

Another element of Make Popular Movies that may strike a chord with anyone who has spent time around the film business is how many scenes revolve around someone either eating or looking for food or being sent for food. There's soup, nachos, pepper, and an especially memorable scene involving megaproducer Bagetti and a lot of pizza. "I'm obsessed with food – always have been, much to the detriment of my body," explained Connolly (who once made a Jackass-style short with a garbage-can-sized root beer float). "I think that may be why I'm a big David Lynch fan. When you watch Twin Peaks, there's so much food humor and food obsession. … Great painters will paint a bowl of fruit, and it's a masterwork. Maybe food is the key to good art."

For all the jabs and asides, and even though the script came from a wellspring of frustration, it's ultimately kind to those caught up in Hollywood. And for all of Bagetti's multitudinous sins and boorish behavior, Gholson said, the cast was never "contemptuous of the parts that we played. … The person in the shoes isn't necessarily looking down at the person who they're playing, and everybody carries some empathy for the artistic struggle."

That's the empathy in the performances that Connolly was looking for by bringing in improv performers to Make Popular Movies. "In the end," he said, "you don't want to watch these people fail."

AFS Presents Make Popular Movies Sun., April 2, 1pm at AFS Cinema, 6406 N. I-35 #3100. Tickets and info at austinfilm.org.