Austin Film Festival: The Horror and Hilarity of HOAs in Subtopia

What’s the most special gift you ever gave a best friend? Something expensive? Something meaningful? Well, you probably never secretly finished a movie you’d been working on together and surprised them with a special screening of the completed movie.

That’s exactly what happened when Luis Caffesse invited his best friend and longtime collaborator Clifford Wildman to to AFS Cinema, only to surprise him with a screening of Subtopia: The Story of Hueco Canyon, their unfinished project that had sat on the shelves for years. Now they’re sharing that gift with wider audiences as it receives its world premiere at Austin Film Festival.

Subtopia mimics the true crime format, looking back on how the quiet little neighborhood of Hueco Canyon erupted into chaos after the death of genial HOA president Gillian Svoboda (Lana Dietrich) and the rise of her successor, Ellen Nickel (Hilah Johnson), whose heavy-handed leadership rubs resident Wally Kaplan (Lowell Bartholomee) the wrong way. Stolen signs, gnome murder, and clown suits take the story into absurd and finally darkly satirical territory.

The idea for Subtopia goes back over two decades, to the aftermath of 9/11 and the passage of the intimidating, intrusive Patriot Act. Wildman said, “We found some parallels in homeowners associations, where people are moving into gated communities and giving up their freedom of movement to be safe.”

It resonated even deeper because the Patriot Act (named just so that lawmakers could give it a cool acronym) and HOAs both feel like they operate in untested and nebulous legal territory. Caffesse said, “HOAs seem like legal entities [but] you enter into a private agreement with a company and they can do the sort of things that we generally only associate with government. So they live in this weird grey area.”

“Especially in Texas,” said Wildman.

It’s why neither Wildman or Caffesse live in an HOA, and while Caffesse said he can see the pluses of them, “I don’t want to sound too, well, ‘That’s the price of freedom,’ but it is.”

They spent years mulling over the idea of a movie, and finally settled on a mockumentary format. Or, as Caffesse said they preferred, “fake documentary, because mockumentary brings to mind – don’t get me wrong, things that we love – but you think of Christopher Guest, of absurdist, very silly, punchline-driven comedy that our film does not have.” Instead, they were inspired by their love of documentarians like Errol Morris, “and we had never really seen anyone at the time do a fake documentary. ... Our idea was that it would draw you in, be hard-hitting at the start, and the absurdity would build as the story went.”

When casting, it helped that they were able to draw on a who’s who of local actors that they had gotten to know from Project: Rant, their YouTube series in which actors perform angry screeds submitted by members of the public. Audiences loved it, actors lined up “because it became an incredible calling card,” Caffesse said, “and the great advantage for Cliff and I is that it plugged us into this incredible talent pool that Austin has.” They approached their wish list of performers about the film, “and the characters were molded around the actors that we knew.”

By 2010, they had complete shooting and had a rough cut – which neither of them were happy with. However, Wildman noted that this hiccup just felt like a brief delay in a project that had already been gestating for eight years, “and that may be part of why we were OK for it to go back on the shelf.” They came back a couple of years later, reassembled the cast, shot more interviews, “and then life just hit us.”

There was no one reason to shelve Subtopia, but simply all the normal stuff – kids, careers. “I wish that we had something dramatic, some great reason why it fell apart,” Caffesse said, “but it shouldn’t be surprising that an indie movie doesn’t get finished.”

So into limbo it went, only to emerge after what Caffesse described as “one of the greatest days I’ve ever had.” As a massive Stanley Kubrick fan, he’d decided he would only watch any of The Shining director’s films he hadn't seen yet for the first time in a theatre. So, two years ago for his 40th birthday, Wildman took him to the movies, only to surprise him with friends, family, and a screening of one of Caffesse’s blind spots. “Next thing I know, we’re watching Barry Lyndon.”

So how do you express your gratitude for such a meaningful gift? Without telling Wildman, Caffesse unpacked their latest, most polished edit of Subtopia and decided to get it over the finish line. “My approach was that I’m going to go back like a film historian. I’m not going to recut it, I’m going to just reconstruct it the way it was meant to be.”

This was still no small job. He spent the next year filming B-roll, adding fake newspaper headlines, working on the music – all while keeping Wildman in the dark. Caffesse said, “I spent a year thinking he was going to get mad at me because I found myself avoiding him. I would tell my wife, ‘I can’t talk to him,’ because every time I would talk to him I would be afraid I was gonna slip up.”

Finally, it was all done, just in time for Wildman’s 50th birthday. Caffesse took him to AFS Cinema, walked him into an empty screen, and told him they would be watching the completed Subtopia. “I cried,” Wildman said, who saw on the screen not only everything they’d done together on screen and working as a movie, but all the details, suggestions, and ideas they’d had together but never finished brought to completion. “All that polish, he had done it for me. … It was like I lent my best friend a car with 100,000 miles on it, and he went and sent it to a custom shop. It was already a nice car, and it was gonna run forever, but I walk in and it’s just this badass car.”

“The goal was to make something that would make Cliff laugh on his birthday,” Caffesse said, but as a completed film Subtopia had a life of its own again. It was Wildman who suggested that they submit it to AFF, but with no expectation. Wildman called the submission “a Hail Mary. But even if we just got an email going, ‘Hey, we watched your film and we don’t think it’s the right fit,’ that’s a great gift, because someone watched my movie.” The fact that it actually got in, and now will be seen by audiences? “It’s all gravy,” he smiled.

Caffesse agreed and added that he hoped their story would inspire other artists. “This experience has shown us that creative projects don’t expire and it’s never too late to share your work with the world.”

But with Subtopia completed, the big question now for them as friends is – how do you top that as a birthday gift? Caffesse just laughed. “I told him after his birthday, ‘That’s it. Now we’re even, and we can’t try to one-up each other anymore.’"

Subtopia: The Story of Hueco Canyon

D: Luis Caffesse and Clifford Wildman
USA, 89 min, World Premiere

Sun., Oct. 27, 2:30pm, Rollins Theater
Thu. Oct. 31, 6:15pm, Highland Galaxy

---

Follow all the Chronicle’s 2024 Austin Film Festival coverage.