Shot from the heart

The independent film scene is littered with the products of laptop coffeehouse toil.

Some 40,000 scripts are submitted to the Writer's Guild of America each year. But hard work alone will get you only so far. What an independent filmmaker needs is something more like luck.

And on a warm May evening a year ago at Primorski, a raucous Russian nightclub and restaurant in New York's Brighton Beach, luck appeared to Atlanta filmmaker Jacob Gentry in human form.

Gentry had never met a movie star in his life until the night he met Faye Dunaway. But he was a huge fan of the first film Dunaway won an Oscar for, Network. That 1976 drama of television's tenacious chokehold on the popular consciousness was prescient decades before reality TV became America's brain cell-killing absinthe. There is a serendipitous connection between Network's cynical view of TV and the script Gentry had written for his feature-film debut, Last Goodbye, about a television actress trying to find emotional sustenance in a media-saturated, disconnected world.

The meeting between Gentry, his college buddy and producer Alex Motlagh, and Dunaway unfolded like the frenzied climax of some zany Hollywood comedy. It began with Gentry and Motlagh waiting in a martini bar in Soho for a phone call from Cassandra Gava.

Gava is a Los Angeles producer and actress who had received a copy of the Last Goodbye script and managed to pique Faye Dunaway's interest. The men were instructed to wait on the sidewalk for Gava's phone call and directions to the unspecified rendezvous where Dunaway and her son Liam O'Neill were waiting, anxious to discuss the script and its potential as a project for O'Neill to cut his teeth on.

They finally received their directive -- to hotfoot it down to Brooklyn. It took them an hour to make their way southeast, while their hopelessly lost cab driver used Gentry's cell phone to call for directions.

Gentry and Motlagh eventually found their destination and sat down at a long table laden with bottles of vodka and a party in full swing.

"I just look over," says Motlagh, "there's Faye right there," seated across from them.

They shared drinks with Dunaway and noticed Dr. Ruth, inexplicably, at the other end of the table like a tiny symbol of mutually beneficial satisfaction.

"I remember at one point, I'm just giving shots of vodka to Jacob and he's drinking it and he's a little looser, and he's preaching. He's quoting Mamet, and Faye takes out her notepad and starts writing! I'm like, what kind of world am I in?"

At age 27, Gentry has already made plenty of short films, including a prize-winner for the 48 Hour Film Project and a Brian De Palma-meets-Charlie Kaufman self-reflexive thriller called Stanley.

He's steeped in Mamet anecdotes from his days as a theater major at the University of Georgia and is well versed in the canons of Hitchcock, Cassavetes, Kubrick and Welles.

And he has enthusiasm to burn.

So he regaled the exquisitely cheekboned Hollywood legend with stories that confirmed his passion for film and a willingness to get the job done.

Recalling that night a year ago, Gentry says he kicked into survival mode.

The music from the stage show was blaring and "... they could barely hear what I was saying," he recalls. "But I was just like -- I don't know if it was the vodka or whatever -- but I just looked at Faye and Liam and I was like," he feigns a raspy, shrieking-over-loud-music voice, "Drama is about this!" he stabs the air for emphasis, "... the most IMPORTANT thing when you're making a movie ... ."

He laughs.

"I'm sitting here telling a film legend this. The most important thing ... and she's like, 'yeaaaaah ... .'"

"I think Faye was kind of testing us out to find out if we knew what the hell we were doing," says Motlagh. "I think Jacob blew her away. I think that's how we got Dunaway."

The next morning, O'Neill agreed to make Last Goodbye. Clementine Ford, Cybill Shepherd's daughter, came on board, too. And Dunaway eventually reduced her normal star salary, offering to make a cameo in the film. Suddenly Gentry's project had legitimacy.

Jacob Gentry got his first camera when he was 12 years old -- a Pixelvision, a child's toy made by Fisher Price that recorded onto audiotape and has become a hipster fetish. By the time he was a 15-year-old student at East Cobb's Walton High School, Gentry and a buddy were making pocket change shooting bar mitzvahs and weddings.

In 2000, he started a production company called POPfilms -- the POP stands for "pieces of passion." Coming from anyone but Gentry, the acronym might sound goofy. But everyone who knows Gentry testifies to the charismatic, earnest showmanship he radiates.

"There's a passion and dedication there that you don't see a lot of," says Motlagh. And most importantly, Gentry is into sharing the passion.

"He wants to give you a personal stake," says Motlagh.

Gentry is passionate -- a human joy buzzer of enthusiasm garnished with the bed hair and lanky frame of an overgrown kid. Like so many other local filmmakers working in his circle, part of Gentry's sincerity is related to a generational paradigm shift.

If the Age of Irony died with 9/11, as Time magazine speculated, then Gentry is leading the charge. Fighting against the death of feeling is part of what Gentry addresses in his films, and it is undoubtedly that purity of intent that draws people to him. Burned out on reactionary, smart-ass gestures, Gentry and his peers speak a language many people have lost touch with.

"What happened to sincerity?" he asks. "What happened to being emotionally honest about things?"

Last Goodbye is drenched in a kind of dystopian angst that comes from its characters having lost touch with just that kind of honesty and struggling mightily to regain it. As with the recent spate of narratively complex, mournful productions like Magnolia and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Last Goodbye takes the pulse of the contemporary consciousness and finds a frightening void.

The film centers on Agnes Shelby (Ford), star of a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"-brand television show. Agnes is a post-feminist action heroine who kicks ass on the idiot box but is an indecisive vapor in her own life. She watches events unfold around her but is unable to take action.

Circling around the cryptically despondent Agnes is corporate underling Roland (Chris Rydell), who's undergoing some kind of alcoholic breakdown, and the tattooed, restless rock band frontman Peter (O'Neill), both of whom, in the 21 Grams tradition, turn out to have unexpected connections to Agnes. Evidence of Gentry's youth is apparent in the film's view of disappointing love affairs as the most profound source of tragedy and grandiose melodrama. But what gives the film a promising old-soul gravity is Gentry's convincing read on a fractured modern consciousness and a world where cell phones, television and myriad appointments seem to scramble and dislocate the intuitive, emotional radar of the characters. Throughout the film, all three main characters struggle to make some kind of connection, and often fail miserably.

That desire for connection is a leitmotif of Gentry's films and a function of his collective filmmaking style, as well as many of the films made by former POP filmmakers. It's easy to see how Gentry's overriding earnestness and appreciation for complicated female characters might appeal to someone like Dunaway, who's probably seen her share of Tinseltown smoothies.

With Dunaway on board, the film's budget suddenly escalated from about $25,000 to nearly a half-million dollars. What began as a small-potatoes local film shot on digital video with a cast and crew of friends became a High Definition Video opus.

Investors were suddenly on notice that this was not just some pipe dream, but a project with Faye Dunaway -- and later David Carradine -- for Christ's sake. A local post-production house, Lab 601, waived its usual editing fees for a cut of the film's profits. Almost overnight, Gentry had to reorient himself to the reality that he was making a real film, with real stars, even though he admits, "I'd never been on a real set."

He remembers his first day on the Last Goodbye set.

"I didn't know ... I was trying to pick up cables and people were like, 'No, don't do that, you're the director.'"

Shooting for Last Goodbye began last June and took place over a mere 16 days to meet the equipment rental budget. Last Goodbye was filmed in Atlanta (with some additional scenes shot at an abandoned mill in Griffin) at dozens of familiar locations including the Masquerade, Spice, 99X and Gravity Pub.

Then crazier things started happening. The kind of publicity you can't buy landed in Gentry's lap. Working on a segment about nepotism in Hollywood, some "20/20" producers decided to focus the segment on Last Goodbye, which just happened to feature a VIP lounge of celebrity spawn. There's O'Neill, of course, and Ford. Harry Dean Stanton's niece Sara Stanton. Andy Garcia's daughter Dominik García-Lorido. Anthony Quinn's son Alex A. Quinn. The spawn-of-celebrities idea was Gava's, and it turned out to be an attention-grabbing one that lifted an independent film into the ranks of a mini-phenomenon.

The entire Last Goodbye cast appeared on "20/20" in February, including Gentry and Motlagh, who came off like old pros sitting in director's chairs, talking about their film.

Even weirder stuff started to happen.

Last Goodbye made it into the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, exactly one year after Motlagh and Gentry's fateful first meeting with O'Neill and Dunaway. Every screening sold out for three nights.

One night during Tribeca, a New York Times Style reporter followed Gentry around the film's cast party at a hipster New York bowling alley. The resulting article featured a picture of Gentry flanked by Stanton and Ford. The author of the piece, Julia Chaplin, described Gentry as "one of the luckiest filmmakers alive."

If this were a Hollywood movie, the rest, as they say, would be history. Young filmmaker enlists big Hollywood producers for next film. Young filmmaker signs development deal with Miramax. Laughs all the way to the bank. End of story.

But Gentry's film is an indie, and everyone knows they tend to have unexpected endings. The next bump in the road to getting the film in theaters is landing a distribution deal.

"To get your movie out there is probably more work than making it in the first place," says Gentry.

Brian Newman, executive director of IMAGE Film & Video Center, estimates that of all of the films that appear in festivals, maybe 5 percent will find distributors.

"The few that do get distribution are the ones that you hear about the most. So you suddenly think, 'Oh, there are so many films getting distribution,'" says Rebecca Carroll, editor-in-chief of Independent Film & Video Monthly. Those success stories cloud the picture of just how difficult it is to sell a low-budget film.

How the story of Last Goodbye ends could have a phenomenal impact on Atlanta's filmmaking scene. Finding a distributor could prove that you can write, shoot and edit a film without ever leaving Atlanta.

Securing a distribution deal for Last Goodbye could mean everything to the city, says Newman. Just think, he says, how the emergence of R.E.M. from Athens put that sleepy Southern Nowheresville on the international indie-rock map. R.E.M.'s success proved you don't have to move to L.A. or New York to make it, just like Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez in Austin proved you could grow a film scene from some podunk Texas university town. Like Austin, Atlanta could become a refreshingly laid-back antidote to deal-making Hollywood. As Ford observed, "there were no egos" on the Last Goodbye shoot, "which is rare in Los Angeles."

America is the land that loves an overnight success story: the nerds who start a computer empire in a Mountain View, Calif., garage. The video store clerk who becomes a hip film auteur. The girl in the tight sweater discovered at Schwab's. What no one ever wants to talk about is how hard it is and all of the countless people who tried their best, had talent to burn, and got really close.

Making an independent film is one of the hardest creative pursuits imaginable. Keeping the momentum up, believing in it despite the odds, enlisting the support of fellow travelers. Living on ramen noodles and wondering what comes next.

The only job harder than making an independent film is selling one.

Felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com