(2007) Director/writer Michael Schroeder intersperses amateurish video and cell-phone frames with high-grade filming in this story of an LA high-school student teaming up with an old Hollywood gaffer and his elderly film crew from a retirement home.

Cameron Kincaid (Michael Angarano), a junior in high school, is determined to enter a film contest. He rides his bicycle over the car of his nemesis and rival, Brett Raven, whose father is providing plenty of cash for his student-film project. After Cameron's mother and stepfather Floyd, who seem to have no control over the boy, once again bail him out of juvenile hall for boosting and then joyriding with his friend in the 1958 Plymouth Fury from John Carpenter's movie Christine, Cameron seems headed for a life of delinquency. His friend and fellow cinephile Murphy White (Joshua Boyd) quotes Nietzsche, referring to himself and Cameron as "The people who don't matter to the rest of the world."

While watching a motion picture about Orson Welles during a sparsely attended matinee, Cameron takes an interest in an irascible old man's argument with a professor of cinema: "I've made more movies than you've been to." The curmudgeonly Glen "Flash" Madden (Christopher Plummer), who began making films as an electrician with Orson Welles, has become a denizen of the Motion Picture Residence for the Elderly with nothing left to do with his life other than swill booze, watch classic movies, and complain about animal control's killing unwanted dogs. In this throw-away society, Flash feels angry but helpless as unused objects, former pets, and the unloved elderly are discarded, dumped, or destroyed.

Eventually winning over Flash with bribes of cigars and Wild Turkey, Cameron gets the help he needs for learning the craft to create his film. Flash elicits a pledge from Cameron that if he ever makes it as the man in the chair (the director) in a major studio, he'll never abuse the underlings.

Financing of $5000 comes from Academy Award-winning film producer Taylor Moss (Robert Wagner), whom Flash hasn't seen or forgiven for 43 years since his wife ran off with Moss. Enlisting his old friends from the retirement home - the soundman is so deaf that when Flash says "We're going on location" he thinks he hears "It's time for my medication?" - along with a legendary screenwriter, neglected nonagenarian Mickey Hopkins (M. Emmet Walsh), who hasn't written a script in 35 years but whom Cameron teaches how to use Google on the Internet, Flash inspires the ancient crew to work on a ten-minute documentary-style movie about neglect in nursing homes.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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