Spot Magazine - It's All GOOD!

July 1, 2009

How to accomplish great things: Dream Big

Rebecca Rodriguez is passionate about two things: making movies and saving animals. This was clear within maybe five minutes of meeting her recently at Pix Patisserie in North Portland.

The independent filmmaker from La Center, WA, was explaining how she’d managed to construct a business model that simultaneously helps animal shelters raise money and get a feature-length Hitchcock-esque whodunit in the can. While nonprofit fundraising is not a frequent ingredient in filmmaking, Rodriguez is cooking up a homegrown business model that just may result in enough fundraising cake to go around.

Rodriguez grew up in Sacramento, CA, aspiring to be an actress and to save animals. When the young naval officer she married was assigned to Guam after graduating from flight school, she followed him. Once on the Pacific island she tried to fit into the narrow role of an officer’s wife but she kept finding herself distracted by the conditions of the local dog population. “I can’t just sit here and put on fashion shows,” Rodriquez remembers thinking. So she dropped out of the Officers Wives Club and started Guam’s first humane society: Guam Animals in Need (GAIN). It was 1989, and there were an estimated 40,000 dogs on the island. She was 21 years old.

For a twenty-something facing that much responsibility, Rodriguez made an important realization. In her own words she says, “I didn’t know what I was doing but I knew enough to ask.” The closest humane society was in Hawaii, so Rodriguez visited to learn about their operations. Back on Guam, getting the fledgling organization off the ground wasn’t just an uphill battle, it was an upcliff battle, she says. For example, to start a volunteer program at the underfunded and under-staffed shelter required working with the Guam Senate.

GAIN had come a long way when Rodriguez left three years later, in 1992. “I was hoping I had laid a decent enough foundation, that the group would continue” she says of her soul-changing experience. “It really beat me up, but at the same time it gave me a great deal of confidence in my ability to help animals.”

After returning to the mainland, Rodriguez searched for her niche in the animal advocacy establishment. For two years she worked at Oregon Humane Society as an animal care supervisor, and then moved to Seattle and worked as program manager for an animal fund. By 1995 she was disenchanted with the overwhelming crisis of pet overpopulation in the U.S. and decided to focus — for awhile — on her other dream: acting.

After studying for a year she started to land paid acting gigs and began writing screenplays. After attending the 2000 Sundance Film Festival she returned to Portland and, three weeks later, shot two short films in two days. One of them, Soul Collectors, was selected to debut at the 2000 Seattle International Film Festival.

After one year Rodriguez was director of a collection of short films showing at festivals all over the world. In 2004 she made Coming Up Easy, her first feature-length film, which won the Best Feature Award at the 2005 Reel Women International Film Festival in Los Angeles.

Her current project could help change the way indie films are made and hopefully will raise funds for animal shelters all over America.

The low cost of moviemaking has resulted in a high volume of independent films on the market, so nowadays getting them distributed is a tall order. This, along with a struggling economy, makes it near impossible for indie filmmakers to raise funds. But Rodriguez had an idea. “Wouldn’t it be cool to find an audience for a movie before I made the movie?” she thought. So she wrote Good Dogs, a fictional screenplay about an investigation into the disappearance of an animal shelter worker, which would hopefully appeal to a dogloving audience.

But that was only part of the solution. After writing the script she created a patent-pending process called Box Office Blocks where the same people who would go see the movie in theaters can pay the approximate cost of two theater tickets and help fund the production. The five-minute process starts by visiting iamagooddog.com and selecting the future placement your own pup’s 40x40 pixel picture (or dog-related logo, if you want to combine a little art funding with some cheap advertising) on the Website.

Once the purchase of your piece of e-territory — that your Louis the Leg-lifter won’t pee on — is complete, you get a certificate of recognition from the United Alliance of Canine Companions (signed by Monster and Fern-a-delic the canine Ambassador and Secretary, respectively) and a downloadable copy of My Dog’s Gone Wild (a perfect film for the canine cinephile). And that’s just the immediate swag. Everyone who buys a Good Dog Block receives a DVD of Good Dogs upon completion.

After the film’s world premier in Portland, Good Dogs will be available by license to animal organizations everywhere so they can present public showings as fundraising events. “It’s fun, it advances the arts, but most importantly, it will help animals,” says Rodriguez, which — besides making great movies — has been her goal all along.

Jake Faris
Spot Magazine

The Power of Estrogen

Portland Women's Film Festival

Coming Up Easy, by local filmmaker Rebecca Rodriguez, is a feature-length film about domestic violence and sexual abuse that reinforces why POW needs to exist in the first place. The movie resonates with an impact that outstrips its quality, simply because the subject matter is generally relegated to trashy paperbacks and made-for-TV movies about gymnasts. (That is to say, it's sensationalized and made sordid.) Coming Up Easy is by no means perfect, but it is, for the most part, even-keeled and realistic, and this forthright approach lends the film an unexpected power.

ALISON HALLETT
The Mercury

Now showing - Best of the 48 Hour Film Project

Wednesday, Sept. 8 to Tuesday, Sept 14, 2004.
BY David Walker, Willamette Week

The 48 Hour Film Project began three years ago in Washington, D.C., and has spread to more than 20 cities worldwide. Filmmaking teams are assigned a genre and given one weekend to write, shoot, edit and score a film, which is screened the following weekend. Late last month, the 48 Hour Film Project came to Portland, and enthusiastic audiences packed the Hollywood Theatre over consecutive nights to see the results. This week's best-of show is a final opportunity to see what is (along with Orlo's Video Fest) arguably the most kinetic film event of the year in a city that already enjoys a healthy underground scene. What you get is a blend of skilled filmmaking and endearing amateurism. Although the best-of lineup is still being determined, likely films include Guilty Party, which exhibits skilled cinematography and editing with an atmospheric score, and Getting 'Wood, which is riotous fun. Quietness of Copper, a charming fantasy about the Portlandia statue, takes its cue from ancient mythology, and features one of the festival's only familiar local names: director Rebecca Rodriguez. Are there better films playing in Portland this week? Absolutely. But quality isn't the only fitting measurement here. Watch the 48 Hour Film Project to experience the contagious thrill of artistry made on the fly. (Brian Libby)

Filmmaker's current success isn't a matter of degrees

Margie Boulé, The Oregonian
March 31, 2004

You want to grow up to be a feature-film director? Everybody knows how to go about it. You study hard in high school, go to a good film school for college, move to Hollywood and spend years working your way up.

Rebecca Rodriguez never read the instructions.

At 36, Rebecca's first full-length feature, "Coming up Easy," will premiere Friday night at the Longbaugh II Film Festival in Portland. She wrote it. She directed it.
She lived it.

Most people keep secret the life experiences Rebecca says she has survived. Rebecca not only talks about violence and abuse that she endured as a child, she made a movie about it. "Based on a true story," it says in the opening credits. "I'm pretty open about certain things," Rebecca says, "because when you own the painful parts of your life, it can be really powerful."

Rebecca is 36 today, and lives in Vancouver. It seems like a long time ago when her mother and father used to battle. After their divorce, her mother married a convicted murderer, just six months out of San Quentin. "For most people, that would be a little red flag," Rebecca says, laughing.

In the years before her stepfather died during a robbery, "We were moving, moving all over the place, so my stepfather could elude authorities." When she was 15, Rebecca was told the family was moving again. "I was tired, and my grades had gone down the tubes. . . . I said, 'I'm not going.'"

She dropped out of high school and got three jobs to support herself. "That was when my life became my own. It was difficult." But she stayed away from drugs and out of trouble. "I think I had an absolute army of guardian angels watching over me."
Unlike most future film directors, Rebecca had no clue she'd end up making movies. She knew she was uneducated. She doubted she'd ever do anything important. It was a dark time when friends left for college.

She married a Navy man at 20 and moved to Guam. The marriage didn't last, but Rebecca moved her first mountain on Guam. Distressed by the number of abandoned animals she saw, she founded a humane society that still thrives there. "It was the most empowering experience," she says. Suddenly she felt she could do anything. In the next few years she moved to Portland, created and patented a parenting system, and became an inventor, manufacturing and selling useful household devices. She created the parenting system, which uses tokens for positive reinforcement, when her sister and three nephews moved into her house, seeking refuge from domestic abuse.
"The creative juices were just crazy-flowing," Rebecca says. "While doing this inventing, I started to itch to act in a film."

She'd had success as an actress, landing the first nine roles she auditioned for. Now she set about writing a script for a film she wanted to act in. It was her story and her sister's, about their childhood and her sister's escape from domestic violence as an adult. She called it "Coming up Easy."

"By the time I finished writing, all my passion had shifted from acting to writing and directing." The first script led to a second. More followed. She went to Sundance Film Festival and saw that aspiring directors began with short films. So she came home to Portland and wrote two short films.

A friend agreed to finance them, and the two films were shot during a single weekend. "Talk about a grind," Rebecca says. "I might as well have taken everyone, dumped us all into a meat grinder and shot us out the other side."

The exhausting effort was worth it. "Soul Collectors" premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival. "Talk about ecstatic," she says. "This huge theater was packed, and people laughed when they were supposed to. I almost passed out, sitting there." Both shorts were picked up by Universal Studios and have been shown all over the world.

It was time to direct a feature film. Rebecca picked her own story, "Coming up Easy." "I agonized over it, because it's a very personal story. I had to sit down with my sister and talk about opening up this can of hurt." Her sister urged her to do the movie. "She feels strongly it's going to help people," especially other victims of domestic violence.

Rebecca and a crew of Portland professionals shot the film in 18 days last year, funded mostly by local investors. They came in on schedule and on budget.
Rebecca is excited about the premiere at 9 p.m. Friday at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland. But she's already working on several potential films, some by other writers. "Whenever money comes for one, that's what I'll do first," she says.
She didn't go to a fancy film school -- she never even finished high school. She doesn't have a big-name mentor or a Southern California address.

But Rebecca Rodriguez absolutely knows her future is in directing films. "In a way, I was really blessed that I didn't have the guidance most people got," she says. "Because for me, there are no boundaries, no limitations. The way I look at it, other people have done it, so I can do it. Let's go do it. It'll be fun."

Postcard from Singapore: American Short Shorts On the Road

Postcard from Singapore: American Short Shorts On the Road
Tim LaTorre, indieWIRE / 08.03.01

Ah...beautiful Singapore...rickshaws, chicken rice, and...short films? As yet another sign that the world arts community has a growing interest in the art of the short film, American Short Shorts successfully invaded the small city/state with its July 11-14 festival.

Founded two years ago by Los Angeles-based Producer Douglas Williams and Tokyo-based Executive Director Tetsuya Bessho, the 2001 installment marks the first time the festival has crossed its Japanese borders and pulled into Singapore's port -- the Southeast Asian city/country best known these days for outlawing gum and dishing out corporal punishment to an American teenager guilty of vandalism.

Organized in association with The Substation, the local 'multi-disciplinary, multi-media, multi-cultural and multi-lingual arts center,' the festival sold out each of its 4 screenings, which underscores the success of the festival with the American-savvy Singaporean audience. According to Festival Executive Wahyuni Hadi, "because American culture is so predominate in Singapore people are not in a big hurry to see American films like Japan. So we had to think of how we were going to sell it and we sold it through artistic merit, which I think the films we are showing deserve."

Shortened from the Japanese program in order to appease the local government censors and fit the allotted time frame, Singapore highlights included Jason Reitman's "In God We Trust," Michael Horowitz and Gareth Smith's "This Guy is Falling," Sam Hoffman's "The Ride Home," Rebecca Rodriguez's "Soul Collectors," Marc-Andreas Bochert's "Kleingeld" and David Greenspan's "Ohagi (Bean Cake)." To give some perspective on the use of short filmmaking in an artist's development, the program also included Tim Burton's animated student film "Vincent." Despite some of the technical limitations -- all films were transferred and projected on video, the program succeeded in its mission: to expose the diverse art of short filmmaking to a new Asian audience.

This focus on short film comes at an important time in the reconstitution of Singaporean cinema. While the country has many theaters that are technologically up to par with or exceed American standards, local production has been limited to about 2 to 3 features a year. Go to any theater and you'll find that they are filled with American or Hong Kong imports.

The last decade has seen a few homegrown hits, which include Eric Khoo's "12 Storeys" (1997), T.L. Tay's "Money No Enough" (1998), and Chee Kong Cheah's "Chicken Rice War" (2000). Director Glenn Goei's debut dance movie "Forever Fever" (1998) was the first feature from Singapore to find a U.S. release. It was picked up by Miramax and subsequently retitled "That's the Way I Like It."

As nervous business interests flee from a post-English Hong Kong looking for a safe business harbor, Singaporeans are beginning to realize that they have the opportunity to develop their own artistic voice. In response to this growing interest in Singaporean cinema, the Singapore Film Commission was established in 1999 to "nurture, support and promote Singapore talent in filmmaking, the production of Singapore films and a film industry in Singapore."

Singapore has discovered that short films are the perfect foundation for this new voice and the Singapore Film commission is handing out funding accordingly. Thus far, 34 short films have received up to S$5,000 each, 2 features have received up to S$250,000, and 5 Singaporeans or permanent residents have been awarded up to S$100,000 each for undergraduate or post-graduate film studies overseas. Not a bad start for a 646 square kilometer country with a population of 3.1 million.
According to Wong Wai Leng, Assistant Director of the Singapore Film Commission, "We believe that if [Singaporeans] really want to make [filmmaking] a career, it's really best to start making short films."

Using American Short Shorts as a testing ground, according to Festival Executive Wahyuni Hadi, The Substation is planning on starting its own short film festival in December that will focus on Asian short films. This coincides with an important change within the American Short Shorts Film Festival. Starting next year, the festival is dropping the "American" and transforming into the Short Shorts Film Festival. No doubt, Singaporeans will have more to contribute in future installments.

BACK WITH MORE

BACK WITH MORE - The Longbaugh Film Festival returns.
David Walker, The Willamette Week
March 31, 2004

It was Saturday night, April 2, 2003, and a group of the most disheveled, shell-shocked-looking people imaginable stumbled into the Hollywood Theatre for a screening at the first-ever Longbaugh Film Festival. This group looked terrible--like survivors of some 1970s Irwin Allen disaster film. The truth was, they had just survived something even more harrowing than The Poseidon Adventure. This was the cast and crew of Rebecca Rodriguez's debut feature film, and they had just finished shooting.

Rebecca and I talked briefly that evening. At the time, I wasn't sure if she understood a word I was saying, as she had the look of someone who had just escaped the basement of a serial killer and then wandered through the woods for days, eating nothing but tree bark and bugs. But clearly Rebecca did understand what I said when I told her, "It would be great if we could premiere the film you just finished at next year's festival."

I never promised Rebecca I would show her film at Longbaugh, and she never promised it would be done in time to be shown. But when she showed me a rough cut last summer, my reason for putting together this festival became clear--I had to give Coming Up Easy (9 pm Friday, noon Saturday) an opportunity to be seen.

Vancouver Director Makes Feature-Length Debut

Tiffini Mueller, KOIN 6 News

VANCOUVER, Wash. -- A Vancouver woman may be the next big thing in Hollywood.
Rebecca Rodriguez is a writer-director, and is being tracked by the major studios. KOIN caught up with her during the making of her first feature film.

Rebecca is doing it -- so far, with short films. "I think short films are often used to showcase, 'Here I am, I'm in the game, I'm a filmmaker and I can tell a story,'" Rebecca said. The studios love them. They also love a feature-length screenplay that she's written. It's about a Portland heavyweight contender from the 1960s. But before she gets the studio green light, Rebecca has to pay her dues. "They have to put all the pieces under a microscope and that last minute, 'Oh, she hasn't done a feature.' So I was like, 'Give me a minute, I'll be right back,'" she explained.

In that "minute," she's been directing what will be her first feature, called "Coming Up Easy" in Vancouver. "Every opportunity I get to bring a film here, I will do that," she said. "There are times I said if I were in L.A. this would have moved a lot faster. But I've made my choices. I write well here. So for me to be here, it serves me."

She's finally working full time on her career here, but there were hard times. That's because the film industry in Portland is unstable. Sometimes it's hopping, and sometimes it's not. "It kills me. It makes me want to work harder, faster so I can get a project here -- a bigger one where I can really employ a lot of people and pay them well."

As soon as the film is done, there will be a small screening in Los Angeles for the people who have been tracking Rebecca. She hopes that will help some of her other projects.

Koin 6 News 2003