Low Budget Legends: "Gremlins" filmmaker Joe Dante

"There might be more future in cartooning than there is in filmmaking."

From around 2003 until 2012, I was part of a two person filmmaking operation known as 13BIT Productions. We came out with two well-received documentaries and two interesting experimental features. We also shot another documentary that remains in the can to this day. It needs editing and I got such a resentment against Apple when they discontinued the old iteration of Final Cut Pro that I ceased editing. This was a good way to shoot myself in the foot, but we can leave that for another day.

Anyway, we did plenty of other interesting things, such as organizing a robot parade every year in New York City. We did primitive animations and kept a strange production blog. We were a low-budget operation and we never made back anything close to what we put into it, but we had a lot of fun. Maybe we built some character, as well, but character could be overrated.

One of the things we did was a website called “Low Budget Legends.” We happily discovered during our documentaries that many public figures were easily accessible. They would often agree to talk on the record if you just reached out to them. We were so into the low-budget process that we wanted to hear from some who had gone before us.

We interviewed Manny Kirchenheimer, Nina Paley, Larry Cohen, Joe Dante and Lloyd Kaufman. We recorded the interviews, transcribed them, put them on the website and, not long after that, Meredith and I each went our own way. You could say we’re in the middle of what’s shaping up to be a two-decade professional hiatus. You can find these interviews if you search the dusty corners of the web, but I wanted - with Meredith’s permission - to get them out into the world again, where others could find some joy and inspiration in their words.

We’re going to start with the transcripts and, if there’s enough interest, we can add the audio files soon. Enjoy!

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What can you say about Joe Dante that has not been said already? Joe has been making great films - as director, producer, editor, or actor - since the early 1970s. He began as an apprentice to Roger Corman and quickly moved into direction with “Piranha,” written by John Sayles. Perhaps best known for his work on “The Howling,” “Gremlins,” “The ‘Burbs” and uncredited work on “Rock ’n’ Roll High School,” he has many other credits, up to this day, in film and television, including many cameo appearances, features, and documentaries.

13BIT:
How did you get involved in filmmaking?

JOE DANTE:
Well, I was a terrific film fan when I was a kid. I practically lived at the movies. I guess I didn’t realize it, but I was storing up a whole lot of film knowledge in my head. I wanted to be a cartoonist. I went to art school and discovered that cartooning was not an art and that if I wanted to stay in school, I’d better take something else. So, I took film. And it’s almost related to cartoons in that there are storyboards and frames and shots and things. I sort of drifted into it because I didn’t really expect to be a filmmaker. But I had an opportunity to come out to California and work for Roger Corman, making trailers. And that led to a chance to direct my first movie, which is an entree that I’m afraid is denied to most people today.

13BIT:
Another person we’ve been speaking with, Nina Paley, was a cartoonist and then she became a filmmaker. And now she wants to go back to cartooning.

JOE DANTE:
I can understand that. There might be a little more future in cartooning than there is in filmmaking.

13BIT:
Why do you think there’s going to be more of a future in cartooning?

JOE DANTE:
I think that movies are changing. I mean, movies as we understood them are a 20th Century art form. And the 20th Century is over. It is now turning into something else. As far as where the movies are distributed and who they’re made for and who they’re made by, that’s all undergoing a tremendous change, partly because of the new technologies available to make films, but also the technologies available to show them.

Whereas, when I was starting out, my advice to a kid would be “Get yourself an eight-millimeter camera and make some eight-millimeter films,” now you can make with a video camera some pretty good-looking movies. And you can finish them to a point that we were never able to do with film because you can do it on the computer. Coppola once said that he thought the future belonged to those who were going to make their own movies. I think that’s true to a degree because you can actually make, if you can afford to pay for it, you can make a feature film without the help of the system.

The problem is that, once you’ve made it, you have to get someone to watch it. And that becomes the difficulty because there are so many things available, so many channels, so many different pieces of material to look at, that to break out of a pack is very difficult. And that’s what film festivals are for. The film festivals used to be just to appreciate film. But now they actually perform a needed function of spotlighting movies that people wouldn’t ordinarily know exist.

Joe Dante. Super Festivals from Ft. Lauderdale, USA, CC BY 2.0

13BIT:
That’s the position we’re in. We make movies now and we couldn’t do it with film. How much did it cost to make your first movie?

JOE DANTE:
The first movie that I made for Roger Corman cost $60,000. And the only reason it got made was because me and a couple of other people who worked there were chafing at the bit to direct a movie. We weren’t satisfied with just doing the trailers. So, on a bet, basically, we said that we would make a picture. We could do it in ten days and we could do it for $60,000 and it would be a releasable movie.

The reason was that we were familiar with all the action scenes from previous movies that were made by the company, and we wrote our script around those. And we made it about a movie company making those kinds of movies. So, we dressed our actors the way the actors in the clips were dressed. And we cobbled together this comedy together about making movies, which, when you look at it today, is actually almost a newsreel of the way pictures were really made on the low budget level in the ’70s.

13BIT:
What movie was that?

JOE DANTE:
It was called Hollywood Boulevard. And it’s actually out on DVD. It’s very instructive. It’s like a little time capsule.

13BIT:
What was your biggest line item?

JOE DANTE:
Well, it certainly wasn’t the cast. And it certainly wasn’t me. I would say it was probably the lab costs. Because we were using clips from other movies. And it costs a certain amount of money just to assemble the crew in the parking lot every morning, no matter what you do. But if it’s done low enough — and these are all non-union films, so there was no level that we had to reach as far as people’s salaries — I would say that the lab costs and just the rental of the cameras and stuff like that.

13BIT:
Some people think you can’t make a movie for $60,000 these days.

JOE DANTE:
Well, I mean, admittedly, the dollar bought more in 1976 than it does now, but you can make a movie for $60,000, I think, if you don’t pay people and if you defer everything and especially if you can get the editor to defer costs. It’s just that when you’re done, what do you do with it, even if it’s a clever comedy?

Because comedies are very cheap to do. Because all you have to do is make them laugh. It’s not that easy to make them laugh, but you don’t have to have things blowing up. But then you’re stuck with the problem of, “Okay, I’ve got this comedy” and now you’re yelling in the wilderness, “I’ve got this comedy. And what is the compelling reason for people to check it out and see whether it’s any good or not?

13BIT:
Distribution is the key these days for low-budget films.

JOE DANTE:
Well, you’re also you’re competing in ways that, when I started, you didn’t have all that many different things for people to do. You know, there was television and there was the movies and there was the radio and records. But now, there’s all these ancillary things — videogames and, you know — all these technological things that come up that give people something else to do other than watch movies.

And even when they watch things on their computer, they don’t necessarily watch a movie because a movie takes some concentration. You know, the MTV generation has been clicking channels for years. And their attention spans are quite small. And to get somebody to stare at their computer screen for 90 minutes and watch just one thing, as opposed to clicking around and sort of looking at different sites and changing channels, it’s not easy. 

When you look at the stats for websites, people tend to stay for less than 30 seconds on any site that they go to. And that translates into sort of an ADD that they get when they’re watching movies. When you’re stuck in a theatre and you’re watching a movie, that’s one thing, but when you can move around and you’re at home and you can feed the cat and, do all the things that people do — vacuum while they’re doing things — it’s extremely difficult to get people to plunk down and say, “Okay, I’m going to devote the next hour and a half of myself to this unknown movie made by these people, I don’t know who they are.”

13BIT:
The short form is looking more popular these days.

JOE DANTE:
Yes, yes. People talk to me and I talk about the movie business. And they always come away feeling depressed. It’s not necessarily depressing. It’s just, you have to approach it with a different mindset. You have to be open to what the entertainment business is becoming, as opposed to what it used to be.

Because it isn’t what it used to be and it never will be again. It’s all evolving. And the trick is to try to get on the track of things that are happening that are new and cutting-edge. Like, for instance, webisodes are something that people can easily digest. And they’re free to watch on the net usually. Now, the problem with the internet is, you know, let’s say you even have a popular webisode, how do you make money with it?

Even if there were commercials in it, it didn’t mean that they actually went out and bought any of that stuff. So, advertisers are very shy about putting stuff on the internet because they don’t see results right away. At least with television, there was the idea that you’re watching or hitting so many people at one time with your commercial that you can charge zillions of dollars if it’s the Super Bowl, or something that hundreds of people or thousands of people are going to watch.

But you don’t know how many people are watching on the internet. So there’s been a reluctance of advertisers to get fully committed to internet stuff. Now that’s probably going to change. But we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen with the internet. We don’t know whether there’s going to be fair use and if it’s going to be free, or is it going to be regulated? It’s all unsettled.

That goes from the internet all the way up to the movie studios. And that’s why people just don’t know what’s coming. They’re very conservative about everything. Look at the movies that get made. They’re either hugely expensive or they’re tiny budgets. You know, the middle-range movie that we all lived with for years is basically gone. It’s gone to cable television.

13BIT:
Except if you were looking at the glass half full, you could say it’s a time of opportunities.

JOE DANTE:
I think that’s the only thing you can do — the glass is half empty isn’t going to get you anywhere.

13BIT:
Right, right, right. I mean, we’re looking at doing webisodes. We’re doing a doc now on collectors. And we’re doing our standard 90-minute narrative, which we’ll make for 20 or 30 grand of our money. But we’re getting so much stuff that we’re looking at webisodes, too. It’s a leap of faith. We’re just going to have to put it out there and hope for some eyeballs.

JOE DANTE:
I think you’re right. I think that’s exactly what it is. It’s a leap of faith. If you have a 90 minute movie that you can chop up into different episodes and run them at times that people, you know, will devote the ten minutes it takes to watch it, and then, “Oh, I like that, I’ll watch the next one,” it’s probably safer, I think, than plunking them down and thinking that they’re going to watch the entire 90 minutes.

13BIT:
That’s what we did with our last movie, which was a narrative, a bunch of vignettes. It was at a festival and nothing happened, so we just chopped it up and we’re putting it up on YouTube. At least people will watch it.

JOE DANTE:
Yes, people will. But the problem with YouTube is that even YouTube doesn’t know how much stuff it has. I have movies that I’ve made that are on YouTube in segments that have been put up by people. And the studios involved don’t know that those are pictures are up there unless somebody calls them and tells them.

13BIT:
How do you feel about the issue with piracy?

JOE DANTE:
Well, piracy is a problem, particularly with China and emergent countries that have no particular interest in our copyright. The whole impetus for making movies originally was that people would pay to see them and that people who spent the money to make them would get their money back and more. Now, that’s not necessarily true. I have a movie that hasn’t come out called “The Hole” in 3D. And it opened in Italy. And already, the Italian dubbed version of the picture is up on YouTube. And you can get them to take it down, maybe. But it depends on what country it is. Because the laws are different in every country.

13BIT:
Do you think it helps as a useful as a promotional tool?

JOE DANTE:
Well, it is a promotional tool. And if you use it cleverly — and almost all movies have websites now — if you use it cleverly, you can do it to your advantage. But you can’t stop a guy with a camcorder from going into a theatre in Singapore and shooting your movie off a screen and putting it on the internet. It’s almost impossible.

13BIT:
Yes. So, in low-budget filmmaking what is the one thing that you would never skimp on? And what is the one thing you would never pay for?

JOE DANTE:
The one thing you never skimp on in low-budget filmmaking, I think, is the script. I mean, if you don’t have a script worth shooting, it doesn’t matter how well you do it or how badly you do it. It’s just not going to be any good. And what was the other half of the question?

13BIT:
Oh, and what was the one thing you’d never pay for?

JOE DANTE:
It depends on a filmmaker. I mean, some people skimp on the music. You certainly can’t skimp on the camera. The image is everything. So, I don’t that’s a variable. It depends on the project.

13BIT:
What is your position on the film versus video?

JOE DANTE:
I love film. It’s going the way of the dodo eventually. Video - I just saw “Winter’s Bone.” And it’s a nice movie, a little depressing. But I spotted right away that it was shot on video. Because the tell-tale thing is usually, if there are trees or bare limbs in a shot, they always have a slight after-image. They have a little line next to it, which indicates that this is not film, this is video. But I’ve seen great video. I mean, I’ve seen pictures shot on video that looked terrific. I’ve seen pictures shot on video that looked terrible. And sometimes within the same movie, like “Public Enemies.”

“Public Enemies” has some really bad video in it with — the lights are blowing out and it just looks like a phony home movie. But it’s a great tool and certainly is going to make filmmaking more affordable for people. The cameras now are so small that they look like still cameras. So, you can actually shoot completely surreptitiously on the street without anybody knowing that you’re making a movie.

I think it’s a boon. It’s just what’s happening. I mean, do I love film? Yes, I love film. I love 65-millimeter film. I love Imax film. Film is great and it’s always going to have its uses. But the fact that they don’t make film cameras anymore, still cameras, should be a tip-off that film is not going to be around forever.

13BIT:
Yes. We see the visual difference between film and video. But the current generation that sees so much video, I don’t know if they’re going to have the same aesthetic.

JOE DANTE:
No, they’re not. It’s going to evolve. It’s going to change. And it’s going to be like the old masters. You know, they painted with a certain kind of paint, and then that paint went out and some other paint came in and the paintings didn’t look the same. But that’s just part of the way things are.

13BIT:
That is a great analogy. I really like that.

JOE DANTE:
Well, use it wherever you like.

13BIT:
Who are your some of your favorite low-budget filmmakers?

JOE DANTE:
Almost all my favorite filmmakers are low-budget filmmakers. And remember that the filmmakers that we all talk about, you know, that everybody loves, like Jim Cameron, who made Avatar, before he made Avatar, he made Piranha Two. And everybody started on a very cheap, low level, on an entry level.

And a lot of their films, a lot of people who made those films, became great filmmakers. But you go back to their original works, and you can still see the gleanings of what were going to turn out to be great movies. I mean, Francis Coppola made the Godfather, but before that he worked for Roger Corman and made Dementia 13. And Dementia 13 is a pretty good movie. You know, the story isn’t very good. But it’s very clever and very artistic.

I really enjoy watching the early works of people who went on to do a lot of stuff. Because, you know, when you’re starting out, you’re not given much to work with and you have to try to make the best of it and use ingenuity. And the things that you learn, you apply to other movies that you make as you go along. And the only thing that’s important when you make a movie is what happens between when you say “action” and when you say “cut.” And all the rest of it around that is completely meaningless for the audience. The only thing that matters is what’s on the film. It doesn’t matter whether you’re making an expensive movie or a cheap movie. It’s the same aesthetic. And you do learn a lot of tricks when you’re making low-budget films that you can use later in situations that are high-budget situations, but have the same problem.

13BIT:
It’s a good learning environment, like a sandbox.

JOE DANTE:
Yes. Yes. I recommend it. And I also recommend that filmmakers cut their own movies. Because they’ll never know what mistakes they make until they have to confront them in the editing room. And woe be to the guy who has a great editor and the editor gets him out of a lot of trouble and then he goes back and makes another movie without that editor and makes the same mistakes and the new editor can’t fix them.

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Paul Vlachos is a writer, photographer and filmmaker. He was born in New York City, where he currently lives. He is the author of “The Space Age Now,” released in 2020, “Breaking Gravity,” in 2021, and the 2023’s “Exit Culture.”