"More than twenty years after his 1975 feature filmmaking debut, American Independent Rick Schmidt remains a free-wheeling derring-do filmmaker holding fast to the notion that people's real lives are more truly dramatic, hilarious, exciting, and as exasperating as those manufactured by Hollywood's minions. Most everyone falls in and out of love, rejects and gets rejected, contends with failure and success, hatred, ambition, the death of loved ones .... It's all there.
"To capture real life on film, Schmidt fashions a creative weave out of the threads of narrative, documentary, and docu-drama film forms. His 'actors' draw on their own experience enabling him to create a unique blend of fact and fiction. In the end, Schmidt makes art and life intermingle and imitate each other.
"Aware that the American Dream Factory financiers would never fund his films, Schmidt, undeterred, remains the maven of low, low-budget feature filmmaking." - Vic Skolnick, Cinema Arts Centre
Directed by Richard Schmidt and Wayne Wang. Script by Dick Richardson, Rick Schmidt, and Wayne Wang. Sound by Neelon Crawford and Lee Serie. Continuity by Terrel Seltzer. Gaffer Jim Mayer. Starring Ed Nylund, Carolyn Zaremba and Dick Richardson.
Narrative documentary of the situation of a gangster film being made and the three performers who were trapped and examined as they acted out their own lives.
"One of the most absorbing films I've seen of the independent filmmaking movement." - Jerry Oster, New York Daily News
Awards: First Place, Kent State AAFF; Tour Int'l Film Festival, Rotterdam; Directors' Choice, Ann Arbor Film Festival.
1975, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 75m, $150
Starring Ed Nylund, Carolyn Zaremba, Dick Richardson, Skip Covington, Willie Boy Walker, Bruce Parry, Constance Penely, Kelly Boen, Marian Lewis, F. Paul Hocking, and Dickie Marcus. Also featuring Sylvester, Ral-Pheno, Jesus Christ Satan, J.C. Burris, Lowell Darling and others. Script by Henry Bean, William Farley, Nick Kazan and Richard Schmidt.
A huge series of Vaudeville-type auditions for the remake of the classical American musical comedy Showboat (in 1988) set against a dying man's (Ed Nylund) vision that everyone can be a star. "In whose image are stars made? What is the effect of enforcing a rigid distance between ordinary life and the glamor it feeds upon? What is the relationship between a person's inner fantasy life and stark exterior reality? To deal with such questions, [1988 - THE REMAKE] poses its own. What can happen if that distance is conflated, the image-making reversed and the ordinary held up as its own model?" - B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Reader
"Rather than fight a lengthy and costly court battle after an encounter with MGM's battery of lawyers, Richard Schmidt decided to take the battle onto a new front by adding a prologue to the film explaining why sections of the soundtrack are missing and the presence of an "X" over certain shots. The film loses nothing as a result of his self-censorship, in fact it gains by the addition of a political dimension, thereby dramatizing the predicament of the independent filmmaker in the industry dominated film world. This black satire has all of a sudden acquired a biting edge." - Carmen Vigil, San Francisco Cinematheque
"A complex and original film about filmmaking and the entertainer in us all." - Whitney Museum of American Art
"An outstanding film of the Year." - London Film Festival, 1980
Awards: First Place, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1978; Florence Film Festival, 1979; Adelaide Film Festival, Australia, 1979; US Film Festival; London Film Festival, 1980.
1978, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 97m, $150
Directed, filmed, edited, and produced by Richard Schmidt. A Living Legend Production. Starring Ed Nylund (as Santa), Carolyn Zaremba, Dick Richardson, Willie Boy Walker, Ted Falconi, Kelly Boen, The Mutants and Flipper. Sound by Nick Bertoni.
The low-budget feature film director (Schmidt) seeks past-life therapy after the star (Carolyn Zaremba) of his epic runs off to New York to make herself a real star before he is able to complete principal photography. Schmidt's visions (under hypnosis) follow his star from Death Valley through future trends (Christmas 1983) of media manipulation to the "Bing Crosbying" of the Mutants and Flipper, with political promises by Lowell Darling (for President!).
1981, 16mm, color/so, 85m, $150
A collaborative feature written/directed by Trudie Dearinger, Michelle Kulstad, Eric Magun, Barry Norman, Anthony Pesce and Rick Schmidt. Produced by Rick Schmidt. A Feature Workshops Production, Copyright 1995.
BLUES FOR AVATAR is a comedy about two oddball characters, a man Cheyenne (Cheyenne Wilbur), and a woman, Mary Jane (Mary Jane Knecht), caught in the circumstances of being unwanted guests in other people's lives. His propensity for women has landed him in the middle of a horrendous breakup, while her quest for self-discovery leads her into what might be direct contact with an avatar ("... a spiritual being sent to earth to teach us enlightenment"). Their friends appear throughout the film, offering real-life stories of irony, outrageousness and late 20th century angst.
1995, 16mm, b&w/so, 74m, $200