Quite a few aspiring filmmakers have approached me over the years wondering how I got started in the industry. I thought it was about time I put the whole story down on paper (or a paper-colored website) for those who are interested. Enjoy!
I had zero connections in the film industry. I spent four years making a movie nobody saw. Major directors had fired me. And now I was working a part-time job scrubbing floors with an ex-con, a food truck driver and a Ringo Starr look-a-like.
So, how did a two-time film school reject like me end up shortlisted for the Academy Awards? Well…
The year was 2008. I was attending UCLA, and even though I couldn’t get into film school I had directed a few short films with some friends. Ever since I was a kid, I had wanted to be a writer. In fact, I was majoring in American Literature (albeit reluctantly). Having grown up in the golden age of DVD commentaries, fiction was my passion and fiction was my plan.
Then, in a total 180, I directed my first documentary. This has been a common thread in my career: plan for one thing, end up doing the total opposite.
That documentary was called Mule Days about an all-mule rodeo in Bishop, California. Mule Days was actually supposed to be a fiction short, but you can read about that subquest in the footnotes. 1
My crew and I came back from Bishop with about 20 hours of footage that we had filmed over the course of a long weekend. I had an idea for the opening scene, but didn’t know anyone who could cut it. (This was an ongoing problem: more than one of the shorts I directed had stalled out and was never finished because we didn’t have an editor.)
Frustrated by this pattern and unable to get the opening scene out of my brain, I asked my friend for his bootleg version of Final Cut 7. I fired it up and set to work.
I didn’t plan on becoming an editor, I became an editor because I couldn’t find one.
I fumbled around on Final Cut 7 for about two years of nights and weekends. After a lot of experimenting, trial and error, and 1,845,347 mistakes, I finished a cut…only to realize that we had filmed half a movie. So, in 2010, we went back to Bishop to shoot more and fill the gaps in our story. I brought that new footage home and kept editing.
Around this time, almost by sheer luck, I started working as an assistant / unpaid intern / bandana wrangler for legendary director Peter Bogdanovich. But you can read about that sub-subquest in the footnotes.2
While I loved badgering one of the world’s greatest cinematic minds with non-stop questions for 20 hours a week, he didn’t pay anything beyond the occasional coffee. When I wasn’t picking up his dry cleaning, I worked as a barista, a production assistant on a bunch of garbage reality TV shows, and as part of the morning cleaning crew at a bougie wedding event space all while editing Mule Days in my off time.
Meanwhile, Peter moved to New York and none of these jobs resulted in anything close to a “break” in the film industry. In fact, some of my fellow reality TV crew members would moonlight on porn sets. A friend warned me that if I didn’t get out soon, this would be my future. So, at the end of the first season of Pit Boss, a reality show that “follows the escapades of former actor Shorty Rossi, a little person with a big heart for pit bulls,” I quit.
Around this time, I finished editing Mule Days and proudly submitted it to film festivals the world over, only to be 100% rejected from everywhere.
Four years of hard work and literally no one wanted to watch my movie. Cool.
Through another series of semi-coincidences, my girlfriend at the time heard that documentary director Lucy Walker was looking for an assistant. I loved her first film, Devil’s Playground, so I was thrilled. With the unceremonious completion of Mule Days I was officially, if accidentally, a documentarian, plus I had already worked for Peter Bogdanovich. I was over-qualified! She’d be lucky to have me! Finally, my big ticket into the film industry!
PLOT TWIST: I’m actually a terrible assistant. So, after a year or so, Lucy politely fired me.
Peter was gone, I was not assistant material, and Mule Days was not the red-hot documentary hit I was hoping it would be. And what was I thinking quitting my PA job?! I was practically committing fraud telling people I was a filmmaker when I was actually serving them a cappuccino3 or running a zamboni over the pool of vomit that the best man had left the night before.
Things were not looking good. What was a budding editor to do?
Find out next week in part two of My Villain Editor Origin Story.
Joe Peeler is a Sundance award-winning director and editor who writes about the art of making movies from the lens of film editing.
SPLICE WORLD. The world of movies, y’know, spliced.
Welcome to your subquest. While I was in college, my friend and roommate, Ryan, was attending Cal State Northridge to study cinematography. CSUN had a program where seniors could pitch their short films and win $50,000. The problem was, you had to direct your short film. Well, Ryan didn’t want to be a director, he wanted to be a cinematographer. I was the director. So, we hatched a scheme in which I ghost-wrote a script, put Ryan’s name on it, created a massive 50-page pitch deck, storyboarded the entire short (in color!), and submitted it for funding. We would put Ryan’s name as the writer/director for the CSUN version, then submit the real version with the real credits to festivals. A fool-proof plan! That short was called “Alperman Grapplefest.” Don’t ask. We scouted in Bishop and got the whole town on board to shoot at their rodeo arena. We were all geared up until — I know this is deeply shocking — CSUN rejected us. So, with no money, we pivoted. We decided to head up to Bishop to the same rodeo arena and shoot a documentary instead.
Welcome to your sub-subquest. One day, Ryan is sitting in a film class at CSUN and the professor makes a comment. The TA chimes in and says, “My boss would disagree with you.”
“Who’s your boss?” The professor asks, incredulously.
“Peter Bogdanovich.”
The room, filled with remarkably uninformed film students, was silent. Except for Ryan, who blurts out “Peter Bogdanovich?!”
After class, the TA told Ryan that she was moving and Peter would be looking for a new assistant. But Ryan, as we discussed in subquest #1, didn’t want to be a director. So, bless him, he passed the TA’s email onto me. Thus commenced three years of hanging out with Peter Bogdanovich.
One time I served cappuccinos to Joel Coen and Frances McDormand. Oscar, please!
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