Film Courage: Can you tell us about the day Steven that you were not accepted to film school?
Steven Shea, Filmmaker: Oh that was a wonderful time. Yes I tried to get into Film School in
Central Florida at the University of Central Florida. Mostly due to the Blair Witch Project
the success of that coming out of there that was a really inspirational movie for me and there you
had to go through a two-year program to be able to be accepted into the film school and so I had a
bunch of friends I was in a film club I was doing a bunch of shorts and things with them and then
we all submitted I was the weird genre kid I was the one that wanted to make horror movies
and action movies and comedy and everyone else was kind of the artist filmmaker so
all of my friends ended up getting in but me because I was the weirdo so it
that was disappointing of course because you spent two years trying to to get into a program but
what I did was I ended up leaving school at that point moved over to Valencia College and
finished up my a degree and then spent the rest of my college fund on my first feature
which is called the night owl and went out with friends in the woods with a camera like
everybody starts with and then ended up signing a really decent distribution deal on that so by
the time the movie was already on store shelves my friends were graduating so kind of kicked it
off that way and of those friends that graduated how many actually work in the film industry now
a lot of them still work in the industry a lot of them are out here in LA actually and we got
to reconnect when we moved out here and so it's kind of neat to see where everyone is from that
group some are more successful than others of course but a lot of them yeah are still chasing
the same dream and how did they tell you you weren't accepted as just a form letter yeah I
got a form lever I got a form letter saying that I wasn't accepted and just kind of like oh sorry and
it was like oh maybe I shouldn't have submitted with a short film about a young girl in a bikini
getting chopping people up with Samurai swords I guess but I thought it was cool at the time
they didn't give you an answer I mean sorry they didn't give you a reason why they didn't no I know
that they had certain quotas to fill as far as other types of people to be allowed in and so
that I'd heard that reasoning later that I didn't fit the the certain quota they needed for certain
things but it all worked out for the best for me so do you ever Replay that if if
you had been accepted where you think your life would have taken you or there may not have been
much difference I mean I would bet it'd be very different because I got into a different school
program that school got me my first job out of college which was camera operating in Nickelodeon
Studios on the Backlot at Universal which I made a bunch of friends there that I'm still friends
with today and still work with today too so I think it definitely would have been a totally
different path a lot of the people in that group moved out to LA immediately started working trying
to work as soon as they got out here and I stayed in Orlando and built up a company
my company Abyssmal Entertainment celebrates 20 years next year which is exciting and so I started
building up that multimedia company and getting more and more clients and starting to do more and
more films and producing for hires so yeah I'm pretty happy the way everything turned out as
far as that one rejection letter and do you think that rejection letter did you a favor and that it
made you want to take risks because you kind of had this chip on your shoulder or maybe you didn't
but just that you were willing to try something that you weren't going to take the safer out
I feel like I'm definitely a risk taker in situations like that I'm always the one in
the video game that runs into battle and so it I looked though I started early I started when I was
16. I got my passion pretty quickly and knew that I wanted to go into movie making and so when I was
16 I grew up in the Florida Keys on an island so there wasn't nearly as many opportunities but I
went and got a job with the local cable access station I started managing a Blockbuster Video
I got an internship with our film commission so the first films that I ever got to go on was true
lies with James Cameron so being there on the seven mile bridge when they land the Harrier
Jets and they're blowing up cars and stuff and hanging Jamie Lee Curtis out of a helicopter I
was like Wow every movie is going to be like this which it is not I'll come to find out later but
I think the one thing about the rejection letter was it kind of gave you a place where you had
to make a choice it's like okay what am I going to do now to get over this because these people
said that you're not good enough to be this in this program but I still felt pretty confident
and so my goal was I knew that I needed to make a feature I knew that feature films were where
all the real money was and and you can get into video stores and do all these different things
so that first year I made six short films in a row because I was like if I make six short films
all a feature is is one really long short so if I can make six shorts in a row then I'll probably
teach myself enough to be able to go and make a full movie and so that's what I did and just using
friends and everything went and went and just went and did it and then I started getting a reputation
for myself in town because they're like well how did this 23 year old idiot get a movie in Best Buy
and all the older people that were all upset because they're like well we've been trying
to this for years and I was like oh I don't know I just went to the video
store and saw who was selling movies and I called them and said hey I have a movie
do you want to sell it and they said yes and then you're in Best Buy and people are so confused but
it seemed to me just at the time common common sense you figure out how that pathway works and
then once you get the machine working then it all works out can you expand on that a little bit more
was it really that simple as finding who's well who's the distributor on this film finding their
number calling them I mean to me because I manage video stores since I was 16. I kind of understood
how the video store process worked I knew that you would have different chains between Studios
to Distributors to Home Video markets so I kind of understood that whole process at the beginning
and then when DVDs came out in the late 90s that totally changed the Home Video Market and those
were so much cheaper because the time a VHS tape cost eighty dollars a piece and a DVD comes out
and it costs twenty dollars so you're already like oh well this digital format is completely changing
the way the market works because Blockbuster could buy five times as many DVDs as one movie
so that's when they started doing the guaranteed to be here and everything switched over to DVD
so then when I was in college looking at home video I was like all right well I understand
how this works and I knew I wanted to make a low budget horror movie so I literally went
to Hollywood Video and looked at all the boxes of low budget horror movies that came out every week
or every other week and saw what company is on the back of this box and it wasn't Universal it wasn't
Sony it was very small companies brain damage films and and whatnot and so you would look that
company up because I'm like all right well this company is the one that sold to this video store
they're getting movies out there and I just happen to luck out with the very first company I called
said yes and we ended up getting some money from it and it paid off the movie it wasn't
a lot of money but we didn't spend a lot of money at the time so it all kind of worked out that way
nowadays it's gotten obviously that harder well it's just as easy it's just harder to make money
because you can get your movie out wherever you want nowadays or you can
put it on YouTube and get 100 million views if you want you if you technically could but
back then you didn't have YouTube this was back in 2003 2002 2003 and so video stores were still
prominent The prominent way to get movies but the digital Revolution was happening and so it was
easier to get your three thousand dollar horror movie on the DVD on a Shelf at the time whereas
nowadays that probably isn't going to happen when did you leave Blockbuster well I went to college
I was at Blockbuster for three years in the keys and then when I went to college in Orlando I
worked for another video store called the video Superstore and I was there for two years I think
and then that store ended up going under like during the whole downfall of video stores the
eventually when Netflix came out back then it was a service where you mailed in they mailed
you a DVD in the mail when that started happening and people didn't even have to leave their house
anymore then video stores started going away and Blockbuster couldn't keep up because they
didn't believe in that at the time and and Mom and Pop video stores like they were just they
couldn't keep up with it either so at that time the whole video market kind of fell out
and that's yes that's why I got out of that business.