If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, or don’t have the internet available at home yet (which makes me wonder how you’re reading this), then maybe you’ve been obliviously to the explosion of fan films. These are movies produced with the intent of taking an existing property and breathing new life into it, with sequels, prequels, or “what ifs.” In some cases these films take on a life of their own, which was the case with the childhood friends who decided to make a shot-by-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark with a VHS camcorder.

Author Clive Young has put together a book that charts the progress of fan films (starting in the 1920s!), and how the internet and inexpensive filmmaking tools have taken these otherwise obscure short films and fan efforts into new arenas. We talked to Young about the fan film dabbling of Hugh Hefner and Andy Warhol, the distribution future of that Raiders remake, and why fan filmmaking is a boy’s club.

How did you originally come up with the idea for your book?

Back in the late Nineties, I created the first fan film website, Mos Eisley Multiplex, which was fairly popular, getting written up in USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and other places. I was fascinated by these filmmakers; unlike a lot of the indie movie provocateurs at the time, the people making these flicks really were outlaws. They were making illegal movies using copyrighted characters worth billions of dollars, so they could easily go to jail for their art.

Because of the website, I started hearing from fan filmmakers all over the planet, interviewing them and collecting cool stories, and it was pretty clear that there was a book there, begging to be written. Unfortunately, no one I talked to in the publishing industry really understood what a fan film was, and the one house that was interested ultimately passed because they felt it wouldn’t be feasible without a CD-ROM of films packed in. Of course, that was impossible due to copyrights, so in effect, the book was killed thanks to bandwidth issues.

Fast-forward 10 years, and today, CD-ROMs are ancient history, online video has gone mainstream, and for that matter, people all over the world know what fan films are now. I always felt it was “the great book idea that got away,” so I started pitching it again with a new proposal. Continuum Books ‘got it’ and 90,000 words later, the result is Homemade Hollywood.

When did you see your first fan film?

The first one I saw, I actually made because I had never heard of fan films at the time. Back in the late Eighties, I adapted part of Neal Stephenson’s first book, The Big U, for a film class. It was a little, five-minute movie about these two college roommates, Fenrick and Klein, who have massive stereo systems and hold sonic battles because they hate each other’s guts. In the book, it escalates to murder and evil pranks with cigars, but I couldn’t recreate that stuff without destroying my dorm room, so I went completely Hollywood and changed the ending. In my version, they discover their stereos were stolen and it ends with them sobbing in each other’s arms. I got an A-.

What was the most surprising thing you found out while writing/researching the book?

I was amazed to discover how far back fan films go. I figured that it was mainly an internet phenomenon and that maybe a few folks in made ‘em in the Sixties with Super 8 cameras. Instead, fan films go back to the silent film era. I found a 1926 Little Rascals one, made by con men in South Carolina who were fooling people into thinking they were cast in a real Our Gang movie.

Another I early one I found was a 1936 fan film shot in Connecticut - Tarzan and the Rocky Gorge. The filmmaker, Robbins Barstow, made it with his brothers when he was 16 and he’s still making movies to this day! The Tarzan flick sort of became a family heirloom - they’d bring out the projector every Thanksgiving and show it, that kind of thing - and in 1974, almost 40 years later, they made a sequel, Tarzan and the Lost, Last Whale. It’s pretty wild to watch them back to back as one movie, they’re all 10 to 16; the next, they’re all pushing 50. He put the 1936 one on the internet and now it’s been seen by over 100,000 people, so something he made over 70 years ago for family and friends has taken on a whole new life.

Fan films tend to be made from comic book movies and big adventure films. Were there any “quieter” fan films, like say, from Sense & Sensibility, or anything that you just didn’t include?

There aren’t many quiet ones, and a lot of that comes down to the gender divide in fan production. Women are attracted to fan fiction, and they produce 99.9 percent of it, while fan films are almost exclusively a “boys club.” Generally speaking, guys like stuff that goes ‘Boom,’ so that’s what you find in fan films, whereas fanfic is often used to explore relationships between characters - material that would lend itself to quieter fan films. Ideally, female fanfic authors should write fan film scripts; we’d get far more well-rounded movies, and that’s happened in a few cases, like a movie I profiled in the book, Star Wars: Revelations, which was made by a husband-and-wife team.

Have any of the directors become a big success story? Or are they on their way?

It depends on how far back you want to go: in the 1940s, 16-year-old Hugh Hefner made fan films in his basement. In the Sixties, Andy Warhol made two fan films, about Tarzan and Batman, respectively, and the Batman one has never been found. More recently, Eli Roth, who made the Hostel movies, started out doing homemade remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Pieces when he was a teenager, and there’s also Joe Nussbaum, who made George Lucas In Love in 1999; he’s gone on to make a few teen movies and a direct-to-DVD American Pie sequel.

When will regular audiences ever be able to see the shot-for-shot Raiders of the Lost Ark remake?

The guys who made it screened it at Skywalker Ranch for ILM staffers, and during the Q&A afterwards, someone asked that. They said, “We dunno - ask your boss.”

Realistically, I doubt it will get released on home video and that’s probably just as well. There are hundreds of kids in it, plus they got permission to shoot places for free and such; tracking everyone down to get contracts signed in order to avoid lawsuits would be nearly impossible. But that’s likely a good thing: the Raiders guys have traveled the world screening it in art cinemas, and I think that’s the best way to see it. The movie is cute by itself, but it comes alive when you’re watching it in a theater with 100 other fans hooting and hollering and having a great time.

Have there been any instances where fan films have directly influenced big-budget Hollywood films?

A lot of people think Sandy Collora’s Batman: Dead End inspired Warner Brothers to give fans a darker Dark Knight, but in truth, Christopher Nolan signed to make Batman Begins six months before Dead End debuted. At the time, Nolan implied in Variety that he was going to take a more serious run at the material, so it’s pretty clear that was already in place. On the other hand, I think Collora’s short - and the fans’ over-the-top reaction to it - proved that Warner Brothers was on the right track; if anyone at the studio was unsure about the new direction, Dead End probably calmed a lot of nerves.

Fan films have exploded with the internet, and now with machinima in games they’re also taking off in another direction. What do you think the next step will be?

There’s a lot of possibilities. I think machinima is going to be the fan film of the next generation, if it isn’t already. At some point, too, I suspect we’re going to see studios start to actively court fan filmmakers in order to boost interest in new franchises or revive old ones. There’s a lot of other aspects, too, which are all in my final chapter, “The Future of Fan Films.”

What’s marketing like for these films? Could DVDs composed of fan films be sold in stores or online? (or are they already?)

It’s mostly word of mouth on the net, but some big-budget fan productions, like Star Wars: Revelations which I mentioned earlier, and Star Trek: Phase II, a fan film series that George Takei and Walter Koenig have appeared in, actively pursue the mainstream media. Shane Felux, the director of Revelations, talked with newspapers and magazines all over the world and wound up doing interviews on CNN, CBS, MSNBC, G4 and CBC. Meanwhile, the Phase II guys do a lot of TV, and also put out a quarterly magazine about themselves in PDF format that’s just as slick as a licensed Trek publication.

As for selling fan film DVDs, that’s a yes-and-no thing. Generally, it would be illegal unless the DVD was released by the copyright holder. Some parodies like George Lucas In Love have been legally released because they don’t use any copyrighted material, and there’s also been a few cases where DVDs containing fan films were allowed to be come out because they didn’t mention the flicks in their packaging; if they’re not selling it on the back of copyrighted material, apparently it’s OK. That said, every comic book convention has some guy selling bootleg fan films; don’t buy ‘em because they’re usually low-res Quicktime files that you can download for free, and they look like crap once they’re transferred to DVD.

Do you have a personal favorite fan film?

I have a lot of favorites! Since you asked about ‘quieter’ fan films earlier, you might want to check out a Star Wars one I love called Reign of the Fallen. Take away the special effects and it’s nearly one of those English costume dramas. On the other hand, if you want to see stuff blow up but still get a good story, I recommend Tomb Raider: Ascension. It’s a 50-minute Lara Croft movie where the first half is moderately quiet, not slow, but quiet and then the proverbial substance hits the fan. Either way, you can’t go wrong with these fan films; I’ve raved about both of them a lot on my fan film blog, FanCinemaToday.com.