(L to R: Actor Ben Gazarra, Tim and David - Festival Director)

  Tim Greene receives an award in New York City at Arlene's Grocery Picture Show.

Features

BACKSTAGE WEST MAGAZINE    (HOLLYWOOD CALIFORNIA)

GREENE MACHINE

Tim Greene goes from clippin' to Creepin'.

 By Ben Rock

Tim Greene is living proof that there is no greater power than ingenuity to drive an independent movie from start to finish. Forget ultra-low-budget fare such as El Mariachi and last year's Sundance winner Primer; Greene's plan makes their $7,000 budgets seem downright bloated. Having completed his third feature film (a G-rated family movie), he has single-handedly invented his own low-budget legacy, beginning with his first feature, a horror spoof titled Creepin'. The writer-director (whose movies can be found at http://www.timgreenefilms.com/) has followed the hip-hop beat of his own drummer and created three features in less time than it generally takes Hollywood to package and produce a single movie.

 Catching the Cash

"The thing is, I didn't have any money," says Greene, as he prepares to take a slew of meetings in Hollywood. "So I just looked at single-parent homes [for inspiration]. My mom raised five boys and one girl by herself, because she knew how to work coupons." With more time than money on his hands, Greene put his nose to the grindstone and came up with a plan to finance Creepin' on his own, cutting corners with coupons and subsidizing the whole affair with rebate checks he'd get from a wide array of vendors. As an example, he explains, "I said, 'Let me go feed the cast,' and I'd get three-course Swanson TV dinners on sale, use my Price Club card, and they had a rebate, so I made two or three dollars on every TV dinner." From the videotape he used to shoot his features to the final distribution format, Greene's gift for thrift got him through the process of producing his films with money to spare. He says, "I got over 300 tapes and a thousand DVD-R's for free. And a thousand DVD shell [cases] for free, all my Xerox copies for free, Internet free. Even the computer I got for $40 with the rebates. I got $250 back on my camera." Seeking out bargains became Greene's full-time job before he rolled a frame of Creepin'. "When I see the guys on the corner selling the Sunday paper, toward the end of the day I [would] go buy the rest of the papers for 80 percent off, because he's trying to get rid of the papers," he says. "It has tons of coupons, so then I'd go buy out Rite Aid, then I'd go buy out Eckerd, then I'd go to the next store and the next store. I would just buy out everybody with all the coupons. I'd get $40 worth of food and make $8 back, and my cast [was] eating Haagen Dazs ice cream."

Hitting the Books

Before Creepin', Greene had no feature film experience. After graduating from Shaw University with a degree in business, he worked as a radio DJ in Philadelphia and on Los Angeles' FM 100.3. In the late 1990s he left radio to manage a talent he'd discovered known as "The Rappin' Granny," a 68-year-old rapper who spawned ad campaigns, clothing lines, her own cereal, and his first film experiment: a parody of rap videos. Tired of managing someone else's career, he decided it was time to take his place as a creative force. He recalls, "I said, 'Wait a minute. Let me stop all of this, and try to do a [feature] film,' even though I didn't know how hard it would be. So I would go to the library, and I read 50 film books." He soaked up information from volumes such as Filmmaking for Dummies by Bryan Michael Stoller. "Really every book [is useful], because everybody writes their own thing," says Greene. "[I read] everything I could get my hands on: directing, video production, photography. You want every shot to look like a postcard--at least I do." Books formed the basis of his film education, but nothing could prepare him for what he would encounter on his first real-world shoots. "The most surprising [thing] is that you never know what's going to happen," he says. "You never know when batteries are not going to work or somebody is not going to show up on the set." Although he was shooting films on his own terms, he learned that there are always compromises that he would be expected to make. "You have to be ready for anything," he says. "When I set up the main shot and we needed the main actor, every time somebody wouldn't show. When you're doing independent films, you're not paying people $20,000 a day. I had to manipulate the script and change things constantly." All his work paid off, however, as his first completed feature was an instant direct-to-video success. "I finally got the picture done three years later. It stayed on the new release shelf [at video stores] for 11 months; the average studio film stays on the shelf for three. That meant that people were renting it like crazy." Creepin's shelf life assured Greene that he would get to make more films, if that's what he wanted.

 Sophomore Score

 After a grueling three years of production and postproduction on the Philadelphia-lensed Creepin', Greene was unsure if he'd ever produce a follow-up film. "This [first feature] was 15-20 hours [of work] a day." Though he subsequently found himself speaking in front of crowds and Creepin' playing at the Tromadance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, he says these spoils can be had only after countless hours of thankless work. "You have to really love this art, this business, because it consumes your whole life," he says with a laugh. "Seriously, I haven't been to sleep in 20 hours. If you're on the set and you're the director, you do one scene, and then you release the actors and then you do the next scene, release the actors.... You're there all day. Then you're editing for three or four months, and your girlfriend's, like, 'You never take me out.' You're going to use a lot of people's time and energy. So you have to really love it and really prepare, and then finish! Make a plan how you're going to do your film, and then execute it. Don't stop midway, or everybody that quit their job for you is going to [say], 'Yo, I'm never going to be on your set again.'" After completing and distributing Creepin', Greene embarked on his second feature, Raykwan's Cuties, in which he served up a hip-hop satire of Charlie's Angels with his inimitable style. The film was made on a tighter schedule (it's already available on DVD) and the same rebate-funded budget, and he credits much of the success of these movies to his business background. "I did all these pictures and got the deals signed, got the cast together, did the casting calls by myself. I never had an agent, manager, or lawyer. Definitely, you've got to have a business sense, and you've got to know what's going on; you've got to know everybody's job," he says. Also figuring strongly into Greene's business model is a clear understanding of who is hungry for his product. His films are made "for my hip-hop audience, [whose] age range is 12-26," he says. "There are, like, 42 million kids online who are into hip-hop. If I just sell my movie for $1.99, out of 42 million, you're going to get at least 10 million kids."

 And Now for Something Completely Different

Following his previous efforts, which were for a more mature audience, Greene focused his sights on the children's market. Rather than overhype his newly completed third feature, he chooses to shroud the film in secrecy lest his concept be purloined by the major studios--including the title. He says, "I can't give the name out yet. This title is so good, it's right to the point, but it's never been done in the history of Hollywood." Excited about his own versatility as well as the plasticity of the ever-evolving hip-hop genre, Greene believes his new film will open doors for hip-hop culture, as well as for his career. "The new picture is a totally G-rated, hip-hop kid's picture," he says. "So I'm, like, the Disney of hip-hop now. You think of hip-hop, you usually think of girls dancing on cars and all that, but this [film] has no cursing. It's a mixed cast, and I think it's going to be my breakout picture." Working outside the Hollywood studio system has enabled Greene to enthusiastically wear more hats than most filmmakers are ever permitted to don. His skill set has grown from directing and producing to just about every craft on a film set and beyond. He says, "I do my own PR. I shoot. I'm the cinematographer, the editor. I do everything on my pictures now." With his endless energy and enthusiasm for filmmaking, Greene has gone from complete obscurity to hip-hop pioneer in four work-filled years. Three features, hundreds of coupons, and thousands of dollars in rebate checks later, he has birthed a body of work on which he looks with pride. "It's totally crazy but phenomenal how anybody can come from nowhere if they really believe that they can do this and really do it and love what they're doing."    BSW