Robert Shupe is a little nervous about CineVegas. The writer and director of Damn Yankee Day, the only feature by a local filmmaker in this year's festival, is hoping to make valuable industry connections when his film screens on June 15 at 4 p.m. That is, if he can manage not to freak out. "I'm a fairly antisocial person, so to go in and schmooze with people and try to talk myself up and pitch myself for projects isn't exactly natural for me," he says by phone from his parents' home in Montana. "I'd hope that there would be opportunities like that that might present themselves, and I would hope that I would be able to behave like a normal human being."
Shupe's social anxiety aside, it's clear that he's incredibly dedicated to his film. The primary reason he's living back at the family home in Helena, Montana, where he grew up before coming to Vegas in 1999 to study film at UNLV, is that he went broke financing Damn Yankee Day, which had a budget of around $16,000. "I'm not the greatest manager of money," he admits. "It wasn't like even when I was making the film I really had a good financial breakdown of where all the money should go, and how much every little thing should cost. I was definitely kind of flying by the seat of my pants through the whole thing." And, like most indie filmmakers, Shupe found himself filling most of the crew positions on Damn Yankee Day. "No one really wanted to step up and do a lot of the grunt work," he says.
So Shupe did the grunt work himself, shooting in Vegas for 10 days in 2004 and another four days last July, and fitting the filmmaking duties in with his full-time day job. Cast and crew were drawn from people Shupe knew at UNLV, and they all worked for free. Shupe eventually quit working to finish editing the film before heading back home. "It was kind of scary there for a while," he says about trying to get the film done before running out of money, and driving back to Montana in a car he wasn't sure would make it.
Now he's excited to return to Vegas to showcase the film he worked so hard to complete. Damn Yankee Day is a dark comedy ("I would like to say it's a satire, but I don't know if it's sophisticated enough for that term," Shupe says) about a foreign exchange student who arrives in America, only to find his host family missing. Shupe cites David Lynch, a former CineVegas honoree, as his biggest influence, and was determined to shoot the movie on black-and-white 35mm film, a rarity in a day when virtually every independent film is shot on digital video. Although film is considered prohibitively expensive for most low-budget movies, and Shupe says that the majority of his budget went to film processing and transfer, he doesn't think shooting on film was the wrong way to go. "When I looked at it—again, the bare minimum amount of film is what I was looking at—it just didn't seem as daunting as people have made it out to be in their heads to shoot on film."
Whether or not he's able to score an agent or interest from producers in financing another film while he's at CineVegas, Shupe plans to move out to LA by the end of this year or early next year. "That's not something that I'm really looking forward to," he says tentatively. "I don't really want to live in LA. But it's just kind of what you have to do, because that's where the business is."
And if he's willing to go broke, quit his job and move back in with his parents all for the sake of filmmaking, it's not as if something like Hollywood is likely to slow Robert Shupe down.