In Conversation with Michael Oblowitz Director of Confidential Informant
Confidential Informant stars Mel Gibson, Dominic Purcell, and Kate Bosworth
Date: 6th March 2019
Case Study: The Making of RICH KIDS
Filmmaker: Laura Somers
Q: What is your film about?
Laura Somers: RICH KIDS is the story of a group of troubled teens from a low-income community break into “Los Ricos”, the local mansion with a border fence, and spend the day pretending to be rich in order to forget their difficult lives.
Rich Kids is a film that sympathetically views the modern day and ongoing challenges of economic disparities, gentrification, displacement and evictions faced through the lens of Latino and Afro-Latino American youth.
The screenplay (by Somers & Saldaña) is based on an actual event that took place in Somers’ childhood home, after a group of neighborhood teens broke into the family home and stayed for several days before the event ended in tragedy. The film’s title, Rich Kids, signifies the wealth of love, talent, intelligence, and emotional resilience that the characters have in spite of their economic challenges while living in a world that views them with skepticism and indifference.
Q: Tell us about the festival run, marketing and sales?
Laura Somers: We have played Rich Kids at over 20 film festivals since early 2018 and continue to go to festivals in 2019. We have won 11 awards, primarily Best of Fest and Best Ensemble Cast. Our actor Gerardo Velasquez won Best Actor at a festival and our DP Eun-ah Lee won Best Cinematography at the same one!
For PR we worked with Smarthouse Media and Creative Allies for our first big premiere, and since then we’ve been doing the rest of the PR ourselves. With each city we travel to with the film, we work on reaching out to local press, bloggers, and targeted organizations to help us spread the word.
Our marketing at this point relies on the festivals we go to and their marketing push, and we rely on our core group of fans to push the word out on our behalf. And we do a lot of social media, continuing to keep our fans updated on our progress so that they can be part of the experience too.
Q: Do fill in the ‘Dramatic Feature’ below?
- Director: Laura Somers
- Producers: Eddie Rodriguez, Laura Somers
- Budget: $65K
- Financing: Crowdfunding on Seed & Spark, Personal credit cards & savings
- Production: Houston, TX
- Shooting Format: Arri Amira 4K
- Screening Format: DCP
- World Premiere: Houston Latino Film Festival
- Website
- Awards:
- Winner of Best US Feature of the New York Latino Film Festival presented by HBO
- Winner Best Feature Women Texas Film Festival
- Winner Best of Fest River’s Edge International Film Festival
- Winner Best Cine-Mas Feature Lone Star Film Festival
- Winner Best Drama Reel East Texas Film Festival
- Winner Best Ensemble Cast Phoenix Film Festival
- Winner Best Ensemble Cast DTLA Film Festival
- Winner Best Ensemble Cast Tulsa American Film Festival
- Winner Best Actor Reel East Texas Film Festival
- Winner Best Cinematography Reel East Texas Film Festival
- Winner Best of Fest South Texas Underground Film Festival
Q: Give the full Official Synopsis for your film?
Laura Somers: Matías is a bright teenager whose family struggles with harsh financial troubles. When he discovers “Los Ricos”, a wealthy family, are out of town, Matías breaks into their mansion where he and his friends spend an afternoon basking in the good life. The party is soon disrupted when a trouble-making relative shows up uninvited. Loyalties are then pushed to the breaking point as Matías’s desire for power in the house rises.
At its heart, Rich Kids is about a young man’s transformation from the person he thinks he’s supposed to be into the person he really is, as he comes to terms with the realities and consequences of living a community ravaged by the wealth gap and income inequality. This vibrant portrait of six troubled teenagers showcases the talents of our young charismatic cast, and is set over a period of less than 24 hours in a limited number of locations in South Houston, TX.
Q: Development & Financing?
Laura Somers: David Saldaña and I worked for a year on the script for Rich Kids which came from an idea I had based on a real experience in my own life. I asked David to work with me on it because I wanted to create a special mix of intersectionality throughout the film process. We spent six months outlining and six months writing and we stuck to a deadline to get it done. We didn’t send it out for notes to many people.
We just wanted to be confident in our vision – it was about not asking for permission to tell our story the way we wanted to. We wrote the script to be ultra-low budget, around free locations, with one main location so that the budget would stay low. The focus was going to be on solid storytelling and good acting, not costly special effects or camera work.
We did not want to spend the time seeking financing from a handful of investors, so we opted for crowdfunding, and our budget made that very doable. We raised the first half for production and the second half a year later for post production once we had footage for Rich Kids to show people. Many people contributed twice! I also put my own money in through some savings and credit cards, as did our Producer Eddie Rodriguez. But it was a reasonable amount we felt we could pay back eventually.
Q. Production?
Laura Somers: We raised the money in August and by then I had already cast the majority of the film. I found my Producer Eddie through Seed & Spark after looking at campaigns that were for films shot in Houston. Eddie convinced me to push the shoot back to October instead of September, and he called on all his local collaborators to come on board and work on the film. They did it because he’s a great guy and everyone loves his passion.
Our DP Eun-ah Lee came from a reference, she’s based in NYC and is very experienced and I knew I needed someone with strong chops and mega talent to lift the quality of the film up as high as it could go on a no-budget. We got our camera package after I called up a local company in Houston and pitched them the story – they resonated with it and gave us an Arri Amira package with Schneider lenses for a very good rate.
I put all my money on camera and camera department, and was so glad I did. I should also mention that our team was coming from many different states, California, Texas, New York so we were doing a lot of our prep and rehearsals via SKYPE!
We had the good fortune of shooting the film almost 100% in sequential order which is such a luxury and helped all of us create the film organically – you can actually sense the film getting better and better as we got better as a team. And it allowed me to know what I could change or cut right in the moment because I knew everything we already had. I wish we could shoot films like that all the time.
We tried to stick to a 12 hour day each day with a 12 hour turnaround, but we definitely had a few 14 hour days and our last day we all decided as a group to just push through and finish it – that might have been a 20 hour day. But we felt so great by the end. Those of us who came from out of town also stayed in the location to save money – that was actually fun because the team got very close very fast. I think that helped the actors bond even more and added to their amazing chemistry.
The majority of the film was shot in one location, my childhood home, which was cool because no one was living in it at the time but it was fully furnished so we really didn’t have to do a lot of set dressing, we spent two days cleaning the house and moving furniture around and then we didn’t really have to do much with the dressing after that. It was a great way to keep things moving quickly.
It helped to know the location so intimately when we were writing the script because location decisions were already made. Sometimes we were shooting outside in the neighborhood but it was all so close to each other that it was easy to go out and come back to base if we needed to. There was one day we had to drive an hour from base to shoot a scene towards the end of the film, and that scene took longer than we had anticipated.
We still had a few scenes to shoot, so I had to basically walk down the street from where we were and make something work in order to get our scenes covered. I enjoy that kind of thinking on the fly, and shooting in Texas allows that ability because you don’t have to be permitted in a lot of places to film.
Once we wrapped I forced myself to take a month off to rest and process. Because we had no money for Post, I decided to act as my own Assistant Editor, organizing the footage and synching the sound myself. I have a professional editing background so I was able to do that. Then I spent about 6 weeks cutting an assembly cut of the film, which is basically editing every scene together very roughly to get a sense of the story. I started looking for an editor at that point to take over and through a recommendation met Carmen Morrow, who had been working on expanding her portfolio and really connected to the material. Her pass on the film gave birth to the movie.
We determined at that point that we needed to reshoot a few scenes and do some pickups, so in May we went back to Houston with the same team and shot for three more days. It was so expensive to reshoot those scenes, and it all came out of my pocket, but it was the best decision we could have made for the film so it was worth it. I would do that again and encourage every filmmaker with a feature to reshoot any problematic scenes to improve them. Carmen did another pass and we were very happy with what we had and at that point we passed the film onto our Composer, Ming Vauz.
While Ming was working, David, Eddie and I went back to Seed & Spark and did another crowdfunding campaign to raise the money for post production. It had been a year since our first one, and our contributors were happy to pitch in again because we had such amazing footage to show for ourselves. We had kept them updated the whole way – they were 100% part of our journey. Our post took the longest Once we had a final cut we started submitting to film festivals.
Q: Festival Preparation & Strategy?
Laura Somers: We had no idea how festivals would respond to the film, so our strategy was to apply to festivals of varying tiers – we did submit to Sundance and SXSW and Tribeca and to save money, didn’t submit to any festivals that would be going on at the same times as those because they demand World Premieres so we knew if we got in, we’d turn everyone else down.
At the same time we were looking at festivals that were interested in Latino stories and filmmakers, female directors, Texas films, social issue films, festivals that had partnered with Seed & Spark, and just cool places we wanted to visit.
So we’ve gotten into a crazy mash up of festivals but each time we meet the festival teams and the audiences, I realize why we were the right fit for them. We tried to submit the film during the early bird level for fests to save money, and we almost never submitted to a fest if it was the late deadline.
PR hasn’t been the easiest because we can’t afford a publicist to push us out there in the way we really need to cut through all the noise. But we’re doing the outreach ourselves with the help of some of the festivals, and we’re finding that it’s growing – people are hearing about the film. It’s a slow growth but it’s all positive.
Q: The Release?
Laura Somers: We are about to release it theatrically via Gathr, we’ve partnered with them so anyone can host their own screening event in their community of RICH KIDS in a movie theater! All the folks reading this article can go to our website to find out more details and host a screening and it costs nothing for them. It’s very exciting. I hope to see a ton of screenings popping up around the country in May, June and beyond.
Q: Advice from the Filmmaker?
Laura Somers: Nobody is going to care about your film more than you. And that’s okay. We are all individually trying so hard to succeed that it’s not personal. Just keep pushing that rock up the hill. When you get a no, find another way. We’re creative people so we’re good at thinking outside the box. We don’t have to play by the rules. Just don’t hurt anybody in the process.
