Clapboard Jungle: the heads of indie filmmaking.
This week’s offerings include a trio of documentaries that range in subject from the history of everyone’s favorite curse word, Miami’s cocaine cartel, and for openers, a cautionary fable for the marginally talented among us who think they have what it takes to make it in Hollywood.
Clapboard Jungle
(2021)
As if the poster’s graphics — artist’s renderings of indie monarchs George Romero, Dick Miller, Sid Haig, Larry Cohen, Tom Savini, and more — weren’t inducement enough, the accompanying paragraph spoke of a “currently over-crowded marketplace” and how this documentary would “serve as a survival guide for the modern independent filmmaker.” Nowhere does it mention, “Vanity production by Justin McConnell who appears to have spent fifteen years in a sub semi-pro capacity trying to emulate schlock that came before him.” McConnell’s IMDB profile boasts almost as many entries as Scorsese. According to the writer-producer-editor-director-star-wallpaper-hanger-etc. the main reason his showreel isn’t as visually stunning as Marty’s has everything to do with budgetary limitations. (One guesses McConnell was too busy savoring the finer points of Troma to bother with Who’s That Knocking at My Door?)