Putting out fires: Inside the Little Rock Picture Show, nine months after the city’s major film festival folded

Little Rock Picture Show organizer Justin Nickels juggled many duties — with his smartphone always handy — during the June 11-12 festival held at the Statehouse Convention Center.
Little Rock Picture Show organizer Justin Nickels juggled many duties — with his smartphone always handy — during the June 11-12 festival held at the Statehouse Convention Center.

Someone is yelling at Uhura.

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The turnout for the Little Rock Picture Show was disappointing, but organizer Justin Nickels says all the effort that went into the show has “definitely been a good thing.”

Nichelle Nichols -- who played the iconic communications officer in the first generation Star Trek TV series and movies -- is a guest of the River City Comic Expo, going on next door in the Statehouse Convention Center. And the yeller -- upset she's not signing autographs for free -- is a filmmaker attending the Little Rock Picture Show, the festival Justin Nickels has organized for the past five years. It is operating in conjunction with the comic expo for the first time. Hence the delegation of T-shirted men in black now confronting Nickels.

For most of the past year, Nickels and his friends J.P. Langston and Cody Riggan have devoted between 15 and 20 hours a week planning the festival, comprising short- and feature-length sci-fi, fantasy and horror films. This year their efforts took on special importance. For the first four years, the Little Rock Picture Show operated under the auspices of the Little Rock Film Festival. But nine months ago, LRFF founders Brent and Craig Renaud announced that they were too busy with their careers as documentarians to continue the 9-year-old festival. (There was also a dispute with the Central Arkansas Library System that resulted in losing their free office space.)

So as the surviving remnant of the LRFF, a lot of hopes and dreams are pinned on Nickels' festival, held June 11-12.

"Having a big-time [festival] generated excitement, but now a lot of people are trying to figure out, 'Where do I go from here?'" Tony Taylor, executive director of the Little Rock Film Society, says.

For Nickels, maybe the first place is next door. To put out the Uhura fire.

...

Two hours earlier, we're standing before food trucks in the subterranean event hall of the convention center. Nickels chats with the Loblolly Creamery vendor, which has themed its flavors this weekend for different comic book characters. He spots a friend in the back of the truck.

"Hey, Matt Owen," he says brightly. "Come to the movies."

Nickels begins to make his way toward his next engagement, a YouTube game show in which he will serve as one of three "celebrity" guests. A "geek-centric" trivia and comedy show called Brain Trust, its host and creator, local comedian Michael "Doc" Brown, bears a striking resemblance to Drew Carey.

The day is just getting underway. Fans dressed in comic book hero costumes, known as cosplay, have started to file into the giant convention hall. Comic book illustrators, actors and vendors hawk autographs and sell colorful memorabilia at dozens of foldout tables. Nickels seems to be enjoying himself.

"There's Batman," he says, pointing to a caped crusader. This is the first comic con he's been to, he says, although he attended a Star Trek convention in eighth grade.

We pass Mike Zeck, creator of Spider-Man's black costume, and Arkansas native Gil Gerard, the actor who played the title character in the late '70-early '80s television series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. A man wearing a blue jumpsuit and a hockey mask trails us.

At the other end of the hall near the food trucks sit a large stage and projector. The projector and screen, worth about $15,000, are provided free to the comic expo by the Arkansas Motion Picture Institute. The idea is that the picture show will provide extra entertainment and equipment, and in return the expo's visitors will come to the picture show. As we pass through a lobby to a quiet hallway where the films are to be screened, it's unclear if it's working.

A man in a black T-shirt, jeans and long gray beard loiters outside the room where the YouTube episode is about to happen. Before he can say anything, Nickels turns to a fast-approaching woman in a blue T-shirt. She waves him off. "I've got a minor emergency," she says.

That's Shelly, Nickels says, smiling, one of the main expo organizers. "She's always stressed out."

The man with the beard introduces himself. Mike Brabender, a local actor and producer, has been in the festival for the last two years. This year he says he helped produce The Bride, a short film by southeast Arkansas native Charlie Brady.

"Justin's been doing a great job here," he says. Nickels is unresponsive. Brabender looks at him.

"It's gonna get bigger," Brabender says. "You know that, don't you?"

"I hope so," Nickels says. "It has to if the filmmakers want it to keep going."

Brabender changes the subject, and Nickels starts texting. As a young man, Brabender says, he moved to Los Angeles, working for years as a stunt man. It's a skill he's returned to in recent films.

"'The night we shot the stunt it was cold, cold,'" Brabender says. "Real cold."

Nickels looks up.

"Was that the night you were on fire?"

...

Nickels is really, really good at comic book trivia. Midway through Brain Trust he correctly answers four questions in a row about The CW television program The Flash.

"Sorry," he says, smiling sheepishly at the other contestants. About 30 people, many dressed in costumes, look on from the audience. "I feel sorry for my wife, actually."

Brown finishes the round by asking what the Arabic phrase "al saher" means (according to The Flash). Nickels slaps a red buzzer in front of him.

"Magician."

"Justin Nickels closes out a category with every question!" Brown roars.

"I got so excited when you told me what this was going to be," Nickels says.

Midway through the show, his wife, Mallory, walks in. The show ends, and he catches her up on how he did so well, and how he had to apologize for watching The Flash so much. She nods.

But as they drift down the hallway toward the screening of the Arkansas filmmakers, it's clear they share other enthusiasms. They met at the second Little Rock Film Festival in 2008, when both were volunteering. She had just moved to Little Rock after graduating from college and was trying to make friends; he was a film enthusiast.

"[The film festival is] very close to our hearts, because we probably wouldn't know each other otherwise," she says.

Nickels is looking at his phone again, tweeting that the screening of Arkansas filmmakers will soon begin. His phone background is a photo of his wife's face. He looks up and smiles.

"We were the first couple to meet [at the Little Rock Film Festival]," he says. "I used to joke, 'This is a really great event. I met my wife here.'"

Asked what it would take to bring back the festival at a similar magnitude, Nickels responds that the community would have to get behind it "in a deeper way than it has in the past," plus about $300,000 annually to hire a couple of full-time employees to continue its growth.

Taylor, the Little Rock Film Society director, is philosophical about the death of the festival. Putting on a film festival is a lot of work, he says, requiring a year-round commitment on the part of a small group of people at little or no pay. Then life happens -- people move, get married, have kids -- or the festival grows in size or complexity to a point where the founders either have to hand it off or shut it down. It's hard to achieve escape velocity.

"The key is, any festival that's been around a very long time, they've had different people run it over the years," Taylor says. "Festivals that faded were run by the same people, and once people moved on it folded."

Taylor believes that for a large Arkansas film festival to survive, it will have to become a regional festival, regularly attracting an audience from outside the state. In the meantime, he's confident other film festivals in the state can pick up some of the slack: Bentonville, El Dorado, the documentary film festival in Hot Springs. He also has high hopes for two film festivals he is helping to organize: the Kaleidoscope Film Festival for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender filmmakers and the Fantastic Cinema & Craft Beer Festival, both heading into their second years.

...

The lights dim, and a film called Blood Art plays. Out in the lobby, Nickels has just received the news about the filmmaker who yelled at Uhura. We cross the lobby, passing through double doors into the convention hall.

It's hot outside, cool and air-conditioned inside the convention center. Artwork, book signings and cosplayers abound. There's a ton of fun, weird energy in the building. A tall guy in a full stormtrooper suit approaches and stabs a plastic finger into the press badge hanging from my neck. I look at Nickels.

"People's confidence really grows when they put on the suits," he says.

He's quiet, gazing at the distant corner where Nichols sits at a table signing autographs. She considered quitting after her first year on Star Trek, Nickels says with admiration. But Martin Luther King Jr. personally asked her to stay, citing the significance of her role as a black actor on a popular television show.

After a trip back to the hall where the film festival is being held -- where he is confronted by the comic con volunteers about the filmmaker who yelled at Nichols -- we head over to see Brent Douglass, the expo organizer. He's wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and he has a cellphone held to his ear. A cosplay contest is about to begin.

"This is Brent," he says into the phone. "Yeah, the Thor dude has the microphone ..."

After a moment, Douglass takes me into a back room, where he sits down to take a 10-minute break and rub his bare feet.

He and his friends organized the first River City Comic Expo in 2011, he says, simply because there wasn't a similar event at the time in Arkansas. The audience has grown exponentially each year, as has the size of the venues, from 12,000 square feet to north of 100,000 square feet.

"If people saw the amount of work that goes into this, most wouldn't want to do it," he says.

They want to keep it affordable, in the $10 to $15 range. But now they must confront how to handle the growth. Douglass and his girlfriend attended a packed comic con in Dallas a few years ago, and came away disenchanted by the experience.

A volunteer comes in and wordlessly hands Douglass a pair of shoes with socks in them.

Last year, 6,500 people attended the expo. This year, they're expecting 10,000.

"We're worried ... where do we go from here?" Douglass says. "We're growing quickly and need more space, but I don't know where that is."

Nonetheless, he's proud of what the event has evolved into. To attract a roster of celebrities in the comic con world as bright as Neal Adams (an important Superman and Batman illustrator), Zeck, Nichols and Gerard is an indication of the expo's growing stature. As he's speaking, it's a little past noon. One of the volunteer celebrity handlers bursts into the room.

"Gil Gerard needs rice!"

...

While Douglass was talking, the filmmaker who yelled at Nichols was quietly and successfully asked to leave the premises. Nickels seems a bit lighter on his feet. He's always loved movies, he says, even when he was a boy and he had an odd phobia about going into theaters. Today, like most Arkansas filmmakers, he has a day job and works on films in his free time. By day he does communications for a local nonprofit. On weekends, he and his friends shoot documentaries. Early this year, he submitted a short film to Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School in Germany -- "I just knew that he watched every submission," he says. "Twenty-five bucks to have Werner Herzog watch your film." To his surprise, his film was selected. His friends and family helped pitch in so that he could attend the four-day workshop in Berlin in March, which he called "the experience of a lifetime."

Passing through the expo, he wanders up to Nichols' table. She's an elegant woman with white hair brushed high and three strings of pearls hanging to her lap. Stark cheekbones, movie-star looks. She regards him quizzically at first; it turns out she's forgotten about the incident.

"We have the same name," he tells her, the unpleasantness out of the way finally. Her eyebrows narrow, a smile unfurls from the corners of her lips, and she extends a hand.

"Hey, brother," she says.

...

Two days later, the results of the weekend are in. About 50 people paid $10 for expo tickets on Saturday night specifically to see Little Rock native James Morrison's Diverge. Forty people showed up on Sunday night, Nickels says.

The turnout is disappointing. The expo organizers should have done a better job promoting the picture show to their attendees, he says, but they were stressed out. It's not any one thing, though.

"I think that what we've been doing has definitely been a good thing, I just don't know that the [filmmaking] community itself has been supporting it like it should," he says. "Or taking advantage of it like it should. These are opportunities for filmmakers to become friends with other working filmmakers. When people who are wanting to make films here don't attend, especially when it's only $10 a day, it's a missed opportunity."

But there's no time to think about that now. It's time to think out 2017's festival.

MovieStyle on 07/01/2016

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