From The Midnight Matinee (Courtesy of Ryan Phillips)
Justin Doescher owes his career as a director to an iPhone.
The Silver Spring native had always loved to make short film, but was struggling to get friends and collaborators on board with a particular script he had written. Tired of sitting on the project, he took matters into his own hands.
“I shot it with my girlfriend’s iPhone 6 and edited it on my own,” Doescher explains (Sean Baker’s 2015 micro-indie Tangerine was also notably made entirely on the iPhone 5S).
The Break-In (2016) marked his feature-length debut as a writer/director.
Even with a finished project, as most independent filmmakers can attest, it can be little more than a mountain of debt without the right distribution. What is a film, of course, without an audience? And in the Washington area, how does a filmmaker find an audience far from industry hubs?
For Doescher, it was through a brand new platform.
Amazon Video Direct is the company’s answer to YouTube, providing an avenue for budding filmmakers outside NY and Los Angeles to have their work seen while making money off streams. Doescher is one of the fledgling initiative’s success stories.
“I always loved making short films, regardless of who liked them or not,” Doescher says. “Without this new platform, I would still be trying to figure out how to get an audience to watch them. It has truly been a life changing experience for me.”
Things went so well with The Break-In that Doescher returned to the platform with last year’s The Midnight Matinee, a compendium of horror shorts that feels like a lo-fi Black Mirror.
“I had a couple short horror films that I had already shot and edited last year and they were just sitting on my laptop,” Doescher says. “I was trying to figure out how I can get people to watch them, since there isn’t a huge audience for short films. So I shot a few extra stories and turned them into a horror anthology, much like the films I loved as a child.”
With a 45-minute running time, The Midnight Matinee fits a specific niche for audiences looking for bite-sized fixes of fear, while giving Doescher room to experiment and pay homage to his influences. Those influences include classic television like The Twilight Zone and ’80s horror anthologies like Creepshow, and such directors as Alfred Hitchcock, M. Night Shyamalan and David Fincher.
Doescher didn’t attend film school (he studied Computer Information Systems at Towson), but another job brought him closer to one of his heroes. As a member of SAG since 2006, Doescher also works as an actor. He plays one of Frank Underwood’s secret service agents on House of Cards, which shoots in Maryland (and is produced by Fincher).
“Though my role in House of Cards is small, I have learned a tremendous amount from all of the talented crew that works on the show. I watch everything that they do day to day, from the director to the sound mixer, etc.” Doescher describes the experience as “an incredible five-year film course.”
While he has been developing new ideas that will require a big upgrade in production costs, Doescher is still dedicated to telling exciting stories behind the camera, regardless of scope.
“I love to surprise an audience. There is nothing more rewarding then being able to put one over on them at the end of the film. Nowadays, everyone is trying to guess the ending, so it’s not always an easy accomplishment. But I just want to entertain people for an hour out of their day, and hopefully they feel like they have seen something fresh and new, even if its on a micro budget.”
Stream The Midnight Matinee on Amazon.
Watch the trailer:
