Less Is More

Hollywood producers may be hard-pressed to make a movie that runs under three hours, but Tarzana filmmaker Shawna Brakefield brought in her latest at under three minutes.

Brakefield Productions’ “Super Fans” is about a quartet of bleacher bums who lack a game to go to, but gather anyway to hoot and jeer at--well, we can’t give away the film’s punch line, but these four bring fanaticism to a hilariously wrongheaded level. Quickly.

“The market for short films is exploding right now because of the Internet,” said Brakefield, who runs the production company out of her Tarzana home and is best-known in Hollywood as director of the Independent Outreach program for the Screen Actors Guild.

“Super Fans” works as a witty tidbit thanks to Tristan Bourne’s finely detailed production design and inspired casting, bringing veteran comic actors Michael Haywood Norris and Bob Sherer together with rubbery-faced newcomers Bob Stephenson and Lisa K. Wyatt as the title characters.

The concept is instantly recognizable to anybody who has ever sat at a sporting event within earshot of overwrought home-team-loving fans.

“I sit near a bunch of them every time I go to a game,” said Dodger season-ticket holder Tom Brunelle, an ad copywriter and TV commercial writer who penned the script and made his directorial debut on “Super Fans.”

“It also took us a lot of time to edit,” added Brunelle, who labored with veteran TV and movie-of-the-week editor George Escobar to winnow hours of digital video down to two minutes and 50 seconds of narrative arc.

“Fans” has already taken its producer places. Brakefield went to Austin, Texas, last month where the film was a finalist at the South by Southwest film and music festival.

The film also showed last month at the Newport Beach International Film Festival, and Brakefield plans to screen it later this year at the Telluride, Colo., and Seattle film festivals.

Moreover, she was in New York last week to talk to Madison Avenue executives about selling “Fans” for a commercial campaign.

The market for short films is lively, with some cable networks bidding for them to wedge in between longer programming segments, and several Web sites snapping them up to run in advertiser-supported formats.

“What’s driving our [business] is comedy, animation and music,” said Patrick Lynn, vice president of acquisitions at mediatrip.com, which recently stocked a download-able library of 15 short films.

“As the medium matures, people will get used to sitting and watching long films on their computers, but right now the short is king.”

Mediatrip.com, which launched last October, is host of Joseph Levy’s critically acclaimed eight-minute “George Lucas in Love,” which sends up “Shakespeare in Love” while imagining the collection of oddballs in the great filmmaker’s life when he was at USC film school--oddballs strangely reminiscent of “Star Wars” characters.

Two of Brakefield’s pre-”Super Fans” shorts won prizes.

The 30-minute romantic comedy “The Piece” won awards at the New York Independent Film Festival and the Houston Worldfest, and her 15-minute “Kid” won several awards, including a Sundance Children’s Program award.

Perhaps her best-known work as a producer was “Earth Day at Disney World,” which enjoyed 15 airings on the Disney Channel in 1996.

The segue from all that reality and dramatic fare into comedy proved an easy leap for Brakefield, who shares life in a rustic Tarzana cottage with improvisatorial comedy actor Tait Ruppert, their runt feline, Little, and two dogs, Chester and Baloo.

“There’s something about short films that’s very immediate, very now, and that’s what comedy is about, too,” Brakefield said.

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In addition to “Super Fans,” Brakefield is developing a series of shorts that will feature well-known music stars in comedy and dramatic roles.

“I’ve never known anybody in music who didn’t want to be an actor,” she said, wryly.

But the emphasis will remain on “short.” While motion picture academy rules state that any film under 40 minutes is a short, Brakefield thinks three to five minutes is plenty long enough in today’s gone-in-60-seconds world.

“I love short films,” Brakefield said,

“They’re unique, an art form all their own. They give actors a chance to break out and do totally different roles and give audiences a chance to see work they might not otherwise be exposed to.”