Filmmaker Is Aiming to Pack a Punch

Orange County filmmaker Evan Jacobs was determined to complete his comedy film, a mock boxing documentary he wrote, starred in, produced and directed.

The 60-minute movie, shot and edited over three years, cost just less than $12,000. That’s chump change for a Hollywood studio but big bucks for an independent filmmaker such as Jacobs, a Cal State Long Beach film-studies graduate who financed his movie by working part-time at an Irvine marketing research company.

To save money for the film, he even moved back into his parents’ place in Fountain Valley, a four-bedroom tract house that served as production central and doubled as the interior of one of the character’s homes.

“I was funding this film by just saving every cent I possibly could and not leaving my house basically for almost three years unless it was movie-related,” Jacobs, 26, said.

Now, Jacobs’ film, “Schusterman Levine: A Boxing Fable,” is in the can and ready for its California premiere at 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Southern California Film Festival at A Captain Blood’s Village Theatre in Orange.

But Jacobs has found his work is far from over.

Now he’s got to get out and promote the screening of the film, which was shot at Williams Gym in Long Beach and at various Orange County locations, including the Boys Club of Placentia, Mile Square Park in Fountain Valley, the Huntington Beach Pier and the state employment development office in Santa Ana.

Jacobs knows what he’s up against.

“Let me tell you something,” he said last week. “As I was finishing the film, I got a really kind of sick feeling because when you finish a film, you want to have a sense of completion.”

But that was not the case, he said. Finishing a movie, “is just part of the equation.

“Now, you’ve got to convince people that this film has value and that with all the big movies out there--’U-571’ and ‘Gladiator’--my small, personal film is a thing you should see, and I think you’ll like it.”

The black-and-white mockumentary tells its story through narration and voice-over. (Filming dialogue scenes was way beyond Jacobs’ minuscule budget.) Think Woody Allen’s early film “Take the Money and Run,” whose comic sensibility is an obvious source of inspiration.

“That movie was a blueprint,” acknowledged Jacobs, a tall and lanky onetime local punk band singer with dark, thinning hair who is as unlikely a boxer as the character he plays.

As Schusterman Levine, Jacobs is a likable loser who loses his job in a record company warehouse after the company moves and doesn’t tell him. He lives in a two-bedroom apartment with two roommates. (Unable to pay more than $150 a month, the British narrator intones, Levine lives in the bathroom.)

But Levine is obsessed with the world of boxing. Or as the narrator explains at the outset of the film, this is “the story of one man’s desire to be immortalized in one of history’s most-celebrated professions: prize fighting. This is the story of Schusterman Levine, a man who should have been a plumber.”

Jacobs identifies with Levine.

“I think everybody, to a certain degree, does in terms of at times feeling on the outside, as though you’re up against something and maybe not fully fitting in,” he said, adding, “I think I can identify maybe more so than other people.”

To promote the festival screening, Jacobs over the past two weeks has done his best to “make noise and let people know this is happening.”

He has phoned, faxed and written letters to film studios and distributors, inviting them to the screening. He’s also contacted local newspapers and magazines and sent out videotape copies of the film to anyone who can help draw attention to it--although, he concedes, “you run a fine line between being persistent and an annoyance.”

Jacobs even drew up a list of Orange County record stores where he put up posters and handed out flyers.

“As people would walk in, I’d grab them and say, ‘I made this movie. If you can come and see it that would be great!’ ”

A longtime fan of Wally George’s syndicated “Hot Seat” talk show on KDOC-TV, Jacobs also sent an autographed copy of his movie poster to the right-wing host.

At the least, Jacobs figured he’d get an autographed picture in return. But he was surprised to find a message from George himself on his answering machine.

The flamboyant George, who knows a thing or two about self-promotion, invited Jacobs on his show. At the end of the brief interview taped at KDOC in Irvine last week, George even had a suggestion for Jacobs’ next film: “The Life Story of Wally George!”

Although the interview was brief, Jacobs, dressed in a black suit and tie--”my best possible clothes”--handled himself well in his first TV appearance.

Unfortunately, the interview won’t air until Friday, two days after the festival screening.

Not that Jacobs really minds.

“Hey, look, I’m just happy that someone cared enough to say, ‘You’re doing something, and we want to help you out.’ That, to me, is the biggest thing, that someone did that.”

The idea for “Schusterman Levine” grew out of Jacobs’ longtime love of boxing.

“My heart goes out to it so much because I see myself in the fighter who tries and tries and no matter what happens--no matter what adversary or circumstance--the fighter prevails,” he said.

Jacobs, who graduated from Cal State Long Beach in 1998, has made five video movies--a documentary of a Hare Krishna punk band, a romantic comedy, an experimental film and two dramas.

But those were on videotape. He wanted to make a movie for theatrical release using a 16-millimeter movie camera.

Jacobs, who starred in four of his video movies, planned to play the title role in “Schusterman Levine” from the start.

“I realized no one else could play this character--nor do I think anybody else would really want to,” he said.

Filming began September 1996; editing concluded last July. (Jacobs tapped Derek Harry of Huntington Beach, the British-born father of one of his friends, as narrator.)

Coordinating the locations and a cast that numbered about 70, excluding extras, was the most difficult part of the job, he said.

But filming went relatively smoothly. Editing is where he ran into problems.

He immediately realized he’d have to throw out nearly a dozen interviews of real boxers talking about the fictional Levine, some shot as far away as Las Vegas. The problem was he had shot the interviews on high-8 videotape, and they looked like home movies compared to the rest of the film, shot with the 16-millimeter.

He couldn’t afford to re-shoot, so he scrapped them entirely.

But through the toughest times, he said, “I called on boxing: I thought, ‘Hey, I’ve got to persevere no matter what.’ ”

“Schusterman Levine” has been shown once, in November at the Lost Film Festival in Philadelphia.

The same month, Jacobs sent a copy to Gil Holland, who produced independent filmmaker Morgan J. Freeman’s “Hurricane Streets” (which took three top 1997 Sundance Festival prizes) and co-produced Freeman’s 1999 film “Desert Blue.”

“I’m a big fan,” Holland said of Jacobs by phone from his office in New York. “He sent the film to me cold. I get maybe 30 short films a week and I watched it late at night. It’s hilarious. He’s a triple threat.”

Holland, who describes Jacobs as “a consummately funny actor and up-and-coming writer,” has been helping the filmmaker find a distributor for “Schusterman Levine.” But, Holland said, a 60-minute film poses a marketing problem: It’s too long for a short film and too short for a theatrical feature. “It might end up getting video distribution,” said Holland, who hopes to help produce Jacobs’ next movie.

Jacobs is already fine-tuning his script for “How I Lost My Mind and Killed Someone.” The title, he said, is strictly metaphoric: “It’s about relationships.”

* “Schusterman Levine: A Boxing Fable” will screen at 8 p.m. Wednesday at A Captain Blood’s Village Theatre, 1140 N. Tustin Ave., Orange. $7:50 for adults; $5 for students; $4 for children and seniors.