Trailer: The Movie! was the first short film I wrote and directed.  We shot it in LA in 2001 and it played in a ton of film festivals.  I’ve lost count how many exactly but it seems like it was over 40.  (Watch Trailer: The Movie!)

Paco Farias and Chris Heltai in "Trailer: The Movie!"

With Trailer: The Movie! DP Clay Westervelt.

A lot of my lasting friendships with other filmmakers were formed during this project.  Paco Farias starred, produced (along with me and Lisa Guzman) and edited the film.  This was pre-Final Cut Pro and we worked in an empty Avid bay at MatchFrame in Burbank late at night.  (Paco was working there as a vault manager and later an editor.)  DP Clay Westervelt and composer Brandon Roberts also became long time friends and filmmaking co-conspirators.

Trailer! let me go to a lot of film festivals and figure out what the independent world was all about.  It also got me a lot of distribution offers.  At various times the film has been distributed by six or seven different companies.

At the moment, it isn’t under any exclusive licenses, though it is still offered on the Internet under some non-exclusive licenses.  So I figure if it’s going to be on the Internet, I might as well have it on my own site.   I’ve re-encoded and uploaded Trailer: The Movie! to this site.