I remember a friend telling me when he saw Rushmore he felt like the filmmakers had figured out a way to put their yearning to tell a good story into the story itself, that aching hope, that desire to make a good movie, they’d managed to put that in the movie, without making a movie about filmmakers. (Granted, they did make the protagonist a playwright, but because he’s in high school it doesn’t seem wanky.)

Todd Sklar has taken his sense of responsibility about finding an audience and interwoven it into the story of Box Elder. There’s an exuberance to the story that parallels the adventure of finding people who will respond, finding people with a pulse who don’t want another boat load of crud from a factory that doesn’t see much of a problem with making movie after movie about video games and old TV shows. Sklar doesn’t think it’s the job of an anonymous (now largely defunct) mid-level distributor to find his audience. And he’s managing, along with a few other filmmakers, to help shift the playing field to an extent that self-distribution isn’t a dirty hyphenate. When you watch his movie at one of Range Life’s events, it’s clear that the experience is all connected –there’s a clear through line for him.

With RSO [Registered Sex Offender] I wanted to see if I knew how to make a movie. (That’s an odd place to be for someone who’s made three already.) I knew I could simplify something that had been needlessly complicated in the past. And we wanted to make a movie that didn’t fit the festival paradigm, we didn’t want to make something designed to make the audience feel smart for getting it, we wanted to make a fun, entertaining movie, we wanted to veer in the direction of tasteless, we wanted to ignore high and low brow notions, and have the movie play at all altitudes of brow, winces, raised eyebrows, with candid disregard for sense and sensibility.

As such, we were lucky to find Todd, who carries these films around him like as if he’s the Statue of Liberty — he’s just basically disinterested in so much that interests the movie making machine, and he’s willing to work 126 (7 x 18) hours per week to do it, he’s willing to spell check emails to theater managers at the Joyo Theater in Lincoln, Nebraska, even if the turnout is a half dozen homeless alcoholics he lets in for free so they can escape a slush storm, and the seats smell like jizz and artificial butter

Bob Byington went to school at UC-Santa Cruz and received an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Texas. His short film Snap/dragon was produced through Fox Searchlight’s mentorship program, and his first feature Olympia premiered on Sunance Channel in 2003. Byington was recently named an Annenberg Fellow by the Sundance Institute for his script Harmony And Me.