Clive Young

This is a very interesting book about fan films, starting with some maybe-scammers who went around in the 1920s making “Our Gang” films with local actors and continuing to the present day. Young is, like many live-action fan film enthusiasts, quite willing to go along with the copyright owner’s vision of a franchise—it’s a little weird to me that live-action fan films seem to sort much more into (1) the super-respectful/narrative extension or (2) the parodic/attacking categories than, say, fanfic or fanvids, but that is how it seems to work. This leads him to be fairly sympathetic to things like Lucasfilm’s attempts to channel fan energies into parodies and documentaries, though in fairness he explicitly recognizes that there is reason to worry about this trend. Likewise, he does know about vids (and gives a shoutout to the OTW), but his chapter about women in fan films, while presented as if it’s going to be a story about how the women really are out there directing, turns out to be more about women acting and carrying out other technical roles. In fact, the film he spends the most time on involves a husband-wife team (husband directing), in which the wife is a vidder, except we never learn a thing about her vids. He has interesting discussions of Star Wars fan film cliches, and he’s upfront about the fact that most fan films aren’t that good—I would have leaned harder on Sturgeon’s Law, myself.

He’s also deeply confused about copyright law, calling fair use a “good idea” instead of a right (the Supreme Court has indicated that fair use is a major reason copyright doesn’t violate the First Amendment), at the same time as he points out that people have to understand fair use before we can expect them to apply it. He aligns himself with Lucasfilm, DC, WB, Paramount and the like in sharply distinguishing between noncommercial filmmaking (which they’ll ignore) and profit-seeking (which they count as, for example, showing fan films at a film festival where admission is charged) (4-5, 200-02, 245). This isn’t the law, though it may well be the practical compromise. At the same time, fan filmmakers often have professional aspirations, and there are a couple of success stories at least among fan filmmakers who have managed to get jobs around the margins of Hollywood already and then used their fan films to work their way further into professional status.

I liked Young’s argument that fan films’ focus on superheroes etc. is often about nostalgia, and specifically about the thrill of imagining oneself participating in a heroic universe, as children are generally allowed to do in Western culture and adults are generally not. “Any adult who likes superheroes, for example, likely spent far more hours as a child making up valiant stories on the fly during playtime than he or she did watching the characters on TV or in the movies. As a result, that adult’s most familiar experience with a favorite superhero might not be as a complcent viewer but as the author of the hero’s adventures. Making a fan film, then, can be a return to that authorial position—an opportunity to reclaim that sense of ownership and authorship, putting the filmmaker back in touch with one of the reasons that a franchise appealed to him in the first place.” In the end, Young defends fan filmmaking as a process of active engagement with imagination and culture, and there’s where we are 100% in agreement.… (more)