On May 10th, 1994, The Crow released in cinemas to tremendous acclaim. Following the tragic story of Eric Draven, whose unresting soul seeks vengeance upon those who murdered him and his fiance Shelly, the movie not only brought more awareness to the 1989 graphic novel by James O’Barr, it helped kick-start a gothic-modernist artistic movement across film, music, and comics soon after. Outside of the impact it left on pop culture, The Crow is a beautifully resonant story of learning to accept death as a natural part of life, and finding meaning within mortality.
This story is what also captured the hearts of two high schoolers in 1994, and inspired them to make a film of their own.
Davis Madole: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, I am here with filmmaker, podcaster and musician David Ullman. David, how are we doing today?
David Ullman: I’m great– very grateful to be here! Thank you.
Madole: Glad to hear it. We are gathered here, because on October 8th at the Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis, you are screening a double feature of not just your 1998 fan film adaptation of James O’Barr’s The Crow that you starred in and directed with Matt Jackson, you’re also screening and distributing a documentary about the making of this film, Inertia: Re-Making The Crow.
Ullman: Yes. Yeah. October 8th in Minneapolis, and then October 16th in Philadelphia [at the Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art]. These films were filmed or captured and recorded on VHS in the ’90s, and I finished the documentary in 2001. But, it’s been largely unseen, until the good folks at Lunchmeat VHS sort of expressed an interest, and helped sort of raise the profile, and yeah, because of that and an unexpected opportunity to screen at this year’s Chattanooga Film Festival, suddenly it’s in a couple of cinemas, which is really mind-blowing for me.
Madole: Oh yeah, that is huge, especially for independent filmmaking. It’s a huge step, and I greatly congratulate you on that.
Ullman: Oh, thanks. Thank you.
Madole: Of course.
Shot in the 1990s and completed in 2001, ‘Inertia: Re-Making The Crow’ follows two small-town Ohio teenagers across four years as they attempt to adapt James O’Barr’s graphic novel ‘The Crow’ on home video. What began as a no-budget fan project expanded to an unflinching portrait of youthful obsession, perseverance, and artistic growth.
What inspired you to pursue filmmaking?
Ullman: I guess we got a video camera in the house. My dad had three brothers in maybe 1987, one of them had a video camera that he wasn’t using, and was looking to get rid of. So I don’t know if my dad bought it, or if he was just given it by his brother, but you know, my baby sister, eight years younger than me, had just been born, and I think the idea was to document, you know, his young family, but I soon sort of hijacked these home movies– like reenacting the Universal monster films of the 30s and 40s.
And so I did like two films, you know, I sort of convinced my dad or mom to film me reenacting both Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So early on when I was like eight or nine, already I was putting myself in front of the camera, sort of directing from in front of the camera, and then watching it back and being like, “No, we could do that better,’ and do the whole thing over again. And so that would that would continue on through a lot of projects, including The Crow in high school.
I think [for] a slightly different generation, it would have been super 8 films, but for us, it was VHS, and it was just like this little portable studio that now we all kind of carry around in our back pockets much much smaller and higher quality (he pulls out his cell phone). But, it was still super liberating, and just something I probably took for granted at that time. And I’ve really just kind of continued on ever since. To this day, I’ve been helping out recently in the last few years with some horror shorts, both on iPhones or full budgeted $25,000 affairs, and it’s all the same thing.
How would you say your craft has developed over time? Were you also inspired by any particular actors or filmmakers?
Ullman: A lot to dig in there. Actually, when I was having my like parents film me, I would just come up with these signals to tell them to stop. So, one of the early ones was to put my fist by my face, kind of like you’re leaning on it. So, I would finish a scene and then I would do this for them to stop. And in one of the [films], I have a younger brother– four years younger, and we were doing one of the Frankenstein adaptation, and it was winter time, so we were all indoors, and I don’t think anyone but me really knew what was going on, ‘cause you’d have to be really familiar with the beats of the movie to know that, “Okay, this diaper box is supposed to be a wooden beam,” or “This staircase is supposed to be a mountain.”
I was playing both the Frankenstein monster and Henry Frankenstein in different shots. I don’t think it made any sense to anyone, but I was sort of seeing how it worked. And I think in this shot I’m remembering, I always made him be whatever was the least interesting character in that scene between the two (he laughs). He was playing Henry Frankenstein, and I was playing his creature, and I’m like choking him, but I threw him into the corner of a counter, and so you hear him instantly go “I’m really hurt, Dave!” and the camera pans up to me, and I’m just going (signaling) straight to the camera (laughing).
So those signals got more and more subtle over time, as did my understanding of what I was doing in front of and behind the camera. But to be honest, much more slowly than I would have liked. I mean, I did ultimately go on to get a degree in electronic media production, so that I could get production jobs. And one of the first ones even before the degree was working at the public access center, where I edited the films that are getting screened now, in the late 90s and early 2000s.
But coming out of that environment, and then ultimately getting the degree just so that I could get those jobs in towns that I didn’t grow up in, I found that the last thing to really kind of click for me was something as simple as threepoint lighting, which any filmmaker probably learns by, you know, age 12 on YouTube these days. But, something like that took me decades to finally get, even though you can see it plenty of times in The Crow movie, I just don’t think I was super conscious of why things looked good.
And that’s I think why they were effective. Maybe emotionally, that was something that I could kind of glean, especially being the performer and the director, but I think some of those technical things took me a much longer time to wrap my head around than I should admit.
But some filmmakers are excited by a lot of the things that were in the air at [their] time, and one of them that had a really strong impact on The Crow project and that I recently re-engaged with was Robert Rodriguez. We had filmed for about a year right after seeing the Brandon Lee big screen movie. I went out, got the comic, we got inspired by that, and we were trying to kind of create this hybrid between the comic and the movie. And we, my friend Matt and I, worked on that for about a year, which was longer than we’d worked on anything up until that point. We put it together as best we could at home and between two VCRs.
So, this is the tape. [The cover] is an image from the comic. My dad was a Xerox technician, and he could make copies for free. And so, we kind of cut this stuff out, probably printed these titles at home on a Dot matrix printer, or something like that. Then, this actual photo of me and the young lady who played Shelly, and the description here that says “The original dark tale of love and justice” actually was cut out of the Kitchen Sink catalog– it was just literally the description of the comic book. And so, we took pre-orders at our high school in October ‘95. And on Halloween 1995, we distributed the tapes to, I guess it would have been ¼ of the whole school, so many of which were actually in it, or in it and cut out.
But, I mentioned all that to get to Robert Rodriguez, because we did a thing, and it was much more impressive than anything we had done before. But then right around it, was like a couple of months after Desperado came out, which was the sequel, and in some ways a remake of El Mariachi, his $7,000 Spanish-language direct. It was going to be direct-to-video, but it came out ultimately through Columbia Pictures.
And if you’ve never read, if you’re interested in this kind of thing, and you’ve never seen an interview with Robert Rodriguez, or read his book “Rebel Without a Crew,” I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is just like this steroid injection of creative freedom into your veins. It’s amazing.
And so at that time, before Blu-rays, before DVDs, there were laserdiscs. And so I saw Desperado. I was like, “This is amazing. Who is this guy?” I got the laserdisc of El Mariachi from our public library, and on there, there’s a commentary where he tells you how he did all the things. And so much of it had to do with careful planning and editing about how he pulled off all of the action stuff in that. As I was hearing these sorts of tricks, I was applying them in my head to our project.
Very directly inspired by Robert Rodriguez, we went back and sort of augmented what we had. And at that point, I was getting older, and so I started to make it more and more directly from the sort of gritty pages of O’Barr’s graphic novel. But, you know, I didn’t really think about that until the last couple of months when I was re-watching his films and rereading that book. But yeah, he had a tremendous impact on not only the sort of the approach that we took to our no-budget filmmaking, but also just in the message of empowerment that he preaches to this day, and I’m so grateful to that guy, and still so inspired by his example.
How did you and Matt Jackson meet?
Ullman: He was a year behind me in school, and we had a friend in common, who was my only friend at the time, a dude named Steve. And so Matt was friends with Steve, and I was friends with Steve, and Matt lived right by Steve. Sometimes, I would go over to Steve’s house, and when you’re that age, a one-year difference seems like so much.
So, then I’m like, “This younger red-headed guy is encroaching on my time with my friend!” and so I didn’t like him at first, and he probably didn’t like me, and I can’t remember what it was that sort of switched, but, eventually we became inseparable, and I didn’t hang out with Steve at all, and we were just like best friends from like age 10 through, I mean, in some ways, I still think of him that way. He’s lived in Europe the better part of the last 15 years, or at least, so I don’t see him as much.
We played club soccer together; When Batman (1989) came out, I was totally obsessed with that, and we would ride our bikes and pretend that we were in that movie, [like] where he speaks into little things, like shields and then they go over the Batmobile. And at some point, that kind of just playing around as kids grew into playing around with cameras, and that sort of persisted. It was not that long of a window, though. Like, maybe 1992 we started playing around and made something really jokey that we called “Illusions” that was completely based around how you’d hit stop [on a camera], and the person in the frame would step out of the frame, and then when you started the camera again, it would seem like they disappeared. We made like two hours worth of shorts that summer.
And in 1993, we made these three action movies that were not necessarily meant to be a comedy. One of them was, you know, “Lethal Weapon 4 and a Half,” we called it, before actual Lethal Weapon 4 came out. But even then, we were essentially ripping off Loaded Weapon One, which was a spoof of Lethal Weapon that had come out in ‘93. So that probably came out in January, and by the summer, we were doing our own version of that. But then we did one called “A Dying Breed,” which was kind of a modern– at that time in 1993– retelling of For a Few Dollars More.
That one was not meant to be funny. But, Matt and I were playing every part, just like dressing up and making use of the tripod, so we could both be in the frame. And again, kind of like the Frankenstein thing, I don’t know if anybody could follow it or who this was for, but I was so into it. And we were kind of making these projects and we’d show our friends or whatever.
But then the following year, we were kind of prepping a new spoof, because we realized that “A Dying Breed” was not very effective. So we wanted to do something where we play characters our own age, like high school kids, and stuff like that. And so we were kind of working on something like that when we saw The Crow, and that movie was so exciting at that time. I mean, it still is, but I don’t think it could be overstated how influential the visuals of that movie were. I saw it a couple of months before turning 15, and it really just opened my world up, especially once I got the book, the soundtrack, and all of that. It just felt like I went from being a kid to wanting to be an adult, or feeling much more mature than perhaps I was. And it was actually Matt’s idea that we should do our own version of that.
At first, I resisted it because I just couldn’t conceive how we could do that. We’d done very few scenes even at night, and it was all just so mature and our first few months were on par with those other silly projects that we did. Everything was like in a couple of different rooms in this basement, and it was all just terrible and laughable, but I think every once in a while we would film a scene that really kind of worked, or gave us enough of a taste of like, “Oh, maybe we could make this better.” So we’d go back and re-film those other scenes. And the very final scene in the movie where Eric returns to his grave, I actually didn’t know what the end of that book was until 1998 when I was finishing the edit, but that scene is actually from our very first 20-minute tape. So it was a fake rain machine, and it was just on the side of my house. But something about those little effective moments just started to build on each other, and then that kind of persisted for four years.
Because you guys were young with very little access to equipment, how did you manage learning as you go?
Ullman: My memories are so colored by having made or finished that documentary; I don’t remember as much as the moments that weren’t captured on tape. While we were filming with my parents’ little handy cam Matt started to carry around these environments [we created]. [But,] everything you see happened, so it wasn’t like we had the ability to composite images, green screen, or anything like that. He was filming, I guess, this behind the scenes stuff and I didn’t know who we thought that was for– I guess just for ourselves. I think looking back, through that behind the scenes footage, it does seem kind of insane what we were doing. But, I don’t know how much that really registered to me at the time. I think I was just so excited about the material that we were getting, the high of certain scenes that came out well. One of the ones that stands out to me is the end, but that happened in that first year of filming, most of the people in front of the camera were just friends of ours who had no interest in acting, and were all matured early, and I think passed for older from a pretty young age. So, I think that works in the movie’s favor.
But, I think some of the other characters who were aging at a more conventional rate had higher pitch voices and stuff, and some of them change over the course if they have multiple scenes. There is the guy that plays T-Bird, and this was not the first person who played T-Bird, because we just kept replacing people, and a lot of times, we weren’t replacing the actors as much as we wanted to film it differently in a different space, and in a more sophisticated way. The guy that ultimately played T-Bird was a year or two ahead of me in high school– and he could drive, he had a car. I think it also helped that the graphic novel is smaller in scale in some ways than a big Hollywood movie. It didn’t have the church at the end, which I imagine to be pretty influenced by the end of the ‘89 Batman, incidentally.
In the comic, Eric and Shelly are killed on a deserted country road; we could easily find a deserted country road, and I think one evening in March, after filming some of the interior scenes with T-Bird, we just drove down to some– they might have been apartment buildings. But, this was something we would sometimes do, ‘cause our town was small, it had a factory on Industrial Street, and that is where you see a lot of the shots of Eric walking alone, and a lot of the more urban environments were right around that area. We would walk up to buildings like those, up on a fire escape just without talking to anybody, and just like try to shoot our scene and go.
And so we did some of that with T-Bird– there was a fair amount of improv, but he was a guy that was in a lot of student theater productions, so he was very interested in acting and very good at it compared to, you know, the rest of us. That’s one of my stronger scenes, because I had such a great scene partner. It was so exciting and cathartic to have this climactic scene where I’m shaking this guy by his lapels and screaming in his face, and he’s spitting blood back at me. And I think those kinds of moments were so exhilarating that all of the times that things didn’t work out, I was just thinking about the next time– that it would come together in that way. And I think that was probably what helped push things through.
I think doing this for me probably changed my brain, and I think it gave me an ability to I think I learned a certain measure of patience and perseverance, because we ultimately did get somewhere. I think knowing like we did this on this level, maybe it would have been a healthier thing for me if we moved on to something original after that first year, but, you know, hindsight 2020, and I guess we wouldn’t be here talking about this if I had done that.
I’m about 10 years into working on a personal documentary that I’m creating that centers around my experience as an independent musician, and also being from a musical family. My dad and uncle grew up with deaf parents, but started to play in garage bands in the 60s, and they taught us, and it kind of carried my younger brother, who actually did some of the music uh the score music for the The Crow much later in that four-year period, because when we first started, he was like 12 (laughs). I thought it might be helpful with this new work to kind of create a history of the other projects like this.
I cut together a trailer [for Inertia]– it’s kind of a longer trailer, because I thought it would be all anyone ever saw. I showed it to my wife, and after the montage of all the insane things, like taping firecrackers to the end of guns, and throwing my fist through windows, standing in front of a burning house, and trying to create the bar with a chainsaw, cutting 2x4s that we found in the attic. And when the the trailer was over, my wife just looked at me. At this point, we’ve been together somewhere between 15 and 20 years. But she just looked at me, she goes, “That’s so f***ed up.” I was like, “Yeah, I guess it probably was.” But nowadays, you can put something like that on YouTube or social media. But, I think putting that on my website is what led to the Lunchmeat folks unearthing the project, and really bringing it to a larger audience.
What inspired the decision to film in black-and-white?
Ullman: I think it was an interview from [Brandon Lee], where he’s like, “I would have loved to have made this in black and white, maybe with the color, maybe with the flashbacks in color.” It was just like a quick aside that he says, and I remember too, he’s like, “But due to the realities of the movie business, we weren’t given the opportunity to do that.” So I was very conscious of a lot of those choices that they were making.
There was a point where I sent some scenes and a little video explaining what we were doing to Kitchen Sink, and they sent back a nice handwritten letter about, “Oh, this is this is neat.” They didn’t say cute, but I’m sure it was non-threatening to them, that they didn’t have a problem with it, you know? So we were just doing what we wanted to do. When I heard that, I thought it sounded really cool. And I think at first, we had no means to make it black and white. It was a choice later on that we made.
Funny enough, there were three rough cuts that I put together at home working things out. I got to where I could get frame-accurate if I could listen to the motors. I don’t remember the number of frames, but I’d stop at a certain point, and then I’d step back. I’m gonna say 32 frames, and then I’d hit the play, pause on the other, and I could get within a 30th of a second– I got so good at it. However, in the top corner, it would say play, and I couldn’t turn it off. So I’m like, “I gotta find somewhere else to cut this together.”
And that’s how I eventually found the public access center. But what was unexpected is with the sort of professional, or at least consumer gear, there was no way to take the color out, other than to turn down the brightness and the contrast. So already, a movie that was recorded by candle light half the time, and with no sophisticated lighting became much harder to see. So in the early tapes that were distributed and available until 2020 when we remastered it and gave it to Lunchmeat for YouTube, like you could barely see anything, because there was no easy way to make it black and white.
But, we were inspired by some things that they would have liked to have done with the movie that were more in line with the book, because the book is in black and white, and the flashbacks– they’re not in color, but they have kind of a different art style, more dreamy; but I think the idea is that the color flashbacks are Eric’s real life– the main character, as opposed to when he was killed and all that. It’s like the life was drained out of him, hence the black and white. Plus, it’s a very black and white idea. They did wrong. I’m going to kill them. It really suits our teenage mindset, too. And that was something that I learned later.
I think when the special edition DVD first came out for The Crow, City of Angels, and I think Salvation, there was a profile of James O’Barr just drawing in his basement and being interviewed. And I think in that interview, I learned that it was around the age of 16 that he met, you know, his Shelly, and that by 18, they were engaged and she was killed by a drunk driver. Even though it would take him like a decade to realize the book, it was written about his teenage romance. And I think there’s something central to those very sort of basic and primal themes, and sort of romanticized versions of love and justice as vengeance.
How did you go about depicting the more graphic scenes from the comic?
Added context: ‘The Crow’ depicts scenes of murder, sexual assault and self-mutilation.
Ullman: Nowadays, people are much more sensitive. There weren’t things like trigger warnings back then. I still have to remind myself that I should probably say something like that in these cinema events coming up. I think it was just so single-minded, and probably very selfish in my pursuits. Looking back, I realized how much I didn’t even include Matt in some of the things I was doing, like that scene I mentioned between Eric and T-Bird.
At the end for us was a reworking of the end of the book, which was a much bigger massacre and there’s a big car crash, and I wrote a version that we could do, but it wasn’t a surprise to Matt sometimes. He’s like, “Oh, you wrote a scene. Okay, I thought this was like our thing.” But so I was just so absorbed in it that I never really questioned should we do this or that.
The death of Eric and Shelly, we did not do that at all in the first version. It wasn’t until probably the latter part of it, we didn’t even curse or anything like that– going through that process showing our parents that first version. By the time I was older, and there’s some of this conflict, I guess I kind of didn’t care. I just wanted to do it as close to the book as we could. So I rarely thought, “Should we do this or that?” It was more “could we,” like physically, practically, could we pull it off? And if so, I always wanted to try. We did that scene a couple of times. I did it at least once with Matt’s handheld camera. I think there’s a bit in the documentary where Matt’s talking to the camera like, “Dave’s over there trying to get himself to cry,” and you can hear me off the side. I’m like, “Okay, I’m ready.” And he turns off the camera (laughs). I don’t remember crying in front of my friend much, but we did do that scene at least one time, the two of us. I think most of what is in the finished project is a locked off shot of just me by myself, so that I could take all the time I needed to get to that emotional place.
Another thing that I’ve realized over time, like I mentioned, I went on to really focus on being a musician from 2005 to 15. So probably age 26 to 36, that was my primary. But it was a little too folk for rock, and a little too rock for folk– you know, kid of the 90s. I was doing my version of “MTV Unplugged” every chance I got.
I mention that, because I’m working on this documentary about that called “The Furious Light,” and I think it’s about the sort of irrepressible creative energy that artists feel, and that if you don’t have the opportunity to make it your career, how do you find a place for that in your in your life? And I think those big emotional scenes in the movies, and the big emotional music I would make, I love to sing out and perform passionately. And I’ve had to think about it a lot over the years. I think that at the time when I was growing up, and for whatever reason, whatever thing about me or my surroundings, I didn’t feel like I could express my big emotions to anyone.
So I found, subconsciously, early on, that I could put those feelings into a performance, and it gave them a place to exist in a socially acceptable context. Even if it was pushing those boundaries with the sort of taboo things we were doing in The Crow movie, it still was somehow more acceptable to me. Obviously, you can’t go around assaulting people, or you ought not to mutilate yourself, but I think it just kind of gave me a context to allow for those big emotions. I guess it is pretty disturbing, but I was going to say it seemed healthy to me at the time, but now, probably not.
Where can we find your music?
Ullman: Most of it’s on streaming. I made three full-length records under my name, David Ullman. The albums are “Dog Days,” “Light the Dark,” and “The Furious Light,” which happens to be the name of the documentary as well. And because I was so unknown, I was like, “Nobody knows about this record. Maybe they’ll find out about it because of the movie. But yeah, it’s all out there, and it’s also all linked on my website davidullman.net. I hadn’t played for 10 years at all, until just last weekend.
One of the players in the movie, there’s the scene where Tom Tom is killed. That scene is kind of interesting for a couple of reasons; one of which is the younger kid that Tom Tom and Skank are menacing uh is my younger brother Brian, who is actually a much more accomplished musician than me, and performs the music that you hear in the self-mutilation and melancholy scenes. But the guy who gets his head cut off, Skank, is my friend Sean. And Sean and I would go on to play music together. And I just played at his CD release party in South Dakota, both he and I for the first time in many years. He’s a law professor now, just last weekend.
It’s like those sort of early creative relationships were so formative for me, that I have fought to maintain them as I’ve grown older, because it’s just so nourishing, and I think the older you get, if it’s not your career, it can be so hard to make space for this kind of thing.
Because you looked so much like Brandon Lee in costume, have you ever dressed up as The Crow for any other occasion?
Ullman: (Laughs) No. I was such an obnoxiously serious young person. I’m like, “This is not Halloween for me!” I might have talked about this in the documentary, but when we went to see The Crow opening night, the experience of seeing it was like nothing I’d ever encountered. And part of that, there was somebody with half their face painted up, and there was so little of that kind of thing that we now think of so commonly as cosplay, at least where I was from. Maybe I would have, there just weren’t really any opportunities.
And I spent so long focused on this, that when I eventually was able to move on, the last thing I wanted to do was put on the makeup. Plus, most of what you see in the film is me from like 15 to 18. So those are great years for a high metabolism. And so I went for a good period, especially with the music and stuff. I would spend so much time in bars and drinking. I just got like, you know, bloated. And nobody wants to see a chubby Eric, right? (Laughs) I don’t know. That sounds terrible to say it out loud. But, I’ve never done it otherwise, and I might have to take care of myself these days, but I still don’t know if I would have the courage to do it.
Will there be more screenings of ‘Interia’ in the future?
Ullman: There are no other plans, but both of those screenings seem to come from other screenings. The home video release of Inertia from Lunchmeat in 2022 made the whole thing available, and for me, I prefer to lead with the documentary, because things are a bit more lenient these days, it seems. But, once upon a time, I did get a cease and desist from Miramax being, “You can’t be doing what you’re doing,” but I’m like, “But I’m not making any money.” And they’re like, “Well, we don’t care. You got to stop all this right now.”
So, I have an uneasy relationship with the adaptation. It is not a thing you’re supposed to do, like I had no permission. I mean, I had the Kitchen Sink thing. It was kind of nice, but I don’t know. And it’s worked out ultimately very well over time. But, uh, even just the sort of thing where I don’t really want it to say in my obituary, “Cosplayed as The Crow for so many years.” But, the documentary I’m much more comfortable with, because I like the themes that it’s about in terms of creativity and coming of age. Plus, that’s my life. That is my story. I feel like I can share that.
But, at the beginning of it, to help set the scene, there’s a fair amount of news coverage of Brandon Lee’s death. I put that together when I was 21 or 22. And looking at it now, I just, man, I don’t know. It’s harder to watch. It feels kind of exploitive. I don’t feel great about that. I don’t pursue a lot with this. I’ve just been lucky that these things have happened at all. When I remastered the movie from the original source tapes in 2020 to make it available, the only reason I really wanted to make it available and stuff for free is because to this day, you can buy bootlegs– and they looked terrible. I mean, I bought one in 2000, and I just like the idea that you could see it if you’re going to seek it out, that you could watch it for free, and that it could look as good as possible. But I took all the credits off of it. And while I link it from my website, I’m much more interested in people seeing it without necessarily knowing my name behind it, if that makes sense.
I’m psyched for the opportunity to share with anybody that cares. But, I think for me, the documentary is something I could make it better now, but I’m still proud that I did it back then, and I like the idea that it can help set the stage for the work I’ve been making for the last decade, so that when I’m trying to get screenings of that, it’ll be less out of left field or something. I don’t know if that makes sense. I suppose if there were other offers that were on the up and up, I would love that. But as of now, it’s just these two in October 2025. But, I do now have a DCP, so for exhibitors, that’s a digital cinema package. And I didn’t have that before, so I could send it to cinemas.
Do you have any words of wisdom or encouragement for any aspiring filmmakers or actors?
Ullman: Oh man. Well, I would caution people who are intrigued by the fan film part of it to be cautious about that. I get it. If you’re lit up about something and you want to do it, get after it. But, I think if you’re of that mindset, if you just tweak your idea ever so slightly, that would mean it could open up opportunities so much more. Trust yourself that you also have good ideas. I think there’s something to be said in hindsight about the kind of “go do it” attitude that we had. I didn’t know enough to think we couldn’t do it at first when I was like, “No, no, no,” but my buddy was like, “No, we could. Let’s try it.” So we tried things, and I think just taking those steps– I’m not really somebody who regrets a lot, but I think the only things I regret are things I didn’t do or try. And I do encounter people who just feel like everything has to be perfect, but for them to take that first step, it might be a Robert Rodriguez thing where he’s just like, “You’re never ready. Don’t wait till you’re ready. And don’t tell yourself all the excuses you’re telling yourself to not do the thing you want to do.”
I think if you want to make a movie, it’s never been easier. And it might not be great out of the get-go, but you know, I’m definitely a testament to just keeping at it, and maybe re-film some things as you get a little wiser– or better yet, apply those to your next project. There’s so much joy to be had in it. If it’s something you really want to do, don’t get in your own way. Just get started.
I’ve been able to collaborate with a writer named Benjamin Percy, who’s written novels like Red Moon, but he also writes comics for Marvel like Wolverine, and he’s writing this Predator series as well. And to me, he’s exactly my same age, but he’s so much more traditionally accomplished. When you actually hear him tell the stories of what led to those things, each one of them, each incremental step in his career as a writer was the result of a failure of some type or other. The idea though is that you just can’t let these failures stop you or discourage you enough to stop pursuing the thing that you want to do.
I think for certain creative people that energy just burns within them, and I think it has to have an outlet, otherwise it’ll kind of burn you up, and it can kind of turn to bitterness. I think it’s so important just to make sure that you’re honoring that part of yourself that wants to do the things, and maybe if you can’t do it in exactly the way that you want to, maybe it’s just the universe telling you to pivot slightly to whatever that thing actually needs to be, or the right time for it. Even this weird thing that I did as a teenager, just because of a different time and context, has an audience that’s still minuscule that I couldn’t have dreamed of back then. Not being afraid of failure– fail quickly and move forward– fail forward, if you will, is probably another bit of advice that I’m trying to take myself. Fail big, and let people wonder why you’re still sticking around smiling.
Madole: David, remind us where can people see Inertia: Re-Making The Crow?
Ullman: You can get Inertia: Re-Making The Crow, which is the story of the four years my friend and I spent in the mid 90s, making as best we could, a panel-for-panel adaptation of James O’Barr’s iconic graphic novel. You can either see that in person in October 2025 in either Minneapolis at the Trylon Cinema on October 8th, in Philadelphia at the PhilaMOCA on October 16th. And then you can get it on tape from lunchmeatvhs.com– It’s limited. Hopefully, there’s still copies whenever this comes out.
And then on the Lunchmeat VHS YouTube channel, you can stream, for free, the adaptation of the graphic novel. Watch it on YouTube. It’s never looked better or been more accessible. Don’t buy those bootlegs, please (laughs). It’s a love letter to a really extraordinary book, and a bit of a homage to the iconic film.
