‘Freshmen’ Tops the Head of the Class
June 18, 2004
It’s a typical Sunday night at Orchid, one of L.A. Koreatown’s newest hotspots. There’s a bar serving more varieties of martinis than even James Bond would know what to do with, private karaoke rooms upstairs that promise the most up-to-date technology for your singing pleasure, and large TV screens showing the first game of the play-offs as Detroit is about to kick some Lakers butt.
In one corner of the establishment is a young Chinese American filmmaker sitting behind a table with a stack of freshly minted DVDs for sale. The DVD is Freshmen; a low-budget independent film that tells the story of four freshmen as they make their way through their first quarter of college. The filmmaker is Tom Huang –– the director, writer and one of the stars of the film. And he is here to celebrate the recent release of his first feature film on DVD.
Huang made the film a few years back when he himself was still in school. He was a film student at Southern California’s Loyola Marymount University, had already made two short films and was itching to make a feature next. He decided to make the film abo7t something he knew well –– the college experience.
“There are all these college films that, to me, show nothing about the college life I lived,” Huang says. “Most of these films show all these white students who live in these huge four-bedroom dorm rooms where they just seem to party every day. Sure, that goes on, but my breadth of experience was about meeting all these different people and cultures and learning about life by living on my own for the first time.”
Now that he had a story to tell, Huang was faced with another problem. He still had to make his thesis film and wanted to submit Freshmen, but the only problem was that students were not allowed to make feature-length thesis projects. So Huang did what any driven filmmaker would do in his position. He lied.
“I handed my professor a [shortened] 50-page version of the Freshmen script and told him I was doing that for my thesis,” Huang remembers. “I just kind of ended up shooting more footage, enough for a feature. [The professors] weren’t too happy about it when they found out, but let me finish it, which was quite kind of them.”
Nine credit cards worth of debt later, Huang had a completed film that he was ready to share with the world. It eventually played in about 15 film festivals and won a number of awards, including the audience award at Visual Communications’ annual Asian Pacific American filmfest in L.A. But Huang couldn’t find a distributor so he decided to book a theater himself for a one-week run at the Music Hall Theater in Beverly Hills, where it received rave reviews from publications like the Los Angeles Times and Variety.
Eventually, Huang was approached by Greg Hatanaka from Pathfinder Pictures who wanted to release Freshmen on DVD. Huang already knew Hatanaka from the days when Hatanaka ran Phaedra, a distribution company that released the APA films Yellow and Strawberry Fields, and a deal was made.
The DVD also features Cynthia Liu’s short film Red Thread starring The Gilmore Girls’ Keiko Agena and is chock full of a bunch of extras including an audio commentary, trailers and stills from the shoot.
Since finishing Freshmen, Huang has been pursuing a writing and directing career. Last year he worked on the short-lived UPN sitcom The Mullets and is trying to get on another show this season as a writer, but with the soaring popularity of reality shows, sitcom work has become harder than ever to find. In the meantime, he pays the bills by doing freelance editing and has acted in films for other directors. He also has a couple of feature scripts he hopes to shoot soon. One will be shot in Taiwan with a real budget while the other is a low-budget DV project.
As tough as the business is, it’s witnessing how audiences reacted to Freshmen that makes it all worthwhile for Huang.
“Actually seeing people being moved by the film, or getting an e-mail from someone that saw it in Israel on TV and wanted to write me –– it’s what I want to do as a filmmaker: make an honest film that moves people and provokes thought.”
For more info on the film (including where you can purchase the DVD) check out www.freshmenthefilm.com. The DVD is also available for sale at amazon.com or towerrecords.com.
Philip W. Chung is a writer and co-artistic director of Lodestone Theatre Ensemble.
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