The Long Road From Idea to DVD
By PETER M. NICHOLS, NY Times
Directors love DVD but don't think it replaces movie theaters. "We're going to work so hard and go straight to video? Hell, no," says Gene Cajayon on a disc of "The Debut," his modest, winning first feature, released this week by Columbia TriStar.
Seated around Mr. Cajayon in the behind-the-scenes featurette are a dozen friends and co-workers who piled into their own vehicles and drove across the country distributing and promoting a movie that would earn a very respectable $1.8 million at the box office in 15 cities (and $650,000 more from sweatshirts and other merchandise).
"The Debut," about a young Filipino-American named Ben (Danté Basco) who defies his elders to pursue his own life, has a better "making of" story than most films on DVD. In 1992 Mr. Cajayon, then 20, developed a half-hour film-school project about his own experiences as a child with a Filipino background growing up in the 1980's in Orange County, Calif. The subject proved large enough for a feature, and a 10-year quest began.
In "The Debut" Ben is an aspiring cartoonist who turns down a scholarship at U.C.L.A. and uses his savings to enroll in the California Institute of the Arts. His father (Tirso Cruz III), a postal worker, is furious and his grandfather (Eddie Garcia) disdainful. Like the student short, the movie parallels Mr. Cajayon's own life. He was embarrassed about his heritage. "Young Asian-Americans had no positive role models," he said this week by telephone. "I grew up hating myself."
Like Mr. Cajayon, Ben seeks white friends from the establishment. "Wake up, little brother, you're just as brown as the rest of us," another Filipino-American tells him. Much turmoil shakes the family in a film with a "neat blend of well-drawn major characters and drama, music, dance, romance and humor that generates considerable charm and achieves a heartwarming resolution," Lawrence Van Gelder wrote in The New York Times.
The movie cost a little more than $1 million to make. Mr. Cajayon sought money from affluent Filipino-Americans, but they balked at the depiction of Ben's working-class family. "People were embarrassed that our community was diverse and that there were just as many struggling Filipinos as there were doctors, lawyers and professional people," Mr. Cajayon said this week.
So he raised the money bit by bit over the years.
After a successful screening at an Asian-American film festival in San Francisco, Mr. Cajayon rented a theater himself. As "The Debut" caught on in the Bay Area, his associates fanned out, seeking support and bookings in cities with Filipino-American populations of more than 20,000.
As of Tuesday there is video, but no one can say the movie took the direct route. "I haven't gone into Blockbuster to look at it yet," Mr. Cajayon said.
