Will Elliott Director Beef and Sage

If information technology weren't for bad weather and bad traffic, loftier schoolhouse stoner comedy 4:xx Austin High would never have happened. In 2009, producer and star Mike Wilson was trying to go to the Austin City Limits Music Festival. "I was trapped in traffic outside of Austin Loftier Schoolhouse. I wasn't going anywhere for a while, and my mind started wandering. I looked at the sign and thought, 'Austin High. That'd be a great proper name for a stoner comedy.'" Warning: Wilson and Austin ISD would similar to point out that the motion picture's hazy and wholly fictional Lady Bird High School is in no fashion based on the real Austin Loftier. When the script started causing ructions in 2010, Wilson says, "The schoolhouse board was very diplomatic and said that we consider entertainment to be entertainment."

Austin High, which is directed by Alan Deutsch, lit up screens at the 2011 Austin Film Festival. Now renamed four:20 Austin High, it blazes and lazes its way onto VOD, iTunes, and Netflix on April 20. (There will besides be select local screenings; see Special Screenings.) Wilson hopes information technology volition sit alongside other smoky Austin classics similar Slacker and Dazed and Confused. While he was inspired by that duo, he wanted to exercise more than only mimic them. "Those films are really old at present," he said. "No one's done a film about the Austin that I know. And so I started thinking well-nigh all the wonderful things that could represent contemporary Austin and what people love nearly it."

A native son of Shreveport, La., Wilson made the groovy expedition to Austin via Dallas as part of a heavy-hit career in the video game manufacture. He besides dabbled in indie movies, acting in a scattering of short films and earning his first producer credit for 2005's Burning Homo: Across Black Rock. Even though he was not looking for another film project, by the time he had cleared that rough patch of traffic, he already had a rough idea of a cinematic Austin where "anybody is like, 'Oh, I do this in the daytime, but I play banjo on the steps of Güerro'south every Wednesday night.'" Past the time he left ACL, he and his friends had already sketched out a script nigh pedicabs, bar bands, Hippie Hollow, and a lot of weed. "The idea, the basic plotline, and the greenish low-cal all came within virtually 20 minutes," Wilson says. He even got a financial backer at an impromptu pitch coming together. "Of form, I let the guy off the hook twenty times," he adds. After all, this isn't just a run-of-the-factory, like shooting fish in a barrel-to-deal stoner comedy: While Wilson wanted to make people laugh, he even so wanted to comment on these strange days, when "Keep Austin Weird" is beingness used to sell the very condos that many feel make Austin less weird. For Wilson, that art vs. investment boxing "is interesting not because it's in Austin but because information technology's happening all over the globe all of the time."

But if Austin's famous for anything, it'southward filmmakers who never finish a movie: Then much and then that the script crams in such a failed effigy. But Wilson had Kirk Johnson and Volition Elliott, aka one-act shorts creators Beef & Sage, to make sure the Zilker Park pitch didn't become a piping dream. Calling them "conspicuously amazingly talented," Wilson says, "If I didn't have them around and know how terribly funny and hardworking they are, I never would have attempted such a feat." They helped him form the initial, sprawling concept into something filmable, and came back in for the final edit. They even so kept to the screwball tradition of rabbit hole subplots, but it'south a lot leaner than the original upkeep-busting draft with its 55 speaking roles and 35 locations. Wilson says, "The next film will have four characters and a house."

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Source: https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2012-04-20/whats-the-buzz/