Caroline Thompson: Small & Creepy is In

Above the littered streets of steel - past the paved hopes for things that cemented and cracked long ago - stands a sign, caving and corroded:[“Hollywood”]. The nine letters cast a jagged shadow on their bastard city.

“That’s why Small & Creepy was born. We feel that Hollywood is over. It’s so over.” This is Caroline Thompson. She is sitting in a red booth at a diner in Studio City. The smell of pancakes and maple syrup has taken over. Her hands folded. One finger climbing on top of the other. Sometimes they rise up into the air when she is describing something passionately, like her new company, Small & Creepy Films. Other times the hands reach for a glass of orange juice, or a fork. Those are the hands that wrote Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Secret Garden, Black Beauty, and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. Those are the hands. She is the one.

Last night, Caroline accompanied her husband and business partner, producer Steve Nicolaides, who also knows the business well, to the premiere of Disney’s Beverly Hills Chihuahua. She cites the film as an example of the descent of Hollywood, pointing towards a clear need for a new direction in film. “Everyone involved in the post-production of that movie will say that they’ve never seen a movie more made by committee. The 200 idiots in ‘wherever’ would say, ‘Well, we don’t understand how…” and they would go back and re-shoot because of what the studio audience said, or the studio executive. The director was just a Yes Man. The movie is not a mess because it is based on the time-honored classic formula of trying-to-get-home despite being chased, but the movie should be a disaster because of the way it was created. There is just no voice behind it.”

Hollywood lost its keys. Its keepers’ inability to open the door into the minds of the lonely and misunderstood led to the conception of Small & Creepy Films. “Steve and I both have just gotten really tired of the lack of passion, the lack of voice, the lack of imagination, the lack of…all these feelings of lack in what Hollywood is producing and feeling. So here is this whole new medium for showcasing work.”

The new portal is a website that welcomes others of like minds with open arms, and the arms stretch out wide. Small & Creepy Films unveils work from filmmakers as close as Brooklyn, but as far as Eastern Europe. A personal favorite is Dialogos, created by Ulo Pikkov, an Associate Professor in the animation department at the Estonian Academy of the Arts. The site invites viewers to “Imagine Franz Kafka, Henry Miller and the Brothers Grimm collaborated on an idea, and Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso animated it…” Smile as you wipe the dirt off your knees. Other content on the site includes a stop-motion animation piece entitled Sproessling, which takes a touching approach towards the possible beauty and inevitable dangers of genetic engineering. Small & Creepy Films blends the questions of the everyday with the discernible absurd. Evan York’s premiere series The Dream Machine for instance, documents dreams. Each subconscious stage is narrated by the dreamer, and then animated by Evan. Freud would be proud.

Caroline stresses that as a curator, she loves all her Small & Creepy babies just the same. If she didn’t love a film, it wouldn’t be there. “People who share our sensibility know exactly that they found their home when they get there. If they love the weird, the outside, the home-made. If they feel, ‘I don’t belong anywhere’...This is where they belong. How do you describe that? You love the grotesque, you love the beautiful, and you love the sweet.”

Small & Creepy is a home for those who don’t know what home is. Caroline originally considered mobile distribution for her independent feature The Hills Are Alive. “It didn’t happen primarily because the technology hadn’t caught up, and the few places that seemed likely to buy The Hills Are Alive…it all just looked like Hollywood bullshit. It was just more of the same – give up your baby and get nothing in return – so I said, ‘No. I don’t want to do that.’ That sort of inspired the idea of doing our own website.” The Hills Are Alive can be seen on Small & Creepy as a 28-episode web series, cut into 2 to 4 minute chapters. “It just broke itself up. To me, work is always like that. Just get out of the fucking way and let it happen, whatever it is. It’s when you get in your own way that things get dull. I think these movie executives, their fucking brains are in their way. Egos, brains, they’re just in the way.”

The new path is paved. The dust of Hollywood has risen and fallen. The ashes lie on the shoulders of the studios. Small & Creepy strongly believes in the Internet as the future of all movie distribution. Steps towards becoming a production entity could send a trail up in flames. When that happens, who knows? Small & Creepy Films follow their noses. A compilation DVD featuring their current films will be available soon through the online store, and Caroline and Steve are accepting submissions for features as well as shorts.

Rip open the envelope. Read the small print. This is your formal invitation. Come in. “Our greatest desire is to inspire people to make the stuff they really want to make, and know they have a home for it. I feel like our site needs to evolve so that there is a greater sense of community, but I think the sensibility is now really clear to people.”