Two former local television personalities have parlayed their talents into an area of filmmaking that Hollywood has virtually ignored in recent years - the family market.
Craig Clyde, known to local entertainment-watchers as an actor, TV host, radio personality and commercial voice, and former KSL-TV sportscaster Don Judd have recently produced new feature films aimed at families. And their first made-in-Utah movies have been released directly to video.The result is that Clyde's Majestic Entertainment and Judd's Feature Films for Families have become mini-industries in the past few years.
"Emphasis on mini," says Clyde of his own company.
- CRAIG CLYDE is a prolific creative force, but in recent years he's been out of the spotlight. Short industrial films not seen by the general public have been his main occupation.
But this year Clyde has finally seen his lifelong ambition of writing and directing mainstream features become reality.
His first, the very low-budget "Little Heroes," shot on 16mm film, was released directly to video this month and is doing very well in rental stores. His second, with a larger budget (though still minuscule by Hollywood standards) and shot on 35mm, is "The Legend of Wolf Mountain." That film is currently in post-production and will be released theatrically in February or March before making its way to video.
But being an independent filmmaker who stretches shoestring budgets isn't what makes Clyde unique. After all, there are ambitious moviemakers all over the country who beat the odds and make personal films every year.
Clyde is unique because he just wants to stick with family films. "There's a huge market for family pictures right now," Clyde says. "We've really been lucky that way."
After years of working in the local entertainment scene, which included small roles in dozens of movies, Clyde did take a stab at making it in Hollywood. While parking cars in an underground garage and house-sitting other people's homes, he landed a job as a "script doctor" for producer Fred Weintraub at MGM.
Eventually, Weintraub bought one of Clyde's "doctored" scripts, "China O'Brien," as a showcase for karate expert Cynthia Rothrock. Clyde didn't get screen credit and the film never played in this country theatrically, but it became a hit in Europe and subsequently was successful as an American video release. It even led to a sequel. And Clyde's work on that film led to other formula screenplay work - with credit.
Still, Clyde says he couldn't get Utah out of his blood. When Weintraub wanted to shoot "China O'Brien" in Yugoslavia, Clyde talked him into scouting locations in the Beehive State. Weintraub liked what he saw and made the film here.
But Clyde wasn't happy churning out R-rated action pictures, and his family-oriented material was repeatedly snubbed by Weintraub and other Hollywood moguls. So Clyde returned to Utah and began making industrial films, which demonstrated his talent to investors who came to believe in his feature-film potential.
"Little Heroes," released on video this month, sold twice as many rental copies as expected, and Clyde says he is courting TV offers from Ted Turner's TNT station and the Family Channel.
The budget of "The Legend of Wolf Mountain" is nearly four times that of "Little Heroes," and this time there are some recognizable names in the cast - Mickey Rooney, Bo Hopkins and local actor Don Shanks.
Both films were shot in and around Tooele with Utah crews and cast-members.
Meanwhile, Clyde is acting in his 37th film, a substantial part in the TV production "In the Line of Duty: Standoff at Marion," currently shooting in Midway. "I don't say much, but it's a meaty part in terms of reacting."
And he's gearing up for his next writing-directing effort, "Native Honor," inspired by experiences growing up on a Washington reservation. It will, naturally, be filmed locally.
- DON JUDD is president of Feature Films for Families, a company that began with telemarketing, selling family-oriented videos through phone and mail orders, and is now shooting its own straight-to-video movies.
Judd and company have made a mark in the market hawking such familiar family-oriented films as "Where the Red Fern Grows," "Against a Crooked Sky," "On Our Own" and the public domain classics "It's a Wonderful Life" and "The Inspector General," among others.
But Feature Films for Families is so strict with its own in-house production code that even some of those films have felt the editor's knife to remove potentially offensive material. "Our company is cause-oriented. We attempt to strengthen traditional values through entertainment and will always be message-oriented," Judd says. "We took profanity out of `Baker's Hawk,' for example."
He adds, "Our intent is to show other producers that they are ignoring a huge market." A market, Judd says, that wants its household entertainment squeaky clean. And Feature Films' experience shows that his instincts have been correct.
"We've been doing business since February of 1990. We started with 12 employees and now we're up to maybe 200. We're the fastest growing distributor of motion pictures in the country. We have an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 new customers a month. Our customer base is over 500,000. We sold our 1 millionth video this year, and now we're being cloned by other organizations trying to copy us.
"But we don't think that's a bad thing, because our intent is to provide a choice to families, and to have others do the same thing means we've accomplished something."
With a catalog of about a dozen films, and disappointment at every turn in attempts to beef up the selection, Judd and crew began making their own movies.
The first was "In Your Wildest Dreams," a modest production filmed locally, which became quite successful within the confines of the company's telemarketing procedures. And just completed is the company's second film, the more ambitious "The Butter Cream Gang."
Judd says he hopes to complete four more movies during 1992, a surprisingly heavy schedule for a fledgling production company. "That's a lot to do, but if we pull it off we'll be doing more than some of the majors (major Hollywood studios). And we will eventually do theatrical films."
Three of the four '92 movies will definitely be filmed in Utah, according to Judd - one near Camp Williams, another in and around Salt Lake City and a third in the St. George area.