could be an expansion of the trailer or a new idea, but either way, it will be slightly longer and more ambitious. As this process repeats over time, the most promising projects will advance, American Idol–like, until ultimately, a group-sanctioned, group-funded feature film will emerge. Thus Scary Cow harnesses the talents of the hive, to use the term of the moment, and the notoriously unwelcoming realm of moviemaking sees a new business model: Jerry Bruckheimer meets Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales.

A director of product marketing at Salesforce.com by day, McConnell has no professional experience in making movies or in running an essentially socialist meritocracy. His is a steamrolling earnestness, sprinkled with the occasional “handy-dandy” or a polite “You guys….” But underneath is a fire for changing the very essence of what the world watches on a Friday night, and who gets the singular, modern satisfaction of creating it.

McConnell goes on to explain Scary Cow’s finer points—the phasing in of new members when they sign up, the renting of an actual theater for the screenings, how that whopping check from Paramount will be equitably divided one day—and then he does what he’ll do again and again for the next year. He steps aside.

The crowd breaks into 13 small groups, determined in advance by McConnell, and former strangers start creating. “I’m thinking of something set on a ship,” says a man named Fernando in one group. “Did you see Crash?” asks a woman with spiky cockatoo hair. “What about a version of that on BART? You know, us all being the same under our skin?”

One pair of young people makes it clear that this may be an endeavor for film lovers, but it’s not necessarily for film devotees. As the Cows offer their initial ideas, the two remove themselves to a corner, where they can be heard dismissing the general level of sophistication. Eventually, they stride purposefully to the door, off to conduct higher-caliber work.

As well they should: This scene is not theirs. As the teams chatter away about locations and story lines, they aren’t driven by film-school precepts or Dogme 95–style zealotry. The atmosphere McConnell is after—competitive yet supportive, challenging yet encouraging—comes not from a high-minded rever-ence for the form, but from something closer to the old punk DIY credos: Learn by doing. Don’t be an aesthete or a perfectionist. Just get it done.

“That punk ethos is very much a socialist ethos, and that’s how I see Scary Cow,” says a tall woman in her late 30s, with dark hair and an intense gaze, who goes by the name xuxE (pronounced zuh-ZA) when she’s with the group. “It’s a communal bootstrapping effort, where you don’t need experience so much as hard work.”

Not all the Cows have alternate identities, but in another sense, xuxE perfectly embodies the Scary Cow ideal. By day a vice president at a San Francisco bank and the mother of two, she has the sort of simmering creativity that’s just barely contained by her buttoned-up

work persona. She signed up not with the hope of becoming the next Jane Campion, but simply to air out her artistic side. Indeed, McConnell isn’t aiming to flood Hollywood with would-be hires; this is a weekend and after-work operation, a secondary pursuit for those whose first doesn’t scratch that itch.

Like many nonfilmmakers who keep a dusty reel of potentially neat scenes in their heads, xuxE has no background in film, or rather, she has the generalized background in film that every American moviegoer has. Perhaps unlike other Americans, xuxE has been pondering the cinematic possibilities of a singing, dancing extraterrestrial. But that must wait. Singing and dancing extraterrestrials exceed the capacity of a two-minute trailer. For now, xuxE and her nine-person team are starting to move toward another idea of hers: a comedy noir called Devious, Inc., about rival fetish agencies.

Over these first two months, the Devious gang and the other 12 teams convene at every free moment. Aside from the occasional prop or bit of minor equipment, the only money they spend is the $50 each person gives to McConnell every month. On a few teams, egos clash and communication breaks down. Most of the participants, though, seem to have incorporated McConnell’s polite, inclusive manner. Boom operators are content to be boom operators; writers accept tweaks to their scripts; directors don’t object to doing menial lighting work.

“Us? Total dream team,” says Samantha Sullivan, a freckled, somewhat Julianne Moore–ish 35-year-old interior designer from Walnut Creek, about the Devious crew. She had thought her day job would make her a good candidate for set decoration, but the team noticed her note-taking and organizational skills and quickly crowned her the producer. “The binder says it all,” says xuxE of Sullivan’s massive notebook. “Maps to locations, release forms, contact info for everyone. I don’t like to look at it. But I believe in it.”

The talent believes in it, too. Actors don’t get much more enthusiastic than Jimmy Rider, 40, a nattily dressed, soft-spoken single father from Oakland who plays the fetish company CEO. Not that he’s oblivious to the barriers between him and a major marquee. Of the world’s A-list actors, very few are African American assistant managers at Washington Mutual. But some sparks aren’t snuffed out by simple odds. “All my life,” says Rider, “I never thought I’d have a chance to be in a movie. At parties, people always say, ‘Jimmy, why are you so quiet?’ But when I get in front of a camera, I’m just alive.”

Eight weeks is a breathtakingly short time in which to make even a two-minute trailer. Of the 13 teams, 3 will fail to meet the deadline. But 10, incredibly, will succeed.

FLASHBACK
In the ’90s, an explosion of indie movies promised to make Hollywood a shiny little footnote in the history of film. A certain number became legend in creative circles and would-be creative circles: $7,000. That is how much director Robert Rodriguez spent to make El Mariachi, his 1992 breakout film, which went on to win

the audience award at Sundance and launched a, well, Hollywood career (Spy Kids, Sin City). Seven thousand dollars? The idea whipped up an irrational exuberance. Mow lawns for a summer, and you’re basically ready to pick out your Oscars ensemble.

Except that the revolution never quite happened as many envisioned. To be sure, the number of indie films now made annually is astonishing—more than the average viewer can see in a lifetime. But far more telling is the number of independent films started each year. Every day, aspiring Rodriguez types learn a heartbreaking lesson: Accessible equipment and all, it’s still almost impossible to make a movie.

Nearly 40 years before Scary Cow came about, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and other young filmmakers set out to circumvent the traditional film system, pooling their money and talents and insisting that Hollywood wasn’t essential to a film’s provenance. Coppola, who set up his company American Zoetrope in North Beach, once remarked, “We had the naïve notion that it was the equipment that would give us the means of production. Of course, we learned much later that it wasn’t the equipment; it was the money.”

Meanwhile, more Maoist-minded and ultimately less sustainable collectives sprouted elsewhere in town. Cine Manifest, a small leftist film co-op, wrote, shot, edited, and distributed its films from a $400-a-month warehouse in SoMa, injecting its politics into its work. In contrast with such groups, McConnell launched Scary Cow out of a kind of pragmatic selfishness. A movie buff since childhood, he wanted to see the warm fuzziness of a community and the efficacy of a solid corporation.

“I remember very clearly asking myself in high school whether I’d go the film route or the business route,” he says. “I chose business, because I knew I’d be able to fund my passions later on. Whereas if I pursued the film path, I’d spend a lot of money going to film school and then come out and not be able to actually make a movie.”

Naturally, McConnell doesn’t just have a vision for uniting weekend Scorseses. He also has a script that he’s been reworking for years. “I was really excited about it, and getting to the point where I could see starting to make it,” he says. “The day came when I turned to my friends and said, ‘Who’s with me?’ They just looked at me and were like, ‘Um, we’d like to watch it, but we don’t exactly have time to make a movie.’”

His film would take a village, McConnell realized. The more he investigated, the more he felt that a village wanted to exist—that a great many people harbored secret fantasies of making, or helping to make, a movie. His message in crafting the Scary Cow appeal went for the gut: “You can spend your precious free time watching Daily Show reruns, or you can make something you’ll be proud of forever.”

MARCH–JUNE 2007
By the time the 10 surviving teams meet at the Mission’s lovably run-down Victoria

Theatre to show their trailers to an audience of friends and curious visitors, the pot has grown to $3,000.

And how are those little films? Awful. Also: wonderful. Future historians who stumble across these works will deduce that our civilization hadn’t yet invented the concept of plot. And this: We had no idea what to do with our hands. But a funny thing happens, watching these creations. A person simultaneously notes the absence of technical perfection and comes to appreciate the endearing human touch. Bad movies can always be explained away as rejections of Hollywood slickness, but with the Scary Cow batch, a refreshing quirkiness often shines through.

“From the acclaimed viewer of 12 Monkeys, The Crying Game, and Deep Throat...” begins the preview for Millennium Man, something about a man at war with an alternate version of himself. In Rewrite, a fictional San Francisco mayor finds himself in a Fatal Attraction–like nightmare with a spurned lover who begins to magically revise the happier aspects of his life. Blood Monkey doesn’t seem to be a preview so much as a behind-the-scenes discussion of what the preview might have been.

For its part, the trailer for Devious, Inc., the film about the rival fetish agencies, is indecipherable. Periodically and inexplicably, Rider growls, “Bitch” at a rival. Someone prods a bound man in the face with a pepperoni. A pair of women’s feet changes shoes multiple times. If the short film were your teenage son, you’d suspect him of moderate to heavy drug use. And yet a promising energy emanates from the peculiar core. The impression is that of absolute novices who, overflowing with spirit, simply didn’t get around to adding any sense. Sense, by extension, might just be some bourgeois hang-up. The weirder, more neurotic visions that generally get test-marketed out of mainstream entertainment have carte blanche here.

Still, though hardly polished, the entries that take away the first round’s prizes don’t exactly eschew the Hollywood model. Forget Me Not teases the story of a widowed father and his daughter, who seems to grow dangerously obsessed with bringing her mother back to life. Indivisible, a taut thriller, involves a Department of Homeland Security investigation into a teacher at a local elementary school. Exciting as it is to observe trackable plots, these more traditional approaches raise a key question: Is Scary Cow a way to make different types of movies, or a different way to make more or less the same old mass-appeal films? Some critics are already wondering if a vote-based system, in which the entire community has the power to advance a film, will ultimately water down the creative process. Can a singular vision coexist with the need to appeal to large numbers of people?

Director Greg Harrison, who made the 2000 rave film Groove in San Francisco with a limited cooperative model (the film’s success sent him to Hollywood), notes that

a communal spirit can work wonderfully on a low-budget project. “But taken too far, it can do a disservice to the film,” he says. “Collectivism can mean just a crunchier version of death by committee, which is the very thing that often happens at the studio level.”

To discuss communal promotion of a creation is to discuss the very future of popular art. In the years since YouTube and other Web 2.0 offerings began honing their community-determined ranking systems, visibility—of a video, an essay or reported story, any online content—has become inseparable from popularity. So far, the model has been remarkably accommodating of quirkiness. At Scary Cow, “there are definitely people interested in mass-appeal movies. You see films that look like they’re basically emulating Hollywood,” says Aaron Newman, a program manager at a biotech company who is working on a documentary about the prospects for a U.S. attack on Iran. “But there are also sci-fi musicals and documentaries like the one I’m working on. There seems to be room for both.”

For all its chaotic, irrational splendor, Devious, Inc., takes home no prize money in this first round. No matter. XuxE, the team’s self-declared auteur, has an even more audacious idea. At the next script meeting, she brings in her son’s SpongeBob SquarePants boom box and plays a song that somehow articulates her singing-extraterrestrial vision. The group, which has stayed fairly intact since Devious, Inc., decides that it’ll put its money and effort toward making Space Man into a 10-minute film for the next round.

The group begins to form a story: part drama, part science fiction, part musical. XuxE wants to get at the existential loneliness of a new arrival on our planet. She wants to get at it without dialogue, with reggae and pop punk and a wandering band of jumpsuited musicians. The team begins to discuss finding locations and friends who can be called on for favors. Rachel McGraw, 30, a blond and sunny new Scary Cow member who runs a pet-care business in El Cerrito—and has a camera—comes aboard as director of photography. Space Man is under way.

So are nine other films. The group has grown from 70 to 90, and the new members have joined up with existing teams to make the next round of films. Those continuing now have twice the experience they had in the first round. Some set out to expand on their trailers, with the idea of inching toward a feature. Others choose to make discrete, fully formed shorts. Those teams now seem aware of the genre’s potential; after all, critical and box-office successes like Bottle Rocket, Napoleon Dynamite, Meet the Parents, and Raising Victor Vargas all got their start as audience-friendly shorts.

But xuxE, for one, has no interest in mainstream storytelling. “I keep saying to the group, ‘Don’t sell out before you even get paid!’” she says.

Few observers would regard that as a risk. XuxE’s script calls for a squad of musicians, something of a futuristic Greek chorus, to follow the extraterrestrial on his peregrinations. The team wants to use members of an Oakland-based band called Space Vacuum from Outer Space, but they are proving hard to schedule. At the last minute, they decide to use actual actors; only three respond to the casting call, and each gets

an unpaid part. Now the film has a chorus, but no biodiesel art car. Intent on infusing the film with an environmental message, xuxE despairs. Finally, she hauls out the old, dusty Volvo she uses to jump-start her working car. The team dresses it up with some bumper stickers, and voilà, a spaceship. (As this particular spaceship isn’t registered, the crew drives a second car behind it at all times, thereby shielding the license plate.)

Jimmy Rider, Devious’s CEO, is now playing the wide-eyed, remarkably human-looking alien, roaming the streets with increasing loneliness. With an extraterres-trial’s innocence, he hopes to pet Earth dogs and sample Earth food. But the dog snaps rudely at his hand, and those french fries belong to a pair of humans disinclined to share. Having fled his collapsing planet, the spaceman discovers an equally inhospitable one here.

Hollywood films may be rife with conflicting visions, but generally a rough industry lingua franca, or a producer’s heavy hand, confines those visions to at least the same plane. With Scary Cow, the only shared vernacular is that of living within the same 50-mile radius. So it is that a director can set out to capture the profound loneliness of a stranger in a strange land, and her star can set out to capture the zaniness of a ’70s sitcom. “I watched a lot of Mork & Mindy,” Rider says of his process for getting into character. “Whenever we were filming, I thought about Mork.”

The crew bops its way through Walnut Creek, San Francisco, the Berkeley Hills, and the Albany Bulb. Exceptions to xuxE’s no-dialogue rule, instituted to accentuate the sense of displacement for the audience, are made for Farsi, Mandarin, and French. The spaceman finds a group of earthlings eager to help him find a way home, and they all dance. A copy of Al Gore’s book An Inconvenient Truth is tossed into the Volvo, and the spaceman and his crew beam back to their troubled planet. It’s wholly bizarre, but the plot threatens to become genuinely coherent.

And the perils of community filmmaking begin to clarify. It’s just a few days before the second-round projects are due, and McGraw, the team’s director of photography and editor, feels she’s been doing the work of a director as well and wants credit as such. XuxE wants her to hand over the raw footage, and McGraw is refusing. The team brings in McConnell, and it’s decided that McGraw will share the director billing—and that the film will be finished without her.

On the day of the premiere, after editing the film until 5 a.m., xuxE heads over to the Victoria Theatre with the finished product, dropping off a copy at the Berkeley Video & Film Festival office on a lark. Not everyone on the team is speaking, but Space Man is done.

JULY 2007
Unlike the respectful hush before an ordinary Hollywood film, a giddy hum pervades the Victoria Theatre this Sunday afternoon. Cameras snap. A puppy chatters on its owner’s lap. Popcorn actually flies through the air. To attend a Scary Cow premiere is to instantly grasp one thing: All movies

should be made by you, or me, or that neighbor who once told you his idea for an underwater noir romance. No question, you’ll miss the seamlessness of a “real” movie. But seamlessness is always playing at the Metreon.

Sullivan and xuxE clutch each other for dear life. “Don’t let them throw things,” says Sullivan.

Built into the Scary Cow model, after all, is an audi-torium full of critics on premiere day. As xuxE puts it, “You can go apeshit on continuity. We didn’t care about that stuff. If the plate of french fries changes, so be it. People on some of the other teams say, ‘Make it higher quality; we want Scary Cow to be a force.’ But being technically perfect isn’t our thing.”

A few more nervous hugs, and the house lights dim. McConnell takes the stage for a short introduction, with typical gentleness. “There is some coarse language…” he cautions.

And then they’re off. The intervening months have not made professionals of the Scary Cows. But like parents at a school assembly, the audience seems to forgive minor crimes in lighting, audio synching, or dialogue.
“You’re really climbing the corporate ladder, aren’t you?” one character says to another with great seriousness. “How can you say this is just a toaster?” a husband pleads with his wife. “We got this toaster on our wedding day!”

Rewrite, the film about the San Francisco mayor, has moved in intriguing new directions, one involving a mysterious taxi ride to city hall; another, a leisurely subplot regarding the mayor’s genitals. Three Stories About Romance explores incontinence and discipline in the dating sphere. In Dark Matter, Ethan Firl, the actor abused by a pepperoni in Devious, Inc., seems on the verge of discovering a shocking truth about his roommate.

Aaron Newman’s remarkably polished documentary consists of nothing more than stark interviews with assorted journalists and activists, but the effect is impressive. “Are you going to add viewpoints from the other side?” someone asks during the short question-and-answer session that follows each film. “Maybe have someone explain why we should attack Iran?”

“If people want to hear that position, they can just turn on the mainstream news,” Newman says, laughing. “This is propaganda!”

Finally, the lights dim again, and it’s Space Man’s turn. There’s no question that the audience is baffled—and fully absorbed. Rider is a stranger and more sympathetic fish out of water than Mork. The foreign tongues create a Babel-like effect. If the commentary on our cold civilization is less than subtle, the songs are more than catchy.

When the lights come on, the Space Man crew scoots past fellow Cows and up to the front of the theater. McGraw has not been seated anywhere near Sullivan and xuxE. But as the crowd lobs technical questions—How was this effect achieved? Did the music precede the shooting?—a certain esprit de corps transcends the tension.

Then it’s time to fill out the ballots. For the Space Man team, the vote feels like something of an afterthought,

since the film has gotten laughter and appreciative silence at the right moments. But Space Man wins the prize for best directing, as well as for best music, sound, cinematography, editing, and special effects—and $1,250.

Of course, it’s not dinner money, that $1,250. Winning in Scary Cow means continuing in Scary Cow.

JULY 2007–JANUARY 2008
After the last-minute stress on the Space Man shoot, Sullivan and xuxE decide to pursue another film, this time in an entirely community-driven way. With Homeless Love, they attempt to solicit equal input from all the crew members. Aside from actress Kia Resnick and technical director Ken Gulley, the rest of the team, a dozen or so, are all new. (Indeed, there’s plenty of fresh blood in Scary Cow at this point, with 110 members now.) “Some people wanted a narrative film; others wanted a documentary. So we did both. Once again, pretty experimental,” Sullivan says.

Meanwhile, McGraw goes on to direct her own film. The Wish Thief, a black-and-white thriller about a park groundskeeper who steals people’s wishes from the coins they toss into a fountain, is both visually polished and memorably quirky. The community thinks so, too. In September, her team wins the prizes for best writing, cinematography, directing, editing, sound, and acting, and is awarded $2,000. Homeless Love is the runner-up for best cinematography, music, and acting. McGraw goes on to work on a film about a lost hiker, and xuxE and Sullivan begin expanding their original trailer for Devious, Inc., into a full-length feature.

Floating spacemanlike above past tensions, the ever genial Rider goes on to do work on both Homeless Love and The Wish Thief. But it’s that extraterrestrial performance he holds dearest. A while back, he popped a DVD into a laptop in the break room of the bank where he works. His coworkers took turns filing in to watch. “Mainly, I didn’t think they knew I could sing. I’d lip-synched before, but that’s different,” he says. “My boss asked if I was going to move to L.A. now!”

At one point, I ask McConnell, Scary Cow’s chief architect, recruiter, cheerleader, bean counter, and mediator, how he’d respond to a call from Hollywood. Not just Hollywood, but good Hollywood—Sony Pictures Classic, say, or another of the production companies actually putting out fine pictures. It’s one thing to

oppose an abstract idea of the establishment; it would be quite another to turn down a fat job that, unlike Scary Cow, would actually pay him a salary.

“Sorry, but I’m already in corporate America,” McConnell replies. “And Sony Classics, behind the scenes, is still corporate America. Scary Cow is something different, and it’s my baby. If someone said, ‘Here’s a premade baby, one that’s actually a grown-up now. Would you like to contribute in some minor way, or would you like to keep your own baby?’—please. I’m keeping my baby.”

And as Scary Cow continues to grow—so far, more than $25,500 has been given to winning teams—he’s looking ahead to an incarnation devoted to kids. For that matter, he also looks ahead to making his own movie one day. Meanwhile, his Cows aim for their own fences. Newman’s full-length Iran documentary is nearly complete. Another feature-length film, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, is under way.

And not long ago, xuxE received a cardboard tube in the mail, the sender marked Berkeley Video & Film Festival. “Oh, great,” she recalls thinking. “You never acknowledge our submission, and now you want me to put your poster on my wall.”

But when she opened the tube, she found that Space Man had received an honorable mention at the festival. “Did I mention I love the Berkeley Film Festival?” she asks on a recent Monday evening. Then she’s off to a script meeting, where she’ll spend a few hours discussing rival fetish companies.

Chris Colin is a freelance writer in San Francisco and the author of What Really Happened to the Class of ’93.