Communism, independent filmmakers and their rich parents

So anyway, I watched Abandoned, an anti-Communist Hungarian movie. Supposedly autobiographical. A kid's father can't take care of him, so he drops him off at an orphanage. There's a Christian kid who is repeatedly flogged because he insists on praying publicly.

It looked like it would be depressing, but it just didn't ring true. Nothing seemed genuine.

I've seen other movies based on supposedly true stories that had the same problem. There are claims that look plausible on paper which fall apart on film.

There was Sleepers, the 1996 juvenile prison sex abuse movie. I expected to be outraged and deeply depressed, but the whole thing seemed completely phony. The book it was based on was later alleged to be a fraud.

Regarding the Hungarian movie, even if it were true, I'm sure capitalist orphanages were no picnic, either, especially the ones in Ireland. The thing I kept thinking about was the fact that an abandoned child grew up to be a movie director. That says something for Communism.

Francois Truffaut had a rather difficult childhood. But it's hard to find a director today who didn't have rich parents who got them started.

When you look at independent filmmakers today, almost invariably they borrowed money from their parents to make their first movies. Even John Waters-----I'm surprised he'd want his parents to even know about them, but his father bankrolled his early films. Waters once said that his mother watched a foot fetish scene in one of his movies and refused to believe any such thing existed---she insisted that he made it up for the film.

Well, the cost of movie production has dropped down to nothing, at least for the ones where film stock and lab costs were the main expense. What else are you going to spend money on?

There was a news story several years ago. A high school kid wrote, produced and directed a movie about the scourge of drug abuse. He convinced his parents to let him blow his college fund on it and he got more money from relatives. The thing cost, as I recall, something like $17,000.

If it were my kid, I would have told him to make seventeen movies for a thousand dollars each.