Acclaimed documentary to be screened in producers hometown

  Friday, July 8, 2016 2:00 AM
  News

Pittsburg, KS

This weekend, in addition to “The Legend of Tarzan,” “The BFG,” “Finding Dory,” and “The Secret Life of Pets,” Independence Cinemas will screen a documentary film produced by Daniel Shepard, who grew up in Independence, Kan., and graduated from Pittsburg State University in 2006.

“NUTS!” is a documentary based on the true story of John Romulus Brinkley, a con man and small-town Kansas doctor in the early 1900s who believed he could cure male impotence and a variety of other ailments by transplanting goat testicles into his patients. Brinkley amassed a fortune, was nearly elected governor, invented junk mail, produced the world’s first infomercials and built the world’s most powerful radio station before his empire eventually collapsed.

The film has won critical acclaim, including the Ashland Independent Film Award for best editing and the best editing award at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. It was nominated for the grand jury prize at Sundance, for best film at the Cleveland International Film Festival and for best documentary feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Shepard said bringing the film to the Independence Cinemas is special for a many reasons, including the fact that the theater is owned by his best friend from college, Aaron Schrader.

“One of my best friends in the entire world, owns the theater and this is where I watched my first movie as a kid,” Shepard said. “It’s the place that really started the love of movies for me. It’s very exciting, weird and a bit surreal.”

Shepard said he will attend the first showings and will field questions from the audience.

“I hope people like it,” Shepard said. “It’s a funky, weird little movie. It’s definitely artsy and creative and I’m interested to see how people connect to it.”

Shepard said the path that has led him full circle from Independence, Kan., to New York and back to Independence has been one he couldn’t have predicted, but he doubts it would have been possible without some special support he got at Pitt State.

“Whenever I think of Pitt State, I think of Dr. Cynthia Allan (chair of the Department of Communication),” Shepard said. “I can’t imagine a person being more supportive of a very all-over-the-place young kid who hadn’t figured out what he wanted to do in life.”

Shepard said he took an array of courses under Allan, who, he said, became one of his mentors.

The summer after his junior year, Shepard had an opportunity to intern for the Inside the Actors Studio in New York.

“I got really lucky,” Shepard said. “One of the associate produces of the show was a playwright in residence at the William Inge Festival, which takes place in my hometown. I met with him and he gave me an internship.”

Several months after he graduated from PSU, Shepard got a call from Inside the Actors, where they had an opening for a production associate.

“I sold my car and moved up to New York and I’ve been here ever since,” Shepard said.

Shepard worked for Inside the Actors Studio for eight years, where he took on increasingly greater responsibilities.

“I did a lot of things,” Shepard said. “I worked on about 66 shows. We won an Emmy while I was there. I had a really great experience and learned a lot about how to run a show, how to budget and really produce episodic television.”

Around 2010, Shepard started writing and producing his own material outside of his work. He and a group of friends made a movie that Shepard co-wrote that won the New York International Film Festival.

“I thought, ‘I like this!’” Shepard said.

Then Shepard created a live-action and an animated web series and both did well.

“They screened at South by Southwest and the animated show actually ended up getting sold to MTV,” Shepard said. “I just fell in love with the animation process. I kind of became obsessed with it and it pivoted my career towards doing nothing but writing and producing for animation.”

Shepard did another series, “Swimming Lessons,” with his brother that was on Hulu.

Shepard eventually left Inside the Actors Studio and formed a company, with producing partner James Belfer, called Cartuna, which focuses on short-form animated content for adults.

One of the first projects Cartuna took on was “NUTS!”

“This film happened to deal with Kansas and all the things that I love,” said Shepard. “It’s so weird. I love Kansas history, but I really didn’t know anything about Brinkley.”

Shepard said the director, Penny Lane, had been working on the project for several years, after reading “Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam,” by Pope Brock.

“I was fascinated by the story and the fact that they needed 35 minutes of animation and they needed it pretty quickly on a small budget,” Shepard said.

Shepard explained that a producer’s role depends on the project, so he needs to be a jack of all trades.

“Producing is kind of everything and anything that the film needs or a project needs to get done,” Shepard said. “You can be as involved as scheduling, managing the budgets, coordinating the crew, coordinating the lighting, paperwork, contracts, all of that not-so-fun stuff. And then there’s the really fun stuff, for creative producers like myself, where I help develop the story, I help develop the characters, I help develop the world that we’re going to set this project in. Because I have a writing background, I usually help with the writing, the text and how we want these people to sound. Then, when it comes to animation, connecting the right animators and their styles to the right projects, making sure they fit within your budget and making sure that the deadlines work. It’s a day-in-day-out kind of job.”

For “NUTS!” Shepard interviewed a number of animators in the New York area before selecting four to work on the film.

“Between illustrators and animators, there were seven different people who worked on individual chapters,” Shepard said. “So you have seven different styles of animation throughout a 79-minute film.

“‘NUTS!’ was difficult in the beginning because of all the interviewing I had to do,” Shepard said. “I had to really lock people in and make sure they got along with the director and the director’s notes, since she had never really worked in animation. I was a middle man who made sure that the animators were happy and the directors were happy. At the end of the day, the thing we’re all kind of worshiping is the product and making sure the product is as good as it possibly can be.”

Shepard said he feels lucky to have had the opportunity to produce “NUTS!”

“You work on a lot of projects,” Shepard said. “I’ve had little pockets of success with some things that I’ve been part of or things I’ve created, but this one obviously stands out as the biggest one.

“I’m excited that I get to bring it home and share it with friends and family,” Shepard said. “I’m very thankful that it came into my life.”