Christopher Rhoten
It’s already become a meme that Kane Parsons was only 20 years old when he directed the polished, assured Backrooms. More remarkable than his age, though, is his lack of experience. It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that a filmmaker too young to legally drink was directing accomplished actors like Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, or that a studio entrusted a then-17-year-old with a $10 million budget. Yet he did, and he was. Whatever you think of the finished film, Parsons is now the filmmaker behind A24’s highest-grossing release.
It’s inspiring because it’s an outlier—for everyone else, there’s usually a bumpier road. Making its world premiere at the 13th annual Chattanooga Film Festival, Curtis Matzke’s First Feature tells the story of up-and-coming filmmaker Thomas Reilly King, or TRK, as he’s referred to by his friends, professors, and peers. While studying at Michigan State University in the late 2000s, TRK was hard at work on his directorial debut, Enduring Destiny, shot and produced on a shoestring, self-financed budget, reliant on the whims of college kids’ schedules. As someone in the film notes, this blue-collar approach to filmmaking is inspiring in its own right; after all, John Cassavetes shot his early films over long periods, often on weekends and whenever extra money became available.
Here’s the catch: Enduring Destiny came out a decade ago, and it was utterly abysmal. Hilariously abysmal. I’ve yet to watch anything beyond the sections shown in the documentary, but I don’t need to see the full feature to see the big picture. Enduring Destiny is the type of run-and-gun, amateur production that’s terrible because it could never be good; scenes shot years apart by a skeletal crew rely on terrible green screen, outlandish wigs, unconvincing effects, and cringeworthy ADR. A moment where TRK reveals that his on-screen mother was played by a woman younger than him, then dubbed with the voice of an elderly actress, had me teetering on the verge of tears. There’s a little BTK in how torturous the effect is.
It’s surreal to watch someone so confident and determined reveal himself to be so unaware. TRK watches an actress’s terrible take back in silence, only to reply with a single word: “Brilliant.” When the gang discusses possibly attracting a semi-famous actor, he suggests someone “like Burt Reynolds.” It’s hilarious, though I poke fun at it all with every ounce of due respect—I myself made a “feature film” in my younger years, and the sheer thrill of planning out a shoot or buying props and costumes made it similarly difficult to notice that nothing was properly lit, that my camera was perpetually out of focus, or that the script, well, didn’t exist. At least TRK had the foresight to storyboard.
Most of the doc explores the extended production period of around five years, but there are also interviews from around the time the film was nearing completion. (It premiered in an actual theater that TRK had catered. On the inside. Next to the screen.) That’s what makes First Feature so endearing: friends and family may not have shared his vision, but they certainly admired his ambition. One of the actors, who plays a villain with green hair that the film shows TRK applying with spray paint indoors, went on to become his lifelong best friend. Another shares that watching Enduring Destiny helped him deal with a bipolar diagnosis.
The actual film, a “melodramatic espionage coming-of-age” about a wrestler/CIA agent who’s reduced to a wheelchair, shares another quality found in so-bad-they’re-good cult classics like The Room: a vague detachment from reality. With only a fraction of the film completed and already thousands of dollars in the hole, TRK had talking action figures produced for a non-existent fanbase, a move that feels like something straight out of The Disaster Artist. Matzke has even included Room alumni Greg Sestero in the more recently recorded crop of interviews, though he really doesn’t belong here and only pops up intermittently.
Why the decade-long gap until the tenth-anniversary scenes, shot in 2024? It’s never quite elucidated whether Matzke started his documentary with the belief that somehow, some way, something half-decent could arise from TRK’s expensive vanity project (though that seems unlikely), or if it was designed to document a disaster from the start. The passage of time renders neither relevant, and it allows both he and TRK to look back with the clarity of distance and appreciate that some sort of classic was created, however unintentional, and however small in scale.
There’s usually an awkwardness attached to certifying someone’s failure. Being so close to his unknown subject, Matzke’s friendship enabled him to capture considerable vulnerability. But there’s a hesitancy, naturally, to portray the production as anything other than harmless, even though the director took out $20,000 in student loans to complete the film and has since spent $80,000 on his follow-up, which is still in production. When the film interviews the director’s parents and looks at the genuinely impressive artwork TRK made as a child, a bittersweetness lingers nonetheless.
Still, maybe there isn’t any failure to document. First Feature is a breezy watch, intrusive but never mean-spirited, and it makes a compelling case that TRK has only brought people together and provided plenty of joy for all involved. Just as TRK used Enduring Destiny as his film school, Matzke has done the same with his documentary, displaying a comparable level of patience in reducing nearly two decades’ worth of events to a swift 90 minutes. It’s a nice touch that he settled on a title that refers to both.
Embarrassment is often seen as the price of success, but First Feature points out that, for many, that second part never comes—for every Kane Parsons, there are a thousand no-names who dip their toes and then descend into oblivion. With this documentary, TRK is now neither, and that’s a fate that carries its own heartening, reaffirming reward.
