Dallas director clicks with sexy, noirish web series

In order to get a taste of the fast-paced, action film work of Arlington-raised, Dallas-based director Blake Calhoun, you don't need to line up at your local movie theater, or even wait patiently by the mailbox for the latest shipment from Netflix.

You don't even need to carve a chunk of time out of your day -- three or four minutes should suffice.

Just log onto the Internet, and behold a few of the bite-size curios that Calhoun has been toiling over in recent years.

In Pink, first released in 2007 and viewable at www.pinktheseries.com, we meet a gorgeous prison inmate named Natalie Cross (Natalie Raitano), who was raised by her mysterious Daddy (Matthew Tompkins) to ably handle guns and knives. In the opening moments, she fends off the advances of a fellow prisoner, sending a gruesome splatter of blood across the shower tiles. Turns out that Natalie is a one-time government assassin about to be drawn back into the killing game.

And then there's Exposed, which Calhoun premiered on the CW's website in summer 2010. This one tells the story of medical student Henry (Chase Jeffery), who is having a difficult time keeping his very dark past secret from his beautiful fiancee (Sara Jane Henriques). Can he manage to outwit his fiancee's shady father -- not to mention a dangerous stalker, a mysterious priest and a jealous friend -- and find happily ever after?

Both Pink and Exposed are filmed in the bright pop colors of a graphic novel, with cliffhangers at every turn. They wear their influences lightly ( Pink owes an obvious debt to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill; Exposed suggests a cross between I Know What You Did Last Summer and 21 Jump Street), and never take themselves too seriously.

Oh, and one other critical detail: They aren't movies at all, but Web series that unfold in three- to five-minute episodes. A "season" typically consists of 10 to 20 episodes, or about 45 to 90 minutes if watched continuously. And while Calhoun says that DVD versions of the shows might eventually be available, at present you can only watch them online.

"I think I was being naïve and arrogant," says Calhoun, 43, of his decision to throw himself, in 2007, into the then-unchartered waters of made-for-the-Web filmmaking. "I thought if I brought something polished to the Web, it would become the diamond in the rough."

Pink and Exposed didn't necessarily launch the UT-Arlington graduate onto the front lines of Hollywood. These days, he's still trying out new projects and still hoping to grab that elusive golden ring -- a deal for his own network television show. But his work online with has marked him as a trailblazer in an age when the entertainment industry is rapidly changing.

And with a third Web series, titled Continuum, in the works, as well a just-premiered feature film called Spilt Milk (it screened at the Dallas International Film Festival in April), Calhoun suggests a new, digital-age model for the indie filmmaker: the guy who has many horses in the race, running on many different tracks, hopeful and cautiously confident that one of them will eventually land him in the winner's circle.

"He's one of the guys in town who walks the talk," says Matthew Tompkins, who in addition to Pink also starred in Calhoun's 2006 feature Killing Down. "There's a lot of people who just talk and flap their wings. He's one of those guys who actually does it."

Well-timed start

Pretty much nothing about Calhoun's physical appearance would seem to suggest "movie director." He has thinning blonde hair and a goatee. He wears oval-framed glasses and a polo shirt neatly tucked into his jeans. When you meet him at the offices of his production company, Loud Pictures, just south of downtown Dallas, you might think "accountant" or perhaps "middle manager at some anonymous corporation." You'd certainly never guess that, behind the ordinary countenance, his brain is conjuring up violent, neo-noir fantasies.

Looks, of course, can be deceiving (that's one of the recurring themes in Pink and Exposed). But in Calhoun's case, the conservative appearance may actually reveal a larger truth -- namely, that it takes a certain levelheadedness to survive in any creative profession, especially when you live outside of the New York/Los Angeles entertainment-industry nucleus. In building his career, Calhoun has been as steady, focused and diversified as, well, an expert accountant.

"In the entertainment industry, you usually have the creatives on one side and the business people on the other," says Mike Maden, Calhoun's frequent collaborator, who wrote the scripts for Pink and Exposed. "Blake is one of the people who embraces both."

"I always had aspirations to be a filmmaker," Calhoun says, "but I didn't know how or what to do." When you're a Texas-raised kid graduating from college in the early 1990s, before the widespread availability of video cameras and computer editing programs, Calhoun says making your own movies isn't something you've ever seen anyone do.

Calhoun landed a job as a production assistant at the Studios at Las Colinas, a hub for production in North Texas, and later found steady gigs as a freelance editor and crew member. Dallas has always been a healthy market for commercial and corporate production -- to this day, that's how Calhoun pays his bills. In 1997, he scraped together enough cash to make his first feature, a crime thriller titled Thugs. It didn't gain much traction in the United States, but did get a DVD release in Germany. ("I always joke that there are a handful of Germans that have seen that movie," Calhoun says.)

Two more features followed, Hit (2003), a comedy featuring the members of Fort Worth's Four Day Weekend improv troupe, and Killing Down (2006), an action thriller that was acquired for U.S. DVD release by Maverick Entertainment Group. In early 2007, though, with YouTube rapidly rising to prominence, Calhoun saw an opportunity to bring his work to a wide audience. The cost of one episode of a Web serial would be under $10,000, less than the millions that are sometimes spent on network TV shows and the hundreds of thousands that usually go into independent features. Another Web series, the teen supernatural romance Prom Queen, had recently caused a splash, suggesting that there was real viability in this emerging format.

The idea for Pink was born less out of some long-standing passion for comic-book cinema or genre entertainment than simple opportunity: Calhoun wanted to team up again with his Killing Down stars, Natalie Raitano and Sheree Wilson. The story that Calhoun and Maden developed seemed to lend itself to the speed and short attention spans of the Internet. The first season was shot over six days in June 2007. Calhoun posted the first episode online a few months later.

"Pioneer is an overused word," Calhoun says, with the soft-spoken modesty that seems to be his trademark. "But we certainly had an entrepreneurial spirit."

Calhoun had good timing, too. Pink arrived well before the dozens of other Web serials that would quickly follow. YouTube featured it on its homepage when it began scoring 20,000 to 30,000 hits a day. Calhoun soon struck a deal with Los Angeles-based production company Generate to create a second and third season of the series. Meanwhile, the CW ponied up the financing for Exposed.

Overnight millionaire? Not exactly. In the heady, pre-recession days of 2007 and 2008, movie and TV studios were eagerly experimenting on the Web, viewing it as a place to discover or train new talent. These days, they've scaled back much of their Internet-exclusive programming. (The CW hasn't yet ordered a second season of Exposed.) For his latest Web project, the sci-fi drama Continuum, which he hopes to premiere late this year, Calhoun has once again found financing from independent investors.

The problem the filmmaker faces is a common one: No one quite knows how to make money off Web-based content. The rules of the game keep changing, so it's hard to gain much of a foothold. To wit: Whereas even five-minute episodes were once seen as trying to a Web user's patience, Calhoun says the present trend is toward increasingly longer-form segments.

Making 'Milk'

Given the nature of his previous work, with its car crashes and gunbattles or heavy-breathing babes in distress, Calhoun would probably seem like the least likely person to tackle Spilt Milk, a comedy about a down-on-his-luck convenience store clerk (Jake Johnson, who played Ashton Kutcher's best friend in No Strings Attached) whose store is robbed by one of his old friends. Unabashedly talky and sweetly earnest, the movie deliberately recalls such '80s-era titles as The Breakfast Club, where a bunch of oddballs suffer through an eccentric crisis on their way to spiritual epiphany.

Unlike his previous works, Calhoun didn't have a hand in writing or developing the screenplay (it was written by University of North Texas graduate Daniel Bower). He was hired to direct the film by producer Marc Stephens, a principal with Dallas-based MPS Studios who has known Calhoun for more than 15 years. Spilt Milk was shot in June 2009, in less than three weeks, mostly inside a former Walmart at Walnut Hill Lane and Audelia Road in Dallas.

For the director, though, the film is part and parcel with his cast-the-net-wide strategy. He says he saw it as an opportunity to broaden his repertoire, and to create the kind of character-driven indie the likes of which people like Kevin Smith ( Clerks), Quentin Tarantino ( Reservoir Dogs) and David O. Russell ( Spanking the Monkey) first broke through with in the early 1990s.

"Those directors all came up as indies, and then slipped into the studios," Calhoun says. "I don't really care where the opportunity comes from."

For Stephens, the choice to hire Calhoun wasn't difficult, especially considering the director's reputation for keeping creativity and pragmatism in careful balance. When you're making a movie for a couple hundred thousand dollars, with a brisk shooting schedule, the last thing you want is a filmmaker who brings to mind the Billy Walsh character on Entourage -- the run-amok "artist" whose ego obliterates everything.

"He comes with a team and a crew [from his commercial production company], and they're absolutely ready to go to work," Stephens says. "And with the actors, he's not going to have this intensive introspection and say, 'Go pretend you're a tree.' He may pull one actor aside at lunch and [give him notes], but it's a real practical, down-to-earth approach."

Adds Matthew Tompkins, who also plays a small part in the film: "One of Blake's initial hurdles was being able to relate to actors, to talk to actors and direct them in a way we like to be directed. But he's become really, really good at it." (Calhoun usually casts his projects himself, through auditions or with actors he knows personally; the casts are primarily Dallas-based but often contain a handful of Los Angeles-based performers.)

Since screening at the Dallas International Film Festival, Spilt Milk has played at the L.A. Comedy Fest and WorldFest-Houston; presently, Stephens says, the producers are weighing a couple of distribution possibilities.

Truth be told, the movie is a tad underpowered, perhaps too low-key for its own good -- it probably won't be the movie that helps Calhoun break through to the next level. But it certainly speaks to his creative adaptability, not to mention his resourcefulness as a low-budgeted filmmaker. For instance, the production only secured enough grocery products to fill up four aisles of the store, requiring Calhoun to find ever more creative ways to shoot the place. You'd never know it unless he told you.

"If you look closely, you can see a lot of the same products repeated," he says, with a modest measure of pride behind his smile.

At home in the industry

So why didn't Calhoun ever try to move to Hollywood? After all, isn't that what any determined young writer-director is supposed to do at some point in his 20s or early 30s?

Calhoun says he flirted numerous times with the possibility of giving the L.A. life a try. He acknowledges that it would certainly be easier to pitch projects or apply for screenwriting or directing gigs if it didn't also require him to jump on a plane to take a meeting.

But Calhoun stresses that there's much to be said for making a good living in the city where you grew up, close to friends and family. He met his wife, Christine, a producer for WFAA/Channel 8 news, through mutual friends, and the two married in 2006. In 2009, they had their first child, and another baby is on the way. He found a professional home, too: In 2010, he teamed up with a consortium of local production companies to form IdeaMan Studios. The group's facility has green- and white-screen capabilities, state-of-the-art editing and sound equipment, and the sort of funky, open-air design that you'd expect to find in a beachside bungalow office in Santa Monica. In short, he doesn't need to leave town to make projects that are polished, professional and Hollywood-ready.

But none of this is to suggest that Calhoun has held his ambitions in check, or that he doesn't think he could still conjure up that one-in-a-million, hit-the-lottery project. With screenwriter Maden, he's hoping to continue to pitch potential television projects to network and cable-TV execs. He has also optioned the life story rights of Cathy Murray, the one-time wife of Dallas wrestler Kerry Von Erich, who killed himself in Denton in 1993. Calhoun and Maden have developed a script from Murray's story, which they hope to get into production in the near future. (Tentatively titled Stranglehold, Calhoun describes it as " Boogie Nights with tights.")

"He's savvy, he stays current on the market, he stays current on the technical trends, and he's got a lot of projects going at once," Maden says of Calhoun. "There's no question in my mind that he's going to break through."

Calhoun's perspective on the subject of "breaking through" is much more direct and down-to-earth. He has built an admirable career in a notoriously tough-to-crack industry. He relishes the ability to be able to pursue so many kinds of projects. He can't imagine doing anything else.

"If I won the lottery tomorrow," he says, "I'd be doing the exact same thing. Except I'd just be driving a more expensive car."