By Cheryl Eddy
Still from Maggots and Men
“It was schoolboys sitting in the classroom, having daydreams,” Cary Cronenwett explains, describing Phineas Slipped, his 2003 debut as a director. “The classroom was in video, and the daydreams that the boys had were little Super 8 [films]. It was bullies, and bullies being bullied, and it was sexy and violent and stuff like that.”
Five years in the making — including time spent studying filmmaking at City College of San Francisco with director of photography Ilona Berger — Cronenwett’s follow-up effort Maggots and Men was first seen by Bay Area audiences as a short film (“sort of an overgrown trailer,” as Cronenwett calls it)
trailer for Maggots and Men
Maggots and Men | MySpace Video
“The structure of the film is kind of expandable and contractable. It’s broken up into discrete stories, or segments. More of those could be added, or taken away,” Cronenwett says. “I did the same thing with my first film: the idea was to get three quarters of the way through it, and then see what’s needed. I always wanted to lean towards the side of making it shorter and really dense. But I also thought, we’ll see how it works out and maybe it needs to become longer.”