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Walda Caesar
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Back when the platform was dubbed Netflix "Instant", Netflix's DVD service was so popular that that was what we referred to when anyone mentioned the company. Now, you'll get a sideways look for telling someone that the DVD service even still exists, much less that you use it. Who can forget when Netflix tried and failed to rebrand its DVD service as Qwikster, somehow thinking that would be necessary, not foreseeing their eventual takeover of the streaming market, and headfirst dive into production?
It all seems like yesterday to me. When I sensed that film school might be in my collegiate future, I realized that my filmic knowledge was lacking. I knew Citizen Kane was the movie everyone thought was the best. I knew that Avatar had outgrossed Titanic. And I knew that George Lucas was my favorite director.
So in preparation for film school, I had to educate myself with films. And the best source of films, with the most complete library, belonged to Netflix. If I subscribed to 3 DVD's a week, I could watch just about one movie a night, granted the mail took a day and a half to leave me, a day and a half to return, and that I saved one weekday to cover the lack of mail on Sundays.
My membership with Netflix began on Instant, but after I had watched PATTON, there wasn't much else that was what I was looking for. It was a far cry from today's platform, with enough classics to educate any primordial film student. Out of necessity, I turned to the DVD program, and that library had it all, and more.
So I spent two summers with lists of anywhere from 50 to 100 movies, most of which were compiled from must-watch lists like the AFI 100, and others of which were genre flicks I had always wanted to see but had slipped through the cracks.
Many of the films were classics, and I had my first opportunity to see films from every era, including the essentials like CITIZEN KANE, genre-defining classics like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and everything in between (WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, anyone?). Out of the pile of movies I got to watch over that year-plus, there were a few that had a major impact on me, and that I kept returning to over and over again.
Many of the films I watched once the rest of the Smat family had gone to bed (since I'm the only night owl among the six). And others I would watch in the middle of the day, especially in the case of a four hour epic like Lawrence. Or too, as football season and workouts began, I would try to fit a movie in between two-a-day practices. I distinctly remember showing up to practice on an August afternoon, bursting with excitement over having just watched Close Encounters, and how it had almost made me late, because it was that good. It's quizzical that football once stood in the way of my filmic education, and in turn became my inspiration for my first movie.
I expected to see the same films once I had started at the USC School of Cinema, but in reality, I only had a handful of these played again in classes. I got very lucky that Drew Casper showed both Lawrence for the Spielberg class, and Great Escape for my year of Intro to Cinema. I later snuck into his screening of Kwai, just to top off the trio. Without these summers of private study, I would have been at a supreme disadvantage, due to the wealth of knowledge I did encounter at USC, that went far beyond watching movies, I wouldn't have had time to watch these films and develop my own style. If there's one thing that ties together all of the films that I enjoy, it's that they're big. They have a sense of grandeur. It's something I try to bring to all of my scripts, and even with a low budget had the chance to fit into my first film.
Netflix has gone through such drastic change since they delivered me to the world of movies. It's very cool to think back to how the platform brought me into this industry, especially when I didn't have great access to public libraries in those days. In their delivery of movies to me, I was in turn delivered to cinema.
The scores of filmmakers who were brought up on Netflix's site will only increase at an exponential rate as time goes on, but I can say I might have been the first (or the last) of the Netflix crowd who attests their creation to the DVD service. Fitting discs into pre-addressed envelopes, checking the mailbox for new ones, doing the math on whether or not I'd have my next movie in time for Friday if I was mailing back one on Tuesday... those were the days.
Without those DVD's, I might not have had a firm idea upon arriving at USC of which movies I liked to watch and make, and certainly wouldn't have moved beyond my all-time favorites like STAR WARS and INDIANA JONES. The delays would have piled up from there, and on and on.
So, Indigenous moviemakers have been working for decades in the independent film world to tell their stories. But over the past few years, the number of movies and television shows with a strong Indigenous presence both in front of and behind the camera has been rapidly growing. And Native creatives based in or hailing from Oklahoma are playing key roles in many of the hot new titles.
One of the most critically acclaimed shows out now follows four Native teenagers in rural Oklahoma, while the most popular title ever on one major streaming service is a long-running film franchise's latest installment, which features an Indigenous heroine.
Filmed primarily in Oklahoma, the FX Networks hit debuted in 2021 to almost universal acclaim and premiered its sophomore season last year to more high praise. It has blazed trails as the first mainstream TV show on which every writer, director and series regular performer is Indigenous.
Co-created and executive produced by Oscar-winning New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi ("Thor: Love and Thunder"), who is of Maori ancestry, and Tulsa-based moviemaker Sterlin Harjo ("Barking Water"), who is Seminole and Muscogee, the bawdy and uproarious coming-of-age comedy focuses on four present-day Native teenagers who set out to escape their rural Oklahoma home for sunny California.
The long-awaited big-budget series based on Oklahoma-born and bred novelist Tony Hillerman's best-selling mystery novels about fictional Navajo detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee debuted in summer 2022. The series was created by Chickasaw Nation citizen and Ardmore native Graham Roland.
With Cheyenne-Arapaho filmmaker Chris Eyre (best known for the groundbreaking 1998 indie film "Smoke Signals") directing many of its episodes, the series counts film icon Robert Redford and "Game of Thrones" mastermind George R.R. Martin among its executive producers, along with Roland.
Set in the 1970s, the series stars Lakota actor Zahn McClarnon ("Reservation Dogs") as Leaphorn and Hualapai actor Kiowa Gordon ("The Twilight Saga") as Chee. The six-episode first season made a powerful enough impression that the show was quickly renewed for a second.
The show centers on the lifelong friendship between Nathan Rutherford (Ed Helms, "The Office"), a descendant of the titular town's white founding family, and Reagan Wells (Jana Schmieding, who is Cheyenne River Lakota Sioux and now has a hilarious recurring role on "Reservation Dogs"), the head of the cultural center for the fictional Minishonka Nation.
The latest installment in the long-running "Predator" sci-fi film franchise is set in the Northern Great Plains of the Comanche Nation in 1719. Filmed in the Stoney Nakoda Nation near Calgary, Alberta, Canada, with a largely Indigenous cast, the prequel pits one of the now-iconic alien trophy hunters against Naru (Amber Midthunder, "The Ice Road"), a Comanche woman determined to prove herself as a warrior.
Soon after the movie premiered in July 2022, 20th Century Studios revealed that the action-thriller, which earned strong reviews, scored the biggest premiere on the Disney-owned streamer to date, topping all film and TV series debuts. Based on hours watched in the first three days of its release, "Prey" also marked the most-watched film premiere on Star+ in Latin America and Disney+ under the Star Banner in all other territories, according to a news release.
Disney and Trachtenberg recently confirmed that "Prey" is the rare streaming-only movie to get a physical media release. It was unleashed Oct. 3 on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD. According to Slash Film, the Blu-ray release includes the Comanche audio track as well as two hours of bonus features, including a making-of featurette, panel discussion, alternative opening sequence, deleted scenes and audio commentary.
Filmed in Oklahoma in early 2020, the crime drama marks the feature film debut of Native American writer-director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. (Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians) and made its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.
Chickasaw Nation Productions spent years turning the epic life of the titular Chickasaw Rancher, Montford Johnson, into a biopic that spans from his birth in 1843, through the tumultuous years of the Civil War and its aftermath and on to the Land Run of 1889.
The son of an Englishman and a Chickasaw woman, Johnson (Martin Sensmeier, who is Tlingit and Koyukon-Athabascan) befriended Cherokee fur trader and merchant Jesse Chisholm (Chickasaw citizen Eddie Easterling), who convinced him to establish cattle ranches and trading posts in the newly created Indian Territory to serve his fellow First Americans. At the height of his ranching operations, Johnson accumulated a herd of more than 35,000 head of cattle grazing over a million acres.
Marvel Studios leaps into Native storytelling with this new series, with all five episodes set to debut Jan. 10, 2024, on both Disney+ and Hulu. They'll be available on Hulu until April 9. "Echo" also marks the first Marvel Studios series to drop all episodes at once for maximum binge-watching.
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