Brian Flemming

Brian Flemming is a playwright, screenwriter and film director. He was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley and studied English at the University of California, Irvine. He worked as a script reader for New Line Cinema while making his first feature film, "Hang Your Dog in the Wind."

To promote "Hang Your Dog in the Wind," Flemming co-founded the one-time 1997 film festival in Park City called Slumdance. This legendary film festival, never seen again, spawned a host of imitators in the years following its appearance.

Slumdance brought Flemming to the attention of indie-film kingmaker John Pierson, who had previously discovered Spike Lee and Richard Linklater, among others. Pierson became a vocal supporter of Flemming and his debut feature, and Flemming went on to work as a director and segment producer for Pierson's Independent Film Channel magazine-style show called "Split Screen," which also featured a segment about "Hang Your Dog in the Wind."

Flemming's next major project was a stage musical, Bat Boy: The Musical, based on a story about a half-bat half-boy in the outrageous tabloid Weekly World News. Flemming co- wrote Bat Boy with Keythe Farley and Laurence O'Keefe. After its humble origins in a small Los Angeles theater called the Actors' Gang in 1997, a production which won L.A. Weekly's Musical of the Year, four Ovation Award nominations and six Drama-Logue Awards, Bat Boy: The Musical eventually made its way to Off-Broadway in March 2001, where the play won the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Musical, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Musical Off- Broadway and six Drama Desk nominations. The musical ran through December 2001 and has since been staged in regional productions dozens of times throughout the world.

Flemming's profile as an indie film director took a huge leap with his second feature film, a faux documentary about the assassination of Bill Gates called Nothing So Strange (2002). The film garnered both accolades (including the Claiborne Pell New York Times Award for Original Vision at the 2002 Newport Film Festival) and press controversy. Bill Gates said through a spokesman that he was "very disappointed that a movie maker would do something like this."

Flemming also raised eyebrows when he announced in February 2003 that he was releasing Nothing So Strange (2002), which had failed to secure a distributor, as an "open source" project, which meant all of the raw footage that makes up the film would be released without copyright restrictions, so that others could make their own films from it without Flemming's permission.

By the time of that announcement, Flemming had become a full-fledged copyright activist, founding the organization Free Cinema, which encourages feature filmmakers to make their films under two rules: 1) No money may be spent on the production, and 2) The film must be "copylefted," which means the film must be released without a copyright. Flemming claims that filmmaking is now "as inexpensive as writing novels" and that the copylefting practice is a way for independent artists to gain notice and distribution in a marketplace dominated by huge, wealthy corporations. (Free Cinema is directly inspired by the Open Source movement in computer software, which operates by similar rules.)

Between his major projects, Flemming has worked as a photographer (London Mail on Sunday, Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly), journalist (Filmmaker and Movieline magazines), awards-show writer (1998 and 1999 Independent Spirit Awards) and songwriter. His photographs and music are available at his personal website. (They are, of course, copylefted.)