[August 08, 2009]

Northwest Florida filmmaker creates tales of the uncanny

Aug 08, 2009 (Destin Log - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- When Earl Newton was 10, he convinced his friends he was born on another planet.

"As a child, we traveled a lot so I spent a lot of time alone," the 28-yearold writer/director of the online television series "Stranger Things" told The Log. "Later, when I finally found children to play with, I would win their attention by building up fantastic lies about being an alien from another world and the terrible galactic wars in which I'd fought." With his parents' encouragement, Newton sat at their Commodore 64 computer and typed the stories into a 13-page novel: "It was the first time I felt the rush of stepping inside my own imagination. I didn't know it then, but that feeling of creativity would guide me back again and again to telling stories." Newton's stories can now be seen on "Stranger Things," a two-year-old science fiction anthology series. Newton's company, Strange RSS, began by making the series available for downloading online; since then, it's become available through the Illusions payper-view network.

"When I first read about Orson Welles and 'Citizen Kane,' " Newton said, "I felt this overwhelming sadness, as if all the newness of cinema had already been tapped years before, and we were just repeating the same old structures and ideas over and over.

"But the Internet has recontextualized everything. We're truly pioneers on a new frontier, and the fact that there is still so much to be discovered is what keeps me going." Newton, a resident of NorthwestFloridasince1996, said he became a writer, and then a filmmaker, because he was constantly rethinking his vision of the world, and he wanted to express that vision to other people: "I think in the heart of any artist is a voice saying, 'Do you see this? Do you see what I mean? Is the world this way for you too?' " At 18, Newton began writing screenplays but, he said, he wasn't good enough back then to convince anyone to produce his work. His solution was to study directing, acting, cinematogrpahy and other filmmaking skills so that he'd eventually be able to produce himself.

Newton said he created a science fiction series because the genre is "as close as we have to modern fairy tales: Strange stories of witches and monsters that still have the power to tell us something about ourselves, our decisions, and our place in the universe. It's the genre, in my mind, with the best possible chance of communicating a real human truth, because it's the last place the audience would expect to find it." The biggest challenge of creating "Stranger Things" on the Emerald Coast is finding people to work with locally, Newton said, and he often reaches out to Tampa, Atlanta or Los Angeles, where the talent pool is larger.

"Podcasting" the show -- making it available as a digital download -- has been a tremendous success, Newton said: It's free, it's easy to access, and it can be downloaded when and where they want it.

For the future, he said, he's looking at a DVD release of the episodes, and also at turning to feature films.

"The longer I work on Stranger Things, the more I find the stories want to expand beyond a 30 minute canvas," Newton said. "The things I want to do now demand the time and the scale that only a feature film can allow for ... For me, it's about the story experience, and each medium offers different possibilities for me and for my audience." To see more of The Destin Log or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.destin.com/. Copyright (c) 2009, Destin Log, Fla. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

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