  by Max Sparber
On Tuesday, July 18, with very little fanfare, the Walker Art Center offered a roundtable discussion on the subject of low-budget filmmaking. The event was titled “Making Good Film and Television with Almost No Money,” and featured four panelists. The first, Bill Rude, had been responsible for organizing the discussion, and led the conversation. Rude is a filmmaker and teaches summer courses in filmmaking at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. His guests were Sean C. Covel & Chris “Doc” Wyatt, who were two of the three producers of “Napoleon Dynamite,” and Ari Fishman, who was a producer for “The Daily Show with John Stewart.”
 The
four chatted amiably for about an hour, swapping war stories about working on
a low budget, including tales of begging and borrowing everything from housing
(“Napoleon Dynamite” crewmembers were housed in volunteers’
spare bedrooms in Idaho) to vehicles (the owners of the van used by the character
Uncle Rico in the same film required the filmmakers to make occasional runs
to grocery stores to buy them toilet paper). At the end of the discussion, they
opened the floor to questions.
The first questioner asked about online video Web pages, such as YouTube.
Bill Rude recounted his attempts to develop an online movie for a company years
earlier, only to have the company go belly up before anything was ever produced.
“The technology wasn’t there,” he said.
Sean Covel thought about the question for a moment, and then opined that it
was a good way to get your videos seen, provided you weren’t looking to
make any money. “There’s no business model,” he said.
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