Resident writes, produces low-budget film

Adam Kozlowski wants to change the way movies are made. The North Las Vegas filmmaker came to the area four years ago to join the cast of “The Lion King” at Mandalay Bay. He played Pumba and made some great friends in the process — friends who wanted to work on his movie that he filmed in North Las Vegas and premiered Jan. 30.

Kozlowski started making short films and thought it was time for a feature-length production. He gathered his resources, called his friends, wrote the script and started filming “Wins A Lot,” a film about two people who are friends on a social networking site and meet in person for the first time.

Kozlowski said he spent three months writing the script while on the road for a production. The film, with a budget of nearly $18,000, was technically classified as no-budget in Hollywood, he said.

“ ‘Wins A Lot’ is a comedy about two unintentional friends from ‘Friendbook’ who happen to meet by chance, and one of the two friends sees the friendship as a real friendship,” he said. “It’s more about the potential dangers of that world but also about not judging a book by its cover and also a little about what is friendship and what it means to be a friend. I think we toss around these words a little too lightly.”

The lead actor of “Wins A Lot,” Todd Bristow, said he was drawn to the project by the script. His most difficult day of filming involved dressing up as a unicorn and having garbage thrown at him, he said, adding that people who had seen the film will understand. He said he would like to see the film go far because he is excited to see Kozlowski’s ideas and would like to do another project.

“It was a fantastic experience,” Bristow said. “It really warmed me up to doing something like this again. I would definitely work for him again.”

In addition to Kozlowski, the film had three crew members and 12 to 14 cast members, mostly locals. Kozlowski said he took a risk when he sent the script to his “Lion King” friend, Patrick Kerr. Kerr, who has appeared on shows such as “Frasier” and “Joey,” was pulled by the script and his character. Kozlowski was flexible to Kerr’s schedule and changed filming days. Kerr said he did not have much in common with his character, the man who meets his Friendbook friend and thinks they are real friends from the beginning.

“The guy is pretty much a loser,” Kerr said. Kerr said he has more than 1,300 Facebook friends himself, many of whom he does not know, so he identified with Bristow’s character more than his.

“All in all, I think Facebook is a really good thing, and it has broken down a lot of barriers in my life,” Kerr said. “My family is mixed up with my more outrageous friends. It’s very interesting, and I’ve always been hesitant to mix certain groups of people together, and I do feel like it’s obliterated a lot of barriers.”

But Kerr said everyone should be able to identify with his character a little bit.

“He is crazy, tender, kind, lost, and I think we all are at various moments of our lives if not our days,” Kerr said.

He said Kozlowski was great to work with, describing him as mellow with a good temperament. “He rolled with what came at him, which is what I think you have to do if you’re trying to do a full-length feature in a 10-day shoot,” he said. “He could easily pursue a career in New York or L.A., but I think he’s focused — at least at the moment — of making movies in a small market.”

Kerr said he was used to being a small fish in a big pond on sitcoms and enjoyed the role reversal. Kerr said Las Vegas is a prime spot to make low-budget films, and he would do another project with Kozlowski “in a heartbeat.”

“A great thing about Las Vegas is it has as much sunshine as L.A., and making movies is all about light,” Kerr said. “It’s a great place to make movies. I think the business of filmmaking is going to be more spread out.”

Kozlowski wrote, filmed, edited and made the score for the film. Now he is in the process of finding distribution.

“No one seems to know how it works short of dumb luck,” Kozlowski said.

He said he has started sending out his trailer to distributors and has considered submitting it to the film festival circuit. But he is not turning up his nose at the straight-to-video route. He said the industry is moving toward that option as audience viewing habits change. And that fits into Kozlowski’s larger plan to create independent films often rather than focusing on one film a year.

“The goal is to make plenty of movies,” he said. “The crazy dream is to sort of create a studio where it almost (hearkens) back to the old days of the studio system.”

He said he started filming in mid-October and premiered the film by the end of January. He wants to keep up that speed and make several films a year for the sake of making movies.

“It’s simple for stories that are well told — you don’t need to take that long,” he said. ”It took me three months to make a movie, basically on my own.”

Big production films are driven by the business investment, he said, but he wants his creativity to be free from worrying about expenses and investments, which means a low budget.

“Creativity needs to be allowed to fail,” he said. “In a place where you’re making four or five movies a year, you make it and move on. You make it carefully and beautifully, but you don’t belabor it, and you don’t second-guess.

“You make it inexpensively. You don’t take three days to get a five-second shot just because you can.”

He said he admires filmmakers Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen for their tight schedules. He added the fact that he does not want to be a “Hollywood guy” should help him stay focused on his priorities.

“I really don’t care about being rich and famous. I just want to pay my mortgage,” Kozlowski said.