How Rejection Turned into an LA Microbudget Movie Love Letter

This article is from Making It, a newsletter from No Film School podcast host GG Hawkins about the career and craft of making your own movies. You can subscribe here.

We got a cult classic on our hands, folks.

Today, we’re hearing from The Drextons. Amanda and Michael are a husband-and-wife filmmaker team who have been writing, producing, and directing together since 2013. They founded Artless Entertainment, an indie production company based in Echo Park. After facing the double rejection of two feature projects, they set out to create their own microbudget film.

Their film, Sour Party, is set to premiere in LA on Saturday, February 8, at Gardena Cinema. Check out the trailer here:

- YouTube youtu.be

The movie will be released by Anchor Bay Entertainment, a relaunched company focused on future cult classics—and they absolutely made the right choice in bringing Sour Party onto their slate. The film is character-driven, reverse-engineered based on what the filmmakers already had, and the result is something audiences will adore.

The Drextons share with us the film’s origins, how they built their core team, and the journey through the lowest lows and highest highs. They speak about the community that rallied around them, but Michael, Amanda, and Sammy (the film’s other lead) are also the kind of people who show up for their community. I first met them through Scott Monohan when all three came out to the Mammoth Film Festival for the weekend to support the world premiere of Yes, Daddy, a 4-minute, 44-second short I directed, with Scott acting in it. It’s no wonder people love showing up for The Drextons — they’re not just insanely talented; they’re also genuinely good people and great friends.

Their goodwill continues to make an impact. They’ve turned their premiere into a fundraising event for fire victims, donating 25% of all ticket sales to the Mutual Aid Los Angeles Network, a nonprofit organization that serves as a connector and information hub for mutual aid efforts, people, and resources across Los Angeles.

NFS: What inspired you to make Sour Party? Can you share the origin story of the film and how it evolved from idea to production?

The Drextons: Sour Party came out of a very difficult time for us. We were working on two projects: a feature documentary that was originally going to be our debut feature, and a second feature script we were packaging. Both fell apart back-to-back, leaving us in a bit of a tailspin. We were questioning everything about our careers, our lives, and the industry. After taking a beat, we came to the conclusion that we had to make something on our own terms, something we didn’t need permission for, and Sour Party was born out of that.

We had written a couple of short film scripts and had shot one of them with these two characters played by Samantha Westervelt and Amanda. We really loved the characters and decided we could take these ideas and repurpose them into a feature. We first approached our friend and DP, Steven Moreno (who was helping us on one of the failed projects), to see if he was interested in making a narrative feature. He agreed to executive produce and DP the film. It simply wouldn’t have been possible without his support and extreme generosity, bringing all of his production gear and most of our crew. We then went to Sammy with the idea of making a feature instead of the shorts and basing it on the characters we had already created. We compiled a list (much like Gwen and James do in Sour Party) of all the resources we had available, friends who would help, locations we had access to, and the three of us got together to craft the story.

We had an extremely tight budget, but we were humbled by the amount of friends who came out, donated time, and worked so hard to help make this film come to life. Special shout-out to our production designer, Lala, who drove all the way from Louisville, Kentucky, with the film’s ENTIRE production design strapped to the roof of her car.

NFS: What’s Sour Party about?

TD: The film is about two broke, struggling 30-somethings who desperately need to come up with money for a baby shower gift. In order to get the gift, they make a list of people from their past they believe owe them money and set out on a twisted road trip across Los Angeles to try and collect on their debts.

Beneath the surface, the film is really an exploration of failure and the pressures of trying to stay afloat in LA. It’s also about friendship, and how when things go sour, it’s your friends who see you through.

Sour Party is semi-autobiographical, informed by our collective experiences in LA over the last 15 years and the wacky characters we’ve encountered. It is our love letter to this city.

'Sour Party' via Anchor Bay Entertainment

NFS: Where is the film currently in its journey?

TD: The film is reaching the end of its journey after three long years. We shot it in 2022, toured film festivals in 2023, which helped us secure distribution. Now we’re excited to share that it will be having a limited theatrical release, starting with a screening in LA on Feb. 8th at the Gardena Cinema. A portion of proceeds from that screening are going to wildfire relief charity. We’re also playing at the Music Box Theater in Chicago on Feb. 18th.

It’s touring arthouse cinemas across the country and will then be available on VOD and Blu-ray shortly after. It’s taken a lot of hard work to get this far; we didn’t have a sales agent, and everything we’ve done has been with persistent hard work and dedication from so many friends and supporters who championed the film.

NFS: Can you speak to your work together as a team, co-directs, and also partners in real life?

TD: We’re married for starters, so this is a loaded question. We actually started working together before we were a couple (we’ve known each other for 15 years since we both moved to LA). We collaborated on a short film together in 2013 and never looked back, founding our production company, Artless Entertainment, a couple of years later.

Working together came very naturally to us; we just clicked as a writing team. We work off of one laptop, feverishly passing it back and forth, and somehow, pages fill up the screen. When we’re writing, we’re fighting. We are both extremely passionate and get very excited, so writing becomes a very heightened activity, to say the least. It actually makes for a very smooth flow on set because we have already hashed so much out beforehand.

In both film and life, we really do feel like equal partners. Our individual strengths and weaknesses complement and balance one another out. What’s challenging about navigating both business and our “real life” is when one of us isn’t doing well, we’re both not doing well, and there’s no safety net. The flip side is that we have each other; our shared passion keeps us going, and we’re able to lift each other up when things get hard.

On set, we have a great workflow, and we share different duties in directing. Everything is discussed at length and agreed to before we ever show up; that way, if one of us is pulled into something, the other is always there to keep the vision on track. This is especially important in Sour Party, where Amanda was also acting. There wasn’t always time for extensive playback and no time for rehearsals, so we relied on our pre-planning to get through it.

We like to say that together we make one competent filmmaker.

NFS: What was the lowest low during the making of Sour Party? How did you navigate that moment and keep the project moving forward?

TD: Making any film is hard; making a film on a micro-budget, relying on friends and favors, is even harder. We had so many challenges during this shoot, from an ever-rotating crew to costly COVID restrictions, getting shut down for filming without a permit (Michael had to go to court in Santa Monica, which is a hilarious story unto itself).

We had to scramble for a new location at 4 a.m. the day before a big shoot, only to discover the new location was located above a “rage room” axe-throwing bar, with deafening sounds that carried so far, we could only film in 15-minute increments while they reset their chamber of destruction. The hurdles were endless, but honestly, none of that was a low point. We were all hands on deck; we were a family, and when pivots came, we always figured out how to navigate them.

The low points came after production had wrapped, after post was finished—when we began the long slog of film festival submissions. Everything was hope and positivity until reality hit. We always knew film festivals were going to be hard; this was not our first rodeo; we’ve been submitting projects on the circuit for years, but somehow the rejections never get easier.

The film festival landscape is so competitive and challenging; getting into top film festivals is more difficult than getting into an Ivy League school, and facing rejection after rejection really did take its toll emotionally. We had put everything we had into this film, but this was the one part of this process that simply was not in our control, and we weren’t prepared. We spent a lot of nights questioning our work and ourselves.

We got through it by sticking together and leaning on each other. Eventually, we found our home and screened at a number of wonderful film festivals, including the Austin Film Festival, where we were nominated for the Comedy Vanguard Award. We won the audience award at the Chattanooga Film Festival, and we really found our people. Sour Party is a weird film, and the people that love it love it hard. What started as a daunting process of facing rejection ended in some of the most rewarding experiences we’ve ever had.

'Sour Party'via Anchor Bay Entertainment

NFS: What has been the biggest high for you in this process?

TD: The biggest high for us would definitely be the community we experienced making this film. The amount of people that showed up for us was completely humbling. People we hadn’t spoken to in years, friends, and artists, came out for this film, and there wasn’t a day that went by where we weren’t overwhelmed by the support we were getting from our community.

Then, on our festival tour, meeting audience members who loved the film was so rewarding. That gave us some of the most incredible moments we’ve ever had as artists. There was one screening in particular that did not go well. It was a male-dominated room (only 3 women were there), and it simply wasn’t the right audience for it. We came out feeling defeated when a woman came up to us with tears in her eyes. She told us that she had been going through a really hard time and felt seen by our film. We were thinking before the screening even started that we shouldn’t have come, but reaching even just one person was so worth it. It’s a cliché, but that really is what art is all about.

NFS: Are there lessons from Sour Party you’d pass on to others starting their own journey?

TD: If we could impart one lesson to anyone starting an independent film journey, it’s this: BUDGET FOR POST! Michael edited Sour Party and so we kind of thought post would be a breeze, but we were so wrong. We had made many shorts and other projects before, but the unexpected costs of delivering a feature almost derailed us on a number of occasions. From music licensing to legal fees, there were so many unexpected costs. Our advice would be to get super granular with every foreseeable post-production cost; don’t think that you’re going to just get the film in the can and figure the rest out. The more you plan ahead, the better off you’ll be.

NFS: What’s next for you as filmmakers? Do you already have a new project brewing, or are you focused on sharing Sour Party with the world?

TD: We always have another project brewing; actually, we have about four. There’s another feature script that we’re aiming to be our next project. It’s a sci-fi thriller, dark comedy, and it won the 2023 Mallorca Film Festival Award for best screenplay. We recently attached a new producer and are actively looking for financing on that. There are also two other feature scripts we’re in the middle of and a couple of TV series we’re actively shopping around. Whichever hits first will be the next thing we focus on.

For the immediate future, though, we’re super excited about getting Sour Party out to the world. We’re going on tour with the film to a few select theaters where we will be along with Sammy for Q&A’s. We already mentioned Gardena Cinema in LA and the Music Box in Chicago; we’re also heading to Brooklyn and a couple of other places with dates announcing soon. There’s a lot of exciting stuff coming down the pipeline for Sour Party. Follow us on Instagram @sourpartymovie for all the latest info.