The Auteur Theory: Filmmaker Jim Towns

Descending into the production office of Shadow Kamera, one is reminded of a dark gothic cave. This is by design. This subterranean dwelling in suburban Los Angeles might be described as a man cave in another universe, but here it’s a post-production facility as well as the hub for the acclaimed podcast, "Borgo Pass."

In the back of the densely packed room, filled with an array of computers, Frankenstein memorabilia, Universal Horror posters, cameras and lenses dating back to the early film era—sits Jim Towns, a thin, intense, bearded man huddled over a rather large microphone.

I originally sat down with the multi-hyphenate several months ago, but life and work got in the way of finishing the piece. To be honest, what most motivated me to return to the profile was embarrassment. In the months since I interviewed him, he miraculously found the time to write, shoot, and edit another feature film, the monochromatic, Jim Jarmush-like, post-apocalyptic Mandromeda. Surely, if he could make a feature film, I could put the finishing touches on a mere profile in the same time frame.

One look at Jim Towns’s IMDb page—with twenty credits and six upcoming titles— might make anyone in the industry both jealous and perplexed. The filmmaker has worked under the Hollywood radar, yet somehow found a way to consistently make movies, which is quite a rarity in this business. Towns’s combination of ingenuity, skin-of-the-teeth tenacity, and luck have elevated him to a rare place in the indie pantheon.

With two movies released in 2024, the bespoke Killer Ex, and the aforementioned passion project, Mandromeda, he seems to have mastered the art of shoestring filmmaking that miraculously makes money for all involved and has artistic merit to boot. However this might change after a recent visit to the U.S. Virgin Islands (where he was feted at the Governor’s mansion) and the tantalizing possibility of obtaining a budget worthy of his talents. Only time will tell, but after sitting down with this truly unique filmmaker, one suspects he will land on top, regardless of the outcome of any one project.

Towns was raised by a single mother in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh suburb with a somewhat disturbing amount of talent in his graduating high school class. In addition to Towns, fellow classmates include Dave Filoni, one of the architects of the modern Star Wars empire, and Grant Moninger, Artistic Director of the American Cinematheque. There must have been something in the water, or perhaps runoff from the nearby steel mills in Pittsburgh. Or maybe it was merely the well-funded art and video department in the high school (much to the chagrin of the sports-obsessed locals).

Jim migrated west about twenty years ago, having graduated from the esteemed Savannah School of Design with a BFA in Sequential Art (which includes comic book illustration/story boarding/illustration for animation) with the intention to become a Hollywood filmmaker. He had already shot Prometheus Triumphant: A Fugue in the Key of Flesh; a bold, inventive feature-length (and decidedly non-Hollywood) silent film, heavily influenced by German expressionist filmmakers.

I sat down with Jim in the aforementioned studio-cave and delved into his two plus decades as a filmmaker. Below is an edited version of our conversation.

Scott Sanford Tobis: Have you always been interested in film?

Jim Towns: Yeah. My buddy, Mike, and I made home movies when we were teenagers. He got one of those Sony videocameras; the one that has the deck that goes over the shoulder we found in a thrift store. We made a movie entitled Breakfast at Denny's 2000 about three cultists who resurrect their dead friend. We shot in a cemetery at night with no permission. The friends realize they have to take Lazarus to Denny's and get him an egg breakfast in order to bring him fully back to life. Unfortunately, he becomes so annoying that they have to kill him again. It was an important moment for me. We actually shot something and finished it!

After I graduated, I moved to New York and started doing set design for theatre. I tried to break into comics and came really, really close to working for The Matrix website. I had read the script before the film came out and thought it sounded ridiculous.

ST: I think a lot of people read the Wachowski’s script and didn't get it. Including famously, the pre-slap Will Smith, who had been offered the lead role of Neo.

JT: I also had a job at a video supply store. Since digital video seemed like such good quality (hindsight is 20/20—it had a mere 480 lines of resolution), Mike and I decided to make our own short: The Sleep of Reason. It was esoteric and very art house with no dialogue.

This whole silent film idea made me think I could take advantage of the low resolution to make video look like old film stock. There were filters that put scratches on the images. It was like, ‘What if our first feature film is something that looks like the beginning of film itself?’ I grew up loving old monster movies. Frankenstein, Nosferatu, Cabinet of Dr. Calagari. So, what if we do it like German expressionist film? We made an actual feature—Prometheus Triumphant—shooting that over the next two years. A 90-minute feature film. Sorry. 79 minutes … because it's the exact length of Frankenstein.

We filmed in an abandoned lunatic asylum, Mont Dix, which was built in 1888. It was like a Mrs. Danvers-style building—a mile long. It was insane. It was so big and empty and absolutely terrifying. And there were still slabs where you could open the door and slide out the bodies in the morgue.

ST: What did you do when you first arrived in L.A.?

JT: I was doing various jobs in the industry—picking up a contract at Warner Brothers and driving it to Malibu to have someone sign it and then back and whatever other craziness existed in the pre-digital world. Typical PA work. Then I got hired to write a bunch of scripts for this guy who had posted on Craiglist. I had a month to write three scripts. So I started doing this thing where I actually changed the spacing in Final Draft to 1.5. He’d shoot the movie and wonder why it's coming in a little short.

That was my first professional screenwriting work, and I was paid a grand total of $500 per script. The director was a psychopath who shall remain nameless, but I did learn something important. He had massive confidence—for no good reason—and that mattered a great deal.

After that, I landed a job at the American Cinematheque and started co-managing the Egyptian Theatre. I was very lucky; they let me do a screening of Prometheus on a quiet weekday afternoon. We invited as many people as possible. It looked great on their new digital projector, and I met Greg Hatanaka, who runs Cinema Epoch, at the screening.

ST: You didn't know him before?

JT: No. He was a friend of a friend. After the screening, Greg and I met up for dinner, and he said he’d put out Prometheus in a limited theatrical release and on DVD. I gotta thank him for taking a chance on a film that was not marketable at all. A black-and-white silent film with tons of full frontal nudity. Not exactly commercial.

ST: Let me guess. That’s when Hollywood rolled out the red carpet for you.

JT: Not exactly. It didn't jump off the shelves. I learned a lesson there. KCRW’s Film Week with Larry Mantle gave it a positive review and Kevin Thomas from the LA Times gave us a quote for the DVD. Something along the lines of ‘the new Fritz Lang.’ When that guy nails the cinematic references, it makes you feel good. A lot of people's first film— Nolan’s Following for one—are very artistic enterprises where you can see the nucleus of their talent. So, I was hoping that people would look at my film and say ‘he could direct a talkie.’

ST: Right. That kid’s got moxie. Let’s give him a shot.

JT: Hollywood didn’t come calling, but Greg gave us a tiny bit of money to go do another film. Mike and I co-directed Stiff, which was an experiment for me, directing actors for the first time with dialogues. Learning how to do coverage. It's weird because I didn't go to film school. I watched a lot of movies. I mean, every DVD I own has director’s commentary that I probably listened to at least once. That was my film school. I was getting into del Toro and Jeunet early on.

Not long after, I randomly ran into Scott Frazzell, a producer who I had done a short film with a few years earlier at an event. I showed him my new project, and he and his now ex-wife decide to help fund it. It was called House of Bad. A tale of three sisters on the run with a suitcase of heroin hide out in their childhood home, which is haunted by the ghosts of their parents. We put it together and I had some really good resources through my wife’s friend who had a house in Pasadena we could shoot in. The friend was smart. She went out of town for the week of the shoot.

(The wife is Betty Lou Towns, the recently appointed Dean of Fine Arts at El Camino College. She has been an amazing supportive person in terms of Jim’s art and life, and someone who prefers to remain behind the scenes, which is why I am outing her at this particular moment.)

ST: I heard that you actually made money off House Of Bad, which seems like a minor miracle.

JT: Yeah, it was deferred, but everyone eventually got paid. In fact, at one point, we were hunting people down, trying to give them money. They were baffled. The investors made their money back, and Scott and I got paid for our work. Oddly, we just got the rights to the film back. We’re going to re-release it on streaming and DVD/BD.

ST: Tell me a bit about your next project, State of Desolation (retitled End Times and now streaming on Amazon Prime FreeVee).

JT: We had moved to San Pedro, and I was really in love with this area. I wanted to shoot a movie at all these cool places. The abandoned fort. The old gun emplacements. And this Navy housing community that had been abandoned in the 90s. I drove to it and asked about filming there. I didn't have any idea what I wanted to film yet, but I wanted to see it. The guard told me, ‘No, nobody has ever been able to film here.’ SWAT and LAPD teams train on attacking houses here. The are goats roaming around the place. But the guard was really cool. He liked my old Chevy Nova, and he mentioned that they're selling the property and a contractor is going to take over. So, if I hear about it being sold, to get in here and ask—maybe the rules will change.

So, a few months later, my wife wakes me up one morning and tells me the local paper mentioned that the property had been sold. I immediately head over and talk to the construction foreman and tell him I wanted to shoot for a few days. He said, 'Yeah, okay, whatever. That's cool.' No money, none whatsoever. The only rule is we’d have to start at 4:00 p.m. after the tractors and everything were finished, Since it was summer, that’s like a four-hour shoot day. So, it's limited. But it was an entire community that had just been abandoned and gone to seed. The houses were tumbling down and everything was just so unique. To find something like that in L.A. Unbelievable.

(NOTE: Utilizing abandoned properties to elevate the look of his films seems to be a recurring factor in his work. From Prometheus to End Times and beyond.)

JT: Anyway, now I have a location, but no script. It’s another case of ‘we have X amount of time because they're gonna start tearing this stuff down.’ We had a month and a half to get ready and then we had to start shooting. So, I write the first half of the movie that uses the location. Then we’ll take a hiatus and shoot the second half (after I write it, of course).

I had Jamie Bernadette (from House of Bad) in mind as the lead. Then an actor named Craig Stark, who had worked on Tarantino’s films, reached out to me. He’s this cool dude from Louisiana with a interesting accent, and he’s trying to get back into film. I come up with this idea, kind of a two hander—about this zombie pocket. Which was perfect since I'm from Pittsburgh, which is part and parcel of Zombie Town.

ST: You actually got money out of this project as well. A recurring theme, and quite a rarity in the low-budget indie arena.

JT: Yeah. It's nice. Asylum is the distribution company.

ST: The Sharknado people?

JT: They release other stuff, but you only hear about the Sharknado stuff. I mean, if they said, 'Hey, Jim, you want to direct a giant shark movie?' Are you kidding? It'd be fun to do it like a real art-house film. Black-and-white. We’d never see the shark, It’s just implied, like the Night of the Demon.

ST: So, in addition to making films, you somehow found the time to create a successful podcast about Universal Horror movies.

JT: Yes. The "Borgo Pass." (Borgo Pass is the name of the gateway to the realm of Count Dracula in the Universal classic.) It’s a labor of love, but we have developed a nice following. It’s available on Apple, Spotify and other podcast hubs.

ST: Then you put together another horror film, The Beast Inside, starring another one of your actresses from House of Bad, Sadie Katz.

JT: Per the seeming norm for my films, it’s been retitled. It’s now called The Possession of Anna, but … I did a project called Immortal Hands before that. We started right before COVID. The script was written, and I was talking to a DP and then—boom—we’re in lockdown.

ST: Yes. A truly good time for everyone in the world. To clarify, after State Of Desolation, what were you doing? It’s the one place your ridiculous overstuffed IMDb page seems quiet.

JT: I started writing fiction. And I worked on a number of documentaries, including ones on martial arts as well as The Bill Murray Experience. And Immortal Hands, the martial arts pilot I wrote and directed. We shot it all over the South Bay. I got to build sets. It was my first time having sets built. The pilot had a decent budget. $45,000 or so.

ST: So, the red carpet was finally being rolled out for you?

JT: Well, with Possession of Anna, an actress I had worked with before came to me with this idea and wanted to make a movie for no money. I told her that I'd help write it and then—suddenly—money started flowing. It was her initial concept: What if a woman who is possessed, but nobody believes her, and she has to exorcise herself? I told her that I actually started writing that script in 2012 and I had gotten thirty pages in and kinda hit a wall. So, I wrote the script, and we start shooting that while I was still editing Immortal Hands.

ST: What was the budget?

JT: Around $75,000. A decent budget. And then went up to $90,000.

ST: Did you tell me you thought it's your best looking film?

JT: I think one of the best parts of that is I got to bring Chad Courtney back. He had shot House of Bad and then gone off and worked for Microsoft, traveling all over the world and becoming a top tier cinematographer. That was a great collaboration. I got to bring on a bunch of crew people that I'd worked with before. We just had a good team making that movie, which was basically four days in a motel room.

ST: How many days was the total shoot?

JT: Fifteen days. Something like that. Might have been twelve, but we did pickups that added up to fifteen. We shot a few days in an old church in Hollywood.

ST: Tell me about Killer Ex, the “bespoke” film you shot in New Jersey earlier this year.

JT: Through the martial arts scene, I was introduced to a grandmaster in Taekwondo out of New Jersey named Jose Torres. He had acted on stage when he was young and wanted to make a movie, so we started talking. It’s the full Jim Towns service. I'll write your movie for if you have a vague idea. And it'll be way better than most of the crap that's out there.

He's a really nice guy. I had gotten to a point where I'd had a lot of conflict-based relationships with the producers of my projects, both in features and documentaries. When 2023 hit, I had kind of reached a breaking point. My wife said, 'You don't make enough money at this to be this unhappy. You either need to make more money or be happier doing it.' She told me that she'd rather I just do the podcast and make no money and be happy. Betty really articulated the problem for me.

So, I might have been hired to write Jose’s idea, but Killer Ex is my film. I chose the composer. I was the D.P. I was the editor. And I’m going to deliver a good film to Jose without losing my mind in the process.

ST: What was the budget?

JT: $25,000. I got most of that. As writer-director-editor-cinematographer.

ST: He got all that for $25,000. No wonder he loves you.

JT: I know, right? And it all lead to the U.S. Virgin Islands thing.

(One of the producers on Killer Ex connected Jim with a producer with connections in the U.S. Virgin Islands. They flew Jim to the islands, feted him at the Governor’s mansion and showed him the various locations the islands offered. The project is currently on hold, but if it happens, it will be the biggest budget—and most freedom—Jim has had as a filmmaker. Be sure to check his IMDb page for updates.)

JT: That’s called Paradise Fallen. I wrote a first draft.

ST: What’s it about?

JT: Child trafficking. I spoke with the head of the FBI in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was surreal. I pick up the phone and hear, 'I'm Jeff. I'm the head of the FBI for the U.S. Virgin Islands. How can I help you?' I was able to ask all these questions. He told me that trafficking is far more complicated than Sound of Freedom. Not sensational. The vast percentage of sex trafficking he comes across are family members. It's like someone with their niece, their cousin, their coach, or whatever. Which is actually exponentially worse.

The basic idea for the film is that these people host these karate tournaments down in the Virgin islands. The winners are promised sponsorships and tours. Then they’re sold into underground fighting. If they don’t fight, or if they lose, they're drawn into something worse. It obviously can't take place in the U.S. Virgin Islands, even if it’s shot there.

ST: Is Paradise Fallen something Jose would fund as well?

JT: No. It’s funded privately and through the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands or connections with the island. It was crazy. The governor came to a thing that we were at, along with the two State Senators. The Film Commission rep drove us all over the island to show us the incredible locations.

ST: The juxtaposition between shooting a film for $25,000 versus shooting in the U.S. Virginia Islands with government approval and real money must be jarring.

JT: It was probably more than the Killer Ex budget just to bring us there for a couple days.

ST: So, what's next for you?

JT: I need to make another black-and-white film. I watched Oppenheimer and it made me want to shoot monochromatic 4K. I also want to do something that's a little bit broader, and not a genre film. I kind of want to prove I can do a story that doesn’t have people getting punched or have zombies in it. I want to prove that my writing can stand up without all of those things. So, it’s a black-and-white film set in L.A., and it's sort of about the end of the world. But it's really about the characters and real people. The story follows three Uber drivers over the night the Andromeda Galaxy is crashing into our galaxy. Scientists are predicting that we have two or three days left on Earth before something cataclysmic happens. And we just follow the characters driving different passengers around to their destinations.

In the time frame between initially sitting down with Jim and the publication date, Mr. Towns wrote, directed, and edited the black-and-white film he was merely contemplating in the paragraph above: Mandromeda. He is currently scoring and seeking a distributor. As with Killer Ex, he was his own cinematographer, and shot it locally with a budget under $20,000. For the record, it looks fantastic. Be sure to look for it on your friendly corporate streaming service in the coming months. Even better, wait for Jim’s preferred method to watch his movies, the eventual Blu-Ray/DVD release.

Jim’s work ethic is boundless and this writer wouldn’t be surprised if he squeezes out another project before the end of the year. Whether it’s Killer Ex 2, Paradise Falls, or something esoteric and unpredictable, it will be worthwhile viewing.

*Feature photo of Jim Towns by Betty Lou Sedor