The rise of St. Louis’ Sundance kid
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Larry Busacca/wireimage.com
If there was any danger that Brian Jun would get a big head after his first feature film was selected to be screened at the Sundance Film Festival last January, Paris Hilton put a quick end to it. There Jun was, mingling at a casual house party in Park City, trying to process the headtrip of debuting Steel City at the indie film festival, when reality tapped him on the shoulder: He’d need to leave the party to make room for the hotel heiress whose best known “film” was shot with an amateur’s video camera and a night-vision lens. “I looked at the girl running the house, and I said, ‘I had no idea Paris Hilton had a movie in the festival,’” Jun says with a laugh.
Such are the humbling dues every young writer/director—even one who’s enjoyed the success Jun has—must pay in the celebutantes-and-sycophants world of modern filmmaking.
It’s been a start-and-stop five years for Jun since graduating from Webster University’s film program in 2001. First there was the move to L.A. (“I had no practical sense of the way the film business worked”). And then there was the invitation to enter Fox Searchlight Pictures’ talent program for young directors. Then came the short film, “Researching Raymond Burke,” that Fox bankrolled. And then came the drought. “Everything stopped,” Jun says. “I had my beginner’s luck, and then I hit a brick wall.”
For the next two years, he schlepped luggage at the St. Regis Hotel in Los Angeles for $6.75 an hour instead of working a better-paying desk job, just so he could interact with people “in the real world.” Of course, the flexible hours that made it easier to scribble down dialogue for Steel City and plan its production didn’t hurt.
Finally, after six months of wooing financiers and waiting for the right actors, Jun came home to Alton, Ill., in December 2004 to make his movie. The shoot took just 18 days and cost $300,000. It’s not exactly blockbuster material—an incarcerated father in a working-class town tries to reconnect with his sons—but Jun isn’t exactly gunning for Michael Bay’s job, either. “I’ve seen hundreds of student films that are imitations of zombie movies or drug deals-gone-wrong flicks,” says Kathy Corley, one of Jun’s professors at Webster. “Brian’s films were different, the kind that would be made by someone who includes John Cassavetes as a creative influence.”
Despite solid reviews at Sundance (Variety said it “hinted at a strong career to come” for Jun), the movie has yet to find a domestic distributor. St. Louis will get a sneak peak, though, when Jun returns to St. Louis on May 7 to screen it for the finale of the Webster Student Film Festival. Regardless of whether audiences elsewhere ever see Steel City, he’s satisfied. “I’m grateful to have made a film, and I’m grateful to have played at Sundance,” he says. “But I don’t have any expectations in this business, period. I could be carrying luggage next year and I wouldn’t be surprised.”
