FAYETTEVILLE — It started with a younger brother’s awed question: “We could make a real movie?” Todd Wolfe, in the middle of editing “some long-form music video stu◊,” told his younger brother, Matthew, that indeed they could. Then he promptly put the conversation out of his mind.

“Probably six months later, Matthew said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a script,’” Todd Wolfe remembers. “I was shocked.”

The result, titled “Left/Right,” has won myriad film festival honors and will be one of the featured presentations this weekend at the first-ever 540 Film Fest,showing tonight at the UARK Ballroom.

The event boasts nine feature fi lms, eight documentaries, 11 shorts and seven student films, all being shown over three days at two Fayetteville locations.

“It’s the perfect way of ending the festival journey for this fi lm,” says Matthew Wolfe, who has lived in Fayetteville since 2004. “Other fi lm festi vals have been good to us; now we can help get this film festival o◊the ground.

The event is the brainchild of Cassie Self, a professional actor based in North west Arkansas, and Rowland McKinney, a lifelong fi lm bu◊who says he watched other Fayetteville film festivals fi zzle but believes this one can fl y.

“Shorts, generally speaking, don’t have a market,” he says of the most popularfilm festival entries. “They’re just a calling card for the filmmaker. We want to go a di◊erent direction and market feature fi lms.

“Anybody can make a fi lm now, but nobody wants to put money behind a film that doesn’t already have an audience,” McKinney explains. “So fi lmmakers, if they’re not supported by the studios, have to go to the fi lm festival circuit to get their films to market.

“We’d love for everybody to come see these films, but my ultimate goal is to have industry players involved in the commerce of filmmaking in Northwest Arkansas.”

“We want people to leave thinking,‘Wow, this is a great place to shoot a film,’” Self agrees.

While not shot in Northwest Arkansas, the Wolfe brothers’ “Left/Right” is indeed proof that anybody can make a movie. Todd Wolfe had music business experience - and is accepted by both as the artsy one - but Matthew, who works in sales, had never written seriously or acted.

“It was one of those things that I thought, ‘If we’re going to put the time and energy into this- which could literally make us hate each other - I wanted to be sure we could do it and do it well,’” Todd Wolfe says. “I was so impressed with the script! I thought we had a story that was strong enough to carry us.”

The brothers got $50,000 in financing and shot “Left/Right” in 15 days in Atlanta and their home region of central Pennsylvania.

Todd Wolfe insisted on top-of-theline equipment and an experienced director of photography, Bruce Cole. Matthew Wolfe insisted that “even though we wanted to makea good movie, we definitely had to have some fun.” Cast in the starring role, he immediately found out that being on camera “was unexpectedly comfortable” - a great relief to his brother.

“We never discussed whether he could act,” Todd Wolfe says.

“Little did I know he’d really excel, and the camera would like him!

“It could have gone terribly wrong, and Christmases would have been awkward!”

The story of “Left/Right” focuses on someone’s life goingseriously awry. Matthew Wolfe says it’s based on a Georgia coach who lied on his resume. For the main character, D. Ray Morton, being caught in that kind of exaggeration means crawling home from his once-successful big-city career to try to salvage something of his identity.

Synopses call “Left/Right” a coming-of-age comedy. Matthew Wolfe disagrees.

“I’d say it’s a drama,” he saysof the film, which he would rate R. “The message I was trying to convey really isn’t all that funny.”

In the end, D. Ray Morton discovers that “his obituary, not his resume, will be the true measure of his worth.” Both Wolfe brothers agree they hope theirs would say they’d told some good stories along the way.

A full schedule and ticket information is available at 540fi lmfest.

com.

Entertainment, Pages 2 on 11/06/2009

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