Award-winning suspense drama short from writer/producer/director Paul Tompkins

The disembodied voice of a photographer stalked a lone actress. Flashbulbs popped intermittently as the man talked, but the actress couldn't see beyond the bright lights to the darkness where the photographer hid.

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"Hollywood Photos of Katie Mills" is a cautionary tale of the predatory world of Hollywood, and was recently selected as a finalist for Manhattan Short Film Festival. The Oklahoma City Museum of Art Noble Theater will be just one of the 72 theaters in the US Canada and Europe to screen the twelve finalists. The audiences will

be allowed to vote for the winner.

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University of Oklahoma student Sara Rae Foster stars as the wide-eyed "Katie Mills" and the short film is just one of three American films included, with other finalists from all over the world including Cuba, Israel, and the United Kingdom.

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Director and writer of "Katie Mills " Paul Tompkins is an Oklahoma native who spent 20 years in California and worked on films such as Francis Ford Coppola's "Rumble Fish," "American History X" and "Galaxy of Terror" with James Cameron. His experience in the Hollywood system gave him the idea for his short film. "It came from people telling me what happened to them, and some of those lines came directly from their experience," Tompkins said.

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Tompkins returned to Oklahoma in 2000 when his mother grew ill. He decided to make films in Oklahoma along with his wife Deborah. "I thought it was going to be fairly easy, but I didn't anticipate the difficulty in raising the kind of funds we're talking about, which is in the hundreds of thousands and even into the millions," Tompkins said.

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"Katie Mills" is Tompkins' first short film and came about when one of Tompkins' screenwriting students handed him a check for CrazyFish, the production company he began with Deborah. "She invited us out to lunch and gave us $2500 bucks,” Tompkins said. "I said ‘I can't make a feature film for $2500 bucks,’ and she said, 'Well, make something.'”

 

The spiritual tone of the short film is part of the goal for CrazyFish, an attempt to develop films that aren't specifically Christian, but bent towards an audience interested in faith-based entertainment that isn't just a sermon on celluloid. "I'm not here to convert anyone with my movies, I'm here to entertain," Tompkins said. "Christians are not going to be able to compete in Hollywood until they learn to make fun of themselves. We sin, we make mistakes and we screw up."

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He wants to avoid lecturing the audience on morals, but rather develop entertaining films accessible to mainstream audiences that also deal with the struggles of the faith-based community.