Movie

Below is Tyler Sorensen's 2019 internet show about the movie featuring interview clips with Dennis and lots of great music from Oregon in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

You can watch the entire movie below for free. The quality may not be the best (this is a digital dub from a 30 year-old Beta SP master), but sadly, it’s the best one that we have. Somewhere out there in the world is a higher quality digital tape (D2) that we paid for as part of the Hemdale offer. We’re sure it looks much better, but we don’t have it.

If you’re so inclined, leave a donation to help us pay the actors, the crew and the few investors who believed in us (it’s been 30 years!). While some distribution companies made money by selling the film, no one involved with the making of the movie ever made a dime, including the writer/director and producers. You can read that story here.

Thanks and enjoy the movie! Watch it here.

30 YEARS ON…

A note from the writer/director Dennis Rockney
The passage of time shines a light on things—especially cinema. We see movies made in another time and marvel at fashion choices, music styles, attitudes, technology and more. They are amazing time-capsules of the period—for better or for worse. Time detaches itself from subjectivity and sentiment—ignoring context, intent, economics and abilities—and simply judges a thing as it is in the here and now.

So, yeah—it didn’t take 30 years—or even 30 days—for me to see the many flaws in this movie. And as writer, director and producer, much of that falls squarely on me. Across the film, there’s some certainly cringe-worthy dialogue, poorly conceived scenes, directorial choices that are less than stellar, and performances that could have been given a better chance to shine. And while I can’t put blame on the technology of the day, we often were at odds with what we wanted to do—and the physical and technological capabilities of that time. Certainly, if we’d made the movie today, it would look better.

But we didn’t—we made it in 1989. And in spite of the flaws, I am proud of this little movie.

I’m proud because of that context. Because it was difficult. Because people who made no-budget films often didn’t add as much complexity as we did; working with untrained crew and inexperienced actors, having very little budget, holding down fulltime jobs on the side, adding time-travel special effects (years before After-Effects). We shot high, approaching it all with a “we’ll figure it out” attitude. And mostly, we did.

It would have been a lot easier to have made a “Slackers” type movie (and, by the way, I love Richard Linklater’s films). We could have cast our skilled actor friends and shot a film about them partying, pissing each other off, getting fired and working dead-end jobs until one of them dies to give everyone else a new perspective. But we didn’t. We took on more than we should have. And in a way, we knew it going in, but we did it anyway.

So now, 30 years later, we celebrate the movie; the wonder, the flaws, the small and the big of it. A Stranger in Time was, and continues to be, a thing that shaped me, taught me, consumed me, but most of all provided me with lifelong friends—and is an experience that still endures, even 30 years on.