“I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.” — Alfred Hitchcock

Hunched slightly over in the darkened outer reaches of Corner Bar on Spring Garden, writer, producer and director Phil Blattenberger is pecking away at finessing his latest screenplay. Forbes anointed him as “Cinema’s Every Man” and says he “is reshaping the industry in his working-class image.” Launched from Greensboro, this young filmmaker managed to wrap two acclaimed feature films in the last two years alone. His 2024 release, Laws of Man, stars Jacob Keohane (Halloween Kills), Jackson Rathbone (Twilight), Dermot Mulroney (My Best Friend’s Wedding), Keith Carradine (Nashville) and Harvey Keitel (Reservoir Dogs).

“I was in grad school at UNCG” recalls Blattenberger. A baby step back in 2017 is what prompted this improbable journey. “As a fun little side project, I wrote a Vietnam War movie. I’m going to shoot this thing in the woods of North Carolina with my buddies to get investors involved.” As it turns out, he raised enough money behind it to ship production overseas to Cambodia. The result was Point Man, an unflinching deep dive into racial tensions during the Vietnam War, racking up nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Director at the Sydney Indie Film Festival, ultimately winning Best Film among other accolades. Sony secured DVD-distribution rights for the 2018 wartime drama.

His second feature, Condor’s Nest, came out a full five years later, and was more ambitious. A WWII adventure about a downed American B-17 bomber crew thwarting Nazis, it stars a platoon of familiar pros including Arnold Vosloo (The Mummy), Michael Ironside (Starship Troopers), Academy Award-nominee Bruce Davison (X-Men, 1923) and Jorge Garcia (Lost). While some scenes were filmed in South America (doubling for Germany), most of the production was shot in North Carolina, including right here in town, even a day lensing at the former Cellar Anton’s site, underneath what is now Havana Phil’s. I’m told it looked exactly as it did when the last meal was served there some four decades earlier. (I wrote about that project in my March 2023 column: ohenrymag.com/wandering-billy-76.)

Blattenberger set sights even higher for his follow up, the aforementioned Laws of Man. “Next step up is a bigger budget, bigger names,” he says about an explosive period piece pitting a suited duo of 1960s-era U.S. Marshalls manhunting a fleeing fugitive. “If we’re going to justify that expense, we’ve got to have the soft money. So we set up shop in New Mexico.” That decision was made primarily due to the state’s generous financial incentives for filmmakers, i.e. soft money. “All of the Condor’s Nest financiers came in so we got Keith Carradine — the first time I’ve worked with an Academy Award winner.” Laws of Man scored Best Film at the Tangier Film Festival in 2024.

“Jacob Keohane, who starred in my first two movies, plays the lead in Laws of Man, just a phenomenal guy.” Blattenberger met the actor while working as a bartender prior to filming Point Man. “His audition came across, I watched the tape and I was like, ‘Where the hell do I know that guy?’ I realized he was DJ Jake the Snake at Club Fifth Season, my first bartending gig in its final days, circa 2009.”

Blattenberger’s fourth feature, Ascendant, is likely to lift off as you’re reading this, but the financing landscape in 2025 is a great deal more fraught than it was even just a couple of years ago.

He characterizes current conditions as the biggest crisis the motion picture industry has faced since the advent of television. “Distributors have chopped their minimum guarantees because they overspent, basically.” Recall that onslaught of intriguing new TV series and big budget pictures bombarding us on streaming platforms beginning around five years ago (thanks to COVID)? Notice how that practice has cooled considerably? Turns out there was some illogic behind that. Amazon, Hulu and Netflix leveraged — and blew through — billions of dollars developing jaw-dropping content with maximum star power, believing that newbies like Peacock and Paramount+ would wither away in their wake, leaving just a few players dominating digital media.

“It just didn’t happen,” says Blattenberger. Posting billions in losses, streamers reversed course, eschewing new acquisitions. “They stopped buying the indie films that hit Cannes and then Toronto. Nobody is getting post-theatrical deals.” The (new) old paradigm was that a movie would have an initial run, get picked up by a top-tier streamer for three months, followed by a Hulu run, then a Tubi exclusive and a cable deal. “That used to be the waterfall.”

I find that comforting, in a perverse way, knowing the movie business hasn’t changed significantly since I walked away 30 years ago. The bobbleheads tucked into top floors are still running things with reckless fecklessness.

As preeminent entertainment essayist and film historian Peter Biskind once wrote, “ . . . the independents who are really passionate always find a way to make their films.” Embracing this unprecedented distribution dynamic, for his next production, Blattenberger set aside an elaborate concept, which was already in the works, in favor of a more scaled-down approach.

“Because B-budget action thrillers require huge names, you’ve got to make your money back on a $1.5 million budget,” argues the auteur. “The exception has always been horror — I hate the word ‘horror,’ so I’m going to call it a psychological thriller — that lets you bring in a genre star who costs you pennies on the dollar compared to your A-listers. Horror turns out a hundred times at the box office what you could possibly expect with low-budget action.”

In pre-production when we spoke, Ascendant is centered around a doomsday cult no doubt up to devilish dealings while on a retreat in Eastern North Carolina. “You’ve got to make your location interesting if you’re going to hold an audience hostage for 90 minutes in what’s effectively a single location. You’ve got to go for broke on the design.” What will be a creepy encampment situated inside what is effectively a 3-acre crop circle is being constructed from the ground up in Rocky Mount. Blattenberger is no Cecil B. DeMille on an elevated perch barking orders through a megaphone. “I’m out there with dirty hands, picking splinters out of my fingers, building sets,” he says of his activity earlier in the week.

“Film it and they will come” may not sound like a solid marketing strategy to a banker or lawyer, but it’s business as usual for indies and major releases alike. When a long shot does hit the mark — take Blair Witch Project, for instance — the money spigot sprays in all directions. “I’m in a weird position where I’m over halfway financed, but, in my experience, once you attach a name, that’s when people really start throwing cash in.” As luck would have it, he’s just signed Rob Zombie collaborator Richard Brake (The Munsters), who also appeared in Laws of Man.

“As producer, all of my pre-production work can be done from a laptop.” As such, Phil Blattenberger has discovered what other local creatives have: You can go Hollywood without living the nightmare. “I sit here in this exact chair at this exact corner at Corner Bar and do half my work. This is effectively my office at this point. I can shoot in Cambodia or New Mexico or Rocky Mount, but, until I need to be on set actually building or directing, I can center myself in a place like Greensboro, North Carolina.”