‘That’s A Wrap’ — Schneider’s 1st CineFlix Film Fest Was Fun For Everyone!

I can’t even begin to tell you how much fun I had the week of Oct. 31-Nov. 3 at the Cobb Grove 16 theater, as actor/director John Schneider brought his first CineFlix Independent Film Festival to Wesley Chapel.

First of all, Schneider and his producer Alicia Allain of Maven Entertainment were on site all week and five of the 22 films featured in the festival were films they produced together. In addition, Schneider and several of the other filmmakers with films being shown during the festival also were at the theater to answer questions at virtually every showing.

Best of all, I felt honored and privileged to have gotten the opportunity to interview — for WCNT-tv (Wesley Chapel & New Tampa Television) — Schneider and his fellow filmmakers Edo Natasha and Quantae Love of “Popolo” and Trent Dion Soto of “Among the Discarded” before the festival started. Schneider said that he has had enough of still being best known for his most famous starring role as Bo Duke in “The Dukes of Hazzard,” despite also having starred as Superman’s father on “Smallville,” and the fact he currently is starring in Tyler Perry’s popular “The Haves and the Have Nots” on the Oprah Winfrey Network. His twice-flooded John Schneider Studios in Louisiana was the setting for most of his films, although many of the other entries in the festival — including “Popolo” and “Among the Discarded” — were filmed elsewhere.

No matter where they were shot, however, Schneider and Allain’s first-of-its-kind independent film festival, which gave these indie filmmakers not only a showcase for their work, but also gives them a cut of the festival’s sales proceeds, was a blast.

I’m not going to lie that the theaters were packed for the festival, but those of us who did attend any of the 22 films did not go home disappointed.

Of the films I saw, my favorite was Schneider’s own legal thriller “Inadmissible,” where he plays a hard-smoking, hard-drinking District Attorney named Bryce Danos who is trying to put away the son of a major mob figure. It’s definitely an exciting, edge-of-your-seat adventure and Schneider appreciated it when I said Danos could kick the butt of Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher character.

I did also love “Popolo,” which is the story of a former soldier who opens a martial arts school in Hawaii who ends up fighting not only racial prejudice (“Popolo” is a kind of berry in Hawaii that turns black, as well as a racial slur used by some Hawaiian people) but another former soldier turned ruthless mercenary.

Although Soto’s “Discarded” is a documentary that was shot entirely with a $300 GoPro camera, it is a moving film chronicling the 30 days Soto spent among the homeless people living on Skid Row in Los Angeles.

I also enjoyed Schneider’s “Hate Crime,” about a gay man who kills his lover, and although the story was a little gory for my taste, Schneider’s “Anderson Bench” is a dark, grisly comedy reminiscent of the ‘80s cult classic “Eating Raoul.”

Considering that I had to work, I couldn’t see all of the films during the festival, but the good news is that virtually all of them will be available in Digital on Demand format beginning sometime around Thanksgiving. I wish the films would have been shown in one of the Cinebistro theaters at The Grove 16, but the event was still very entertaining, so I hope Schneider and Allain will be encouraged enough to want to bring the festival back next year.

As for Schneider still being pigeonholed as Bo Duke, I have to agree with what he said during our WCNT interview: “That’s like a guy curing cancer but people knowing him for a great term paper he wrote in 1978.”

For more information about the films at the festival, visit CineFlixFest.com. And, check out all nine of my short interview segments with Schneider, Soto, Natasha and Love at WCNT-tv on YouTube.