How do you make a movie when you’ve got no money or resources? The best way is probably to set your film in one place, hire young actors who will work cheap, and do as much as you can yourself. This is exactly the approach that writer/director Kyle Smith took with Turkey Bowl, a movie set entirely during a game of touch football among friends. There’s no real story here, not much tension to be found in anything other than the fairly pointless question of which team will win the annual game whose prize is always a frozen turkey; but the movie manages to engage nonetheless.
This one is half comedy, half character piece. You see the players show up, go through the entire game play by play in pretty much real time, and then watch everyone say their goodbyes; so there isn’t much time to dig too deep into everyone’s pasts and personalities. But what you find is that you get enough through the way the characters interact with each other when they’re grouped in different combinations, and through little asides that get thrown around here and there. Eventually you start to piece together the group’s pasts, their relationships, and their insecurities.
Things gets a little forced at times, the characters are prone to fits of melodrama which are necessary to let them spit out mouthfuls of illuminating dialogue here and there, but it doesn’t get too bad. And the heat of competition is enough to cover any questions of why emotions run so high in a span of just an hour. Turkey Bowl doesn’t accomplish all that much, it’s not belly laugh funny and it doesn’t develop any of the characters to the point where you’re affected by them, but it’s proof that anybody who has an interest in filmmaking and a knowledge of how to use a camera can get out there and start doing stuff that doesn’t look amateur and embarrassing. If you set small goals they become very easy to hit.
