Marin filmmaker’s short film on fame, social media heads to SF festival

Dmitry Milkin thought things were going to go differently when he started taking his 3D animated short film “Curpigeon” on the festival circuit in 2016.

The story about a community of park pigeons and old men who come together and help one another get through a great loss resonated with audiences across the country, grabbing him awards, landing the film on Amazon Prime and getting it optioned to turn into a longer film. In just a few years, it would all go away as quickly as it came, exacerbated by the pandemic, with contracts expiring and the industry shutting down.

But a magical production of “Hamilton” that the San Rafael writer, director and photographer saw on March 11, 2020, at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco, thanks to the show’s lottery system, would in part inspire his new project, “Good Guy with a Pun,” which will make its Bay Area premiere at the San Francisco IndieFest this week.

The film can be screened online from Feb. 5 through 15 at sfindie.com and will be part of a short film program at 8:30 p.m. Friday at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Admission is $10 to $19.44.

The low-budget production, filmed and made in the Bay Area, surrounds ’90s child star Billy Brown, played by Julius Thomas III, desperately clinging to fame by broadcasting every moment of his life on Instagram. But when his daughter, Jane, played by Zani Jones Mbayise, faces a crisis, he must choose between his role as a father and his obsession with stardom.

“Billy’s ambition and his need to both get back what he had before and also his desperate need to be wanted and find community — that was an exaggerated version of what I was feeling,” said Milkin, who started writing the story in 2021. “On top of it, it was taking a philosophy that I got from watching Robin Williams and ’90s sitcoms. I started following all of these former child stars from that era and seeing where they are now. And then when Julius came on board, he brought his charm and complete sincerity to the role. It softened the edges of the more pessimistic part of the character and made him very sweet, lovable and lovably unaware of how cringy he’s being.”

Milkin, who is in the midst of turning the 24-minute film into a longer streaming series, took the time to speak about the film.

Q: How has comedian Robin Williams inspired you?

A: I’ve been in Marin since 2016. Originally, I’m from Russia. I came to the states as a political refugee in 1992. But when I moved out here for grad school, I was like, this place was built for me. This place is home. When I went to San Rafael and I realized how much film history this place has, I never wanted to leave.

When I moved to the United States, Robin had that surge of movies geared for my age group, between “Aladdin,” “Hook” and “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which was my all-time favorite.

All of those movies were formative to me. Aside from being hilarious, they taught kindness and empathy. And the comedic style is something that I really adopted into my personality. When I moved out here for grad school, I started meeting people who worked with him and knew him and heard all these stories about his kindness. During the pandemic, I was introduced to his wife, Susan.

I took a photograph of the Robin Williams Tunnel and realized that the spacing of the two tunnels is the same spacing as his eyes. I superimposed this photo that I took with the poster from his movie “Toys,” the one with the red bowler hat.

Literally the day after I did that, I met Robin’s neighbor, who then introduced me to his wife. I met her and gave her a print of this photo, and we chatted, and she introduced me to one of her old friends, Michael Pritchard. He and I have become extremely close, and he introduced me to a whole lot of people as well. He was like this patriarch godfather of this film that really connected me to the community and a lot of organizations to help me create this thing from really no budget at all.

This came after a period of time where I really felt like I lost my community. This movie is a bit of a comeback for me.

Q: Tell me about this special “Hamilton” show.

A: My wife and I submitted to the “Hamilton” lottery and ended up winning front-row seats. We saw “Hamilton,” and we saw Julius Thomas III as Hamilton right in front of us, and we burst into tears at the exact same moment watching him. It was beautiful. After the show ended, I and my wife and all those people who were in the theater walked away in this daze of like, what did we just see? As we exited, all of our phones were buzzing, chiming and going crazy. Turns out that when we were inside the theater, the pandemic lockdown had started. It was the last piece of theater in the country for some time.

I went home, and I’m like, I don’t know how to process the lockdown, but I need to find this guy. I found him on Instagram. He had posted a video that said, “Now I guess I’m out of a job. I don’t know what to do.” I just wrote to him on Instagram saying, “I’m so sorry. I just want you to know that you moved me so much.” After that we connected; about a year after that I wrote “Good Guy with a Pun.” Call it fate, but the night after I wrote it, he posted another video saying he didn’t know what’s next. I wrote him back, “I literally just wrote this project with you in mind. Will you read it, please? And then if you like it, I really want us to be partners and build this whole thing together.” And he said yes. Aline Aghababian from Solano Jewelers in Lafayette Square and Victor Talbot gave me the funding to make this film.

Q: What inspired the story?

A: My wife and I had our first son. I was living across the street from the Civic Center. In the thick of the pandemic, I would take him for a stroll around the Civic Center and listen to “Pod Meets World,” a rewatch podcast by the stars of “Boy Meets World.” I was a huge fan of the show as a kid. I thought I’d check it out, just expecting fluff and nostalgia. Listening to the show, I was really surprised at how intense and in-depth they get. It’s this way of adult eyes dissecting a very sanitized-looking childhood. But there was a real underbelly underneath it that they didn’t understand as children, but they could see it through a different perspective now.

I came up with this idea for this former child star who’s obsessed with this bygone time and who just desperately wants to make a comeback, which was exactly how I was feeling. I was so close to this big break, and I just was clamoring for any opportunity to get back to it. But then, life happens, and dark things happen, and the world isn’t sanitized. In between his daughter getting cyberbullied and him stopping a mass shooting, Billy’s trying to figure out this path back, and he has to make a choice between this dream that he’s had or real-world consequences of being there for his daughter.

Q: The film shows Billy showing his whole life on Instagram Live. How do you feel about social media?

A: I think that with everything, there’s a full spectrum, and it’s a tool like anything else that can be abused and has extremely powerful advantages too. You can run the gamut from kids being cyberbullied and harming themselves all the way to resistances happening through TikTok or Instagram.

I didn’t want to talk down to an audience and be like, social media is bad, fame is bad, or other kinds of things in the zeitgeist that everyone’s heard a million times already. And I didn’t want to be like, it’s great, like that ’90s sitcom sanitized thing. I was really trying to figure out how to show the collective inundation and trauma that we’re constantly battling, especially the millennial generation, from Columbine and all these other mass shootings, 9/11, war and economic recession and one thing after the other.

I wanted that roller coaster ride to be present in it and tried to weave a story about a guy who’s trying to stay positive in the face of it all and learn how to do that without this fake, performative nature of it.