Don Glut isn’t a famous filmmaker, hell he isn’t even a well known filmmaker to the mainstream, but what makes him such a likable person is that he’s well aware of that yet still talks about his films with charisma and sheer heartfelt emotion.
Because with Glut, his short animated films are capsules of his childhood, and not so much productions to be scrutinized. Which is not to say there’s not a surprising amount of ingenuity and originality behind them. Glut was a young boy influenced by films, and he felt he wanted to take up the profession and made as many movies as he could with his best friends. Glut, in the end is a man who was given lemons and made lemonade.
He’s never apologetic about the quality of the films, and really explores how he was able to bring together such little resources and make so much out of them, from monster movies, dinosaur films, and really shoddy but entertaining superhero films in and around his house which managed to be apart of some grade A filming locations Glut went to town with.
Glut is the filmmaker in all of us, the person who wants to tell a story and entertain us and adamantly display his love for film in spite of lacking the funding to do so. “I Was a Teenage Movie Maker” becomes even more of an entertaining bit of film obsession when Glut explains his friendship with Forry Ackerman and their attempts to bring Glenn Strange in to film a low-budget Frankenstein film.
Glut’s films become increasingly professional, and he’s one of the first filmmakers to view film as a medium for entertainment that he made for himself and eventually turned into a career. The conversations with Glut are utterly engrossing, and the man knows films even if he was never an iconic legend.
But most of all, Glut is proof positive that you don’t always need a lot of money to create a film that’s entertaining and important. You just need creativity, originality, and a lot of heart. Something many aspiring filmmakers would do well to remember.
