Anne Flournoy's first film, Louise Smells A Rat, is an elliptical spy story, set to a driving merengue by Johnny Ventura and made from twenty-four hours of discarded 16mm prints, distilled down to four and a half minutes. The film was invited to be in the New York Film Festival and then picked up by a distributor who blew it up to 35mm. Oddly, it never made a penny.

 

She made more short films and worked at a day job. Variety called her third short Nadja Yet "a nine-minute showstopper". But it soon became clear that the only indie filmmakers who were quitting their day jobs and launching careers were the ones making features. With a $5000 prize from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a group of established actors, and a crew of aspiring filmmakers, Flournoy and team set out to shoot a trailer for a b/w, 16mm, coming-of-age story: How To Be Louise. But instead of a trailer, they managed to shoot the first half of a feature in then unfashionable Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

 

The production proceeded in fits and starts over the next two years as money for the next step materialized. When How To Be Louise was invited to be in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance and the Panorama at Berlin, it seemed that the stars were lining up for her long dreamed of career path. The film was applauded in Europe: Italian newspapers gave it headline status in their art sections, and Flournoy was named a Guggenheim Fellow. The film opened at Jonas Mekas' Anthology Film Archives in New York City's East Village and The New York Post gave it three stars. But the other reviews were mixed and that was the end of its theatrical run. One thing was clear: the next script would have to be irresistible to distributors and reviewers.

 

Seventeen years, two kids and many unsatisfactory drafts later, she had her lucky break. The notes from trusted confidants for 'the final rewrite' were lost along with her luggage by Delta Airlines.

 

Bent over a pad in an airless room on a hot summer day, she tried to resurrect the lost material-- to no avail. The pursuit of the long form of features was, for this artist, climbing the ladder to nowhere. Her ideas were better suited to shorts and finally the time was right. What had made sense in the pre-internet era, the independent 90-minute feature film, was no longer the only format. People were making a living with internet videos and podcasts. Cell phone movies were on the horizon. Suddenly short videos could be a life's work. The Louise Log was born.