thedailytimes.com : Your 24/7 news source

Ruby Tuesday brought Michael Samstag to East Tennessee. The mountains kept him here.

After leaving the Blount County-based business to start his own company, Samstag went through a number of ventures before carving out his niche in the East Tennessee film community. And while this area may lack the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, it's where Samstag considers home.

"It's a couple of things that keep me here," Samstag told The Daily Times this week. "The obvious part of it is that it's a beautiful place to live with a very affordable cost of living. I like having a yard, and I don't have any interest in living in LA or New York. I'm just not programmed that way. The other side of it is that East Tennessee is also a hotbed of production and creativity.

"The first few years I lived here, I flew under the radar and didn't know what was going on in this area. I had my clients and I did my thing, and then I started meeting people. I started finding out that the third-largest producer of cable television is right here in East Tennessee. I discovered there's a lot of production going on here with an active arts scene and a very happening music scene, and from all of this is where KnoxvilleFilms.com started to emerge."

Samstag, who lives in West Knoxville, came to East Tennessee when Ruby Tuesday moved its corporate offices from Mobile, Ala., to Blount County. After several years working for Ruby Tuesday Inc. Television (RTI-TV), he left to start his own company, but the venture was short-lived when an opportunity became available to work with iPix, an imaging technology company headquartered in Reston, Va. The company had just signed a deal with POP.com, a digital entertainment company, to produce interactive short films for the Internet, and they wanted Samstag to act as a liaison between the two.

"My first day on the job was on a plane to LA to go work with Ron Howard's and Steven Spielberg's people," Samstag said. "I shot every iPix movie ever made, but after Sept. 11, they decided to get out of the movie business, and I got downsized. But my last day in LA, I was in a conference with Warner Bros. home entertainment and DVD division, pitching to use iPix for the Harry Potter DVDs, so I spent the next three years working on the Harry Potter movies and on 'Van Helsing' for Universal.

"It was a great, great experience, and since then, I've moved into more independent filmmaking projects. I took the spoils from my work on the Harry Potter DVDs and invested in my documentary, 'War and Truth,' and I've been working on that for four years."

The "War and Truth" documentary chronicles the history of embedded journalists from WWII to today, with an emphasis on how, when the United States went to war with Iraq, more than 2,000 journalists were involved in its coverage. The documentary was shown in the Atlanta Film Festival and won the top prize at the Annapolis Film Festival, and Samstag said he recently sold broadcast rights for an edited-for-television version to the Middle Eastern network Al Jazeera.

"Now, the entire Middle East will get a chance to see it," Samstag said. "We're hoping it captures the attention of the world press."

Although Samstag's background is in the technical side of film production, he went to school for directing, and he's had creative input into all of his projects. He helped develop the use of iPix from a user's perspective, but he was known as the "creative guy" at the company, and on the Harry Potter DVDs, he worked with up to five producers directing stand-alone extra features for the DVD versions of the movies.

"It was like directing a huge production — we did virtual tours of the set, and we actually created scenes from the book that weren't in the movie," he said. "I did go to school for directing, and that's my personality. In any situation, I kind of end up in a director's role."

That's the case with KnoxvilleFilms.com and its involvement in the new Tuesday night event that takes place at World Grotto in Knoxville. Known as "Cinematini Tuesday," the evening spotlights local short films and documentaries. In February, as part of the venue's Black History Month celebration, local screenings take place at 7 p.m., followed at 8 by films made by African-American directors such as Mario Van Peebles, David LaChapelle and Spike Lee.

It's just one of a number of projects that KnoxvilleFilms is taking part in to call attention to the East Tennessee film community, Samstag said.

"The bottom line is that we looked at the 'Austin City Limits' program and thought how they have, with one TV show, put Austin on the map as the music capital of the world," he said. "We asked ourselves, 'Why can't we do that for Knoxville as a creative hotbed?' There's a lot going on here as far as active, independent filmmaking goes."

Early on, KnoxvilleFilms.com was host for a weekly podcast in which a new artist was interviewed in a different venue around the area. A few weeks ago, the Grotto approached Samstag about getting involved in the Tuesday night affair there, essentially asking KnoxvilleFilms.com to make each night a mini-film festival.

"We're a lean, mean organization," he said. "We don't have a board, and we don't vote on things. We said, 'This sounds like fun; let's do it.' We got a call a week before the first one, and we got it up and ready and had 75 people there the first night.

"The whole idea is that it's creative collaboration and networking through the celebration of film. The film is sort of the excuse to gather, and we're just hoping people have a chance to network and meet people doing amazing stuff. We want to focus on artists, sculptors and musicians and just continue to move that forward. We're working on bringing in musicians and art and pulling it all together with the idea that at some point this turns into a big festival.

"Whether it's a Knoxville Film Festival or doing a South By Southeast — sort of our version of Austin's South By Southwest — we want to make a big cultural, music and art festival," he added.