From George Lucas to Wes Anderson, Billy Bob Thornton to Mike Judge, directors have stretched their stories from short subject to feature-length film. Journalist Michael Fox takes us down memory lane to reveal what films went the distance, including some you might not have expected.

Every year in the late fall, when Hollywood releases its “serious” pictures, articles pop up in newspapers coast-to-coast griping about the epic length of not-so-epic movies. It’s probably not fair to pick on critics, at least this once, because all of us have complained, at one time or another, about an engrossing film that went on too long and exceeded our patience and goodwill. But here’s the odd thing: You never hear anybody lamenting that a movie was too short.

OK, I can think of one exception. That would be the richly imagined, impeccably crafted short film, typically seen at a festival but increasingly on one of the indie film channels, that’s complete on its own terms yet leaves the viewer wanting more—more, as in an urge to spend more time with the characters, to experience their world a while longer and to get deeper into the texture and travails of their lives. Every once in a rare while, we get our wish.

Why so infrequently? Short films, like short stories, are their own form with their own rules and constraints. So, to paraphrase Groucho Marx or Sigmund Freud, sometimes a short is just a short. At the same time, the laws of capitalism apply. The lack of a market for shorts—other than animated works from the likes of Pixar—effectively eliminates studio backing. While government funding for the arts (including cinema) in Europe encompasses short films, the closest thing in this country is a grant from the NEA or a foundation.

The upshot is that most short films are no-budget student projects. And the majority of those are educational films, in the sense that the makers are learning their craft, rather than accomplished stories or eloquent works of art. The better-crafted shorts, typically produced in the graduate film departments at Southern California and Manhattan colleges, are usually designed as calling cards to impress a producer or studio. The goal isn’t so much communicating with an audience as landing a job (to direct a feature, optimally).

It’s the rare short film that is granted the love, attention and resources to be re-envisioned as a feature-length movie. Here’s a sampling of some of those rarities.

From Short Film to Feature

THX 1138
George Lucas’ stylishly austere 1971 sci-fi film, THX 1138, expands on the student short he made four years earlier at USC. You can choose to be touched by the idea of a more mature artist revisiting his student film to better effect, or you can recognize that Lucas was rehashing his own ideas long before Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace.

Sling Blade
Billy Bob Thornton dreamt up the enigmatic, criminally insane Karl Childers of Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade (1994). When the actor reprised the character in Sling Blade (1996), this time under his own direction, it kicked his career onto another plane.

Bottle Rocket
Wes Anderson’s charming debut feature, Bottle Rocket (1996), likewise came into the world two years earlier as a short. Anderson plainly retains a measure of affection for the short form. His latest film, The Darjeeling Limited, was augmented by a freestanding prequel, Hotel Chevalier, that was originally available online only and then appended to the beginning of the film in some theatrical engagements.

Office Space
Based on a series of animated shorts about an office drone that Mike Judge created for Saturday Night Live in 1993, Office Space (1999) was the animator’s first foray into live action film. Now a cult classic, the film captured day-to-day life in a cubicle with spot-on irony, resonating with office workers everywhere.

A Day Without a Mexican
It took six years for Sergio Arau to expand his half-hour satire, A Day Without a Mexican, into a feature-length film, released in 2004. Arau is also a cartoonist, a painter and a musician, so one assumes he had plenty of other projects occupying his time. Or perhaps social commentary, even in the guise of accessible humor, doesn’t attract financing as readily as, say, a quirky road movie with young, attractive male leads.

Napoleon Dynamite
Jared and Jerusha Hess’s 2004 feature Napoleon Dynamite was adapted from a short film Jared Hess produced while studying at Brigham Young University just one year earlier. Peluca, the nine-minute 16mm short film, is included on the Napoleon Dynamite Special Edition DVD and also features Jon Heder as the quirky high school underachiever.

D.E.B.S.
Writer-director Angela Robinson’s D.E.B.S. (2003) introduced an ethnically and sexually diverse quartet of prep-school girls who are enlisted as undercover agents. Robinson’s send-up of teen-girl pictures and action flicks inspired a studio to put up the dough for a full-length flick, which came out a year later under the same title. Alas, the short got better reviews.

The Last Lullaby
Long before director Jeffrey Goodman finished A Matter of Principal (2003), a vignette about a retired hit man, he envisioned expanding it. He had a certain advantage, in addition to his talent and ambition: Max Allan Collins, who adapted his own short story, is a best-selling author (the graphic novel Road to Perdition) and had also penned a series of novels about the hit man. (Studios love “franchises,” which is a fancy word for “sequel after sequel after sequel after sequel.”) Goodman and Collins’ feature, The Last Lullaby, starring Tom Sizemore and Sasha Alexander, is slated to debut on the festival circuit in 2008.

Michael Fox is a San Francisco-based freelance journalist and film critic.

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