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BUZZ SURROUNDS YOUNG PRODUCERS OF `RAW DEAL’
ANA VECINA-SUAREZ, Herald Staff

February 20, 2001

In their cut-off shorts, baseball caps and rolled up sleeves, Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman look like the kids next door. Believe me, they’re not.

These two Miami 22-year-olds produced a feature-length documentary, Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, that was all the rage at last month’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. After a bidding war, the film was bought by Artisan Entertainment, which has a string of fantastically popular and lucrative hits - The Blair Witch Project, Pi and Chuck & Buck.

For the past three weeks, Corben and Spellman have been wined and dined by industry moguls in Utah, Los Angeles and New York, and when we meet poolside in their North Miami-Dade address, the hot new auteurs are bleary-eyed from cross-country travel.

“Hectic? Yep,” says Corben in wry understatement. But you know he and his pal have loved every minute of it.

Getting to Sundance is a big deal in the industry. Of 1,700 films submitted, about 80 are shown during the festival. Of those, eight were bought this year, and certainly Raw Deal was the one with the most buzz. Corben and Spellman were interviewed by The New York Post, The Los Angeles Times, Variety, and the web version of Newsweek. Though neither will reveal the selling price, The New York Post cited sources that put the figure at $2.5 million.

“We expected some kind of attention but not in the scale we’ve gotten,” admits Corben. “It’s a little scary, but it also gives us confidence and faith in our own work.”

This fall, to coincide with the release of their film, their filmmakers’ journal will be published by a yet undisclosed house. It may prove to be riveting, not only because the book will chronicle the experience of one of the youngest filmmakers to make it big at Sundance but also because the documentary explores an alleged rape at a fraternity party at the University of Florida in 1999, a case that was controversial from the beginning and promises to remain so for a long time.

In fact, Spellman says raising funds locally proved easier than with the first two movies they made because of the initial publicity. “With Raw Deal,” he adds, “it was simply the story. It’s very compelling and we knew other people were going to be intrigued by it.”

The most controversial part of the film is the raw footage of what actually occurred at the Delta Chi party. The home video, taken by two fraternity brothers, records the encounter with stripper Lisa Gier King, hired to perform at the event. King says the footage captured her rape. The fraternity brothers claim everything was consensual.

Police investigated, then agreed with the fraternity and arrested King for filing a false police report. Those charges were eventually dropped, but disagreements over who is telling the truth continues. And both Corben and Spellman say their film won’t necessarily settle that argument, either.

At Sundance screenings, the audiences were evenly divided. Even the directors changed their minds about what happened after watching the entire movie in one sitting. They won’t say, however, whom they believe. Eventually, the frat was kicked off campus for three years and the stripper pleaded guilty to operating an escort service without a license.

Making the movie affected the young men in ways they had not predicted. “I kept telling people I didn’t want daughters and if I did have them, they would be home-schooled in the basement until they were 40,” Corben says.

Corben and Spellman are accustomed to the attention. Corben was a child actor for most of his elementary school years, living on and off in Los Angeles. He met Spellman in ninth-grade television production class at Highland Oaks Middle School in North Miami Beach. They were 14 and very ambitious. The two recruited a crew and spent evenings and early mornings gathering information for their own newscast.

Corben went on to the New World School of the Arts in downtown Miami , Spellman to North Miami Beach High, but their friendship and common interests kept them together. A year later, they filmed a 36-minute video about AIDS (Waiting), which is now shown in health education classes around the country.

When the duo read news reports about the fraternity incident in Gainesville, the two friends knew this story was bigger than anything else they had done.

“We were absolutely fascinated by it,” Spellman recalls.

So fascinated that they both dropped out of college from the University of Miami and moved to Gainesville to do the shooting and investigating.

For Sundance, friends and family flew out to Utah to support them, though Corben admits to being a little squeamish about showing the film because of the subject matter and the fraternity’s home video. “Our families were very supportive,” Corben explains, “but this isn’t the kind of movie you take your grandmother to see.”

He fends off criticism that they could have edited the explicit footage. “It’s preposterous that people would think it’s pornographic,” Corben adds. “Pornography is erotic and titillating, and there’s nothing erotic and certainly nothing titillating here. This is disgusting. There is such ugliness here.”

For now, the dynamic duo is keeping their options open. They’re in the initial stages of four projects and a pilot for a television series titled Stiltsville, about a fictional group of people who inhabit the real Biscayne Bay landmark. They plan to be in production by next year on a feature film, based on a true story, that takes place on a college campus. Regardless of the subject matter, though, Corben and Spellman will use their hometown as base.

“We’re definitely staying here,” Corben says. “What Kevin Smith [Clerks, Dogma, Chasing Amy] is to New Jersey and Rick Linklater [Slackers, Suburbia, Dazed and Confused] is to Austin, we want to be to Miami.”