Rick Schmidt has written, directed, shot, edited, and produced more than twenty award-winning features since 1973, which have been shown at over 50 film festivals worldwide (see www.lightvideo.com/films.aspx ). He is also been credited for spawning a new generation of filmmakers with his books Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices , and Extreme DV .

“Richard Linklater emerged at a vital, if dubious, moment in American film. It is a period I am inclined to describe as the Rick Schmidt era of the American Independent film. For it was Schmidt's 1989 book, How to Make a Feature Film at Used Car Prices, published by Viking, a major, mainstream American publishing house, that defined that moment as much as the work of any one of its practitioners. Schmidt's book offered tips on how to make a film for $10,000 or less. It became a bible (or at least a self-help manual) for a generation of aspirant filmmakers who, by 1992, had witnessed the low-budget successes of Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Linklater himself and, most notably, Robert Rodriguez.

-- Brian Price, Framework magazine.

Since becoming a recipient of the Independent Filmmaker's Grant from the American Film Institute (AFI), as well as four Media Arts grants from the National Endowment For the Arts (NEA), Schmidt has collaborated with his son, cinematographer Morgan Schmidt-Feng ( www.filmsight.com ), a former Lucasfilm documentarian. Together they have co-produced over ten features at Rick's Feature Workshops. Their 1998 workshop feature, Loneliness Is Soul , was selected for BEST SCRIPT by the International Jury at the 29th Figueira da Foz International Film Festival ( Portugal ). And in 2000, Schmidt and his son Morgan co-produced Chetzemoka's Curse (Dogme # 10 ), only the second official American Dogme feature after Julian Donkey-Boy .

Schmidt's Morgan's Cake is a deadpan, unpretentious delight...one of

the best of the festival."

-- Janet Maslin, The New York Times

Their earlier $15,000 feature, Morgan's Cake, starring then 18-year-old Morgan, screened at Sundance's Dramatic Competition, Berlin International, Melbourne, San Francisco International, New Directors/New Films (NYC), Florence Film Festival ( Italy ), many others. Recently Schmidt has become a columnist at Moviemaker magazine, answering filmmaker's questions at "Extreme Indie."

"More than thirty years after his 1975 feature flimmaking debut, American Independent Rick Schmidt remains a free-wheeling derring-do filmmaker holding fast to the notion that people's real lives are more truly dramatic, hilarious, exciting and as exasperating as thosemanufactured by Hollywood 's minions. Most everyone falls in and out of love, rejects and gets rejected, contends with failure and success, hatred, ambition, the death of loved ones...It's all there. To capture real life on film, Schmidt fashions a creative weave out of the threads of narrative, documentary, and docu-drama film forms. His actors draw on their own experience enabling him to create a uniqueblend of fact and fiction. In the end, Schmidt makes art and life intermingle and imitate each other. Aware that the American Dream factory financiers would never fund his films, Schmidt, undeterred, remains the maven of low, low-budget feature filmmaking."