Hard as it may be to believe, changing the future of cinema was not on Mike Cheslik’s mind when he was making “Hundreds of Beavers.” Cheslik was in the Northwoods of Wisconsin with a crew of four, sometimes six, standing in snow and making his friend, Ryland Tews, fall down funny.
“When we were shooting, I kept thinking: It would be so stupid if this got mythologized,” says Cheslik.
And yet, “Hundreds of Beavers” has accrued the stuff of, if not quite myth, then certainly lo-fi legend. Cheslik’s film, made for just $150,000 and self-distributed in theaters, has managed to gnaw its way into a movie culture largely dominated by big-budget sequels.
“Hundreds of Beavers” is a wordless black-and-white bonanza of slapstick antics about a stranded 19th century applejack salesman (Tews) at war with a bevy of beavers, all of whom are played by actors in mascot costumes.
No one would call “Hundreds of Beavers” expensive looking, but it’s far more inventive than much of what Hollywood produces. With some 1,500 effects shots Cheslik slaved over on his home computer, it’s a low-budget heir to the waning tradition of Buster Keaton and “Naked Gun.”
At a time when independent filmmaking is more challenged than ever, “Hundreds of Beavers” has, maybe, suggested a new path forward, albeit a particularly beaver-festooned path.
After no major distributor stepped forward, the filmmakers opted to launch the movie themselves, beginning with carnivalesque roadshow screenings. Since opening in January, “Hundreds of Beavers” has played in at least one theater every week of the year, though never more than 33 at once. (Blockbusters typically play in around 4,000 locations.)
More than half of its approximately $500,000 in ticket sales came after the movie went to video-on-demand.
Daniel Scheinert, the co-director of the best picture-winning “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” recently called “Hundreds of Beavers” “the future of cinema.” That bold pronouncement might seem extreme for a movie about a guy wearing a comically large beaver hat.
But in a shrinking movie industry, DIY microbudget filmmaking may increasingly be left to fill some of the void left by risk-averse, corporate-driven Hollywood.
“I hope people can stop shooting things to make them look like commercials and just get back to more of the nitty gritty and letting your imagination flow,” says Tews, who also co-wrote the movie with Cheslik. “I just hope we stop bowing down to Hollywood and thinking they’re the gold standard. Because they just aren’t.”
“Hundreds of Beavers” is a micro example, but it was made with a strong belief in the big screen. This weekend the film is on an encore tour at some 70 theaters, including a 7 p.m. Sunday showing at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre. They’re calling it “A Northwoods Christmas.”
It’s a victory tour (with a Blu-ray release to follow) for a barnstorming indie hit that Cheslik hopes shows aspiring filmmakers that the same kind of goofy inventiveness that goes into a TikTok video can be channeled into a movie.
“You still can do whatever you want,” Cheslik says. “No one’s going to stop you if you take a phone and make a 90-minute timeline instead of a 30-second timeline.”