In the four years since D.U.M.P.S. was originally posted, the contributors have suffered repeated attacks portraying them as whiners who don't make their own films. In response, they complained a little and that was about it.

That just changed with the release of Keir Serrie's short film, How To Be A Cyber-Lovah, his first in over five years. FM.C caught up with Keir and talked about his movie, DUMPS, and the DVD release of the Ryan Phillippe film "Antitrust."

FM.C: You haven't made a film in five years. What the fuck were you doing?

SERRIE: A strange thing happens when you're living in L.A. and trying to get work as a filmmaker. You stay so focused on the big picture and spend your time writing feature scripts that it's easy to just stop making films altogether.

FM.C: What got you back into making films?

SERRIE: It was a combination of things. First, and foremost, the feeling of powerlessness you can get out here as a would-be director or writer can be overwhelming. Everyone has a story of "the one that got away," a time when they were meeting with all the studio bigwigs only to have it snatched away at the last minute for no apparent reason. So there was a desire to actually create something, and actually have control over a project. The other factor was the emergence, just in the last couple years, of cheap DV editing technology. When it's almost free, there's no excuse.

FM.C: So you shot on DV?

SERRIE: Yeah, we used a PD-150 and cut on a G4 with Final Cut Pro 2.0. All the effects were created in Photoshop and manipulated in FCP.

FM.C: Speaking of effects, the ones you use in your film violate one of the DUMPS rules.

SERRIE: Yeah, no cheesy '80s effects. But it's a fake infomercial, so it was tongue-in-cheek. We've got all the greatest hits in there: the clock wipe, the flying titles, the screen quadrants. It's absolutely hideous.

FM.C: Did you break any other DUMPS rules?

SERRIE: There's a lot of stuff in there that you shouldn't do on purpose. It's supposed to be a crap infomercial, so I guess it was kind of cheating as far as DUMPS is concerned.

FM.C: Going back and reading DUMPS again, would you change anything?

SERRIE: I would make it apply to feature films, too. I was watching the Ryan Phillippe film "Antitrust" on DVD and there's this reveal where Ryan finds out that Tim Robbins is evil and THEY ACTUALLY DOLLY/ZOOM INTO HIM. I was so shocked that I had to rewind it and watch again with the director's commentary on. And the director explains that he wanted to emphasize Ryan's horror. Unbelievable. It's like emphasizing a joke by putting a rimshot on the soundtrack.

FM.C: Have you read all the DUMPS posts?

SERRIE: I've read a lot of them. I think we could add most of the rules that people have posted. No director cameos, no suicides, no gratuitous pot smoking, no dorm rooms that aren't supposed to be dorm rooms, no poignant homeless people. And there's my all-time favorite, never give a sympathetic male character a ponytail.

FM.C: What about the negative feedback?

SERRIE: That's the stuff that really catches your eye, little keywords like "moron" or "blow me." The best was the guy who posted this angry diatribe in this really flowery language. "I decry all the picayune details of your silly tome" or something like that. I think these people picked up on a certain tone we took, which was definitely smart-ass, but we were just trying to be funny. A lot of people seemed to think that we were restricting their creative freedom by not allowing them to indulge the worst clichés around. The way I saw it, it was like watching somebody about to step on some dog shit, and we were the ones saying, "hey, watch out for that dog shit!" But if they want it all over their shoes, I guess that's fine. There was another assumption that we were condescending to all the lesser talents out there, and presenting ourselves as flawless. Shit, you think we came up with that list just by watching other people's crap? I made most of these mistakes myself. There's a mountain of Super-8 film in my closet, terrible stuff starring my girlfriend from 1992 that deals with important issues like spouse abuse...stuff that as a 22-year old I was apparently an expert about. Even my thesis film (http://www.fsu.edu/~film/fsufilms/films/william.html) that I made in '95 breaks at least two or three of the DUMPS rules.

FM.C: So where can we see this new film?

SERRIE: It's on the web at http://www.herbzipper.com.